SOURCE: Fisher, Carl. “The Crowd and the Public in Godwin's Caleb Williams.” In Women, Revolution, and the Novels of the 1790s, edited by Linda Lang-Peralta, pp. 47-67. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Fisher explores Godwin's inclusion of the larger community as a force that reacts to the words and deeds of individual characters within his novel.]

Nothing is more notorious than the ease with which the conviviality of a crowded feast may degenerate into the depredations of a riot. While the sympathy of opinion catches from man to man, especially among persons whose passions have been little used to the curb of judgment, actions may be determined on which the solitary reflection of all would have rejected. There is nothing more barbarous, blood-thirsty and unfeeling than the triumph of the mob.

—Enquiry Concerning Political Justice¹

Few novels engage their historical moment as cogently as Caleb Williams. The way in which the novel depicts individual psychology, or critiques the state, has often been documented.²

Personal obsession and private oppression are undoubtedly foregrounded, but always against a background of the community. The novel incorporates and involves the general populace, a public which responds to the actions of prominent individuals and reacts to violations of social norms; Godwin presents a social cross-section that strives to match the audience he defines in the preface as “persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach.”³ Identifying how Godwin integrates the public into Caleb Williams underscores the essential interaction of the individual and the collective in the polarized political world of the 1790s.

Godwin envisioned Caleb Williams as part of the French Revolution debate, an extension of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and a fictional rejoinder to Burke's Reflections, anti-Jacobin propaganda, and governmental repression. Throughout Caleb's “adventures,” Godwin critiques the collusion of the population with power as it operates “not merely through political institutions and the law, but through prejudice, prepossession and habit.”⁴ Essentially, Godwin probes the “moral economy” which defines eighteenth-century social relations, the supposed benevolence and heavy-handed paternalism of the gentry; he identifies this relationship as far from moral, and recognizes that it is based on and supported by processes of irrational and fierce identification.⁵ At the same time, he critiques the passions of the people, as in the epigraph about “the depredations of a riot,” with an Enlightenment-oriented fear of the mob.

The people's role, Godwin suggests, has taught them to be dominated and yet to imagine themselves free; they function with this logic, not irrationally, but conventionally within the prevailing discourse. Hence the public become accomplices and agents for the status quo, unaware of either the need for or the possibility of change. Riot, although it has revolutionary potential, is a critical factor in the eighteenth-century moral economy. In fact, popular disorder is considered a “right” by participants, and a necessary safety valve by those “above.” But, the five years prior to the publication of Caleb Williams were unprecedented both for the level and tenor of popular activity, and for the public concern it generated among the literate and the elevated. Burke's commentary on the “swinish multitude” in Reflections, or on the Revolutionary mob that torments the iconic Marie Antoinette, had sensitized a culture already growing uneasy with popular disorder.

Popular disorder frightens Godwin as well; he prefers debate and rational discourse. For example, while he appreciates the rebellious impulse of the French Revolution, he also notes: “I was far from approving all that I saw even in the commencement of the revolution. … I never for a moment ceased to disapprove of mob government and violence, and the impulses which men collected together in multitudes produce on each other.”⁶ Further, in Political Justice Godwin often equates “mob government” and “democracy.”

Godwin's fiction reflects this concern. Riot, while not a direct feature of Caleb Williams, appears in St. Leon (1799), where Godwin dramatizes the 1791 Birmingham Riots. The “confused murmurs and turbulence of the populace” leads to a riot which destroys science equipment with “shouts of infernal joy.” A bystander laments,

There was a principle in the human mind destined to be eternally at war with improvement and science. No sooner did a man devote himself to the pursuit of discoveries which, if ascertained, would prove the highest benefit to his species, than his whole species became armed against him. … He saw, in the transactions of that night, a pledge of the eternal triumph of ignorance over wisdom.⁷

A letter by Joseph Priestley, one of the principal targets of the Birmingham rioters, to the Birmingham Gazette about ten days after the riots, addresses the townspeople similarly:

By hearing the Dissenters … continually railed at as enemies of the present Government, you have been led to consider any injury done to us as meritorious. When the object was right you thought the means could not be wrong. By the discourses of your teachers, and the exclamations of your superiors, your bigotry has been excited to the highest pitch. You were prepared for every species of outrage, thinking that whatever you could do was for the support of Government and especially the Church.⁸

Though Burke had raised fears of the revolutionary mob, Godwin (along with Priestley and other radicals) recognized in the Birmingham riots something much more frightening—a tendency toward regressive conservatism.⁹ As Robert Bage wrote to a friend who had been a target in Birmingham, “Since the riots, in every company I have had the misfortune to go into, my ears have been insulted with the bigotry of 50 years back—with, damn the presbyterians—with church and king huzza—and with true passive obedience and nonresistence.”¹⁰ Riot, as an extreme expression of popular culture, undoubtedly fell short of the rule of reason; it seemed as likely to be reactionary as revolutionary, and certainly unlikely to lead to “political justice.” By the 1790s, the temporary equality of riot and the subsequent return to order, a carnivalesque moment in the larger social equation, had been replaced, imaginatively and practically, with the uneasy aftermath of destruction and distrust.

Just as the view from above ultimately saw riot as a blow against order and subordination, intellectual radicals understood riot as a blow against progress. After all, one of the shouts of the Birmingham rioters, as they destroyed Priestley's library and scientific equipment, was “No Philosophers.” Godwin, an advocate of rational dissent, imagined the people “armed against him,” at times literally and always intellectually. In this situation, he and his contemporaries felt caught between suppression by the powerful and persecution by the popular.

These realms collude, as Godwin often points out, and he protests not just legal and authoritarian oppression, but the fomented loyalist hysteria that supports it. Of the Paine trial, in which the author of The Rights of Man was convicted in absentia, he wrote,

We all know by what means a verdict was procured: by repeated proclamations, by all the force, and all the fears of the kingdom being artfully turned against one man. As I came out of court, I saw hand-bills, in the most vulgar and illiberal style distributed, entitled, The Confessions of Thomas Paine. I had not walked three streets, before I was encountered by ballad singers, roaring in cadence rude, a miserable set of scurrilous stanzas upon his private life.¹¹

Any reader of Caleb Williams will recognize the closeness of this scene to the reception of the criminal biography which Gines produces under Falkland's authority. The inset criminal narrative is one way Godwin uses the novel to delineate a sense of the “public” as unavoidable, ubiquitous to both civic and personal life. The criminal biography denotes a world of commodification and exploitation, in which personal stories are for sale, although Godwin would want to impress on a reader that they are often fabrications. Caleb, at first, doesn't understand this, and repeatedly expresses surprise at public participation in his own story, first with the reward broadsheet which the criminals possess, then when at the public house on the road to London, and again after a close brush with Gines when he moves on to work with Mr. Spurrel, the watchmaker. When he hears a hawker tell his story exactly—except, of course, lacking the details of Falkland's guilt—he is caught in “utter astonishment and confusion.”

The criminal narrative ends with a reward promise, and then “All for the price of one halfpenny.” The way the broadsheet presents information, ending with the reward, creates the text as a kind of lottery ticket; a person could spend a little in hope of a larger reward, either morally, financially, or both. Like an eighteenth-century version of America's Most Wanted, “the public was warned to be upon their watch against a person of an uncouth and extraordinary appearance, and who lived in a recluse and solitary manner” (269). Far from rebellious, popular culture here is complicitous with patrician culture, and Caleb imagines:

A numerous class of individuals, through every department, almost every house of the metropolis, would be induced to look with a suspicious eye upon every stranger, especially every solitary stranger, that fell under their observation. The prize of one hundred guineas was held out to excite their avarice, and sharpen their penetration. It was no longer Bow-Street, it was a million of men, in arms against me

(270).

The People, who do not recognize their own exploitation, betray the individual. Godwin idealizes rational consensus but apprehends coerced opinion, created and exploited from above, accepted and desired from below.

At best, the audience for Caleb's story lacks information to make informed judgments; at worst, they fall prey to propagandistic lies and collude with the culture machine meant to keep them in place. Hence, Godwin faces a dilemma. He wants to rehabilitate the participants of popular culture, to move them from the realm of prejudice and misinformation to the presumably more free and open air of the public sphere. In fact, he sets this transition as a critical alternative to the transgressive patrician culture in Caleb Williams which he imagines withering away (along with government) in a progressive future. However, the conceptual entities of the public sphere and popular culture in reality associate uncomfortably, and are not easily melded.

The eighteenth-century public sphere, as defined by Jurgen Habermas, consisted of a “broad strata of the population” which, while originally integrating people in “their daily existence as consumers,” becomes highly politicized by the 1790s. Habermas notes the development of “public opinion” as a key element of the British scene, “formed in the conflict of arguments concerning a substantive issue, not uncritically based on common sense in the either naive or plebiscitarily manipulated assent to or vote about persons.”¹² Habermas quotes a 1791 Parliamentary speech by Fox, who argues that in determining governmental action “one thing is most clear, that I ought to give the public the means of forming an opinion.” The public sphere theoretically provides a nexus of informed communication. In Political Justice Godwin defines what he considers a public sphere along Habermas's lines: “conversation accustoms us to hear a variety of sentiments, obliges us to exercise patience and attention, and gives freedom and elasticity to our disquisitions” (1, 295). Godwin desires this silhouette for the popular audience, to develop their individual and private senses of judgment and enhance their rational communicative capability.

The Falkland/Caleb dynamic dramatizes Godwin's sense of an information-based social economy, as Falkland “doesn't believe that facts should be freely disseminated according to public will but only deployed according to private interest. … Falkland doesn't see truth as a condition of life but as a strategy of politics.”¹³ When Caleb agrees originally to Falkland's bargain, he “discounts the interest of humanity-at-large by working against a system of free and unimpeded social communication. … By agreeing to protect Falkland's reputation, Caleb agrees to protect the system of his own persecution. By betraying humankind's interests, he must, like Falkland, abandon the society of free-speaking individuals.”¹⁴

In essence, Godwin idealizes the public sphere as a world of exchanged ideas, gentrified behavior, enlightened rationalism; by contrast, popular culture embodies retrogressive belief systems, unenlightened identification, and violent potential. Crowd behavior is one aspect of this culture, as is the presumed “vulgarity” of popular entertainment (like criminal biography). If the public sphere is the coffeehouse, popular culture is the alehouse. The line between the public and the popular, in Godwin's view, must be bridged by rational discourse. The gentry, in demanding allegiance and acceptance, create a class of governed who are not able to rationally and individually consider truth; popular culture is created in relation to this demand, both from above and below, and popular opinion becomes an orgy of firmly held untruths.

For example, when Caleb travels after one of his escapes, he stops at a “public house” on the London road, and eavesdrops on the “gentry of a village alehouse” (235). Here he hears them discuss “the notorious housebreaker, Kit Williams,” an authoritarian narrative passed as rumor in a market town. One of the speakers comments, “Some folks must be hanged to keep the wheel of our state folks a-going.” This is not meant ironically, for the speaker has no misgivings about capital punishment. General opinion holds that Williams's real crime was not theft, but betraying Falkland's trust. Godwin highlights the hyperbole of popular narrative by those Caleb ironically styles “historians and commentators.” Caleb supposedly escaped prison “no less than five times,” and “made his way through stone walls, as if they were so many cobwebs” (236-7). He is given almost superhuman qualities, yet the hyperbolic narrative is spoken as truth. The innkeeper, conversely, identifies with Caleb's plight and hopes he will escape, not knowing she is talking to him. These juxtaposed views point out the contradictory nature of popular culture: the reaction of either adoration or execration is predicated on inappropriate premises. At first Caleb is alarmed: “I could almost have imagined that I was the sole subject of general attention, and that the whole world was in arms to exterminate me.” He soon warms to the situation—“by degrees I began to be amused at the absurdity of their tales, and the variety of falsehoods I heard asserted all around me”—but the momentary safety evaporates quickly. Far from being harmless, popular opinion is a form of social control, and public control of his story abridges Caleb's options.

In this scene and others, Godwin clearly critiques the inconsistent and essentially unstable practices and ideology of popular culture. Each character within the novel, regardless of station, must negotiate the problem of public opinion. Not surprisingly, characters respond to the public based on their class position. Tyrrel, for example, while “tyrannical to his inferiors,” enjoyed being the “grand master of the coterie” at the market. When he spoke, “he was always sure of an audience. His neighbors crowded round, and joined in the ready laugh, partly from obsequiousness, and partly from unfeigned admiration” (18). However, “when his subjects, encouraged by his familiarity, had discarded their precaution,” he would choose a target to persecute. In critiquing Tyrrel, Godwin comments on the identification process; people feel comfortable and identify with the powerful, who can turn vicious in a moment.

Godwin presents the psychology of oppression as well as an allegory of crowd psychology. Despite his lofty position, Tyrrel still fears public humiliation. When he ruins Emily Melville, he utilizes power but is still “sensible the world would see the matter in a different light” (80). Caleb comments that tyranny, when revealed, will “level all distinctions, and reduce their perpetrator to an equality with the most indigent and squalid of his species.” Ultimately Tyrrel is reviled; as Mrs. Hammond says to him on reporting Emily's death: “All the world will abhor and curse you. Were you such a fool as to think, because men pay respect to wealth and rank, this would extend to such a deed? They will laugh at so barefaced a cheat. The meanest beggar will spurn and spit at you” (91). Tyrrel transgresses against traditional polite/popular relations, which protect the gentry except in extreme and public cases. Accustomed to obedience,

Now he looked round and saw sullen detestation in every face, which with difficulty restrained itself, and upon the slightest provocation broke forth with an impetuous tide, and swept away all mounds of subordination and fear. His large estate could not now purchase civility from the gentry, the peasantry, scarcely from his own servants. … It seemed as if the sense of public resentment had long been gathering strength unperceived, and now burst forth in unsuppressible violence

(93).

When Tyrrel decides to attend a “rural assembly” and “meet the whole tide of public opinion,” the popular and the public merge, and “The general voice was eager to abash him. As his confusion became more visible, the outcry increased. It swelled gradually to hootings, tumult, and the deafening noise of indignation” (95). Tyrrel is already an outcast when murdered.

In contrast, Falkland's ability to control and abuse the legal process makes him a strong foe, but his ability to harness public opinion indemnifies him. When Caleb first publicly accuses Falkland, “I no sooner said this, than I was again interrupted by an involuntary exclamation from every one present. They looked at me with furious glances, as if they could have torn me to pieces” (171). Caleb's crime is insubordination; spectators, whether social equals or subordinates, identify with Falkland. The dynamic may be different—the gentry understand that taking Caleb seriously would undermine the entire social system, while the middle and lower orders depend on Falkland symbolically—but the result is the same.

If Tyrrel holds his power over the people through intimidation and physical threat, Falkland does so through a benevolent exterior. He is venerated by the people for his humanity and compassion; as in his beloved chivalric readings, the people are lieges, unquestioning in their allegiance but protected by their lord. Falkland acts in favor of the less powerful repeatedly, whether in heroically putting out a fire—where “the inhabitants were in the utmost consternation … [and] stood wringing their hands and contemplating the ravages of the fire in an agony of powerless despair” (43)—or saving a damsel in distress, as when Grimes tries to rape Emily.

Falkland recognizes the theatricality of his patrician position. He fears public humiliation because it would lower him from his pedestal in the eyes of the public. An early episode presages this theme, during Falkland's continental sojourn, when he reconciles with Count Malvesi after a misunderstanding, commenting that “if the challenge had been public” he would have been “obliged to be your murderer” (15). Indignity may be personally painful, but it is tolerable as long as it is private. When Tyrrel knocks him down in a public assembly, he burns with “public disgrace” (99). Later, in his confession to Caleb, he gives as the motive for murder that he had been “insulted, disgraced, polluted in the face of hundreds.” He claims that he did not seek immediate revenge on Tyrrel because it would have been a selfish act, while he intends only to promote “the general good” (99).

Caleb's later conflict, not just with power but with the popular will that supports it, is anticipated by Falkland's acquittal, when the “general sentiment … was a sort of sympathetic feeling that took hold upon all ranks and degrees. The multitude received him with huzzas, they took his horses from his carriage, dragged him along in triumph, and attended him many miles on his return to his own habitation” (103). The carnival process represents a celebration of things as they are, a moment of seeming freedom which in fact reaffirms the status quo. In replacing one form of constraint (Tyrrel) with another (Falkland)—in fact, Caleb earlier describes a scene in which the mere presence of Falkland leads the people to desire “revolt” against Tyrrel (19)—the local population merely maintains custom. Godwin warns in a discussion of governance in Political Justice that the people should “beware of reverence,” because custom allows the gentry to maintain a hold on a private world of privilege and information, and consequently influences all aspects of public life.

Popular culture tacitly and complicitly maintains the patrician/plebeian equation, which by Godwin's terms impedes progress. There is intended irony in Caleb's claim that “the world was made for men of sense to do what they will with it. Its affairs cannot be better than in the direction of the genuine heroes; and, as in the end they will be found the truest friends of the whole, so the multitude have nothing to do, but to look on, be fashioned and admire” (117). The popular culture which buoys Falkland will victimize Caleb; the novel dramatizes the difficulty of the individual caught between inhuman authority which will go to any extreme to maintain control, and the unruly mob, created and credulous, which cheers for all the wrong reasons.

One of Caleb's central recognitions, late in the novel, is that “Mr. Falkland, wise as he is and pregnant in resources, acts by human and not by supernatural means … he cannot produce a great and notorious effect without some visible agency” (296). The agency is most directly Gines and the legal system, but includes the manipulation of public opinion, which Falkland depends on when he persecutes Caleb. Godwin reflects a public which repeatedly accepts disinformation and misinformation, labors under prejudice and misapprehension, and does not know its own interest.

The presentation of public opinion as critical to the action, a constant background and occasional foreground, provides a bridge to recognizing Godwin's desire for a world which transcends popular culture and develops a more humanized public sphere—not a commercial or political sphere, but Godwin's vision of a rational future of communication and openness.

The popular culture/public opinion nexus finds repeated representation in Caleb's narrative. Godwin sets these terms with Caleb's birth to “humble parents … peasants” (3). Even as a child, Caleb notes, “I had considerable aversion to the boisterous gaiety of the village gallants … village anecdotes and scandal had no charms for me” (4). Caleb imagines himself apart from the rural popular culture, although he accepts “the laws of decorum” (114)—by which he means the rules of subordination and social hierarchy. Later, Caleb's persecuted state should ally him with the lower orders, for he has to struggle with the “joint considerations … of security and subsistence” (266). Still, he has a hard time internalizing popular concerns. When he hears his own story made public, he resents the audience, the “hawkers and ballad-mongers … footmen and chambermaids” (274).

The disguises Caleb uses to avoid capture—beggar, Irishman, Jew, itinerant artisan, hack writer—establish him as on the margins, a part of the crowd, yet he despises its members. He “incurs contempt with the dregs of mankind” (234), yet expresses little sympathy for the lower orders. He knows they “incur contempt” but still calls them “the dregs of mankind.” This is vocabulary from above, except as used ironically in radical writings.¹⁵ Classifying and name-calling, of course, offer tremendous power. Tyrrel and Falkland both claim they will crush enemies like “insects.” When Falkland calls Caleb an “insolent domestic,” Caleb feels muted, forced to passivity—the conversation no longer resembles a dialogue, and much remains unspoken. Other phrases of elite opprobrium occur throughout the novel: “vulgar classes,” “scum of the earth,” “dregs of mankind,” “a rabble of visitors.”

Caleb willingly rubs elbows with the crowd, but fashions himself above with a curious individualism not uncharacteristic, perhaps, of Godwin's own political view. Caleb's discussion with Falkland about Alexander the Great sheds interesting light on this point. Caleb questions, “How many thousands of lives did he sacrifice in his career? What must I think of his cruelties?” Falkland tells him that this is wrong thinking, that “the death of a hundred thousand such men is at first sight very shocking; but what in reality are a hundred thousand such men than a hundred thousand sheep?” Caleb suggests that this may not be an ideal way to govern, and expresses Paineite ideas about the “cheated multitude” and “the whole machine of state.” Finally, he argues that “the pike and the battle axe are not the right instruments for making men wise … it seems to me as if murder and massacre were but a very left-handed way of producing civilization and love” (110-11).

This passage exemplifies the dilemma of the novel. Marilyn Butler calls Caleb a “plebeian everyman” and says of the Alexander passage that “Caleb oscillates between maddening Falkland with lower-class cynicism about Alexander's nobility, and buttering him up by pretending to despise the commonality.”¹⁶ As shown above, Caleb does always have a conflicted relationship with the “commonality,” and the “lower-class cynicism” is probably intended as the kind of insight Godwin might hope of a reader, who can recognize that heroes and leaders of state are far from selfless. Godwin wants to minimize the assumed distance between the upper and the lower orders. As Caleb says of his own perspective, “Mr. Falkland had always been to my imagination an object of wonder, and that which excites our wonder we scarcely suppose ourselves competent to analyse” (297). This is exactly the impression intended by the grandeur and mystery and punishment of the law, and presents the view that the lower orders have of the elite.

The only ones who seem capable of class analysis are the thieves, or at least their leader, Mr. Raymond, who argues, “Our profession is the profession of justice. [It is thus that the prejudices of men universally teach them to colour the most desperate cause, to which they have determined to adhere.] We, who are thieves without license, are at open war with another set of men, who are thieves according to law” (216). Caleb is uneasy in their company, however, and his parenthetical insight separates him from their rebellion. In fact, his sensibility becomes manifest when he sees the thieves once he is brought to shelter; he says they enter “tumultuously,” and “all had a feature of boldness, inquietude and disorder, extremely unlike any thing I had before observed in such a groupe” (215). This is language resonant of the time: tumult, disorder, inquietude. He appreciates Raymond's theory of thievery—after Caleb tells his story, Raymond comments: “Who that saw the situation in its true light would wait till their oppressors thought fit to decree their destruction, and not take arms in their defence while it was yet in their power? Which was most meritorious, the unresisting and dastardly submission of a slave, or the enterprise and gallantry of the man who dared to assert his claims?” (220)—and the Alexander parallel resounds. But Caleb ultimately sees the thieves within the fearsome context of collective action, consonant with the real 1790s fear of “levellers” and the “swinish multitude,” for although the government creates some “atrociously exaggerated precautions” about property, these men “commit an alarming hostility against the whole” (226) and their attention “was in the highest degree misapplied, unassisted by liberal and enlightened views” (219).

Only when in total extremity does Caleb claim kinship with the lower orders. He is hurried “from one species of anxiety and distress to another, too rapidly to suffer any one of them to sink deeply into my mind” (249). The harshness of circumstances makes him more sentient than rational—precisely the critique Godwin makes about popular disorder. Forced into “vile subjugation,” he “seemed to be in a state in which reason had no power” (154). In thinking of the inequity of society, he claims: “I was astonished at the folly of my species, that did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious and misery so insupportable” (156). Caleb's emotional and intellectual processes mimic the state of riot, even to where he claims, “I am incited to the penning of these memoirs” (3).¹⁷

If Caleb becomes a “monster,” as he is called by several figures within the novel, Godwin makes it clear that he has been created that way, both compelled into radical rebellion and invented in the minds of the public. So too is popular disorder a creation within society and a projection of the imagination. Toward the end of the narrative, Caleb reflects, “My sensations at certain periods amounted to insanity” (306). Insanity, Godwin demonstrates, is an induced state. In much the same way the public, which had once been a tractable mass, a friendly face, a community spirit, becomes something menacing in the 1790s. Perhaps Caleb acts as alter ego for the popular voice: forced into “servile submission,” his “whole soul revolted against the treatment I endured, and yet I could not utter a word … it was inexperience, and not want of strength, that awed me” (144).¹⁸ Unsure what to do, he falls back on custom. He claims that before Falkland's service he had been independent, but he is now accustomed to the will of another. His mind is often in “tumult” or “chaos” or “whirlwind”—the internalized state of external popular forces—and he feels governed by terror. Unable to make appropriate choices or have appropriate identifications, he is a miasma of received ideas. When Forester's servant finds him, after his first escape, and tries to convince him to return, Caleb argues, “I am an Englishman; and it is the privilege of an Englishman to be sole judge and master of his actions” (159). The “Free Born Englishman” ideal, both perpetual and naive, caricatures Caleb's early innocence, and Caleb himself mocks it later in jail.

If Caleb is a surrogate for the potentially revolutionary crowd—like Frankenstein's creature—he is also a strong critic of the popular will: “I saw my whole species as ready, in one mode or another, to be made instruments of the tyrant” (277). He critiques both paternalistic social relations and reifying instrumental reason. He tells Falkland that, through totalizing persecution, “You are wearing out the springs of terror” (283-4). Total desperation is more likely to foment revolution than to ameliorate it, and this is one of the claims Godwin made about the repressive measures of the government. Caleb, in many ways a creation of Falkland and of genteel culture, is as despised and feared as Frankenstein's creature becomes, and equally as dangerous. His story, like the creature's, provides a cogent social critique. Caleb upsets the status quo—like popular disorder—but things return close to their normal course by the novel's conclusion.

What does it mean that in his moment of triumph Caleb finds his will dissipated? His triumph does not change the social system; it merely provides a temporary release. Additionally, “Caleb does recognize his complicity, but in exactly the wrong way, in a way that permits ideology to continue to function invisibly behind a facade of personal psychological agency.”¹⁹ Godwin notes in Political Justice that “the characters of men originate in their external circumstances” (24). It is easy to imagine that he means both individual and mass character, and that his evocation of popular behavior tries to create an understanding of crowd psychology without the vocabulary. It would take the social sciences and psychology of the nineteenth century to see the crowd as something historically produced—or to find new ways to subjugate it—but Godwin's popular representation situates cultural anxieties and tells us much about the cultural contradictions of the time. Caleb Williams may not emphasize riot, but the fear of it provides an impetus for Godwin's critique of popular culture.

Falkland has produced passion through his oppressiveness, and according to Godwin, “Revolutions are the produce of passion, not of sober and tranquil reason” (PJ, 1, 244). Yet when Caleb reaches the height of his passion, he maintains, “I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale—! I will show thee for what thou art, and all the men that live shall confess my truth!—Didst thou imagine that I was altogether passive, a mere worm, organised to feel sensations of pain, but no emotion of resentment?” (314). Resentment should lead to discourse, to narrative, to the open expression of ideas, not to “daggers” and physical violence. The ultimate arbiter becomes public opinion: “These papers shall preserve the truth: they shall one day be published, and then the world will do justice on us both … they will one day find their way to the public!” (315). Godwin insists on a rational public because he recognizes a world in which revolution is possible, and not just the limited disturbances of the Gordon riots, or the Priestley riots, but a larger overthrow of society. This potential world of feeling and irrationality, this radical spirit, would be anathema to his own principles of gradual change and rational exchange. He needs to create a readership that will neither accept “things as they are” undigested nor be so outraged as to throw off their “chains” in a revolutionary action. From this perspective, the character of popular culture embodies numerous tangible problems: sheer numbers, violent potential, intense conservatism, incorrect identifications, and facile credulity. Through the alternations of Caleb's social consciousness, Godwin tries to create a reader who will not be violently transgressive, but who can develop a new sensibility of social relations.

The experiences of 1791-94 had given Godwin a great deal to think about in terms of the popular consumption of texts, from the widespread outrage over Paine to the contentious reception of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.²⁰ But Political Justice, while often associated with political anarchism, was not a revolutionary text. It does not advocate popular uprisings or popular participation—it insists on individual reason and responsibility as opposed to collective action. For the same reasons Caleb Williams may be a radical social critique, but it is not a revolutionary novel. Godwin, even in the revolutionary period, disliked the “general voice.” He says of democracy, “truth cannot be made more true by the number of its votaries” (PJ, 1, 220). Democracy, in Godwin's mind, comes to be associated with the passions, not with the rationality he so cherishes. In fact, Butler and Philp argue that “only a year after the publication of Political Justice, with its long vistas of progress, or perfectibility, Godwin devastatingly acknowledged the power of a prevailing ideology, through the tendency of the weak and the disadvantaged to submit to its values.”²¹

Still, at some level Godwin hoped to reform the “people” through examples and principles of reasoning. The novel form would be ideal for this duty. Reading a novel is an individual act and allows for reflection. Godwin imagines a cumulative effect to the reading process. He claims in Political Justice, “Truth dwells with contemplation. We can seldom make much progress in the business of disentangling error and delusion, but in sequestered privacy” (1, 290). If enough individuals were influenced, it would change collective behavior from violent reaction to rational, cooperative—but not complicit—behavior.²² It also might reach those to whom “books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach.” He can hope for a wide distribution of his ideas:

By the easy multiplication of copies, and the cheapness of books, everyone has access to them. The extreme inequality of information among different members of the same community, which existed in ancient times is diminished … vast multitudes who, though condemned to labour for the perpetual acquisition of the means of subsistence, have yet a superficial knowledge of most of the discoveries and topics which are investigated by the learned

(1, 283).

Godwin hopes to bridge the critical “inequality of information” which defines history.

Reading is progressive, Godwin suggests, and likely to lead to positive social change; yet he also insinuates that “knowledge is something to be selectively communicated to the lower classes, not produced by them … his conception of texts and the audiences they engender is more in line with Addison and Steele than with Hog's Wash or Pig's Meat.”²³ Godwin expresses a consistent anxiety, as well as a fearful fascination, with the lower orders, the same expressed in gothic novels and in much of the intellectual culture of the 1790s as well. Godwin imagines tremendous benefit, perhaps the only hope to build a future, in enjoining the transition of potential rioters to thoughtful readers.

A central paradox of Caleb Williams is Godwin's attitude toward the public, and particularly toward popular action. He suggests to readers they must discard previously held assumptions and be suspicious of authority, but they should not act in concert. Thompson denotes this same “ideological contradiction” in Political Justice:

It is as if Godwin is able to recognize the objectification of social relations under market capitalism, with its reification and alienation, and the consequent loss of the sense of community, and finally its replacement with a legalistic notion of society. Nevertheless, for all of this, Godwin is still unable to envision an alternative community, other than the vaguest notion of universal benevolence and brotherhood. … [he] is caught exactly betwixt and between … despising the false bourgeois solutions to alienation—romantic love, marriage, and the sacrosanct family, but at the same time, his vision is at the origin of the most extreme bourgeois vision of hyper-privatization and withdrawal.²⁴

Rather than collectivity, Godwin insists on individuality, in part because he perceives the public as an amorphous and fickle entity, ill defined, always in flux. This attitude relegates Godwin to the status of historical oddity, neither full-blown revolutionary nor wholly enlightened ideologue.

Ironically Godwin, despite his reputation as a radical, is as fearful as Burke of the mob. He hoped, however, that he was not throwing pearls before swine. Godwin wants to educate the reader to throw off habitual prejudices and inherited constructions. The episodes of the novel would create a world the readers knew—even if only through other narrative—one they perhaps never knew to critique due to the misprision of everyday life. Hence, Godwin does not merely show “things” as they are, but the people as they are. In this sense, “the inbuilt unreliability of the first-person account throws the burden of interpretation and decision on the reader, soliciting his or her active participation.”²⁵ This follows Godwin's belief in private judgment, and allows individuals to know what to do when confronted with public situations and extreme events. The crowd may not be subject to reform—unless enlightened one member at a time.

Godwin imagines the key to transforming potential rioters to careful readers is in controlling narrative, providing not the screed of conservative propaganda and the mass culture machine but alternative views, not stories of chivalry but those that will enact social communication and inspire civic responsibility. Novels, no less than other texts, confront a highly performative world in which it is difficult to judge real allegiances. In mass terms, this can be seen in the similar gestures of popular radicalism and popular loyalism; the fact of spectacle might have been as important as any cause, and opportunity seemed as important as political preference in whether people participated in a Paine burning or a reform meeting.²⁶ Godwin's novels try to cross class boundaries and create an enlightened readership.

Despite this ideal, different readers take different things from texts, as Mary Shelley noted about Caleb Williams: “those in the lower orders saw their cause espoused and their oppressors forcefully and eloquently delineated—while those of higher rank acknowledged and felt the nobleness, sensibility and errors of Falkland with deepest sympathy.”²⁷ Falkland himself, after all, is not portrayed as innately evil; he is equally a prisoner of ideology and received ideas. Before his transition to villain, he says of the lower orders: “Poor wretches! they are pressed almost beyond all bearing as it is; and, if we unfeelingly give another turn to the machine, they will be crushed into atoms” (77). Falkland shows sensibility and social conscience, certainly ironic considering his later persecution of Caleb. Interestingly, his sense of the lower orders as a collective subject crushed as individual atoms marks a typical patrician refusal to acknowledge the possibility of collectivity.

The entire history of popular activity in the eighteenth century, capped by the disorder and exacerbated loyalism/radicalism of the 1790s, suggests that Godwin's ideal was not for the people to become proactive, or mass agents, but individuals who can shrug off the chains of intellectual paralysis and ingrained belief in system, hierarchy and paternal authority. He does this not by showing an ideal society, but the errors of popular culture. Popular agency is seen as either unthinking reaction or unenlightened complicity. In Caleb's final concern over the interpretation of his story, one critic sees a moment which frightens Godwin terribly; not just the perpetuation of falsehood through popular texts, but the continuing misreadings by a public “so debauched by falsehood it cannot recognize the truth when presented with it.”²⁸

Godwin contends with the dilemma of continued misunderstanding and passivity on one hand, and potential riot on the other. There are many public clusters in the novel—rural assemblies, anonymous city crowds, fire spectators, jury members—and many potential audiences for the novel. As Godwin points out in Political Justice, a “multitude of men” can only be intellectually united by “equal capacity and identical perception.” Similarly, this multitude should not be emotionally moved to reactive violence by inequality; the riotous mob doesn't fulfill the requisites of the public sphere. Godwin hopes to construct this public with his novel of “things as they are,” to move the culture through debate from acquiescence to progressivity, positing an idealized, alternative, utopian (but ultimately impossible) public sphere in which private individuals would employ judicious reason for the public good.

Notes

1. References in the text and notes will refer to the 1798 third edition of Godwin's Political Justice (1793), published in facsimile by the University of Toronto Press, 1947. This reference is to v. I, 295.

2. Critical works helpful in contextualizing the novel in the 1790s include Marilyn Butler, “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams,” Essays in Criticism 32, no. 3 (July 1982): 237-56, and Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel: 1780-1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

3. References in the text and notes will be to David McCracken, ed., Caleb Williams (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977).

4. Butler, “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams,” 243.

5. E. P. Thompson looks at the “traditional” nature of social relations, including popular protest, with riot legitimized by custom and only enacted when paternal protection of the lower orders failed, as in hunger riots. See Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (February 1971): 76-136.

6. Quoted in Charles Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (London: H. S. King and Co., 1876), I, 59.

7. William Godwin, St. Leon (Oxford University Press, 1994), 289-90.

8. Quoted in Vivian Bird, The Priestley Riots, 1791, and the Lunar Society (Birmingham: Birmingham and Midland Institute, 1992), 56.

9. George Rudè denotes many British examples of the conservative tendency of popular disorder in The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981), including chapters on “Church and King” riots and the “Motives and Beliefs” of the pre-industrial crowd.

10. See Kelly, 6.

11. Quoted in Butler, “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams,” 238. In Political Justice Godwin points out the irony of public identification with and participation in the justice system; a criminal commits “an offence against the community at large” but because “the pursuit commenced against the supposed offender is the posse comitatus, the armed force of the whole … when seven millions of men have got one poor, unassisted individual in their power, they are then at leisure to torture or kill him, and to make his agonies a spectacle to glut their ferocity” (335-6).

12. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 66. Tellingly in Caleb Williams, the entire plot is predicated on the fact that Mr. Underwood attempts to manipulate Hawkins' vote in county elections, which begins the concatenation of events.

13. Scott Bradfield, Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the Development of American Romance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 7.

14. Ibid., 8.

15. For example, popular journals such as Eaton's Hog's Wash, or a Salmagundy for Swine and Thomas Spence's Pig's Meat; Lessons for the Swinish Multitude self-consciously used Burke's terminology and “adopted the personae of pigs to define the character of the audience and to present radical thought as the opinion of humble swine.” See Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 79-89.

16. Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 151; Butler, “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams,” 247.

17. When Caleb escapes the second time, he exclaims his ecstasy at his freedom with a rhetoric similar to riot: He experiences a “sacred and indescribable moment” as he revels in “new found liberty” and “regains his rights.” Along with this personal carnivalesque, he exults in his escape from “the gore-dripping robes of authority!” and hopes to further avoid “the cold blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!” (210).

18. Butler in her introduction to the 1818 Frankenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) points out the stylistic and ideological debts to Caleb Williams, and also notes that several critics have “developed the argument that his dark Other, the Creature, represents the newly politicized masses,” (xiv) and that in the nineteenth century, particularly in political caricature, the “so-called monster” appeared “as the personification of popular, violent radicalism,” (xlvi).

19. Gary Handwerk, “Of Caleb's Guilt and Godwin's Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams,” English Literary History 60, no. 4 (Winter 1993).

20. Political Justice was read aloud in hundreds of public meetings, and excerpts were published in Eaton's Politics for the People and Spence's Hog's Wash (See Mark Philp, “Thompson, Godwin, and the French Revolution,” History Workshop Journal 39 (Spring 1995): 94. Pitt felt the work was harmless because it had a relatively high price and would be unaffordable for more potential readers.

21. Marilyn Butler and Mark Philp, eds., William Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs (London: William Pickering, 1992), v. I, 29.

22. Godwin, commenting on the value of Shakespeare and Milton in The Enquirer (1798), elaborates a theory of reading which helps explain his sense of the efficacy of literary production: “The poorest peasant in the remotest corner of England, is probably a different man from what he would have been but for these authors. Every man who is changed from what he was by the perusal of their works, communicates a portion of the inspiration all around him. It passes from man to man, till it influences the whole mass.”

23. Garrett Sullivan, “‘A Story To Be Hastily Gobbled Up:’ Caleb Williams and Print Culture,” Studies in Romanticism 32, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 332.

24. E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?” Social History 3, no. 2 (May 1978): 189.

25. Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 6.

26. See Mark Philp, “Thompson, Godwin, and the French Revolution,” 97.

27. Quoted in Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 42.

28. Sullivan, 335.