Puppets, Waxworks, and a Wooden Dramatis Personae: Eighteenth-Century Material Culture and Philosophical History in William Godwin’s Fleetwood

Abstract

William Godwin’s novel Fleetwood, or The New Man of Feeling (1805) is a phil osophical history, crafted through distinctively eighteenth-century material objects. Two extraordinary episodes underpin this history of one individual’s mind and of the times that shaped it, and demonstrate how material objects con tribute to the personal and political nature of narratives of the self. First, a human-sized puppet is used in a fatal prank among Oxford undergradu ates; second, Fleetwood deliriously destroys a waxwork image of his wife. Where Godwin’s contemporaries found these scenes too outré for a novel that claimed veri similitude, I argue that their materi alism is crucial to Fleetwood’s examina tion of eighteenth-century insti tu tions. Because examin ing material culture was a typical eighteenth-century historiographical strategy, Godwin is able to write as though in the era that he describes and with the wisdom of hindsight from 1805. Fore ground ing the material objects of puppet and wax work illuminates the satirical, educational, medical, sexual, and theatrical dis courses that imbue Fleetwood’s material artifacts and that shape the novel’s setting.