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Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England
Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England (1817) is the fifth novel by William Godwin. The novel explores the afflicted psychology of Charles Mandeville, a royalist supporter during the turbulent period of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth (1649) and role as Lord Protector of England (1653-58). According to Godwin's Preface, the novel is influenced by Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; or, The Transformation, An American Tale (1798) - itself influenced by Godwin's first novel Caleb Williams (1793) - and Joanna Baillie's tragedy De Monfort (1798). Godwin's emphasis on the minutiae of historical detail and his intensive psychological examination of individual character within the novel continues many of the themes that preoccupy his earlier fiction and philosophy. More than Godwin's previous works, however, Mandeville is marked by a relentlessly pessimistic tone that

Plot Summary
The novel begins with the three-year old Charles witnessing the slaughter of his parents, along with many other British settlers, during the Irish revolt of 1641. Escaping with the aid of a Irish servant-woman, Mandeville is subsequently remanded to the gloomy, secluded ancestral home of his uncle Audley and educated by the fiercely anti-Catholic minister Hilkiah Bradford. Largely ignored by his shut-in Uncle and resistant to Hilkiah's severe interpretation of Protestant doctrine, Mandeville takes to wandering alone across the desolate country landscape, where he is frequently haunted by traumatic memories of the Irish massacre. In 16**, Mandeville leaves his Uncle's home to attend Winchester College. There, the taciturn Charles first encounters Clifford, an eloquent and popular fellow student whom Mandeville perceives as his arch-enemy.
 * Henrietta Beaulieu College


 * seditious, anti-royalist cartoons

After graduating from Winchester, Mandeville briefly attempts to make a name for himself by joining the Penruddock insurgency, but quickly departs when he sees that Clifford has also joined the ranks.

inadvertently thwarting Mandeville's every attempt to become "something substantive in the dramatis personae of society" throughout the novel (123).

Critical Reception
Mandeville received mixed reviews. The intense and dark psychological focus of the novel led many reviewers to compare Godwin's eponymous protagonist to Lord Byron's tortured and misanthropic loners (Byron's similarly themed, Manfred: A Dramatic Poem is published in the same year). Quarterly Review (October 1817) Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (December 1817) Edinburgh [Scots] Magazine (January 1818), James Mackintosh "exposition of a mind radically diseased." British Review (February 1818)

While Mandeville was largely dismissed by professional reviewers, the novel became influential for many second generation Romantics, including Godwin's daughter Mary Shelley, his son-in-law Percy Shelley, and Byron. Offering his own review for *****, Percy suggested that Mandeville might even be considered superior to Caleb Williams while Mary Shelley cited her father's ***** as a major influence on Frankenstein (1818). need reference here.

More recent criticism

William Brewer cites Godwin's proximity to Rousseau’s Confessions, arguing that “Mandeville, like Rousseau, is partly the victim of his own hyperactive imagination,” and that his unaccountable hatred of Clifford “has no more basis in reality than Rousseau’s delusion” that French philosophes were secretly plotting to ruin him

George Woodcock speculates that the dark focus of the novel possibly reflects Godwin’s increasing financial destitution, while D.H. Monro calls Godwin’s literary emphasis on “the wretchedness of the man. . . cut off from sympathetic communion with his fellows” Accordingly, critical reactions contemporary with the novel invoked Mandeville’s similarities with Byron’s tortured and misanthropic loners, whose similarly themed philosophical drama Manfred is published in the same year.

BJ Tysdahl argues that

Pamela Clemit

William Brewer compares Mandeville to Rousseau's Confessions, arguing that

Reading the novel from a psychoanalytic perspective, Gary Handwerk sees Mandeville's unjustifiable hatred of Clifford as a "displacement" of his childhood trauma

Conversely, Tilottama Rajan has suggested that the traumatic force in Godwin's novel does not necessarily culminate in a psych(ot)ic closure of history, but ***. Extending the hermeneutic context of the novel to a broader thematic that includes the "troubled" visions of history in German Romantic philosophers such as Friedrich Schelling, Rajan argues that

Selected Bibliography
Brewer, William. The Mental Anatomies of William Godwin and Mary Shelley. Mississauga, ON: Associated UP, 2001.

Butler, Marilyn, ed. Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Clemit, Pamela. The Godwinian Novel: the rational fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley. London: Clarendon, 1993.

Godwin, William. Mandeville: a tale of the seventeenth century in England. 1817. The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, Vol. 7. Ed. Pamela Clemit and Mark Philp. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992.

Handwerk, Gary. "History, trauma, and the limits of the liberal imagination: William Godwin’s historical fiction." Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre. Ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Rajan, Tilottama. “The Disfiguration of Enlightenment: War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville.” The Godwinian Moment. Ed. Robert Maniquis and Victoria Myers. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010.

Tysdahl, B.J. Godwin as Novelist. London: Athlone, 1981.