Godwin Baxter—Sir Colin Baxter

Godwin Baxter’s connection to Sir Colin Baxter is marked by inherited illness, unresolved judgment, and a later dispute over how their family history was represented. Godwin identifies Sir Colin as the source of the syphilitic disease that threatens his life, yet in his final hours he asks Archibald McCandless to forgive his father, whom he remembers as a deeply culpable man.

Inherited Illness

Over breakfast, Godwin explains that he inherited a syphilitic illness from his father, described as a great surgeon. He expects it eventually to cause insanity and general paralysis, though he cannot know whether the first symptoms will arrive within months or years. The account makes Sir Colin’s place in Godwin’s life concrete through a medical inheritance, without establishing that Godwin treats the illness as a deliberate injury or assigns his father direct blame for it.

Godwin has prepared for the illness to advance: he carries medicine intended as a painless poison, to be taken by himself when symptoms begin. His disclosure turns their biological connection into an immediate prospect of loss, even as he presents his plan as settled and asks those close to him not to become doctors on his account.

Judgment and Forgiveness

As he is dying, Godwin asks Archibald to forgive Sir Colin. In the same breath, he calls his father a foul scoundrel and says that Sir Colin began more than he could see through to the end. The appeal is therefore not a reconciliation or an acquittal: Godwin preserves his condemnation while asking his friend to release the grievance. His final reference to the two men makes this unresolved father-son judgment part of the farewell he leaves behind.

Archibald administers the medicine that Godwin has prepared. Godwin’s request about Sir Colin is thus voiced in the same final scene as his death, giving the relationship its most direct personal consequence: the son’s last words about his father are addressed not to Sir Colin, but to the friend who survives him.

The Family History in Competing Accounts

Victoria McCandless later argues that Archibald’s book invented a different account of Godwin’s origins. In that fiction, Sir Colin manufactured Godwin by the Frankenstein method, a device Victoria describes as part of Archibald’s attempt to imagine that he, Godwin, and Victoria had shared an equally deprived childhood. She insists that Archibald knew this account was false. The fabricated creation story should therefore be distinguished from Godwin’s own breakfast disclosure, which identifies his illness as inherited from Sir Colin.

The relation is presented through two sharply different forms of evidence: Godwin’s direct account of hereditary disease and Victoria’s retrospective challenge to Archibald’s fictional family history. Together they leave Sir Colin linked both to the bodily condition that shapes Godwin’s final years and to a contested story about how the son came to exist.