"The Tyranny of Age": Godwin's St. Leon and the Nineteenth-Century Longevity Narrative

Abstract

This essay reads William Godwin's novel St. Leon (1799) in relation to contemporaneous medicalizing discourses concerned with the elimination of old age. I argue that in St. Leon, a speculative case study of a disastrously unbounded life, Godwin recants his earlier paean to immortality in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793-98) by undermining the solitary subject for whom senescence is a symptom of political tyranny. St. Leon therefore signals an acute transitional moment between late eighteenth-century thought and incipient Romanticism, and marks the first example of the nineteenth-century longevity narrative, wherein the finitude of individual lifespan exists in strained reciprocity with the perpetual succession of species.

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