William Godwin’s Stunning 1794 Advice to a Young Activist on How to Confront the Status Quo with Self-Possession, Dignity, and Persuasive Conviction

Godwin’s daughter, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley — herself a visionary far ahead of her time — would later recount that despite Gerrald’s eloquent defense, the judge interrupted him with the astounding assertion that he was even more dangerous to society because his motives were pure rather than criminal. He was found guilty of sedition and sentenced to fifteen years of penal transportation — a verdict Shelley considered equivalent to a death sentence, for Gerrald was already ill with tuberculosis and could not be expected to survive a long journey to a faraway colony.

After a yearlong imprisonment in London, he was put on a cargo vessel named Sovereign — one final jab of irony — and shipped off to New South Wales, where he died four months later, shortly after his thirty-third birthday. But his example ignited in generations of reformers the passion for justice and human rights — a bittersweet reminder that, in Zadie Smith’s beautiful words, “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”

Complement with Albert Camus on what it really means to be a rebeland Albert Einstein’s wonderful letter of solidarity and advice to Marie Curie when she — yes, even she — was besieged by detractors, then revisit Godwin’s soul-stirring love letters to and from Mary Wollstonecraft.