Professor Pamela Clemit

  • English literature of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
  • The Godwin-Shelley family of writers (Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Percy Bysshe Shelley), their associates and heirs
  • The 1790s
  • The literature of English religious nonconformity
  • Letters, journals, and autobiographical writings of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
  • Textual editing and editorial theory
  • The political novel

I specialise in English literature of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. My work intersects with the fields of history, philosophy, and politics. My research is mainly devoted to the two generations of writers and intellectuals influenced by the French Revolution in Britain, with a particular focus on the anarchist political philosopher and novelist William Godwin (1756-1836) and his associates. I have produced numerous scholarly and classroom editions of novels, life-writing, and other works by Godwin, as well as by Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. My principal research project is The Letters of William Godwin (2011-) which is being published in six volumes by Oxford University Press. The edition is providing authoritative, fully annotated texts of all known surviving letters from Godwin and a selection of previously unpublished letters to him. Two volumes have been published so far.

I continue to research and publish in other areas of interest. In 2017 I led a collaborative project to digitize and make publicly available the sole surviving manuscripts of Godwin’s principal works, Political Justice and Caleb Williams, which are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Images of the manuscripts are available to view on The Shelley Godwin Archive. I have written on letter writing as a social practice and on scholarly editing as a mode of historical enquiry. Other specialisms include the 1790s, the Wollstonecraft diaspora, the political novel, and the letters and journals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, broadly conceived.

Undergraduate: English literature, 1740-1900, with a special interest in dissertation supervision.

Graduate: topics of doctoral theses previously and currently supervised include Percy Bysshe Shelley; the English Gothic novel; Gothic abbey architecture in Radcliffe, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron; Godwin and the theatre; Godwin’s correspondence; Godwin’s educational writings and children’s books; gifts, gratitude, and charity in Godwin, Wordsworth, and De Quincey.

In 2015 I joined Queen Mary University of London as Professor of English (Professor of the Humanities from 2021). Previously I spent 25 years at Durham University, where I was successively Lecturer, Reader, and Professor in English Studies. In 1999-2000 I was a member of the inaugural class of Fellows at the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers (directed by Peter Gay). I was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2007-10), and have held Visiting Fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford; Harris Manchester College, Oxford; Mansfield College, Oxford; and Wadham College, Oxford. I was the recipient of the Keats-Shelley Association of America Distinguished Scholar Award for 2016.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the English Association, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

I serve on the following Advisory/Editorial Boards:

Enlightenment and Dissent

Elizabeth Montagu Letters

Maria Edgeworth Letters Project

The Shelley-Godwin Archive

The Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope (24 vols.)

Books 
The Letters of William Godwin, Volume II: 1798-1805 (2014), ed. Pamela Clemit, in The Letters of William Godwin, gen. ed. Pamela Clemit, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011-).

The Letters of William Godwin, Volume I: 1778-1797 (2011), ed. Pamela Clemit, in The Letters of William Godwin, gen. ed. Pamela Clemit, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011-).  

The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s, ed. Pamela Clemit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit, World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

‘Life of William Godwin’, Poems, Translations, Uncollected Prose, ed. Pamela Clemit and A. A. Markley, Volume IV of Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, gen. ed. Nora Crook, 4 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002).

William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker, Broadview Literary Texts (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001).  

Matilda, Dramas, Reviews & Essays, Prefaces & Notes, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume II of Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996). 

Falkner: A Novel, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume VII of Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996).

Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, ed. Pamela Clemit, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996).

William Godwin, St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Pamela Clemit, World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).  

The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, Oxford English Monograph Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, reprinted, 2001).  

Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume V of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993).   

Early Novels, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume II of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992).

Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume III of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992).   

St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume IV of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992).  

Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume V of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992).  

Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume VI of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992).  

Parts of Books
‘Reloading the British Romantic Canon: The Historical Editing of Literary Texts’, in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences, ed. Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 306-28.

‘Godwin’s Citations, 1783-2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavour’ (with Avner Offer), in New Approaches to William Godwin: Forms, Fears, Futures, ed. Eliza O’Brien et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 273-96.

‘William Godwin’, in Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, ed. Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 173-81.

‘Letters and Journals’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 418-33.

‘Revisiting William Godwin’, in Oxford Handbooks Online, gen. ed. Colin Burrow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 

‘Commerce of Luminaries: Eight Holograph Letters between William Godwin and Thomas Wedgwood’, in Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, ed. Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2011), 261-82.

‘Godwin’s Political Justice’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s, ed. Pamela Clemit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 86-100.

‘Holding Proteus: William Godwin in his Letters’, in Repossessing the Romantic Past, ed. Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; paperback edn., 2010), 98-115. 

Frankenstein and Matilda: The Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26-44. 

Refereed Journal Articles
‘Botanical Networking: Four Holograph Letters from Charlotte Smith to James Edward Smith’ (with Brad Scott), Romanticism, 26: 1 (Apr. 2020), 1-12.

‘The Signal of Regard: William Godwin’s Correspondence Networks’, European Romantic Review, 30: 4 (Aug. 2019), 353-66.

‘Godwin’s Citations, 1783-2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavor’ (with Avner Offer), Nineteenth-Century Prose, 41: 1/2 (Fall 2014), 27-52.

‘Sociability in Godwin’s Diary: The Case of John King’ (with Jenny McAuley), Bodleian Library Record, 24: 1 (Apr. 2011), 51-6.

‘Readers Respond to Godwin: Romantic Republicanism in Letters’, European Romantic Review, 20: 5 (Dec. 2009), 699-707.

‘William Godwin’s Juvenile Library’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, NS 147 (July 2009), 90-132.

‘“A Society of their Own”: Four Letters from Laura Tighe Galloni d’Istria to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’, La Questione Romantica, NS 1: 1 (June 2009), 95-109. [Also published (2012) as an Electronic Enlightenment born-digital project]

‘Charlotte Smith to William and Mary Jane Godwin: Five Holograph Letters’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 55 (2006), 29-40.

‘Self-analysis as Social Critique: The Autobiographical Writings of Godwin and Rousseau’, Romanticism, 11: 2 (Autumn 2005), 161-80.

‘William Godwin and James Watt’s Copying Machine: Wet-Transfer Copies in the Abinger Papers’, Bodleian Library Record, 18: 5 (Apr. 2005), 532-60.

‘Godwin, Women, and “The Collision of Mind with Mind”’, Wordsworth Circle, 35: 2 (Spring 2004), 72-6.

‘William Godwin’s Papers in the Abinger Deposit: An Unmapped Country’, Bodleian Library Record, 18: 3 (Apr. 2004), 253-63.

‘Two Pamphlets on the Regency Crisis by William Godwin’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 20 (2001), 185-248.

‘Two New Pamphlets by William Godwin: A Case of Computer-Assisted Authorship Attribution’ (with David Woolls), Studies in Bibliography, 54 (2001), 265-84.

‘Philosophical Anarchism in the Schoolroom: William Godwin’s Juvenile Library, 1805-25’, Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 9:1/2 (Fall 2000/Spring 2001), 44-70.

‘Mary Shelley and William Godwin: A Literary-Political Partnership, 1823-1836’, Women’s Writing, 6: 3 (1999), 285-95.

‘From The Fields of Fancy to Matilda: Mary Shelley’s Changing Conception of her Novella’, Romanticism, 3: 2 (1997), 152-69.

‘Shelley’s Godwin, 1812-1817’, Durham University Journal NS 54, 85: 2 (July 1993), 189-201.

Selected TLS Reviews
‘Unpolished Gems’, Times Literary Supplement, No. 6223 (8 July 2022), 7-8. Review of Nora Crook’s edition of Volume Seven of the JHUP Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, accompanied by cover image.

‘Missing in Inaction’, Times Literary Supplement, No. 6146 (15 Jan. 2021), 3-4. Lead review on Wordsworth: three biographies and a sonnet sequence.

‘Storm Sky Bright’, Times Literary Supplement, No. 5975 (6 Oct. 2017), 27. Review of Coastal Works, ed. Nicholas Allen et al.

‘Greeky Peeky’, Times Literary Supplement, No. 5963 (14 July 2017), 3-4. Lead review on Thomas Love Peacock: two volumes of the Cambridge edition of his novels.

‘Romantic Rebel’, Times Literary Supplement, No. 5912 (22 July 2016), 11. Review of Marilyn Butler’s Mapping Mythologies.

‘Loss in a Life’, Times Literary Supplement, No. 5875 (6 Nov. 2015), 3-4. Lead review on Wordsworth: one biography and two collections of essays.

‘So Immethodical’, Wall Street Journal (22 May 2015), and in Times Literary Supplement, No. 5851 (22 May 2015), 11-12. Review of Adam Roberts’s edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.

Online Publications (excluding blog posts)
Political Justice: A Description of the Holograph Manuscript’ (2017), The Shelley-Godwin Archive, gen. eds. Neil Fraistat, Elizabeth C. Denlinger, and Raffaele Viglianti, n.d., University of Maryland.

Caleb Williams: A Description of the Holograph Manuscript’ (2017), The Shelley-Godwin Archive, gen. eds. Neil Fraistat, Elizabeth C. Denlinger, and Raffaele Viglianti, n.d., University of Maryland.

Interviews
‘Five Questions: Pamela Clemit on The Letters of William Godwin’ (interviewer: Matthew Sangster), British Association for Romantic Studies, 15 Apr. 2021.

‘Five Questions with Professor Pamela Clemit’ (interviewer: Simon Reid-Henry), QMUL Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 21 Oct.