The idea of capacity is central to Godwin’s political theory. In spite of his assurance that equality is unrelated to physical or intellectual ability, Godwin makes individual and social liberty contingent upon the types of contributions one’s capacities allow. His political system inevitably produces exceptions (those who do not or cannot contribute to the general good) for which he needs to devise additional measures. People who lack the right kinds of mental and physical capacities prove to be an intractable difficulty. In his fiction, Godwin centralizes the idea that the mind should work in concert with the body, and sees incapacity in either of these as socially and personally problematic. We see this in his repeated use of automata, dolls, and characters who disengage from their bodies in various ways; and in his fictional use of rejuvenation and cure. Godwin speculates that when reason governs society, illness and incapacity will no longer be present. His attitude towards deformity is quite separate from his views on capacity. Deformity, in Godwin’s fiction, is usually a visual sign of an evil character, and he does not articulate the prodigious phase of disability.

The conclusion moves beyond Richardson, Burney, Austen, and Edgeworth to demonstrate the wide-ranging ramifications of networked authorship for other authors during the period.It was not necessary to be a member of an underprivileged group in order to be situated within an authorship network.Three of their well-educated male contemporaries were influenced by literary networks that inspired significant revisions to their most famous novels: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794).The case studies of these three novels show that revision was a major tool of eighteenth-century composition practices and was linked to networked authorship, overturning spontaneous, individual conceptions of literary production during the period.The larger consequences of this study are for the categories of novel and author: by concentrating on revision, we can understand the mutability of the novel form and the networked nature of authorship.