William Godwin was born in 1756 in Wisbech, a market town in Cambridgeshire, one of a dozen children of a Nonconformist minister. As the most promising of his siblings, he was sent to study to become a Dissenting preacher in Norwich, then to the excellent Hoxton Academy in London from which he graduated with the equivalent of a degree in divinity in 1778. Over the next five years Godwin attempted, without success, to become a clergyman supported by an enthusiastic parish: his congregations at Ware, Stowmarket, and Beaconsfield were repulsed by his narrow Calvinistic theology and the intellectual rigor of his sermons. Meanwhile, Godwin’s religious and political beliefs were themselves being assaulted by the currents of political thought from the French Enlightenment, to which he was introduced by William Fawcett, one of his acquaintances at Ware. After reading Holbach, Helvetius, and Rousseau, Godwin came to believe, as he wrote in The Herald of Literature, that “human depravity originates” not in Original Sin but “in the vices of political constitutions.” By 1783 he had become an atheist and a radical. He moved back to London and successfully pursued the life of a novelist and journalistic writer. His historical sketches and his biography of William Pitt the Elder led Godwin to be employed as a political journalist by members of the liberal faction of the Whig party led by Charles James Fox. Through these connections Godwin met the republican radicals with whom he would later be associated, including his lifelong friend, the anarchist playwright Thomas Holcroft.
When the French Revolution broke out in July of 1789, Godwin was elated by the thought that the Enlightenment principles of Rousseau might be put into practice across the channel, and by the hope that such a revolution might spread to England. That opinion was in the mind of Richard Price, another Dissenting minister, when in November he gave a special sermon, “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country,” in which he cheered on the French radicals and his own countrymen on the hundredth anniversary of the Glorious Revolution and the Declaration of Rights that had limited the power of the English crown. The most important conservative response to Price came from what might have seemed an unlikely source, the parliamentarian Edmund Burke, who had written sympathetically of the American colonists during their war of liberation. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) argued that the Glorious Revolution had only restored rights that James II had usurped, that the revolution in France had overturned all the laws and customs of the country, and that to imitate France was to invite total anarchy. Burke’s attack in turn generated a pamphlet war between those who admired and those who abhorred the French Revolution. The most important ripostes to Burke were Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791).
Godwin met with those on the radical side, including Paine and Wollstonecraft, but he himself did not participate in the pamphlet war. Instead he worked slowly on a manuscript arguing his political principles commissioned by his publisher George Robinson, which became the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Godwin begins with the Rousseauist principles of human equality and natural goodness, viewing society as a blessing, because of the equally natural human desire to commune with one’s fellow creatures, but government as a powerful corrupting force and at best a necessary evil.
Despite the evil results of bad laws, Godwin argued that revolutionary change was problematic because its methods were violent and its results uncertain; it might end up reinstituting equally abusive laws under the new regime. Ideally, changes in government ought to be the result of rational dialogue and argumentation. But when an abusive governmental system is entrenched, violent revolution may be necessary to extirpate it and create a new government.
Godwin argued that property rights – the usual reason for the constitution of governments – were also problematic. The world and its goods constituted for Godwin a common stock to which all had equal rights. The only genuine rationale for inequality would be the civic benefit and public pleasure that might arise from private wealth, such as the ability of rich men to build bridges and improve roads for all to use, to fund an art museum or orchestra for all to enjoy, and to subsidize scientific experimentation in order to improve our understanding of the natural world. Godwin argued, along property lines, that marriage – which he defined as the ownership of a woman by a man – was intrinsically unjust; he called it “a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies”:
Most important, in relation to Caleb Williams, were Godwin’s theories about crime and punishment. Godwin felt that capital punishment, as legislated in England, was supremely irrational; since both theft and murder were hanging offenses, a rational thief would proceed to murder any witnesses to the crime. Godwin admitted that prisons must exist, because society must be protected from those who have become habitual criminals. But the purpose of prisons should not be punishment – which would be both cruel and useless. Rather the criminal should be guided into a rational understanding of what we owe to our fellow creatures, without the use of force, physical or spiritual. Indeed, since human beings are naturally good, criminals must have been made what they are by society and its government: it is not their fault:
Godwin ended Political Justice with a utopian vision of the future after the era of repressive governments has been brought to an end. He predicted a world in which
Political Justice was published in mid‐February 1793, and it was an immediate popular and critical success, a formative influence on the ideas of both Wordsworth and Coleridge in their radical phase. But it had arrived at a critical moment in the political scene. Louis XVI had been guillotined in January, and on February 1 England declared war against revolutionary France – a war that would continue with a few brief interruptions through the various gyrations of French governments until the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The Pitt government of 1793 was already deeply afraid of those sympathetic to the French Revolution, like the Corresponding Societies that had formed the previous year to spread democratic ideas among the working men of England. Thomas Paine was indicted for seditious libel, a capital offense, and escaped trial by fleeing to France.
In 1794, Pitt’s government suspended the Habeas Corpus Act, prohibited public meetings of any political nature, and indicted ten advocates of radical reform for high treason, including Godwin’s friend Holcroft. Godwin’s views were equally subversive, but Pitt refrained from prosecuting him, primarily because he felt that Political Justice, costing nearly £2 at London bookstores, was beyond the reach of the working classes. (In fact groups of laborers pooled their pennies to buy copies, and cheap pirated editions were also available.) Chief Justice Eyre had argued that, despite the absence of any overt action against the government, which the law of treason normally required, the English Jacobins’ opinions could be construed as subversive of the war effort and therefore treasonous. Godwin dashed off an anonymous pamphlet ridiculing this novel theory of “constructive” high treason. In November 1794, the first three radicals to be indicted for treason were brought to trial in London, but the London juries so quickly acquitted all three defendants that Pitt gave up on the idea of show trials and released the rest of those indicted.
Nevertheless, the crackdown on political meetings and journalism continued in London and Edinburgh, and the conviction and transportation to Australia of several publishers and political organizers meant that radical politics had to go underground for the duration. The war of ideas between radical reformers and conservatives continued, but the venue changed from public meetings and political tracts to novels, which could represent in fiction what could not be safely said. Caleb Williams is one of the first texts to come out of this literary war of ideas. Its first title, Things as They Are, suggests that it represents the obverse of the utopian vision of Political Justice; in fact it strikes one from the first as a Gothic novel of surveillance, pursuit, and flight, but unlike the usual Gothic fiction in that it is set in England and in the present day. Published in 1794, it was an immediate success, going through several editions in England, and was quickly translated into French and German.
Godwin had been a celibate bachelor until the age of 40, but with greater ease in his circumstances from two popular books, he cultivated social life among the English Jacobins, attracting many of the women who were an important part of this circle – Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Robinson. Godwin had met Mary Wollstonecraft six years earlier, around the time of her 1790 riposte to Burke, but they had clashed. In the six years since then she had published the first modern feminist tract, the Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), had seen the French Revolution at first hand, and had fallen in love with, and been betrayed by, the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, by whom she had had an illegitimate child. On her return to England, Wollstonecraft moved into lodgings in Godwin’s neighborhood of Somers Town in 1796, and late that year they became lovers.
Wollstonecraft was as philosophically opposed to marriage as Godwin was; indeed, she was hard at work on a feminist novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, which delineates in scarifying detail the failure of English law and social practice to protect married women from violence, fraud, and patriarchal power. But she had become pregnant once again, and as she and Godwin considered the legal and social stigmas which their child would have to bear, they swallowed their philosophical objections, and were wed at St. Pancras Church in March 1797. At the end of August, Wollstonecraft delivered a healthy child whom they named Mary, but the placenta was retained, childbed fever developed and she died ten days later. Godwin was deeply affected by her loss, and immediately set to work to honor her memory with a posthumous edition of her previously unpublished works, including Maria. But he misgauged the reading public’s tolerance for Wollstonecraft’s unrestrained passionate nature. Readers were appalled that she had had sexual affairs outside marriage with Henry Fuseli, Gilbert Imlay, and Godwin himself, and that she had contemplated suicide when abandoned by her lover. Wollstonecraft’s reputation would not recover until late in the twentieth century.
By 1798, the radicalism of British intellectual circles had given way to reaction, partly because the ideals of the French Revolution had already been tainted by the Terror of 1794, and partly because the war with France had entered a new and more dangerous phase. As the eighteenth century ended, Godwin became the butt of anti‐Jacobin writers, like George Walker, whose 1798 novel The Vagabond contains a Panglossian philosopher identifiable as Godwin. Although he continued to publish interesting philosophical novels (St. Leon in 1799, Fleetwood in 1805, Mandeville in 1817) none of these ever became a runaway best seller like Caleb Williams. Although Godwin took on commercial projects after the turn of the century – such as a set of educational books for children – neither his writing nor the gifts of wealthy admirers enabled him to support fully the blended family that resulted from his marriage, in 1802, to Mary Jane Clairmont, a widow with two children of her own.
By 1812 Godwin was deep in debt and pretty much forgotten by the public when he received a letter from the 20‐year‐old Percy Bysshe Shelley, who introduced himself as the heir to a baronetcy and a fortune of £6000 per year. A radical for whom Political Justice was his Bible, the handsome idealistic Shelley captivated the entire household. Godwin borrowed from Shelley to pay his urgent debts, while his daughter and two stepdaughters fell in love with him. Already married to Harriet Westbrook, Shelley eloped in 1814 with Mary Godwin, and Godwin’s philosophical ideas about marriage did not prevent him from feeling outraged and betrayed. Godwin became reconciled with his disciple and his daughter, particularly after Harriet’s suicide enabled the pair to marry late in 1816. The Shelleys published Mary’s first and greatest novel, Frankenstein, dedicated to Godwin, in 1818, then moved to Italy, where they lived and wrote till Shelley’s death, in a boating accident, in 1822. Mary returned to England the following year, staying with her father together with her surviving son by Shelley until she was able to arrange an independent household.
Godwin’s major work of the 1820s was a four‐volume history of England from the Civil War to the Restoration, the first major history to look at these years from the perspective of the parliamentary republicans. Its heroes are the leaders of the Long Parliament who administered England as a commonwealth during the brief period from 1649 to 1653, between the execution of Charles I and the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. In 1833, after the passage of the first Reform Bill and the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, literary friends persuaded Prime Minister Charles Grey to offer Godwin a post in the Exchequer that included a house along with a salary of £200 per year, and the anarchist philosopher, who had ridiculed pensions in Political Justice, ended his life as a pensioner. William Godwin survived into his eightieth year, dying in 1836.
Godwin’s rapid and vivid narrative is compulsively readable: the critic William Hazlitt said that no one could begin the novel without finishing it, and that no one who finished it could forget it. Its plot comes pre‐sold to twenty‐first‐century audiences, who are familiar with movie thrillers – the ones about people who inadvertently learn a secret, either a personal secret or a secret of state, and who then are pursued by homicidal villains to within an inch of their lives until the showdown a few minutes before the end of the last reel. The plots of Rear Window, The Three Days of the Condor, and The Bourne Identity, all find their roots here.
In his preface to Fleetwood, when it was republished in 1832 in Bentley’s Standard Novel series, Godwin claims that he engineered the thriller plot of Caleb Williams by starting with the last volume and working backwards. He began with an idea for a tale of “flight and pursuit, the fugitive in perpetual apprehension of being overwhelmed with the worst calamities, and the pursuer, by his ingenuity and resources, keeping his victim in a state of the most fearful alarm.” The second volume, as he saw, would then have to present the rationale for this flight and pursuit, the discovery by the protagonist of a secret weighty enough to be dangerous, and the revelation to the pursuer that he had made that dangerous discovery. Finally, Godwin says, he thought through what would have to occur in the first volume: there the man with the secret, eminently virtuous if imperfect, and both wealthy and intelligent enough to pursue the hero endlessly, would have to be “driven to his first act of murder,” an act we would see as arising from his virtues, and therefore not entirely culpable.
But the preface Godwin wrote for Caleb Williams when it was first published in 17941 suggested that the novel was not intended as an adventure story but rather as a political novel, an apologue that addressed the divide between the party of “reformation and change” and the one upholding “the existing constitution of society.” The original title of Caleb Williams was Things as They Are, and Godwin insists that his novel is not a fantasy but a picture of the contemporary “moral world,” a “general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man.” In other words, the novel would be an exposition of his radical social philosophy published in Political Justice the year before, without the messianic forecast of the perfectible future, but rather with an exposé of the defective state of society, particularly in regard to criminal justice.
While a number of critics (including Marilyn Butler) posit that the novel Godwin wanted to write was Things as They Are, and while others (like Robert Kiely) posit that the novel Godwin wanted to write was The Adventures of Caleb Williams, the fact is that he wanted to write an adventure story that would also be a political novel. Many of the episodes work equally well in carrying out both intentions, and many of the ideas and opinions expressed seem taken directly from Godwin’s arguments in Political Justice. But as commentators on the novel since Eric Rothstein in the 1960s have pointed out, once he let go of it in a novel, Godwin’s imagination started to run away with him, producing a complex vision and a critique of intentions and motives that transcends the issues he raised in his philosophical tome. More on this later.
The first volume of Caleb Williams loads the pistol that the second and third volumes will fire off; it is a back story that harks back to a narrative past before Caleb Williams has joined Ferdinando Falkland’s household as his secretary. Caleb has noted that Falkland is strange, in a way we might call bimodal: depressed and despondent most of the time, his temper occasionally awakens to paroxysms of rage, most vividly when Caleb approaches an iron trunk and is accused by Falkland of being a spy. The master has secrets and Caleb wants to know what is at the heart of his mystery. Mr. Collins, Falkland’s steward, whose favor got Caleb his employment, is the source, or so we are told, of the narrative that occupies the rest of the volume.
The first brief segment of this back story is thematically rather than causally related to the rest. The Pisani‐Malvesi episode, contained in volume I, chapter 2, presents Falkland as a knight‐gallant who has read and imitated the heroes of romance and, on his Grand Tour of Italy, is highly admired by all the inhabitants. He attracts, in particular, Lady Lucretia Pisani, and thus becomes an object of the jealous envy of Count Malvesi, who loves and hopes to marry the Lady Lucretia. Falkland, sensitive to Malvesi’s feelings, and realizing he lacks “the feelings of a lover” toward Lucretia, makes himself clear to her and courts her successfully for Malvesi. But Malvesi is convinced that Falkland has toyed with his feelings as well as Lucretia’s and makes overtures to Falkland suggesting that he is about to call him out to a duel. Falkland’s diplomatic response is that he is always ready to defend his honor if necessary, but the Count may be acting in haste. Violence is avoided, and both Malvesi and Lucretia are grateful to Falkland. The point of the episode is to paint Falkland as a Christian gentleman‐hero in the mold of Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. In fact, the chapter is a somewhat briefer replica of an episode within Sir Charles Grandison (volume V, letter 23), where in Richardson the part of Lucretia is taken by Clementina della Porretta, and where Count Malvesi is called Count Belvedere. (Even the name Mal‐vesi seems an inversion of Bel‐vedere.)
The rest of the book is taken up with the rivalry of the gracious Falkland and the coarse and vulgar bully, Barnabas Tyrrel. This begins as soon as Falkland moves into the neighborhood, and is admired by the rest of the gentry in ways that inspire Tyrrel’s loathing and hatred. Tyrrel reacts by attempting to destroy those in his power who admire Falkland, particularly his ward, Emily Melvile, who has fallen in love with Falkland after he saves her life by gallantly rescuing her from a fire. In his resentment, Tyrrel contrives to marry her off to an illiterate and vulgar tenant aptly named Grimes, whose courtship of Emily reveals his lascivious anticipation of dominating her. Emily’s resistance causes Tyrrel to imprison her; Grimes pretends to be willing to help her escape, but in fact he betrays her. Falkland providentially is able to come to her rescue, but Tyrrel has her arrested for debt, she is taken to a gaol, where she catches a fever and dies.
In the midst of this melodrama, Godwin inserts a chapter about a tenant farmer of Tyrrel’s named Hawkins who becomes another object of Tyrrel’s domination: Tyrrel wants Hawkins’s son for a servant, Hawkins refuses, and Tyrrel exacts revenge in a variety of ways. He obstructs a path from the Hawkins farm to the main road and when Hawkins’s son clears the obstructions at night has him taken to gaol as a felon; meanwhile Hawkins’s farm animals suddenly begin to die off. Again, Falkland attempts to intercede for Tyrrel’s victims and is told to mind his own business. The episode ends with Hawkins absconding from the neighborhood the same night that his son escapes from the gaol. The climax of the volume is in chapter I.11, where Falkland publicly shames Tyrrel for his treatment of both the Hawkinses and Emily, and Tyrrel responds by first knocking Falkland to the floor with his fists and kicking him when he is down.
At the end of the chapter we are told: “Mr. Tyrrel was found by some of the company dead in the street, having been murdered at the distance of a few yards from the assembly house.” Falkland is immediately suspected of the murder, but he denies having murdered him, indeed argues successfully that, having intended to challenge Tyrrel to a duel, he is the man most deeply damaged by the murder of Tyrrel, since it has prevented his being able to get satisfaction for his insulted honor. A few weeks later the Hawkinses are arrested for the murder of Tyrrel; aside from Falkland, they were the people most recently at odds with Tyrell, and an incriminating knife is found in their dwelling that corresponds to the one that slew Tyrell; both are tried, condemned and hanged for the crime. Collins’s narrative concludes by relating that after the execution, Falkland became the psychologically damaged creature who has so engaged Caleb’s curiosity. But of course Caleb’s curiosity is rather heightened than assuaged by Collins’s narrative. Most of what is told here is in effect public knowledge, the history of the neighborhood; some of the judgments are explicitly those of Collins. But Falkland’s behavior to Caleb, at a time that is by now “several years” after the incidents involving Tyrrel, indicates to Caleb that Falkland has unrevealed secrets at the heart of his mysterious turn of mind.
It is clear that Caleb becomes a suspicious reader of Collins’s narrative, but the entire narrative in the first volume of the novel would itself seem to invite suspicious readings, because so much of it parallels important episodes in earlier fiction, primarily the novels of Richardson.2 As mentioned, the Pisani/Malvesi story summarizes a very similar episode in Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753). The deathbed scene of Mr. Clare in chapter 5, warning Falkland about his “impetuosity” and his rash reactions to “imagined dishonour” suggests the similar deathbed scene of Allworthy giving advice to Tom Jones in book V of Fielding’s novel. Falkland saving Emily from the fire in chapter 6, exiting the flames “with his lovely half‐naked burthen in his arms,” suggests the fire scene in the second installment of Richardson’s Clarissa. The following chapter presents Emily again in a Clarissa situation, Tyrrel planning to marry her off to the grossly illiterate Grimes, who relishes the idea of ravishing her, which echoes Clarissa and Solmes. In chapter 8, the sequence in which Grimes pretends to help Emily escape from her imprisonment in Tyrrel Place, suggests the elopement of Clarissa from Harlowe Place in the first volume, while Falkland’s coincidentally timely interference with Grimes’s plan to carry Emily off suggests the rescue by Sir Charles Grandison of Harriet Byron from abduction by Sir Hargreaves Pollexfen. Finally, Emily’s arrest for debt, and her illness and death following that arrest again seems drawn from the final volume of Richardson’s Clarissa.
In a sense the fact that texts echo earlier texts should not be surprising. It can be a mere coincidence, like the fact that Sophia, in Tom Jones, finds herself in a similar position to Clarissa, at odds with her father, who locks her up in the hope of getting her to agree to marry a man she loathes. (The first part of Clarissa was published in 1747, but Fielding had been working on Tom Jones since 1745, and had undoubtedly conceived from the beginning the Tom–Sophia–Blifil triangle that generates the plot.) Or it could derive from the fact that Godwin, particularly when he was casting about for incidents to populate the back story of Falkland’s depression, rage, and fear, used the first ideas that came to his mind, including ones that were ripped from the century’s best sellers. As Godwin admits in his Introduction to Fleetwood, “it was ever my method to get about me any productions of former authors that seemed to bear on my subject. I never entertained the fear, that in this way of proceeding I should be in danger of servilely copying my predecessors.” In either case, it would be polite to ignore the echoes.
For most of the novel, we will become familiar with the psychology of Caleb as a prisoner and as a fugitive. But at the beginning of Volume II, Caleb is the cat rather than the mouse. He becomes fascinated by Falkland, and observes him closely, while Falkland, for his part, becomes highly aware of Caleb’s gaze. Caleb spies on Falkland less as a duty than as a pleasure, indeed a forbidden pleasure:
But of course, Caleb does not merely watch Falkland; he provokes him in order to create something to watch. In the same chapter, Caleb and Falkland converse about Alexander the Great, with Falkland apparently identifying with Alexander’s desire to be seen as divine in order to rule his followers. At one point, seemingly at random, Caleb asks, “Clitus … was a man of very coarse and provoking manners, was he not?” Cleitus was a Macedonian general, originally an adherent of Alexander’s father Philip, who provoked Alexander into a rage in the course of a drunken banquet in Samarkand, whereupon Alexander “seized a spear from one of the guards and ran him through.” Plutarch tells us that Cleitus “was naturally of a harsh temper and willful” (Life of Alexander, 50.9). Caleb’s general point, given the discussion, is an illustration of his argument that whatever Alexander’s lofty virtues, it is hard to defend a man “whom a momentary provocation can hurry into the commission of murders,” but his quip about Cleitus seems to be a backhanded way of bringing to mind another man of “very coarse and provoking manners” – Barnabas Tyrrel, whom Falkland stabbed to death in a rage. Instantly, Caleb realizes he has created something worth looking at; today we call them micro‐expressions, the momentary, instantly repressed visible evidence of an emotion. Falkland “gave me a penetrating look as if he would see my very soul. His eyes were then in an instant withdrawn. I could perceive him seized with a convulsive shuddering, which, though strongly counteracted, and therefore scarcely visible, had I know not what of terrible in it.”
Caleb enjoys provoking Falkland: indeed the pleasure is such that he discovers he cannot stop himself. Finding a letter from the elder Hawkins in an old chest of drawers, he lets it fall where Falkland will pick it up, read, and remember. When Falkland explodes in a fit of rage at him, Caleb cowers, offers to leave his service, even offers to allow Falkland to kill him. All this emotion puts Caleb into a “rapture” to think that he is of such importance to Falkland. As he cowers, at the end of II.3, Caleb swears to himself, “that I would never prove unworthy of so generous a protector.” But in the very next paragraph (II.4), “the old question that had excited my conjectures recurred to my mind, Was he the murderer?” Caleb reverberates for some time between being overawed by Falkland and needing to provoke him, while Falkland, on his side, oscillates between explosions of rage and deep and withdrawn depression. The penultimate episode concerns a peasant accused of murder, for whom Falkland is serving as Justice of the Peace to decide whether to commit him for trial at the assizes. Caleb decides to attend the hearing and watch, not the accused, but Falkland.
But Falkland is also watching Caleb watching: “We exchanged a silent look, by which we told volumes to each other. Mr. Falkland's complexion turned from red to pale, and from pale to red. I … would willingly have withdrawn myself. But it was impossible; my passions were too deeply engaged; I was rooted to the spot; though my own life, that of my master, or almost of a whole nation had been at stake, I had no power to change my position.” The examination proceeds, and the accused’s story, at a lower social level, is parallel to that of Falkland and Tyrell, about a sensitive young man who, driven past endurance, kills a bully who threatens both him and a helpless woman. And, like Claudius in Hamlet, Falkland hears the tale until he can bear no more:
Caleb’s response, in these days since Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men, can strike today’s readers as sexual, even orgastic: he seems to have probed and penetrated his master Falkland. George Haggerty calls this “a vivid portrayal of male–male desire” and argues that “spying itself is an act of sexual violence.”3
This, of course, is not the final act of spying; Caleb follows this up by taking the occasion of a chimney fire to break open the iron trunk that had attracted curiosity in the very first chapter of the novel, a trunk that Caleb has long been sure contains the answer to the mystery that he sees in the heart of Falkland. But as he lifts the lid, Falkland is suddenly present, and the power/knowledge relationship between Caleb and Falkland suddenly is reversed. This overt criminal act puts Caleb deep in Falkland’s power, and for the rest of the novel Falkland attempts either to imprison Caleb or to keep him under surveillance.
Much of the rest of the novel can be understood as an attempt to dramatize the problems with the legal systems of Britain, of what is wrong – almost beyond repair – with Things as They Are, but it is interesting perhaps to note that the key motivating factors of volume I and the first third of volume II of Caleb Williams are not really addressed by Godwin in his philosophical treatise. The envy inspired in Tyrrel by the admiration of the neighborhood gentry for Ferdinando Falkland, the jealousy he feels about his ward Emily’s sexual attraction for Falkland, and the quasi‐sexual desire Caleb feels in relation to Falkland and his secrets – these all too human traits are not addressed in Political Justice. What his ideology is blind to Godwin the man understands, and his novel reflects that understanding.
Godwin’s argument in Political Justice, following Beccaria, was that capital punishment is always wrong, more horrifying than murder itself because it is carried out in cold blood; and it is not merely wrong in itself: its prevalence leads to further crimes as criminals eliminate any witnesses who can testify against them. The pursuit of Caleb Williams by Ferdinando Falkland exemplifies this. Crimes were themselves primarily the result of the social choices forced upon people, who are not guilty of what they cannot help, any more than a dagger is guilty when it is used as an instrument of murder. People, unlike daggers, form habits, however, and must be restrained so that they do not repeat the harm they do to others, and if possible they must be reformed. Restraint and reformation are what call prisons into being, but Godwin opposed both the prisons that existed in Great Britain, which he called seminaries of vice, and the improvements suggested by contemporary prison expert John Howard, who had advocated solitary confinement to encourage meditation and self‐scrutiny.
The horrors of imprisonment in actual British gaols of the period are explored in a rather mechanical way in II.11, but Godwin almost immediately poses the more interesting question about whether stone walls do a prison make. The last volume of the novel explores a different sort of imprisonment – one that may seem familiar today, but was only an imaginary exercise in the 1790s: becoming an object of surveillance, observed and controlled by powers that, almost supernaturally, are always aware of where one is and what one is doing. Having escaped from gaol, Caleb finds that England is his prison, just as Hamlet called Denmark one, and for the same reason, because it contains nothing but the sour remains of an obsession he cannot evade. And once the novel is over, if not before, the reader may become aware that Godwin has been exploring a kind of imprisonment that might almost be called existential, in the sense that Caleb ultimately finds himself imprisoned within his own narrative. The thrashings Godwin experienced as he tried out different endings to his novel bear witness to the unresolvable inconsistencies between his social and political ideology and the all too human psychology of his central character.
The central prison sequence (volume II, chapters 11–14) begins with Caleb’s incarceration and ends with his escape, and the opening chapter takes up the standard litany of complaints about the prison system: the gloomy passages, the dirty cells, the company of the dregs of society, the harsh and inhumane turnkeys. Initially, Godwin seems unclear whether he is writing a separable essay or whether Caleb is writing his memoirs. The description of “cells 7.5 feet by 6.5, below the surface of the ground, damp, without window, light, or air, except from a few holes worked for that purpose in the door, [in which] three persons are put to sleep together”, is footnoted to John Howard’s treatise on prisons. Caleb asks the reader to “forgive this digression”, which consists of “general remarks”, while at the same time insisting that these remarks are the fruit of personal experience, dearly bought. Godwin aim is to arouse the reader’s outrage that such pestholes exist in a supposedly free nation, that Englishmen may be thrown into them to rot for months merely on suspicion of having committed a crime, or to die of endemic disease.4
In what might be called Godwin’s “Harry and Louise” moment, spelling out the political issues for the witless, Caleb is visited by his fellow‐servant Thomas the footman, who assumes that Caleb is guilty of the crime for which he has been framed. But once Thomas has fully taken in Caleb’s situation – shackled, bound, sleeping on the damp stones, eating moldy bread and drinking filthy water – he exclaims that
Nevertheless, and despite the way it works against his ideological motive, Godwin cannot let the matter rest with the material conditions of incarceration. In the chapter following that of his imprisonment, Caleb works himself into an ecstasy meditating upon the ways in which a mind strong by nature and well furnished with memories and learning can keep active and engaged despite the physical privations and lack of external stimuli. He can, for example, work his way through Euclid from memory, or write novels in his imagination, remember his entire past or envision the process of his future death. Being hanged holds no terrors for Caleb, once he considers that all men must die, and that dying while in good mental and physical health has certain advantages over dying while sick and enfeebled by age. Falkland, his persecutor, is essentially impotent to destroy him: “You may cut off my existence,” Caleb exults, “but you cannot disturb my serenity”. Exactly how convincing this passage is supposed to be is not clear, but Godwin certainly does not mark Caleb’s new fortitude as mere self‐deception. Considered as a mood it seems to last for most of our hero’s imprisonment, although his mind seems more intensely and effectively employed when Caleb stops imagining the propositions of Euclid and applies his faculties instead to imagining a means of escape from his dungeon.
Caleb’s adventures after his escape from his gaol are what make Godwin’s novel the precursor to the popular thriller, a wildly various sequence of episodes set in vivid locations in the countryside, in cozy market towns, busy seaports, and the metropolis of London itself. But as Godwin proleptically announces with Caleb’s opening sentence with its simple summary – “My life has for several years been a theatre of calamity” – Caleb’s freedom is an illusion. Caleb, who has spent months in a complex process of escaping from his gaol, now spends several years on the run, through a series of scenes, each of which is merely an instantiation of the original escape, endlessly repeated like a recurring nightmare. The claustrophobia of the gaol gives way to the agoraphobia of Godwin’s Hobbesian scene, where any man’s hand may turn against Caleb at any time. He can move, and motion may be preferable to confinement. But eventually it dawns upon us as it dawns upon Caleb that the relief he felt on escaping from gaol was like the relief he felt when he discovered in his dungeon that he could use a discarded nail to release himself from his manacles and fetters. Caleb could wander at will around his cell, true, but he was still in gaol. Escaped, Caleb’s cell is England, around which he can wander, but he wanders like Cain, not at will but forced to change his perch and his outer shape each time he recognizes he has become an object of suspicion and surveillance.
Bentham imagined the Panopticon in 1791, and only a few years later Godwin imagined something greater: a system of surveillance that, fed by wealth and power, could turn an entire country into a gaol for a dangerous individual. As Falkland’s creature Gines sums it up for us and for Caleb, “You are a prisoner at present and I believe all your life will remain so … within the rules, and the rules with which the softhearted squire indulges you are all England, Scotland and Wales. But you are not to go out of these climates. The squire is determined you shall never pass the reach of his disposal” (III. 15). Godwin may be courting what Fielding termed the “marvelous,” but not the supernatural, in representing how one man, Gines, could penetrate Caleb’s various disguises and assumed accents, discover his intermediaries, and track him through the anonymous inns and lodgings of London.5 But Gines has help: the broadside offering a substantial reward for Caleb’s capture incites the thief‐takers, private precursors of police detectives, to seek him out, while Falkland’s widespread publication of the criminal biography, The Wonderful and Surprising History of Caleb Williams, destroys Caleb’s reputation with the respectable. Even friends who have known his character from their own experience, like Laura Denison, join what Jane Austen was later to call the “neighborhood of voluntary spies” that regulates each community, to hound Caleb out of his Welsh market‐town.
Today surveillance is a commonplace – we have computers, listening devices, cell phones that transmit our location at each moment, ankle bracelets that allow us to put people under “house arrest” in their own homes. If advances in cybernetic culture make it possible for the US National Security Agency to monitor billions of telephone transmissions, effectively wiretapping whole neighborhoods, the technical change that made Godwin’s version of surveillance possible was the print culture itself. Print culture cuts both ways: it allows Caleb the means of life by writing, using agents to avoid exposing himself to public scrutiny, but also makes it possible to spread throughout an entire nation the poison that destroys Caleb’s ability to live in society.6
The third and most modern‐sounding mode of imprisonment explored in Caleb Williams is the sense we are given of Caleb’s being imprisoned inside himself in a hell of his own making. It is easiest to see what sort of hell this is if we first take a look at Falkland’s fate, because Caleb and Falkland are unwilling partners locked into a death‐spiral. Falkland’s first impulse, once he realizes that Caleb has discovered his secret, is to bind Caleb close to him, to imprison him within his hall and, when Caleb manages to escape from domestic surveillance, to frame Caleb with a trumped‐up burglary. But however willing he is to wound Caleb, Falkland is yet afraid to strike. Since his guilty secret is that he committed a murder and connived at the execution of two innocent men, the last thing he is capable of doing is perpetrating another judicial murder – in fact it is his half‐brother Forester who commits Caleb to stand trial for the burglary, over Falkland’s impassioned protests. Caleb himself realizes his position when he confronts Falkland in III.12: “What is the mysterious vengeance that you can yet execute against me? You menaced me before; you can menace no worse now. You are wearing out the springs of terror.” And the obsession with controlling Caleb has its cost: the effort, as we see whenever Falkland appears in volume III, is visibly and progressively destroying him.
Parallel to this, Caleb after the reversal in II.6 is the passive partner of the death‐spiral, suffering physical abuse and ordeals that Falkland does not. The adventure narrative is so absorbing that it is only when we stand back from it that we recognize that Caleb is as possessed by Falkland as Falkland is by Caleb, since he can shape no interests, no goals, no motivations, no life to speak of, apart from his efforts to evade his surveillance. After the collapse of the Laura Denison idyll, Caleb like his master throws himself ever more fervently into an obsessive quest for self‐justification, and the narrative circles back to its beginning in a vain search for a point of origin from which a new start can be made: “My life for several years has been a vast theatre of calamity,” Caleb began, and he concludes in III.14 by telling us that “the writing of this memoir served as an avocation for the last several years.” But writing itself, beginning in “melancholy satisfaction” is now “changed into a burthen.” Once entrapped in Falkland’s web, Caleb is now entrapped in his own web, his scene of writing.
And Godwin may have been entrapped as well, because, once the narrative had come full circle to explain its origins, he had to find a denouement consistent with its vision. The manuscript ending discovered by Gilbert Dumas is accepted by many readers as the better conclusion to the story, since it accords with the bleak vision of truth being effectively unable to speak to political power, of the unequal rights of the working classes before the law. In effect, Falkland gets away with murder not once but twice. It may indeed be more consistent with the Godwin of Political Justice, but what it tells us about the result of Caleb’s speaking – that Caleb has been incarcerated again, either in a private asylum or a prison – is a mere return to the “springs of terror” that Caleb had declared were already worn out. The final paragraphs of this ending, coming directly after Caleb notices that he has been drugged, designed as an indication of the imminent dissolution of Caleb’s mind, are in obvious imitation of Richardson, specifically the “scraps and fragments” that Clarissa Harlowe writes immediately after she is drugged and raped by Lovelace.7
The published ending, preferred by Gerard Barker and others, presents a double peripeteia, in which Caleb hales Falkland into court. Falkland, moved by Caleb’s speech, admits his own guilt and dies soon after, while Caleb turns from justifying himself to accusing himself, of Falkland’s murder. But to make this double reversal work, Godwin is forced to create a speech in the court for Caleb that recasts, sometimes subtly, sometimes grossly, the narrative we have experienced up to III.14. For example, Caleb claims that he “would have died a thousand deaths” rather than betray Falkland’s secret, even though he had accused Falkland of the murder of Tyrrel before a London magistrate as recently as chapter 11 of volume III. Both endings provide effective closure to the plot of flight and pursuit, but neither can be a fully satisfying completion of the philosophical narrative.
That this was not the original plan, Godwin noted in his 1832 introduction to Fleetwood: “I began my narrative, as is the more usual way, in the third person. But I speedily became dissatisfied. I then assumed the first person, making the hero of my tale his own historian.” Though Godwin doesn’t explain the reason for his dissatisfaction, one suspects that Caleb’s experiences seemed more vivid in the first person. But the problem with the use of the first person, as we have seen with Oroonoko and with Moll Flanders, is that it makes possible suspicious readings that the author may not have intended: qui s’excuse s’accuse.
And there are occasions when Caleb’s narrative ties itself into logical knots that Godwin almost certainly did not intend. At the outset as Caleb introduces himself, he tells us (appropriately, given his role as the Man Who Knew Too Much) that “the spring of action, which, perhaps more than any other, characterized the whole train of my life, was curiosity.” But he goes on: “I was desirous of tracing the variety of effects which might be produced from given causes. It was this that made me a sort of natural philosopher; I could not rest till I had acquainted myself with the solutions that had been invented for the phenomena of the universe.” We might now expect to find Caleb describing his attachment to books expounding the physical sciences, but instead he describes his “invincible attachment to books of narrative and romance …. I read, I devoured compositions of this sort. They took possession of my soul.” And Caleb is not only a consumer of novels, he becomes a producer of them as well. In III.8, while hiding from Falkland’s persecutions in London, masquerading as “a deserted, solitary lad of Jewish extraction,” Caleb tries to meet expenses by writing poetry for the literary magazines, and finds that he can make money most quickly and reliably by writing narratives about crime, “histories of celebrated robbers …, anecdotes of Cartouche, Gusman de Alfarache and other memorable worthies, whose carreer [sic] was terminated upon the gallows.” (And, turnabout being fair play, Caleb becomes the subject of exactly such a crime novel: in III.10, he hears a street peddler bawling out that he has for sale “the most wonderful and surprising history, and miraculous adventures of Caleb Williams.”)
The problem with learning, in volume III, that Caleb becomes not just a reader but an author of crime novels, is that it reflects back on the first volume of Caleb Williams, the back story about how Falkland becomes a murderer. Caleb presents this narrative as primarily the product of his questioning Collins, Falkland’s steward, but except for chapter 12, which Caleb strategically presents entirely in Collins’s voice,8 the narrative shifts its focalization wildly from one center of consciousness to another: Caleb presents here, without any indication of how he can know them, the thoughts and private conversations of Tyrrel, of Emily Melvile, of the Hawkinses, even of minor characters like Grimes and Mrs. Jakeman. Given the likeness of the events of the first volume to some of the “books of narrative and romance” Caleb and his readers grew up reading, we can only conclude that these events have the air of familiar fiction. And everything we have read about the oppression of Caleb by Falkland, via the “memoir” that Caleb says he composed “over several years,” is self‐justifying rhetoric, a brief for Caleb Williams. And we are entrapped in that narrative because there is no counter‐narrative. If this is not the truth about Things as They Are, we are in deep trouble, since we have no access to any higher truth. So Godwin’s decision “to make the hero of my tale his own historian,” adopted to enhance the pathos of the narrative and its political punch, may have had the paradoxical effect of calling attention to the synthetic aspect of the novel at the expense of its mimetic and thematic aspects. As a novel made up of bits and pieces of other novels, Caleb Williams concludes as a “half‐told and mangled tale.”