William Godwin, chivalry, and Mary Shelley's The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 1999 by Brewer, William D

As the industrial revolution transformed England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of important writers re-evaluated the precapitalist institution of chivalry. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Mary Wollstonecraft scorns Edmund Burke's expressions of "gallantry" and "knightly fealty" (24) in the part of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) in which he deplores the treatment of Marie Antoinette by the revolutionaries. She speculates that "probably the spirit of romance and chivalry is in the wane; and reason will gain by its extinction" (29) . Lord Byron is even more critical of chivalry in his addition to the preface of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II ( 1812) . Responding to objections that his "`vagrant Childe' . . . is very unknightly, "he points out that

the good old times... were the most profligate of all possible centuries.... The vows of chivalry were no better kept than any other vows whatsoever. . Burke need not have regretted that its days are over, though Maria Antoinette was quite as chaste as most of those in whose honours lances were shivered, and knights unhorsed. (20-21)

In An Essay on Chivalry (1818), Sir Walter Scott praises "the exalted, enthusiastic, and almost sanctimonious, ideas connected with [the] duties" of chivalry for counterbalancing "the evils of the rude ages in which it arose" (5-6) . But he also writes that "the devotion of the knights of Chivalry degenerated into superstition, [and] the Platonic refinements and subtleties of amorous passion which they professed, were sometimes compatible with very coarse and gross debauchery" (39-40). Percy Bysshe Shelley presents a more positive view of knight-errantry's influence on gender relations in A Defence of Poetry (composed 1821 ) . He declares that "if the error which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has become partially recognized in the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which Chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets" (497-98).'

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had close personal relationships with three of these four writers: she read and reread her mother's works (see The Journals of Mary Shelley 684); she admired Byron's poetry and made fair-copies of many of his works (Blumberg 71-75); her husband was a literary collaborator, and by the time she wrote The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830) she had already edited his Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824). Mary Shelley's conception of chivalry was, however, most profoundly influenced by the writings of her father, William Godwin. As Katherine C. Hill-Miller observes, "From 1822 to 1836, Mary Shelley's relationship to her father constituted one of [the] major emotional commitments in her life" (52). Doucet Devin Fischer describes Godwin's literary and personal support of Shelley during the composition of Perkin Warbeck:

before the end of [September 1827] Godwin had sent her an account of the children of Edward tV and details concerning the aftermath of the battle of Bosworth Field, the novel's opening incident. Her father continued to assist her by fulfilling small research commissions at the British Museum, supplying books from his library, and untangling factual knots. He remained her devoted partisan, offering encouragement as she worked on Perkin Warbeck after recovering from smallpox. (xiii)

This essay will focus on the influence of Godwin's conception of chivalry on Mary Shelley's The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.2 In his discussion of hereditary distinction in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793 ed.), Godwin asserts that "There was once . . . a gallant kind of virtue, that, by irresistibly seizing the senses, seemed to communicate extensively to young men of birth, the mixed and equivocal accomplishments of chivalry." He contends that the men of late eighteenth-century England, unlike their chivalric forebears, are threatened by "the poison of flattery[,] effeminate indulgence," and wealth, "the fatal blast that destroys the hopes of a future harvest" (Political and Philosophical Writings3: 253). Godwin also examines the strengths and drawbacks of chivalry in Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799), Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803-4), and Thoughts on Man ( 1831 ) . Although he recognizes that "the profession of chivalry is . . . allied to ignorance, extravagance of sentiment, and a too prompt appeal to the sword," he admires the chivalric "theories of honour and gallantry" (Life of Chaucer 1: 200-201 ) . According to him, "The feudal system was the nurse of chivalry, and the parent of romance; and out of these have sprung . . . the generosity of disinterested adventure, and the more persevering and successful cultivation of the private affections" (Life of Chaucer 2: 56).

Both Godwin and Shelley were aware that "the mixed and equivocal accomplishments of chivalry" led to a great deal of suffering. The eponymous narrator of Caleb Williams declares with some justification that Falkland's madness stems from "the poison of chivalry" (326) . Godwin's St. Leon and Shelley's Perkin Warbeck suggest, however, that although the modern "commercial spirit" (Perkin Warbeck 306) which replaces chivalry encourages economic and social stability, it creates a world in which the old chivalric virtues of honor, loyalty, physical courage, and reverence toward women are no longer valued and in which men are dedicated to the acquisition of wealth rather than the "cultivation of the private affections."