Holding page: William Godwin's Diary

The Bodleian Libraries have taken William Godwin’s Diary resource offline as a cybersecurity precaution.

We understand how disruptive this has been to the many scholars and communities who use this resource and apologise for any inconvenience.

Find out more about the background to this decision.

Future developments: The project team aims to undertake major work on the Diary over the first 8 months of 2025. Please contact Mark Philp for questions about the project: mark.philp@warwick.ac.uk.

Alternative ways to access Godwin Diary resources are outlined below.

Alternative ways to access the material

A temporary site has been created at the University of Warwick at which users may access the Diary, albeit without full functionality.

The Godwin Diary TEI records are available in the Oxford University Research Archive.

A static web-archive version of the site can be browsed in the Bodleian Web Archive.

Digital facsimiles of the Diary are available via Digital Bodleian.

About the project

The award-winning William Godwin’s Diary website hosted a digital edition of the diary of William Godwin, kept between 1788 and 1836. The diary is a resource of immense importance to researchers of history, politics, literature, and women’s studies.  It maps the radical intellectual and political life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as providing extensive evidence on publishing relations, conversational coteries, artistic circles and theatrical production over the same period.  One can also trace the developing relationships of one of the most important families in British literature, Godwin’s own, which included his wife Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), their daughter Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and his son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Many of the most important figures in British cultural history feature in its pages, including Anna Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles James Fox, William Hazlitt, Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charles and Mary Lamb, Mary Robinson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, William Wordsworth, and many others.

The project that edited the Diary and created the digital resource sought to code Godwin’s diary so as to retain the richness and diversity of the information contained in them. Each element in a day’s entry was coded so as to distinguish what Godwin read, what he wrote, whom he saw, where he saw them, in what activities or meals they shared, and where he went. The project transcribed and encoded the diary using the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), an XML mark-up standard specifically geared for the representation of texts in digital format.

The diary is part of the Abinger Collection of manuscripts held in the Bodleian Library.

The Godwin Project was directed by Mark Philp with David O’Shaugnessy and Victoria Myers and funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

The Diary is a data-rich, narrative poor resource, which makes it a natural resource for digital scholarship. It was at the forefront of digital projects when created, but now needs substantial restructuring to maintain accessibility and functionality. The project lead is currently working with the Bodleian, the Centre for Digital Scholarship at Oxford, and the University of Warwick to undertake this work.

Last update to original site:
2012

Date when website was withdrawn:
29 November 2024