2012/09/15 by Mark Philp, David O’Shaughnessy, Victoria Myers +3 · 1 voice
paper · doi:10.5281/zenodo.19980560
openalex publication_date 2012/09/15 · openalex created_date 2026/05/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
The website https://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ was taken offline by the institution. A mostly-functional backup of it exists at https://godwindiary-test.warwick.ac.uk/ and James Cummings has another couple of sites of it including a GitHub one at https://github.com/jamescummings/godwindiary/. The website held 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 digitizing and editorial work on the project was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Grant (2007-2010), with additional funding from the John Fell Fund at the University of Oxford and from Pepperdine University, California. The British Academy generously funded an international conference in Oxford on the project in July 2010. The project team are grateful to the Bodleian Library for supporting the scanning of the images. The project has been directed by David O’Shaughnessy and Mark Philp in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, and by Victoria Myers in Pepperdine University, California. The website was designed and implemented by the project’s technical director, James Cummings at the then Oxford University Computing Services at the University of Oxford. The project’s two research students were Kathryn Barush (Wadham College, Oxford) and James Grande (Linacre College, Oxford). In addition, supplementary research work has been undertaken in Oxford by David Fallon (St Anne’s College, Oxford), Hannah Simpson (St Hilda’s College, Oxford), Hannah Philp (Cheney School, Oxford), Ruth Turvey (University College London), and in California by Laura Kalinkewicz, Brent Russo and Vinnie Oliveri (Pepperdine University). The project is also deeply grateful to Edward Pope for his extensive contributions to the website drawing on his work on the Abinger Collection, the National Archive, and a wide range of archival and genealogical resources. Richard Ovenden, Bruce Barker-Benfield, and Wilma Minty of the Bodleian Library, and Pat Boreham, Genevieve Garrido, Kate Candy and Esther Byrom at the Department of Politics, Jim Richardson at the Manor Road Building, have worked closely with the team throughout the course of the project. Alfred Andrew Fote also provided technical support in California. Pamela Clemit, who has been working in parallel on an edition of Godwin’s letters to be published by Oxford University Press, generously shared her time and expertise. Beth Lau played a critical role in initiating and directing the transcription of the diary before this project began. The staff at UCLA’s Special Collections Library, Law Library, and the Young Research Library, and those at the Henry E. Huntington Library in California, provided invaluable support. Members of the project’s Advisory Board and participants at its conference (Oxford, July 2010) have also contributed widely to the editorial work of the project. We would especially like to thank: Robert Anderson, Judith Barbour, John Barrell, Gail Bederman, Stephen Burley, Lionel Burman, Julie A. Carlson, Linda Clark, Nora Crook, Catherine Delafield, Martin Fitzpatrick, Amy Garnai, Kevin Gilmartin, Katherine Gleadle, Robert Godwin, Christopher Goulding, Isobel Grundy, John Halstead, Gary Handwerk, Maurice Hindle, Neil Hitchen, Joanna Innes, John Issitt, Elizabeth Kraft, Robert Maniquis, Jon Mee, Tilottama Rajan, Glynis Ridley, Sharon Ruston, Michael Scrivener, Tom Snjiders, William St Clair, and Tim Whelan. Note: GodwinDiaryImages.zip should be unzipped inside the godwindiary folder. However, this is not an HTML scrape of the site but the underlying files. Not all required javascript or other static files have been included, just the basics.