Mandeville, Mourning and National Myths: William Godwin's Civil War Novel and the Use of History

Abstract

Mandeville (1817) is the second of William Godwin’s historical novels, and is set during the period of the English Commonwealth (1649–60). Readers at the time of its publication made comparisons with the ‘German school’ of novel writing, linking it with both the Gothic and sturm-und-drang fictional modes. Modern critics have recognised it as a work exploring psychological and cultural trauma, the aftereffects of war on the generation that came after. Godwin cited Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and Joanna Bailie’s De Monfort (1798) as major influences on the novel, and this essay will attempt to use these texts as a vector to explore the direction of Godwin’s ideas. Like all of Godwin’s (mature) novels, Mandeville is a first-person narrative—and this essay will argue that here Godwin specifically uses this as a nod towards historical memoir, a genre that shaped understanding of the Civil War and Commonwealth period during Godwin’s lifetime. The novel’s narration is characterised by its paranoia and self-destructive violence, steeped in the era’s political and religious tribalism. In the context of Godwin’s ideas on the purpose of historical writing, fiction, and critical reading, this turn towards memoir can thus be seen as a challenge to the public understanding of the period (and its reliance on implicitly dubious memoir) and the cultural issues of the seventeenth century that persisted through to Godwin’s time.