• Name: Pye, Henry James
• Gender: Female
• Birth Date: 17  February  1745
• Death Date: 11  August  1813
• Occupation: politician

Henry James Pye was elected MP for Berkshire in 1784 but retired from parliament in 1790. His loyalty to Pitt was rewarded with the poet laureateship which he held until his death. The DNB describes his poetry as 'mechanically competent' though 'never distinctive enough to be really bad'. He was also a novelist, his works including two later anti-Jacobin novels, The Democrat (1795) and The Aristocrat (1799).

The identification is uncertain, but it is plausible. Godwin first mentions Pye in 1795 during his visit to Warwickshire:
'Kennelworth-book-club, dine w. Parr , Greatheed, Wills, Johnson, Pye, col Staunton, and Sayer and 2 : Supper, talk of learning. Bayle, art: Spinosa.' According to St Clair's Reading Nation this was the year in which the Kenilworth Book Club was founded.
The second occasion associates him with John Taylor and in his Records of my Life, Taylor recalls Pye with sympathy and affection.

In the 1796 list Godwin noted meeting Pye in 1802 but it is at least possible that he simply forgot the earlier encounter or that Pye only became noteworthy in Godwin's mind by the time the second meeting took place.

• DNB.
• John Taylor, Records of my Life, 2 vols, (London 1832).
• St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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