University of Virginia Library

We are grateful to Lord Abinger for permission, granted through the Bodleian Library, to quote from Godwin's diary in the Abinger Collection, held on deposit in the Bodleian Library; to Beth Rainey, former Sub-Librarian, Special Collections, Durham University Library, for her expert advice; and to Françoise Deconinck-Brossard for supplying a text by Joseph Towers in electronic form. Thanks are due to the following individuals for help of various kinds: Bruce Barker-Benfield, Malcolm Coulthard, Martin Fitzpatrick, Oliver Hudson, Gary Kelly, Michael Popham, Lisa Vargo, and, above all, Robin Dix. Pamela Clemit's part in this study was completed with the support, mainly for other purposes, of an Arts and Humanities Research Board Research Leave award.

University of Durham, Special Collections, Routh 67. F. 2/5. Both pamphlets under discussion are contained in a volume of ten tracts, entitled "Pamphlets concerning King's Illness 1788-89." The volume includes a manuscript contents list in an unidentified late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century hand, headed "S. S. S. 7." Before rebacking in 1998, the spine had a fragment of a label bearing the same number, which suggests that the volume was originally part of a large pamphlet collection or that this is the pressmark of a private library. The volume also has a nineteenth-century ownership inscription, "James Weale." The pressmark on the spine, "LVII | F | 2," indicates that it forms part of the library of Martin Joseph Routh (1755-1854), the great patristics scholar, whose collection of printed books passed on his death to the University of Durham. The hand in which the authorship ascriptions of the two pamphlets in question are written does not occur elsewhere in the volume and is not that of Routh himself. A review of copies of each pamphlet in other libraries found no other evidence of authorship attributions.

Godwin, diary, Abinger Manuscripts, Dep. e. 196, fol. 20r.

Monthly Review, 80 (March 1789), 275. For Godwin's known work for Robinson, see Bentley, 77-83, 89.

University of Durham, Special Collections, Routh 67. F. 2/6.

Godwin, diary, Abinger Manuscripts, Dep. e. 196, fol. 26r.

A fuller discussion of Godwin's early writings is in preparation for publication in Pamela Clemit, The Literary Lives of William Godwin (Oxford University Press).

For the cusum technique, see Farringdon; for detailed criticisms of its assumptions and results, see Sanford et al., and Ruecker.

For a description of the construction and discriminatory function of the core vocabulary, see Woolls (2003).

An exception was the sample of De Lolme's writing, which was typed because the printed copy of the pamphlet proved impossible to scan. The first 2,650 words were entered to create a sample of approximately the same length as the other Regency pamphlets, which proved to be so distinct from the others that it was considered unnecessary to enter the rest of the text. This represents the only instance where part of a text was used.

Godwin noted dining with Towers for the first time on 7 October 1788; Lofft's name appears on a list of acquaintances made in 1788 at the back of the seventh volume of his diary (Abinger Manuscripts, Dep. e. 196, fol. 16r; Dep. e. 202, fol. 47r).

For an examination of the shared vocabulary characteristics of eighteenth-century Dissenting sermons, including works by Towers, see Deconinck-Brossard.

CopyCatch is a collusion and plagiarism detection program developed by David Woolls and is commercially available from CFL Software Development, UK.

For an edition of the two pamphlets, together with a fuller discussion of the material summarized in this paragraph, see Pamela Clemit, "Two Pamphlets on the Regency Crisis by William Godwin," Enlightenment and Dissent 20 (2001) (forthcoming).