• Name: Joseph, Samuel
• Gender: Male
• Death Date: 1  July  1850
• Occupation: sculptor

These entries are either to the sculptor Samuel Joseph (1790/91-1850), or to his cousin, George Francis Joseph (1764-1846), portrait and subject painter (who painted a watercolor portrait of Lamb for William Evans).

In 1832 there are thirty or more entries, with seven being ‘sit to’Joseph’. Samuel Joseph is best known for his monument to Wilberforce at Westminster Abbey, and ‘gained a reputation for his portrait busts and medallions, attracting a distinguished list of sitters (NPG)’. According to by Madge Dresser, ‘Set in Stone? Statues and Slavery in London’, he was responsible for making thirty busts, four statues and five monuments. The DNB entry for Samuel Joseph notes, ‘Failure to gain a Royal Academy travelling scholarship to Rome in 1817 exacerbated his isolation from the ideal classicism of portrait sculpture then in vogue, and propelled him instead towards a rarer, idiosyncratic naturalism expressed in the portrayal of a sudden alertness of facial features and a flamboyant treatment of hair…the catalyst in this approach to portraiture was Joseph's involvement with the pseudo-science of phrenology, in which the mental powers of the individual are read by feeling and interpreting cranial bumps. He was admitted a member of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society on 26 December 1820’. There’s some evidence that Godwin had an ongoing critical interest/curiosity in the study of phrenology - George Stuart Mackenzie (1789 - 1848), the author of Illustrations of phrenology - with engraved Portraits included Godwin (Plate Number XVII) who is diagnosed: '...if this portrait be correctly drawn, the right side does not quite agree with the left in the region of identity, and where Dr. Spurzheim places the organ, which he has called in French 'Surnaturalite', or 'Sens de Marveilleux', a disposition to believe in what is marvellous and improbable. This dissimilarity may have produced something contradictory in his feelings, which he may have felt extrememly annoying.' Godwin further discusses the subject in Thoughts on Man in the essay ‘Of Phrenology’, written between 28 December 1830 and 9 January 1831, and personally attends a lecture by Spurzheim in 1831 (see also ‘Lectures in Diary’ file). Though critical of this method of diagnosis, Godwin had Mary Shelley’s head analysed by his friend William Nicholson when she was three weeks old, and in 1830 notes in his diary ‘Cast at Spurzheim’s’. This does not by any means prove that the Joseph in question is Samuel Joseph, but given Godwin and Joseph’s mutual interest in phrenology around this time, it’s more likely to be Samuel as opposed to his cousin George.

The diary shows that Joseph was a frequent contact of Thomas Uwins, painter, and Uwin's memoir makes it clear that he was friendly with Samuel Joseph. Godwin sat for his portrait several times in 1832 and on four of those occasions T Uwins is recorded as an 'adv'. After referring to Joseph the sculptor in an 1821 letter Unwins continues:
'Now Joseph has always had a very high opinion of me; it was he who introduced me to the Wilsons of Highbury, and who has done me many other valuable professional services; and it is he how is now urging me, by every motive which friendship can suggest, to try my fortune in Scotland'. A Memoir of Thomas Uwins, R.A. , p. 88.

• DNB
• Thoughts on Man: Political and Philosophical Writings, vol. 6.
• Madge Dresser, ‘Set in Stone? Statues and Slavery in London’ in History Workshop Journal 64.1 (2007) 162-199
• Sarah Uwins, A Memoir of Thomas Uwins, R.A. (East Ardsley, Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1978)

This table lists the people this person is most frequently noted with in the diary.