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John-Erik Hansson »

John-Erik Hansson is lecturer in British History at Université Paris Cité, member of the Echelles (UMR 8264) research unit and reviews editor of the Anarchist Studies journal. He is a specialist of the intellectual and cultural history of political radicalism, from the late eighteenth century to today. In particular, he has worked on William Godwin and his circle, with a special interest in the links between radicalism and the diversity of genre of writings, from philosophical treatises to children’s books. More recently, he has worked with Matthew Adams on Godwin’s twentieth-century reputation as a precursor of anarchism, to rethink the ways in which anarchists have (re-)constructed their own histories.

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This article is © 2025–26 The Author and is the result of the independent labour of the scholar credited with authorship. Unless otherwise noted, the material contained in this journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND) International License.
Date of acceptance: 5 March 2025.

Referring to this Article

J.-E. Hansson. ‘Quite Interesting: Godwin as a Writer of Fables’, Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 25 (Summer 2024), pp. 57–71.

Online: Internet (date accessed): https://www.romtext.org.uk/articles/rt25_n05/
PDF DOI:10.5281/zenodo.20017983

Quite Interesting

Godwin as a Writer of Fables

09 May 2026

Abstract Abstract

Abstract: Writing under the pseudonym of Edward Baldwin in the preface to the Fables, Ancient and Modern (1805) the first book for children he wrote for his own bookselling business, William Godwin argued that a major flaw in the books of fables circulating at the time was that their content and style caused them to fail to be ‘interesting to the mind of a child’. In this article, I explain how Godwin sought to tackle this perceived problem in his own book of fables, and for what purpose. To do so, I draw from Sianne Ngai’s recent examination of ‘the interesting’ as an aesthetic category whose genealogy begins in the Romantic period. I show that, although it certainly shares many features identified by Ngai from Schlegel to contemporary art, Godwin’s aesthetic of the interesting does not map on to the formation of a reflexive, detached, ironic modern subject. I rather suggest that a ‘Godwinian’ aesthetic of the interesting relies on what Ngai calls the ‘deeply pedagogical dimension’ of the category in order to subvert the formulaic, moralistic and didactic dimensions of fables while opening space for inquiry into a wide variety of scientific, historical and literary subjects. This, for Godwin, would contribute to the formation of engaged, reflexive readers who would then be likely to grow into individuals capable of contributing to social and political reform and the progress of humanity more generally.

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