With Godwin also is very commonly connected Thomas Holcroft (or, as Lamb always preferred to spell the name, "Ould craft"), a curiosity of literature and a rather typical figure of the time. Holcroft was born in London in December 1745, quite in the lowest ranks, and himself rose from being stable-boy at Newmarket, through the generally democratic trade of shoemaking, to quasi-literary positions as schoolmaster and clerk, and then to the dignity of actor. He was about thirty-five when he first began regular authorship; and during the rest of his life he wrote four novels, some score and a half of plays, and divers other works, none of which is so good as his Autobiography, published after his death by Hazlitt,
and said to be in part that writer's work. It would have been fortunate for Holcroft if he had confined himself to literature; for some of his plays, notably The Road to Ruin , brought him in positively large sums of money, and his novels were fairly popular. But he was a violent democrat, some indeed attributed to him the origination of most of the startling things in Godwin's Political Justice , and in 1794 he was tried, though with no result, for high treason, with Horne Tooke and others. This brought him into the society of the young Jacobin school, Coleridge, and the rest, but was disastrous to the success of his plays; and when he went abroad in 1799 he entered on an extraordinary business of buying old masters (which were rubbish) and sending them to England, where they generally sold for nothing. He returned, however, and died on 23rd March 1809.
Holcroft's theatre will best receive such notice as it requires in connection with the other drama of the century. Of his novels, Alwyn , the first, had to do with his experiences as an actor, and Hugh Trevor is also supposed to have been more or less autobiographical. Holcroft's chief novel, however, is Anna St. Ives , a book in no less than seven volumes, though not very large ones, which was published in 1792, and which exhibits no small affinities to Godwin's Caleb Williams , and indeed to the Political Justice itself. And Godwin, who was not above acknowledging mental obligations, if he was rather ill at discharging pecuniary ones, admits the influence which Holcroft had upon him. Anna St. Ives , which, like so many of the other novels of its day, is in letters, is worth reading by those who can spare the time. But it cannot compare, for mere amusement, with the very remarkable Memoir above referred to. Only about a fourth of this is said to be in Holcroft's own words; but Hazlitt has made excellent matter of the rest, and it includes a good deal of diary and other authentic work. In his own part Holcroft shows himself a master of the vernacular, as well as (what he undoubtedly was) a man of singular shrewdness and strength of mental temper.
The Novel school of the period (to which Holcroft introduces us) is full and decidedly interesting, though it contains at the best one masterpiece, Vathek , and a large number of more or less meritorious attempts in false styles. The kind was very largely written much more so than is generally thought. Thus Godwin, in his early struggling days, and long before the complete success of Caleb Williams , wrote, as has been mentioned, for trifling sums of money (five and ten guineas), two or three novels which even the zeal of his enthusiastic biographer does not seem to have been able to recover. Nor did the circulating library, even then a flourishing institution, lack hands more or less eminent to work for it, or customers to take off its products. The Minerva Press, much cited but little read, had its origin in this our time; and this time is entitled to the sole and single credit of starting and carrying far a bastard growth of fiction, the "tale of terror," which continued to be cultivated in its simplest form for at least half a century, and which can hardly be said to be quite obsolete yet. But as usual we must proceed by special names, and there is certainly no lack of them. "Zeluco" Moore has been dealt with already; Day, the eccentric author of Sanford and Merton , belongs mainly to an earlier period, and died, still a young man, in the year of the French Revolution; but, besides, Holcroft, Beckford, Bage, Cumberland, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Monk Lewis, with Mrs. Inchbald, are distinctly "illustrations" of the time, and must have more or less separate mention.
William Beckford is one of the problems of English literature. He was one of the richest men in England, and his long life 1760 to 1844 was occupied for the most part not merely with the collection, but with the reading of books. That he could write as well as read he showed as a mere boy by his satirical Memoirs of Painters , and by the great-in-little novel of Vathek (1783), respecting the composition of which in French or English divers fables are told. Then he published nothing for forty years, till in 1834 and 1835 he issued his Travels in Italy, Spain, and Portugal , recollections of his earliest youth. These travels have extraordinary merits of their kind; but Vathek is a kind almost to itself. The history of the Caliph, in so far