In 1813, an anonymous government spy reported to the Home Office a suspicious development in the London publishing world. Given the paranoid political culture of the time, the existence of such a report is not unusual in itself. Its importance lies in the subject of its scrutiny. The publisher in question was producing neither revolutionary pamphlets nor rabble-rousing Jacobin novels but such titles as Tom and His Cat: the Surprising History of a Good Boy (1806) and Think Before You Speak, or, The Three Wishes (1809); yet, these titles made his identity all the more alarming, for he was a known political radical: ‘At length Mr. J. Godwin [sic] was written on the door-post in very small letters; within a few months it appeared boldly in large letters over the door; still it is very little known that the proprietor is Godwin, the author of Political Justice. There appears to be a regular system through all his publications to supercede all other elementary books, and to make his library the resort of preparatory schools, that in time the principles of democracy and Theo-philanthropy may take place universally.

’ This report illustrates what Mitzi Myers, Alan Richardson, and other scholars of Romantic literature have long demonstrated: that children's literature at the turn of the nineteenth century was a site of political and ideological conflict.

The spy worries about the impact of Godwin's books on young minds. As the report observes, Godwin has pseudonymously authored not one but several books for children including a mythology textbook that "artfully hints the wisdom of the morality of the heathen world" (162) and an insidious pocket dictionary, "which consists in giving only one meaning to words which have several, and omitting all such words as philosophers of the present day do not like to explain" (163, emphasis in original).

This report can be read as a reflection of the intense political anxiety that colored the turn of the nineteenth century in England: it projects vast and terrible consequences contingent on the literary output of what was, in fact, a small publishing house that went out of business in the economic downturn of the 1820s. This report is certainly hyperbolic, but it is also perspicacious. As Pamela Clemit argues, a "regular system" is discernable throughout Godwin's books, a system as much political and literary as it is educational ( “Philosophical Anarchism” 47). It is an interest in further investigating this "system" that initially inspired this project, which has been motivated by two central questions. First, why would Godwin—anarchist philosopher, political advocate, and successful novelist and dramatist—decide in the middle of his career to pseudonymously author, publish, and sell children's books? Second, what is the relationship between Godwin's children's books and his other writings? At first glance, Godwin's decision to publish books for children appears at once unlikely and unwise: the Juvenile Library's success depended on Godwin's anonymity because of his reputation for radical politics and loose morals. Godwin lived in dangerous times: if his customers had known his identity, he could have lost their patronage; if the government had discerned it (and deemed it threatening enough), he could have been tried or even imprisoned, as had other radical writers and publishers before him.

At the same time, Godwin's involvement in the production of books for children makes perfect sense in light of his interest in the intellectual development of citizens.

Long before he opened the Juvenile Library, Godwin had contemplated the role of reading in education and, ultimately, social politics. Thoughts about education permeate his works from the 1790s, from An Enquiry into Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793) to The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797) and St. Leon (1799). Three years before he opened the Juvenile Library, Godwin had written a children's book for Benjamin Tabart under the pseudonym William Scolfield. Although criticized by Sarah Trimmer, Bible Stories. Memorable Acts of the Ancient Patriarchs, Judges, and Kings: Extracted from their Original Historians (1802) was successful: according to William St Clair it underwent multiple reprints and was pirated in the United States.

Bible Stories' success, St Clair conjectures, likely encouraged Godwin to continue writing for children (Godwins 284). Godwin's decision to write for children appears to have been motivated by personal experience as well as professional success and interest. By the time Godwin and his second wife, Mary Jane, embarked on the Juvenile Library venture, they were raising five young children: Mary Godwin, the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft who would eventually marry Percy Shelley and author Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818), among many other titles; William Godwin, Godwin's son with Mary Jane; Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's daughter with Gilbert Imlay; and Charles and Mary Jane (later Claire) Clairmont, Mary Jane's children from previous relationships. As a parent and social reformer, Godwin was keenly aware of the pedagogical needs of young readers and of the insufficiency of the books available to them. As he explains in the preface to Bible Stories, his motivations are those of a parent: "The following book is the production of a parent, who could not find, among the numerous works which for the last twenty years have been published for the use of children, one which he could with complete satisfaction put into the hands of his own."

The combination of his family's pressing financial needs, his and his wife's prior experience in children's publishing, and the urging of his friend Joseph Johnson inspired Godwin to produce books for children that would further the political theories and ideals he expounded in Political Justice, The Enquirer, and his earlier novels.

Although Godwin's business was not as profitable as he might have hoped, the juvenile titles he wrote and published were well received. The same critics who associated the radical Godwin with atheism, subversion, and sexual immorality often praised the children's books he wrote under his pen names: "Edward Baldwin," "William Scolfield," and "Theophilius Marcliffe."

The Critical Review had "no hesitation" in recommending Marcliffe's Life of Lady Jane Grey and of Lord Guilford Dudley, her Husband (1806) to young readers, and even the conservative Anti-Jacobin Review admitted that Baldwin's History of England (1806) was "well adapted to the capacities of those for whose use it was designed," although the reviewer had misgivings about the work's rendition of the Reformation.

Studying Godwin's children's books thus illuminates those tensions between mainstream readership and radical content, and between literary invention and iteration, that characterized Godwin's better-known works and those of other Jacobin writers.

While literary historians have long been aware that Godwin wrote and published children's books, these works have received significantly less scholarship compared to his novels and philosophical writings.

A cursory glance at the Modern Language Association's International Bibliography, for example, reveals that only 8 of the 179 books and articles about Godwin's corpus published over the last twenty years investigate his children's books or the Juvenile Library.

It is difficult to determine why such a disproportion exists. One possible reason is the relative inaccessibility of Godwin's children's works. In spite of their long publication histories in the nineteenth century, these books are no longer in print today. The only exception is the 2010 facsimile edition of The Pantheon by Kissinger Publishing, which fails to identify Edward Baldwin as Godwin's pseudonym. The Pickering & Chatto edition of The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin (1993) reprints the preface to Bible Stories alone among Godwin's Juvenile Library works.

Available primarily in special collections, microfilm departments, or through rare book dealers, these books have limited circulation.

A third reason may simply be that Godwin does not comfortably fit within the dominant historical narrative of late-eighteenth-century children's literature as it has developed in the 1990s and 2000s. Once seen as a veritable wasteland of didactic fiction against which Romantic poets rebelled with new imaginative literature, scholars now recognize the 1790s and 1800s as a dynamic era of experimentation in children's writing and education.

This recovery largely results from the work of Mitzi Myers, Alan Richardson, Norma Clarke, Pamela Clemit, and others who have demonstrated how female writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Eleanor Fenn, Anna Barbauld, and Maria Edgeworth, sought to integrate learning into a fictional form that would please young readers.

Such work has led to no less than the recuperation of children's didactic fiction and an expanded understanding of children's literature in this period. Nonetheless, Donelle Ruwe observes that scholars of British Romanticism continue to think of children's literature from this era in dichotomizing ways: as a struggle between books that appealed to children's imaginations (both through didactic literature and fairy tales), or books that sought simply to instruct them (2). This binary, Ruwe argues, has led scholars to overlook those authors who wrote textbooks, in particular Sarah Trimmer and William Godwin (2). Of these two authors, Godwin is especially complex because his vision of childhood—and, by extension, children's education—was an amalgam of Romantic poetic ideology, his own political philosophies, and his practical experience raising children; it was highly nuanced and always in the process of development. In The Enquirer (1797), for example, Godwin endorses imaginative freedom as a cornerstone of education when he encourages young readers to "wander in the wilds of literature."

Then, in Fleetwood; or the New Man of Feeling (1805), he worries about the long-term consequences of the type of child endorsed by Rousseau and later William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as too unstructured.

Whether stemming from the works' inaccessibility or misidentification or from the vicissitudes of scholarship, there is a lack of sustained study of Godwin's children's books and the Juvenile Library. This deficiency is all the more striking when we consider that Godwin's children's books (both the ones he wrote and the ones he published) were popular in their own time and remained so even after his business crumbled. Some of the books he published, such as Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespear (1807) and the first English translation of what would later be known as The Swiss Family Robinson, remained in circulation into the twentieth century.

The longstanding popularity of Godwin's children's books alone should suggest their scholarly importance to both historians of children's literature and to scholars of political and social history. So too should their influence. Godwin's ability to appeal to schoolteachers, parents, and students enabled him significantly to effect children's book production and the politics of childhood in the early nineteenth century, but it also allowed him to disseminate his beliefs on a broad scale. As St Clair argues, many of Godwin's children's books gained a wider contemporary circulation and had a longer-lasting impact than the philosophical and fictional works for which he is now most celebrated.

The profound cultural impact of Godwin's children's literature—especially as an expression of his social politics—necessitates their reproduction and welcomes further critical inquiry.

The spy report on the Juvenile Library illustrates the difficulties Godwin faced, in large part, because of the reputation he had acquired in the 1790s as a political radical. Few public figures during that tumultuous decade were as famous or as controversial in England as William Godwin. In the fearful political climate that followed the French Revolution and England's subsequent declaration of war with France, the English government kept one wary eye fixed on the Channel and the other on London radicals, political dissenters, and other dealers in unpatriotic licentiousness and "French" immorality. Godwin was an offender on all of these fronts. His visibility in the London political scene made him a hero both to mainstream Whigs and to the radical Jacobin fringe. Throughout his life, he corresponded and kept company with almost every important writer and political radical of his time, but it was his literary output in the 1790s that sealed Godwin's reputation as a Jacobin.

The publication of Political Justice (1793), in which Godwin examines the philosophical principles behind the French Revolution and criticizes the role of political institutions, branded Godwin as a radical in the public opinion. Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) confirmed this reputation. A proto-thriller that champions individual liberty and opposition to tyranny, this novel dramatizes many of the ideas of Political Justice, and to devastating effect. Caleb Williams appeared in the same year as Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury, October 2, 1794 (1794), Godwin's defense of the radicals Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, and John Thelwall during the Treason Trials of 1794. Taken as a whole, these three publications, each electrifying and each directed to a different audience, associated Godwin in the public eye with the dangerous Jacobin fringe. Godwin's candid biography of his late wife Mary Wollstonecraft, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Women (1798), forever linked him with sexual indecency and loose morality. Memoirs' frank depictions of Wollstonecraft's love affairs, suicide attempts, and illegitimate child not only tainted Wollstonecraft's already questionable posthumous reputation but also further maligned that of her widower.

Increased literacy and exploding literary output of this decade also played a decisive role in heightening political anxieties. While social unrest stemmed from a variety of sources—from rising prices in commodities to land enclosure to the inequalities of factory labor—the availability of printing presses and cheap paper made possible the large-scale distribution of literature, both moralizing and inflammatory. Rising print production correlates with an upsurge in literacy, especially among the lower classes. Charity schools and Sunday schools grew in this period with the primary aim of helping poor children and adults learn to read the bible. Rising literacy rates had an unintended outcome, a voracious public appetite for reading material, in particular political pamphlets. This genre was immensely popular with readers and publishers alike: pamphlets were easy to print and cheaper than books, which meant they could be produced on large scales that made them more accessible to the average citizen.

Pamphlets could disseminate information and raise passions much like the large-scale gatherings outlawed by the government. For example, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791), an incendiary defense of mankind's natural rights in the face of governmental tyranny, was consumed in unprecedented numbers by the newly-literate lower classes. The government responded by trying and convicting Paine of sedition, but his ideas nonetheless were influential. Godwin was not involved in the production of Rights of Man, but Paine helps illustrate both the dangers Godwin faced from government officials, and the opportunities print production offered him for sharing his ideas with a broad audience. The spy report was perhaps rightfully wary of him: Godwin was not simply a radical, but one with an interest in children's education and the means to widely produce and distribute his writings in London and across the country.

These same coincidental forces of the marketplace and the schoolroom—the simultaneous rise in adults' and children's literacy along with the means of reproducing literature accessible to the masses—significantly altered the state of literature for children. The very concept of childhood was transformed in these decades, as the idea of childhood as a time of innocence and free play blossomed in the Romantic era from its Enlightenment beginnings. Children's literature experienced two watersheds in the eighteenth century, with the 1740s marking the beginnings of children's imaginative literature and the 1780s witnessing a shift to more didactic types of fiction.

Scholars traditionally have celebrated John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744) as the first book of modern children's literature (that is, the first book designed for children's amusement), even though they concede that books for children existed since at least the late seventeenth century, many of which, as F.J. Harvey Darnton argues, were designed to give children "the highest pleasure, that of studying and enjoying the Will of God" (53). Nevertheless, scholars find something distinct about Newbery's fiction for children: its playfulness. With their decorative bindings, witty titles, and accompanying toys, Newbery's books self-consciously were designed to appeal to children. Newbery published a variety of children's works, from ABCs to science books to miscellanies, but it is his juvenile fiction that came to epitomize what Darnton calls Newbery's "'plumb cake' and morality" literary style characterized by its lighthearted tone and educational purpose (125). The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes; Otherwise Called Mrs. Margery Two-Shoes (1765), arguably one of his most famous publications, presents adventures similar to those found in longer novels, but abridged into a shorter, child-focused story. Goody Two-Shoes provided instructive life lessons, but it did so in ways that readers presumably found enjoyable. It remained in print throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Mary Jackson observes that it even experienced a resurgence during World War II.

Less than half a century after the first edition of Goody Two-Shoes, a more moralistic and instructive movement in children's fiction competed and eventually edged out Newbery's books, figuratively and literally. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Romantic-era writers such as Charles Lamb looked back fondly on the 1740s and 1750s as a golden age of children's books, one that was being eradicated by what he refers to in a letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the "cursed Barbauld crew." Their didactic fiction, he complains, had all but supplanted Goody Two-Shoes and fairy tales: ‘Goody Two Shoes is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld['s] stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery; and the Shopman at Newbery's hardly deign'd to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary ask'd for them. Mrs. B's and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. B's books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, & his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers […] instead of that beautiful Interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child […] Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography & Natural History? Damn them. I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights & Blasts of all that is Human in man and child.

’ In actuality, this "crew" was a diverse and unconnected group of writers which included the Christian moralist Sarah Trimmer, the conservative social reformer Hannah More, the more liberal educators Maria Edgeworth and Anna Barbauld, the popular novelist Charlotte Smith, and the radical Mary Wollstonecraft, among others. Though personally and politically distinct, their work coheres in what Lamb derisively perceives to be an interest in teaching children intellectual and ethical lessons in real-world settings. Lamb's and other Romantic writers' denigration of these authors has influenced their historical reputation as prudes and pedants—a reputation that Myers, Richardson, Clarke, and others have exploded. However unfair and obsolete this reputation, there is a grain of truth to it: these authors did write stories embedded in the realities of domestic life in order to train their young readers to enter a world of social dislocation, inequality, and injustice. While Margery Two-Shoes enjoys a change of fortune from shoeless orphan to wealthy heiress, her successors in Smith, Wollstonecraft, and More experience little of her economic or social mobility. They face worlds populated by begging veterans, ragged orphans, and young women consigned to lives of genteel poverty because unable to earn an independent wage and unable (or unwilling) to marry. In this setting, there are no opportunities for Margery's entrepreneurism; protagonists must learn obedience, kindness, frugality, and fortitude as well as duty to family, community, country, and God. The same types of rewards Margery enjoys are no longer available; readers (and characters) must learn to cope with the world as they find it.

These didactic writers' realistic styles are as much expressions of their social politics as they are of their views about children's reading materials. Wollstonecraft, Trimmer, Edgeworth, Smith, and Barbauld differed politically, but they were united in their distrust of so-called imaginative fiction (such as fairy tales and romances) as wasteful, self-indulgent, and confusing to children. While Myers and Richardson have shown that these authors appropriated fairy tale elements in their work, their stories generally discouraged flights of fancy; instead, they inspired young readers to learn about and take pleasure in the world around them.

Smith's Rural Walks (1795), for example, teaches young women poetry, Linnean botany, and history, as well as domestic philanthropy through the Woodfield and Cecil children's daily rambles in the countryside. It is precisely this turn to practical and scientific knowledge that Lamb finds so offensive, a blight on children's literature and, by extension, childhood itself. In this view Godwin agrees with Lamb. In the preface to Bible Stories he laments that, a generation hence, young people "will be able to tell you from what part of the globe you receive every article of your furniture; and will explain the process of manufacturing a carpet," but will have no access to imagination, for Godwin that "most essential branch of human nature" and "the ground-plot upon which the edifice of a sound morality must be erected" (313-314).

Though similar in the value they place on education and the genres in which they wrote, there were importance differences between these authors, especially surrounding questions of class mobility and religion. Moral guidance offered by Wollstonecraft, Smith, and Edgeworth was more social than spiritual; inset tales in Original Stories from Real Life (1788) and Rural Walks (1795), for example, encourage charitable benevolence and kindness to animals, while stories like Edgeworth's “Lazy Lawrence” (1800) teach the value of hard work. Trimmer also offers these lessons, especially in her popular Fabulous Histories. Designed for the Instruction of Children Respecting their Treatment of Animals (1786), but she also includes religious lessons in her works, admonishing readers that conformity to mainstream religion was a means to spiritual salvation. Much like Godwin, Trimmer was dissatisfied with the literature available to children, but their similarities confined themselves to this concern. In reality, they were opposed in their politics and philosophy. Trimmer, a High Church educator and mother of twelve, felt that contemporary literature for children was so spiritually (and developmentally) misguided that all but a few carefully chosen works would corrupt young minds. In 1802 she started the Guardian of Education, a periodical review of children's literature closely modeled on the Anti-Jacobin Review, the publication that sought to controvert the perceived threat of Jacobin principles in England following the French Revolution. The comparison is not merely formal. Like the Anti-Jacobin, the Guardian's reviews uncover dangerous and subversive elements, but for literature written to a much younger audience.

That children's literature should receive the same treatment as revolutionary pamphlets and Jacobin novels—both in the Guardian of Education and in the spy's report— illustrates how strong the perceived link was in this period between the expanding children's book trade and radical politics.

To Trimmer and her cohort of conservative writers, the problem with fairy tales and fanciful stories is not that they cultivated imagination per se, but that they encouraged children to imagine social milieus other than the ones to which they were born; they encouraged them to imagine the wrong sorts of things. For Trimmer, this type of thinking was synonymous with dangerous liberalism and radical, democratic ideas.

Trimmer excoriated Godwin's first children's book, Bible Stories (published under the pseudonym William Scolfield), for treating "the Histories in the Bible" as "common histories for children"—that is, for ranking the "sacred writers who penned what the Holy Ghost dictated […] with the authors of profane history."

The work's treatment of scripture offended Trimmer, but she was even more alarmed by the educational philosophy that underwrote this treatment. As Godwin explains in the preface to Bible Stories, religious lessons have been purposefully avoided in order "to interest the youthful imagination" (315). For Trimmer, this decoupling was not merely profane; it was morally catastrophic precisely because it encouraged unregulated fantasy. She rejected the work out of hand and advised others to do the same: "we hope every parent […] will discern the folly, as well as wickedness, of leaving children to form their own principles and regulate their own manners, without lesson or rule, as the wild flights of an unbridled imagination shall direct" (211). For Godwin, however, this detachment epitomized his belief that imagination and autonomy were the bedrocks of youthful development; the qualities that Trimmer abhorred were, in fact, the cornerstone of Godwin's entire system of education.

Clemit summarizes Godwin's educational vision as contingent on three central ideas, which, she argues, later shaped his children's books.

First, Godwin argues that children's education should inculcate intellectual habits rather than simply teach facts. Such habits will enable children to engage complicated issues as mature adults; they will provide, as Godwin describes, "against the age of five and twenty, a mind well regulated, active, and prepared to learn" (Enquirer 115). This prioritization, he believed, would help children learn to judge the world around them according to the dictates of their conscience rather than an external authority. The second idea of his educational vision is the commitment to children's autonomy, especially in their choice of reading materials. Choosing their own books, he argues, acclimatizes children to independent thought. Literature also encourages imagination, the third tenet of his philosophy, and one that Godwin argued in the preface to Bible Stories was central to the development of sympathy and morality (313-314).

Autonomy, imagination, and intellect exist symbiotically in Godwin's paradigm: they develop in response to each other as the child learns. While The Enquirer and preface to Bible Stories outline this philosophy, it also finds a clear expression in Godwin's novel Fleetwood; or the New Man of Feeling (1805), which devotes nearly a third of its narrative space to a discussion of learning. The personal experiences of William Ruffigny—a central character that spends his childhood working in a silk mill in Lyons— argue powerfully that intellectual freedom requires physical freedom: "Every boy learns more in his hours of play, than in his hours of labour. In school he lays in the materials of thinking; but in his sports he actually thinks: he whets his faculties and he opens his eyes."

Childish romping allows the mind to connect with and enliven the raw materials of the schoolroom. More important, it enables an ingrained desire for mental freedom, since "the mind of a child is no less vagrant than his steps; it pursues the gossamer, and flies from object to object lawless and unconfined" (Fleetwood 150). While Trimmer fears that such unmanaged thoughts could lead to moral corruption, Godwin regards them as necessary for the growth of mental and moral faculties.

In 1805—the same year that Fleetwood was published—Godwin and his wife opened the Juvenile Library, a small store off Oxford Street funded by subscriptions from Godwin's rich admirers (including his future son-in-law, Percy Shelley).

Their venture was aided by Mary Jane's relative familiarity with the children's book market, by the advice of Godwin's friend Joseph Johnson, a radical publisher who had enjoyed some success in producing children's books (including Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life in 1788), and by their friend, radical author Eliza Fenwick, who served briefly as the shop's manager and contributed two titles to its roster.

The business was initially registered under the name of Thomas Hodgkins, the store manager, in order to disguise Godwin's involvement from the government and general public, but when the Godwins discovered that Hodgkins was stealing from them, they shifted ownership to Mary Jane. In 1807, the business moved to a new location at 41 Skinner Street, a run-down building within earshot of the public executions at Newgate and close enough to Smithfield to reek of slaughter. The family lived in the upper floors, and Godwin was careful never to be seen in the shop itself. It was renamed the City Juvenile Library, and its front door and title pages carried the name of M.J. Godwin, which St Clair conjectures might have been an obfuscating attempt to attach themselves to the unrelated and respectable bookseller "John Godwin," since passers-by seem to have read the plaque as "M^r. J. Godwin" (Godwins 174). The business moved to 195 Strand in 1822, but failed in the financial crash of 1825, the burden of having been funded almost entirely by loans swallowing all its modest profits. Between its foundation in 1805 and its eventual dissolution in 1825, the Godwins (under both imprints) published only around sixty titles, but these titles included such milestones as the Lambs' Tales From Shakespear and the first English translation of J.D. Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson (originally published as The Family Robinson Crusoe) as well as the ten books by Godwin himself, most of which ran into multiple editions in England and the United States even after Godwin's death in 1836.

The divide between Godwin's experiences writing about educational reform and producing books to meet the needs of schools and schoolchildren was often striking. Much of the Juvenile Library's success depended upon the lucrative business of supplying textbooks to schools, requiring Godwin to negotiate the delicate territory between publishing books that would reflect his own philosophies and would succeed in the competitive schoolbook market. Confronting the realities of readers who differed in class, gender, and educational backgrounds from the abstract child he envisions in The Enquirer likely refined Godwin's education vision; at the very least, they forced him to moderate the content of the books he published. Such negotiations are visible in a letter to Charles Lamb in which Godwin insists that Lamb curtail the gore present in his manuscript of The Voyage of Ulysses (1808) on the grounds that such violence would make the text impossible to sell to girls' schools: ‘We live in squeamish days. Amid the beauties of your manuscript, of which no man can think more highly than I do, what will the squeamish say to such expressions as these? ‘devoured their limbs, yet warm & trembling, lapping the blood.' p.10, or to the giant's vomit, p. 14, or to the minute & shocking description of the extinguishing the giant's eye, in the page following. You I daresay have no formed plan of excluding the female sex from among your readers, & I, as a book-seller, must consider that, if you have, you exclude one half of the human species.

’ Godwin's concerns are simultaneously pragmatic and pedagogical. From a business perspective, he worries that the work's present carnage will deter young women (and their families and teachers) from purchasing it; he is concerned about the potential fiscal consequences of Lamb's rhetoric. As an educator, though, he fears that such revulsion will lead to deficits in young women's knowledge of the classics; since girls were rarely taught ancient languages, retellings like Lamb's might be their only exposure to Homer.

He faced a similar issue with his own text, The Pantheon; in 1810, Godwin had to commission the re-engraving of four of the illustrations to drape cloaks and fig-leaves over nude figures of Venus, Apollo, Mercury, and Mars in order to secure a lucrative order from Dr. Burney's school in Greenwich.

As in Bible Stories, Godwin makes a claim for the dual importance of imagination and intellect in the Advertisement to Outlines of English Grammar (1810), his abridgement of William Hazlitt's A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue, which Godwin also published earlier that same year:

‘There are two qualities especially necessary to any considerable improvement of the human mind, imagination, and the habit of considering things, with precision and order. Without the last of these, we are exposed to the danger of being constantly deceived; our opinions have no standard; but are entirely at the mercy of our age, our country, the books we chance to read, or the company we happen to frequent. (Outlines v-vi)’ Outlines invokes the radical grammarian (and treason trial defendant) John Horne Tooke on its very first page, a citation which suggests the text's agenda: that universal access to the laws and principles of language can act as a leveling influence on society, and that a knowledge of English grammar, learned in one's youth, can best equip future citizens to make well-informed decisions.

The idea implicit in the above passage is that the cultivation of independent thinkers will allow the next generation of readers to question the assumptions of "our age" and "our country."

The first text that Godwin both authored and published under his own imprint, Fables Ancient and Modern. Adapted for the Use of Children from Three to Eight Years of Age (1805), was his most successful; the Juvenile Library published eleven known editions between 1805 and 1824, including a French translation by Mary Jane Godwin.

The frontispiece contains an illustration by William Mulready (the artist whom Godwin immortalizes in The Looking-Glass) of Aesop instructing a group of children. Mulready borrowed the image from a statue that Godwin had installed over the door at Skinner Street, and Godwin seems to have embraced Aesop as a kind of totem, claiming in the Fables' preface to have "fancied [himself] taking the child upon [his] knee" like the figures in the statue and illustration.

Despite the inherently didactic nature of Aesop's fables, Godwin refrains from preaching to his readers, instead adopting a simple and direct style to inspire reflection. He also radically edits or completely re-conceptualizes these stories. For example, he insists on providing his readers with "happy and forgiving" endings, often resulting in fables that seem to lack a moral compass. This apparent lack of guidance infuriated Trimmer, who claimed that Fables' happy endings "prevent the proper discrimination betwixt virtue and vice, which children should be led to make at as early a period as possible […] the public is presented with a set of fanciful stories, destitute, for the most part, of moral, and everything else that should characterize a Fable Book."

This appears to have been Godwin's point: the very lack of obvious, tidy morals encourages free-thinking liberality in his child readers. Godwin's characters confront injustices that invite his young readers to consider the consequences of social customs and laws and, at times, to arrive at their own conclusion even before the characters do. The tale of “The Wolf and the Mastiff,” for example, reads as a miniature Caleb Williams, with its two "animals originally of the same class, only with a little difference in [their] education" debating the merits of freedom, service, and the individual will in a society ruled by masters (140).

Baldwin's next book, The Pantheon; or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome (1806) was Godwin's attempt to supplant the Pantheon of the Heathen Gods and Illustrious Heroes, a French text translated into English by Andrew Tooke in 1698 that was the standard mythology textbook for eighteenth-century English schoolchildren. Along with Fables, the Pantheon was one of Godwin's most successful works for children, running into multiple editions throughout the nineteenth century.

John Keats owned a copy which was found among his possessions when he died in Italy, and critics have noted that Keats's idiosyncratic treatment of the titans in Hyperion and Endymion are indebted to the Pantheon.

Godwin dedicated the Pantheon to the Reverend Matthew Raine, the master of Charterhouse school, probably in the hopes that such flattery would establish a relationship between the great school and the small bookseller.

Godwin's preface positions his Pantheon as a fresh alternative to its dull and "malicious" predecessors. He attacks Tooke specifically for his heavy-handed moralizing and repeated insistence on the superiority of Christianity over ancient paganism.

Unlike Tooke's "elaborate calumny upon the Gods of the Greeks […] in the coarsest thoughts and words that rancour could furnish," Godwin's text glows with respect for the characters, customs, and ideas of the ancient world. In so doing, he suggests to his young readers that the modern world can, in fact, learn from the pagan past. Moreover, unlike other mythologies, the title page of Godwin's Pantheon addresses itself to "young persons of both sexes," opening the beauties of the classical world to girls as well as boys.

The last paragraph of the Pantheon's preface provides a précis of Godwin's goals for his text: ‘The uses of the study of ancient mythology are, 1. to enable young persons to understand the system of the poets of former times, as well as the allusions so often to be found interspersed in writers of a more recent date: 2. as a collection of the most agreeable fables that ever were invented, it is admirably calculated to awaken the imagination; imagination, which it cannot be too often repeated, is the great engine of morality: 3. it presents us with an instructive lesson on the nature of the human mind, laying before us the manners and prejudices of a nation extremely different from our own, and showing us to what extravagant and fantastic notions of the invisible world the mind, once bewildered in error, may finally be led.

’ Here, Godwin returns to some of his favorite themes: the fact that these tales are valuable because "agreeable" to young minds, the idea that imagination (that "great engine of morality") is essential to child readers, and the idea that children can benefit from observing cultural differences. The final sentence can be read as both a defense of his project and, in a broader sense, a swipe at his own, modern world; the idea of minds "bewildered in error" and in need of guidance suggests a stark comparison between the classical world that Godwin's text venerates and his own war-torn and divided nation.

Baldwin's other major works —The History of England (1806), History of Rome (1809), and History of Greece (1821)—continued to entertain young readers while challenging their assumptions. These texts' emphases on reflection, rather than the rote memorization of facts, made them innovative within their contemporary market. In these histories, aspects of Godwin's political agenda become clearer. In The History of England (1806), for example, Godwin devotes a chapter to Oliver Cromwell, and according to his chapter heading, Cromwell "governed this nation with more vigour and glory, than any king that ever sat upon the throne." Similarly, Godwin's chapter on the aftermath of the War of the Roses ends with a leading question that he refuses to answer: "Was he [Perkin Warbeck] the Duke of York, or was he an imposter? in other words, Which was the true murderer, Richard III, or his accuser, Henry VII? This is one of the most difficult questions in history."

As Clemit notes, the mere mention of the pretender Perkin Warbeck within a discussion of British kings calls the absolute authority of the monarchy into question ( “Philosophical Anarchism” 66-67).

By withholding an answer to this "difficult question," Godwin simultaneously challenges his young readers to think critically about national history and to question the institution of the monarchy itself. The History of England contains other critiques of royal power. Godwin, for example, first describes Edward III as "like too many other kings and heads of nations, he desired to be a conqueror" and then immediately defines "conqueror" as "a man who sallies forth at the head of an army, to disturb the peace and repose of honest, unoffending husbandmen, peasants and artisans: he causes the death of thousands, and reduces nations to slavery, that he may become famous and have songs made in his praise" (79-80). Similarly, in the chapter on James I, Godwin depicts that monarch as a "pedant" who was "not fit" for rule. Godwin describes James's declaration "that it would be sedition in them [Parliament] to dispute what a king might do in the heights of his power" as "very foolish talk," a passage which not only suggests that a king can be foolish, but also flatly rejects the power of the monarchy over Parliament (128).

Such persistent questioning of institutions makes The History of England as much of a treatise on contemporary politics as a lesson in history.

Godwin was never accused of being a shrewd businessman: although moderately successful in terms of sales and contracts, the Juvenile Library was founded almost entirely on borrowed money. Godwin often took a flippant attitude towards matters of finance, and, as Kinnnell explains, the company did not sufficiently advertise in provincial newspapers, thereby missing a valuable, growing market of rural readers (80).

These forces combined with the market crash of 1825 to bankrupt the business, which closed its doors in that year. Despite its failure as a business, the books published by the Juvenile Library profoundly contributed both to the contemporary children's book market and to our understanding of Godwin's own educational and philosophical ideas.