William Godwin was an important figure in the transition from Enlightenment thinking to Romanticism during the early nineteenth century. A radical philosopher, novelist, historian, and progressive educationalist, he was in East Anglia in 1756 and trained for five years for the Dissenting ministry at Hoxton Academy, before abandoning a career as a minister to become a writer. The lover of Mary Wollstonecraft, his followers included Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, and Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne were all influenced by his work. He died in London in 1836.Maurice Hindle divides his time between freelance writing and teaching for the Open University. He has also edited Frankenstein for the Penguin Classics.