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Updated: May 29, 2025
For Godwin himself it was also well that, with these uncongenial early surroundings, he, when the time came to think, was of the calm most calm and unimpassioned philosophic temperament, instead of the high poetic nature; not that the two may not sometimes overlap and mingle; but with Godwin the downfall of old ideas led to reasoning out new theories in clear prose; and even this he would not give to be rashly and indiscriminately read at large, but published in three-guinea volumes, knowing well that those who could expend that sum on books are not usually inclined to overthrow the existing order of things.
For all the world like those English shopkeepers we met on the Righi, doing the three-guinea excursion in their Sunday clothes!" Certainly the spectacle of these exotically plumed bipeds, whose fine feathers were already bedrabbled by sand and growing limp in the sea breeze, was somewhat dissonant with the rudeness of sea and sky and shore.
He was the friend and adviser of statesmen; he might have ended as a Cabinet Minister, for no man ever succeeded in gauging the extent of his miraculous ability; he seemed to be the most powerful, as well as the most dreaded man in England. Woe is me! We had to carry him up to bed; and he stayed on until he spent a three-guinea cheque, which Mr. Landlord cashed for him.
But the tenant farmer's wife who made the butter and cheese, and even helped to salt bacon, where is she now? Where are the healthy daughters that used to assist her? The wife is a fine lady not, indeed, with carriage and pair, but with a dandy dog-cart at least; not with three-guinea bonnets, but with a costly sealskin jacket.
She is a little flighty in some ways, but she has some sense too, some notion of the value of money; she does not lose her dead about dress, nor does she buy costly baubles at the jewellers'. She, certainly wastes a good many pounds on books, when a three-guinea subscription to Mudie's would answer the purpose quite as well.
That this three-guinea book was bought and read to the extent of no less than four thousand copies is a tribute not merely to its vitality, but to the eagerness of the middle-classes during the revolutionary ferment to drink in the last words of the new philosophy. A new edition was soon called for, and was issued early in 1796.
But all her past extravagance did nothing to prepare him for the extent to which, as he expressed it, she could "go it," when she had, as you might say, an incentive. That, the chemist's, was in a way the worst. Still, they amounted but to a few pounds and an odd shilling or two. Starker's bill did the rest. The three-guinea costumes he could understand.
These days of dining at three guineas a head for the good of railway undertakings are pretty well gone; and agents and counsel may well sigh over the recollection of doings probably never to return. 'The truth is, we were all mad in those times, added the individual who owned so candidly to the three-guinea dinner.
Pitt observed, when the question was debated in the Privy Council, that 'a three-guinea book could never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare." Godwin purposely published his work in this expensive form because he knew that by so doing he would keep it from the multitude, whose passions he would have been the last to arouse or to stimulate.
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