Welcome to the award-winning digital edition of the diary of William Godwin (1756-1836). Godwin’s diary consists of 32 octavo notebooks. The first entry is for 6 April 1788 and the final entry is for 26 March 1836, shortly before he died. 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 diary has been transcribed and encoded so that it is fully searchable. High resolution scanned images of the diary are also provided.

Those new to the resource are encouraged to refer to the Introduction to the Resource and to the section about searching the site. The diary is part of the Abinger Collection of manuscripts held in the Bodleian Library. For further details, see Abinger Collection.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions on the website feel free to send them to: godwin.diary@politics.ox.ac.uk. You may also follow @godwindiary on twitter for excerpts from the diary. In early 2012 the website won the annual award for Digital Resources from the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.