Caleb Williams or Things as They Are (1794)

My copy Cassell (FN1) paperback, 360 pp. 1966 ( )

The classic pursuit novel by Godwin. ( )

William Godwin's Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams was published in 1794. Though the language is a challenge (the sentences are miles long, the vocabulary is exuberant, to put it mildly), it reads as fast as a whodunnit. The appealing point is it has a social realism that feels familiar, but the characterization and narration are still over the top in an old-fashioned way. The main actors in the feud between two country gentlemen are good and evil personified, larger than life.

Godwin was an early anarchist who wrote a tome called An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice in 1793. The book provoked strong reactions on both sides of the questions, how much government is enough and how can reason guide the affairs of the day. Godwin became well-known and he quickly wrote Caleb Williams to further illustrate his political ideas. The novel was a best-seller in its time.

The theme is a timeless one: the crushing of the individual by society. It’s the story of a victim of the rigid moral conventions and rotten laws designed to protect the interests of a corrupt evil ruling class. As Godwin put it in his preface to Caleb Williams, he proposed “to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer.â€?

Godwin depicts Caleb Williams as an unforunate who is bedeviled by a relentless monster of a man who will be conten with nothing less than total ruin. The narrative is in the first person. Only gradually does the reader come to realize how much Caleb William himself is the blame for his own troubles; moreover one begins to wonder if this is a portrait of madness. Is there truly a pursuer bent on his destruction. Whatever the outcome, Godwin's prose keeps the reader interested.

Godwin was married to Mary Wolstonecraft and was the step-father (perhaps father) of Mary Shelly who wrote Frankenstein. ( )