Fleetwood’s Upbringing and Its Effect on Making Friends Anonymous College

In William Godwin’s novel Fleetwood, readers are introduced to a character who is predominantly solitary and is socially inadequate when he is within society. This is due to the fact that he grew up as the only child of a father who was withdrawn from the social world when his mother passed away. Being raised in Merionethshire, he grew up with very little social interaction and instead was raised in nature and, arguably, by the wilderness itself. This plays a significant role in the subsequent events in the novel, as his solitude growing up makes him socially inept, especially in his relationships with women. As this novel is also titled Man of Feeling, readers are able to see how Fleetwood’s journey allows him to discover conventional men of feeling and how his character challenges this idea. Since he grew up in solitude, his journey is drastically different as his character is not aware of how to act in society. It is clear that Fleetwood’s lack of friends while growing up impedes him from having proper social relations, having decent morals and ideal traits to become a proper ‘man of feeling'; his status feeds into his egoism in the sense that he does not realize other individuals have feelings that cannot be read from outer...