 Godwin’s philosophical importance rests principally on his Political Justice. He wrote other philosophical works, The Enquirer (1798) and Thoughts on Man (1831), but he has become perhaps better known for his novels, the most famous of which is Things as They are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), and for the part he played in literary London from 1783–1836—from his heyday in the 1790s as the radical philosopher who married Mary Wollstonecraft, through the next forty years in which he was variously the butt of attacks by Thomas Malthus, Samuel Parr and a host of anti-jacobin scribes, friend of the romantic poets, publisher and author of children’s books, father-in-law and sponger off Percy Bysshe Shelley, and historian of the Civil War, to his final anomalous position as a government pensioner supported by a Tory administration. His papers and especially his diary, which sparsely records what he read and wrote and whom he met, provide an immense resource for scholars of the romantic period.