The Diary of William Godwin

William Godwin’s diary presents a range of difficulties to both researchers and editors. Compiled over a forty-eight year period, Godwin manages to record a tremendous amount of detail in the fewest possible words. This edition – the first time the diary text has been published – takes advantage of the digital medium to give researchers new ways to synthesise Godwin’s terse and codified records into coherent forms. The edition also includes vast amounts of secondary material, particularly a wealth of biographic information. At the same time, the lack of documentation and explicitly stated editorial methodology makes classification difficult: William Godwin’s Diary is an excellent historical resource that successfully exploits the digital medium, but falls short of meeting the criteria of a Scholarly Digital Edition as a work of textual scholarship