William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries
Ch. IX. 1812-1819
William Godwin to Mary Jane Godwin, 18 September 1817
“On Thursday last I had a visit from Mr R—— of Barbadoes, who drank three glasses
of wine, and I began to be afraid would want thirteen more. He is a sort of
greasy, dingy, short and thick player-looking man. He enquired about the three
![]()
![]()
pounds we have been overpaid, in rather an
equivocal way; but I have seen no more of him. He says Mrs Fenwick is very well, and that Eliza was expected to lie down in two days
after he sailed. He has taken up his abode for the present at Thomas Fenwick’s.”
Eliza Fenwick [née Jago] (1766-1840)
The daughter of Thomas Jago and wife of the journalist John Fenwick; she was a novelist
and member of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin. In 1814 she emigrated to Barbados and spent her
later years in the United States.
Eliza Ann Fenwick (1789-1827)
The daughter of the writer Eliza Fenwick (d. 1840); she performed as an actress before
emigrating to America with her mother, where she was unhappily married the actor William
Rutherford; she died in New York.
Thomas James Fenwick (1769-1850)
The brother of the newspaper editor John Fenwick; he was a linen-draper in Penzance who
failed in 1803, and afterwards a clothier and tailor in Limehouse.
William Rutherford (1781-1829)
The son of the Rev. Thomas Rutherford; he married Eliza Ann Fenwick (daughter of the
novelist) in Barbados and left her to pursue an acting career in Britain; he died a
suicide.
