 Godwin was born on 3 March 1756 at Wisbeach [now Wisbech], Cambridgeshire, the seventh of thirteen children of John Godwin (1723–1772) a dissenting minister, and his wife Anne (c1723–1809), the daughter of Richard Hull, a ship-owner engaged in the Baltic trade. As a minister Godwin’s father was involved in a number of conflicts with his congregations and the family moved first from Wisbeach to Debenham, Suffolk and, in 1760 to Guestwick, near Norwich, Norfolk, where they lived until his father’s death. The village was small and the revenue poor; to supplement their income they took in pupils to whom John Godwin taught the classics. The family’s financial circumstances improved on the death of Edward Godwin (1695–1764), Godwin’s paternal grandfather—also a dissenting minister and friend of Philip Doddridge, in whose Academy Godwin’s father and his uncle Edward had been educated.  Godwin’s upbringing was rather gloomy. He was not a robust child and his aunt “instructed me to compose myself in sleep, with a temper as if I were never again to wake in this sublunary world” (“Autobiography” in Collected Novels and Memoirs (CNM hereafter), 1992, I, 12). At five he was reading The Pilgrim’s Progress with her, together with James Janeway’s Account of the Conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children (1671–2), and hymns, catechisms and prayers written by Dr. Isaac Watts. One of Godwin’s earliest memories was of composing a poem entitled “I wish to be a minister” (CNM I, 15), and a favourite childhood entertainment was to preach sermons in the kitchen on Sunday afternoons.