Variously described as a satirical, political or anti-Jacobin novel, The Vagabond was an immediate popular success and reached this third edition within the first year of publication. I am indebted to an online catalogue entry posted by Second Life Books of Lanesborough, MA, for the following notes:
In the book, we are told, William Godwin appears as ‘Stupeo’ and Walker paraphrases and deliberately misinterprets both Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women and Godwin's own Political Equality. Walker’s ‘Stupeo’ advocates gambling as a way to equalize assets and eventually founds a Utopian republic in America, which fails.
St. Clair, in his The Godwins and the Shelleys, summarizes the central episode of the novel as when “the hero stands before a burning house in which the girl he has made pregnant is trapped along with her father, but both are burned to death before he can calculate the comparative utility of his options.”
The Vagabond, starring William Godwin as ‘Stupeo’
IT was a third edition of 1799, slightly foxed and browned and lacking the half titles, but the copy of George Walker’s novel The Vagabond seen in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of August 19 was in a contemporary calf gilt binding and it sold at £400 (C.R. Johnson).
