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parents for this neglect. His formative years were marked by poverty
     and a dreary existence. They put a chill into his soul that would never leave him.
    John Godwin belonged to the Sandemanian tradition, a small and joyless sect of Dissenters who embraced “primitive” Christianity.
     He believed in predestination, original sin, and divine retribution. Indeed his Calvinist views were so rigid that he alienated
     his congregation and had to move to Debenham in Suffolk when William was two. Here again, William’s father had difficulties
     and two years later he relocated once more—this time to Guestwick, north of Norwich, where he would remain till he died. Much
     of Godwin’s childhood was spent here. The local meeting house’s most treasured possession was a carved oak chair known as
     Cromwell’s chair. The young William occasionally sat in it, taking the place of Oliver Cromwell, the hero of the Dissenters,
     who had ruled England for five years when the Puritans had controlled the country.
    William remembered his father as a man who had little love of learning or books and that he usually scribbled his sermon for
     the Sunday service at tea on Saturday afternoon. By contrast William himself was a very early reader and soon went through
     the Bible, books of sermons,
The Pilgrim’s Progress,
and other religious literature. As he recalled, “I remember, when I was a very little boy, saying to myself, ‘What shall
     I do, when I have read through all the books that there are in the world?’” A favorite “improving” book for him was James
     Janeway’s
A Token for Children, Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young
     Children
—a series of stories about children who were saved by obeying God’s will and dying at a young age. Uncle Edward Godwin, another
     minister, had written a children’s book called
The Death Bed, a poem concerning the Joyful Death of a Believer and the Awful Death of an Unbeliever,
which all the young Godwins had to read. The title tells it all.
    Death in its reality was not unknown to the Godwins. One brother drowned at sea and another in a pond right outside the Godwin
     home. William himself was a sickly boy and was lucky to survive an attack of smallpox; his religion forbade him to be inoculated,
     and he said he was “perfectly willing” to die rather than disobey.
    All this piety made the young William fear that he might be damned forever for any small infraction. Even as a child, he wished
     to become a preacher himself. At home, he would stand on his high chair in the legal wig that had belonged to his great-grandfather
     and deliver sermons to an imaginary congregation. Rather than enjoying his son’s performances, however, John Godwin feared
     that William was acting like a showoff.
    When he was eight, William began attending school at a town two and a half miles away. He practiced preaching as he walked
     through the woods. One day he made a friend collapse in tears when he described the damnation that awaited him for his sins.
     Later he secretly borrowed the key to the meeting house and preached and prayed over his friend like an ordained minister.
     (In a note that he wrote to himself, he said he allowed the boy to kiss him. The nature of the kiss was not noted.) The only
     errant act of his childhood that William remembered was attending the theater in Norwich, when he was nine. Though his father’s
     female cousin accompanied him, theater-going was forbidden by his religion.
    His father sent him back to Norwich when he was eleven to be educated as the only pupil of the Reverend Samuel Newton. His
     father chose Newton because he believed that William needed even stricter training to instill more humility in him. Newton’s
     preferred method of instruction was beating for the smallest behavioral lapses. William was beaten only once, but even that
     was an astonishing experience to him. As he recalled, “It