SOURCE: Harvey, A. D. “The Nightmare of Caleb Williams.” Essays in Criticism 26, no. 3 (July 1976): 236-49.

[In the following essay, Harvey discusses the nightmarish setting of Godwin's novel, focusing on the vivid descriptions of corruption and oppression as well as the harsh fates to which the primary characters are subjected.]

Although there has been some interesting recent work on William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams it can hardly be said to have received the recognition it deserves. It is too often dismissed as a ‘Philosophical Novel’, that is, a piece of inadequately dramatised preaching, and some commentators degrade it even further by seeing it merely as a curious pendant to Political Justice, the work Godwin completed just before starting the novel in 1793.¹

That Godwin himself considered Caleb Williams to be a novel of ideas, and in particular, an analysis of contemporary society, is shown by the full title under which he originally published the novel, Things As They Are: Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, and by a brief preface, suppressed ‘in compliance with the alarms of booksellers’, in which it was claimed that the

narrative is intended to answer a purpose more general and important than immediately appears upon the face of it … 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 of man.

Godwin also wrote a letter to The British Critic (vol. 6, pp. 94-5) in answer to criticism of his portrayal of the English legal system, in which he claimed that the novel's object ‘is to expose the evils which arise out of the present system of civilized society; and, having exposed them, to lead the enquiring reader to examine whether they are, or are not, as has commonly been supposed, irremediable’. But Godwin's letter went on to make clear that his object was to expose more than just the evils of English society. ‘I was obviously led to place my scene, and draw my instances from the country with which I was best acquainted—England. Not that I thought the laws of England worse than the laws of most other countries.’ His aim was not to expose particular features of a particular society, but rather to deal with the common features of all societies.

Yet as an account of the theme of Caleb Williams both the suppressed preface and the letter to The British Critic are clearly inadequate. They in no way deal with significant aspects of the novel which are obvious to any discerning reader. Even as far as it goes, the professed aim of providing an analysis of social injustice cannot be taken too literally. It is no accident that Caleb Williams itself, for all its immediacy of effect, is curiously detached from recognisable time and place, and contains no hint of the precise period at which the action is supposed to have occurred, nor of the locality where the most important of the events took place. We are told that Caleb spent a night in ‘an inn in the midway between Mile-end and Wapping’ (III, ch. 8, p. 254),² and that he lived for a period in ‘an obscure market-town in Wales’ (III, ch. 13, p. 289), but most of the action seems to be set in a generalised Midland landscape which has all the distinctness of immediate details, and all the vagueness of real distance and direction, of a nightmare. This might be understood as part of an attempt to give the narrative a general rather than a purely English application; but the way in which for example Caleb, returning from an errand, is able to lose himself in a place ‘where scarcely a single track could be found to mark that any human being had ever visited the spot’ (II, ch. 8, p. 146), and then chances upon an inn halfway to Forester's home, where he meets first Forester, his potential saviour, and next Falkland, his potential persecutor, indicates that in fact these events are not taking place in the real world at all but in an idealised landscape of coincidences and cruel twists of fate.

The novel does, however, embody two extended studies of the corrupting influence of society: the account of landlords persecuting tenants and dependants, and the various descriptions of robbers and convicts. To some extent the whole novel is about a landlord persecuting a dependant—that is, Falkland persecuting Caleb—but as this piece of tyranny is not particularly plausible, and depends for what credibility it has on the more down to earth account of the persecutions of Tyrrel and Underwood in Volume One, it is these former which repay closer examination. Certainly no other novel of the eighteenth century has anything resembling in vividness Tyrrel's oppression of his dependants. The nearest thing to it is the description of Squire B.'s power over his servants in Richardson's Pamela, but this is vague and insubstantial by comparison, hinted at rather than made explicit. The explicitness of Caleb Williams on the other hand almost tempts one to speak of Godwin as a pioneer of socialist realism. But then there is difficulty. Hawkins is evicted by Underwood because he refuses to vote according to Underwood's wishes. We may leave out of the question the fact that Hawkins, as a freeholder in an English county, necessarily had not one vote, but two to dispose of—unless it was a by-election, or a Welsh county, neither of which is stated to be the case in the novel. The novel describes how Hawkins was evicted for refusing to dispose of his supposed one vote according to his landlord's wishes. That such a thing ever happened in an English county election in Godwin's day is extremely unlikely. In boroughs where electors voted by virtue of being ratepayers for houses rented from borough patrons, or by right of possessing burgages or freeholds which actually belonged to the patron, evictions of recalcitrant voters certainly occurred.³ In Ilchester, only ten years after Caleb Williams was published, the local patron punished householders who voted against his interest by demolishing 100 out of 160 houses in town, of which he was sole owner, and erecting ‘a large workhouse, to accommodate those whose disobedience had offended him’.⁴ In Irish counties, where many voters were so only by right of fictitious freeholds granted to them by their landlords with the sole purpose of creating votes, similar tyranny was possible, and many duels were fought between landlords and rivals who dared to poach their tame voters.⁵ In English counties, however, the independence of the voters was jealously regarded; interference would have been resented by the voters and deplored by the landlords themselves. It is true that landlords often stated their preferences in the expectation of influencing their tenants, but in six years of reading material dealing with elections, I have never come across an instance of an English county voter being positively ordered how to dispose of his votes, let alone of his being victimised for disobedience. Of course it is impossible to deny categorically that such a thing ever occurred in this period, but such an event was certainly quite out of the normal order of things.

Godwin himself was in a rural county during a county election only once in his life, being at school in Norwich during the Norfolk contest in 1768, when he was aged twelve. Consequently there is no reason to suppose that his description of Hawkins's persecution was based on first-hand knowledge and certainly it is not to be regarded as a typical instance of landlord oppression. Moreover, Hawkins's misfortunes are brought to a conclusion by the discovery in his lodging of the blade of the knife with which Tyrrel was murdered, a discovery which is never explained in the novel, so that it may be said that his whole story, both in its beginning and in its end, is ideal rather than real, generally probable enough in view of the power of the rich over the poor, but altogether improbable with regard to details.

Godwin's account of the robbers and convicts—deftly set off by convincing descriptions of the interior of gaols, culled from John Howard's The State of Prisons in England and Wales (1777-1780)—departs from verisimilitude in a different way. It is not actually implausible, but it is expressed in ideal terms:

The persons who composed this society had each of them cast off all control from established principle; their trade was terror, and their constant object to elude the vigilance of the community. The influence of these circumstances was visible in their character. I found among them benevolence and kindness: they were strongly susceptible of emotions of generosity. But, as their situation was precarious, their dispositions were proportionately fluctuating. Inured to the animosity of their species, they were irritable and passionate. Accustomed to exercise harshness towards the subject of their depredations, they did not always confine their brutality within that scope. They were habituated to consider wounds and bludgeons and stabbing as the obvious mode of surmounting every difficulty. Uninvolved in the debilitating routine of human affairs, they frequently displayed an energy which, from every impartial observer, would have extorted veneration. Energy is perhaps of all qualities the most valuable; and a just political system would possess the means of extracting from it, thus circumstanced, its beneficial qualities, instead of consigning it, as now, to indiscriminate destruction. We act like the chymist, who should reject the finest ore, and employ none but what was sufficiently debased to fit it immediately for the vilest uses. But the energy of these men, such as I beheld it, was in the highest degree, misapplied, unassisted by liberal and enlightened views, and directed only to the most narrow and contemptible purposes.

(III, ch. 2, pp. 218-9)

In such passages that Godwin's didacticism comes out strongly, but its tendentiousness completely nullifies any claim it may have to be objective reporting. Description of things as they are has here been overwhelmed in preaching.

But according to the stock view, preaching is exactly what this novel is all about. All that Godwin himself said on the subject (apart from the general claims in his preface and in his letter to The British Critic) was that the novel ‘may, perhaps, be considered as affording no inadequate image of the fervour of my spirit: it was the offspring of that temper of mind in which the composition of my Political Justice left me’.⁶ This, however, is no more than stating that the novel was written in a state of nervous exaltation. It is in no way an assertion that Godwin was still preoccupied by the issues of Political Justice. In fact, Political Justice and Caleb Williams have very little subject matter in common. References in Political Justice to the power of landlords or to the psychology of robbers are scanty in the extreme.

The most important (and lengthiest) parts of Political Justice are Books III and V which discuss the principles of government and contain Godwin's critique of representative democracy, and Book VIII which discusses the question of property. These sections, which constitute Godwin's title to be considered as the founder of Philosophical Anarchism, have scarcely any echo in Caleb Williams. This is not to say that the two books do not share certain assumptions, such as the power of the mind to alter the human predicament, and the influence of social systems on individual happiness: indeed it would be hardly conceivable that two books written by the same man within a brief period of time should not contain some evidence of a common viewpoint. But assumptions are one thing, explicit discussion another, and there is little common ground between the two works when it comes to priorities of emphasis and the treatment of details.

There is, however, one theme in Caleb Williams with regard to which Political Justice provides a valuable gloss. At various stages in the novel the plot is given a new twist by a deliberate decision on the part of one or other of the protagonists: Tyrrel's decision to persecute Hawkins, Caleb's decision to investigate Falkland's mysterious past, Falkland's decision to persecute Caleb, Caleb's decision to force a showdown. All these decisions contain a large element of perversion in that they all lead to consequences the reverse of what the decider originally wished for: they are, as it were, tragic decisions. Yet it is clear throughout that each of these protagonists could not have decided otherwise, being the people they were. Tyrrel's furious jealousy of opposition, Caleb's obsessive curiosity, Falkland's fanatical regard for the purity of his good name: all determine the resolutions they make. Though there is a kind of apparent existentialisme in each protagonist's decision to fulfil the dictates of his own personality at whatever cost to himself or others, in reality the protagonists are not making any decisions at all, being trapped each within his own system of personality and having no alternative but to pursue the course of action already determined by the pre-existing framework of their ideas and appetites. They do not make decisions because they do not actually have any scope for choice. That this reflects Godwin's beliefs about human behaviour will be seen clearly from an examination of two chapters of Book IV of Political Justice, Chapter V ‘Of Free Will And Necessity’ and Chapter VI ‘Inferences From The Doctrine Of Necessity’.⁷

In these chapters Godwin argues that there is no such thing as Free Will. He claims ‘if we form a just and complete view of all the circumstances in which a living or intelligent being is placed, we shall find that he could not in any moment of his existence have acted otherwise than he has acted’.⁸ There is no such thing, therefore, as a voluntary action: any given act results

completely from the determination that was its precursor. It was itself necessary; and, if we would look for freedom, it must be in the preceding act. But in that preceding act also, if the mind was free, it was self determined, that is, this volition was chosen by a preceding volition, and by the same reasoning this also by another antecedent to itself. … Trace back the chain as far as you please, every act at which you arrive is necessary. That act, which gives the character of freedom to the whole, can never be discovered. …⁹

Godwin concludes that ‘Man is in reality a passive, and not an active being’.¹⁰

Godwin's argument in these two chapters is not altogether satisfactory, and the political moral he deduces from it, that everyone can be persuaded of his or her true interest merely by rational explanation, and will then, being incapable of choice, infallibly act upon that true interest, is less satisfactory still. Nevertheless, the passages on Free Will in the earlier book provide us with a reading of Caleb Williams which makes more sense than the idea that the novel is about moral choice. A strong vein of determinism runs through the novel. Every so-called decision made by Tyrrel, Caleb and Falkland is inevitable, given their respective characters. Caleb himself speaks of ‘a hand of fatal impulse that seemed destined to hurry me to my destruction’ (II, ch. 4, p. 121). When Collins tells Caleb ‘I consider you as a machine … but you did not make yourself; you are just what circumstances irresistibly compelled you to be’ (III, ch. 14, p. 310), this is not merely the last in a long line of callous rejections of Caleb by those whom he looked up to, but a simplified version of the doctrine of necessity in Political Justice. It may be assumed further that the respective characters of Tyrrel and Falkland which determine their behaviour are the products of a corrupt society and of their position in it, and that their manifestly inaccurate analysis of their respective true interests is the result of their environment—though curiously enough the same is not obviously true for the deraciné Caleb himself.

We ought not to complain, however, of Godwin's overt didacticism in thus injecting a favourite notion of his Political Justice into his novel, for two reasons. Firstly, the discussion of necessity in the earlier book makes it possible to interpret the ‘decisions’ in Caleb Williams correctly; secondly, this interpretation embodies the deeply tragic notion that the individual is not merely trapped by his environment, but that he himself is the trap. It is as if Godwin had elaborated a theory of tragic inevitability, and then written a novel to exemplify his theory. Nor is this all, for Caleb, pursuing the destiny of his own character, which is to reveal the truth about himself and about Falkland, finally catches up with Falkland, and finds that the ‘best interest’ which his character has caused him to pursue has led him to destroy the one man he admires more than any other; his achievement, instead of bringing him happiness, overwhelms him with guilt.

Yet though Caleb Williams may be detached both from the period of political upheaval in which it was written, and, in most respects, from Political Justice, it remains a novel based on the central springs of the society which produced it. It does not attempt a detailed exploration of the outward ramifications of that society, but focuses on a single, but crucial, aspect of society. Caleb Williams concentrates on a single social relationship which can be taken as the archetype of all such relationships in eighteenth-century England. The persecution of the poor Caleb by the rich Falkland is not a factual representation of what happened, or could happen then, so much as a myth; it illustrates not the outward manifestations of society but rather its underlying structure.

In some novels, such as most of Jane Austen's, the conflict between the protagonists and society is internalized, and the struggle is between the protagonist's better self or real destiny and the web of conventional aspirations and attitudes which society has grafted on to the protagonist's psyche. But in a few novels—Clarissa and Caleb Williams are perhaps the only two produced by the eighteenth century—the protagonist is not fighting to overcome society, either internally or externally: it is evident almost from the very beginning that the protagonist is totally trapped by society, and the narrative concerns the horrifying struggles of a doomed creature, hopelessly striving to free itself before it is inevitably crushed. In these novels, society is not an opponent whom, despite huge odds, the hero or heroine dares to take on in a David and Goliath struggle in which David is destined to win: rather society is a trap, and the hero or heroine's boldest efforts to escape are doomed to failure. Thus Falkland, as the embodiment of society's oppressive power, tells Caleb

I have dug a pit for you; and, whichever way you move, backward or forward, to the right or the left, it is ready to swallow you. Be still! If once you fall, call as loud as you will, no man on earth shall hear your cries; prepare a tale however plausible, or however true, the whole world shall execrate you for an imposter.

(II, ch. 8, pp. 153-4)

This sense of imprisonment accounts at a superficial level for the horrific fascination of these novels, but it also allows them to achieve a rare profundity of pessimism.

In Richardson's Clarissa, the author's exploration of the personalities and motivations of Clarissa Harlowe and of Lovelace detract from the mythic element of the novel, and in some ways Clarissa lacks the simple force and directness of Richardson's earlier and cruder Pamela. In Caleb Williams, however, the detailed, very striking, explorations of personal motivation are fully integrated into the myth because, as we have seen, even differences of personality and of apparent choice are represented as merely the inevitable outcome of social forces.

Thus the implausibilities of detail in Godwin's account of the various persecutions in Caleb Williams, though they invalidate the novel as a piece of reportage, in no way detract from it as a visionary exposition of what was implicit in a society where some people had great wealth and power, and others nothing at all. Caleb is the archetype of the man who has nothing but his manhood. ‘Ah, this is indeed to be a man!’ he exclaims on escaping from gaol, and goes on to muse, ‘Strange, that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to law’ (III, ch. 1, p. 210).

A further aspect of the mythic element of the novel is the completeness of Caleb's isolation. ‘Everyone, as far as my story has been known, has refused to assist me in my distress, and has execrated my name’ (I, ch. 1, p. 3). Magistrates, the very personifications of fairness, are eloquent in their condemnation. The virtuous Laura casts him off without staying to hear his explanation. Even the ‘amiable, incomparable’ Mr. Collins turns from him. Caleb feels this bitterly:

The greatest aggravation of my present lot was, that I was cut off from the friendship of mankind. I can safely affirm that poverty and hunger, that endless wanderings, that a blasted character and the curses that clung to my name, were all of them slight misfortunes compared to this. I endeavoured to sustain myself by the sense of my integrity, but the voice of no man upon earth echoed to the voice of my conscience. ‘I called aloud, but there was none to answer; there was none that regarded’.

(III, ch. 14, p. 308).

Pamela had her parents, and Clarissa had Miss Howe, though they were powerless to help, but Caleb is totally alone, the individual pitted against a society united in condemning him.

Caleb's struggle with society is also portrayed in terms of a conflict between old and new. Caleb's claim to represent the new is merely implied—sufficiently clearly, no doubt, in view of his numerous criticisms of society—but implied nonetheless. Falkland's identification with the old is, however, specifically indicated by the fact that ‘among the favourite authors of his early years were the heroic poets of Italy. From them he imbibed the love of chivalry and romance’ (I, ch. 2, p. 10). Falkland's adherence to an outmoded code of chivalry is his tragedy, for it embroils him both with the vile and wholly contemporary Tyrrel, and with the idealistic Caleb. Falkland and Caleb are thus representatives of two rival value systems, Falkland of the code of honour and reputation, Caleb the code of truth at all costs. Falkland's value system is quite as sympathetically portrayed as Caleb's: Caleb himself admires it and in the end, in the very moment that Falkland, its embodiment, is destroyed, it is seen to prevail. Yet this conflict has nothing to do with the real-life historical struggle between old and new, between the oligarchic rule of the great landowners and the political ideology of the late Enlightenment, with which Godwin was personally involved at the time that he was writing Caleb Williams. Although Godwin seems sympathetic to Falkland's ideas, there is no evidence that he had the least affection for landowner oligarchy, and he can hardly have intended the conflict between Caleb and Falkland as a symbolic representation of the conflict between the progressive political ideology of the day and the traditions of the ancien régime. It is merely a generalised portrayal of the way in which, by emphasizing their differences, rival ideologies are doomed to destroy each other even though pointing to the same goal.

But Caleb Williams is more than a mythic representation of man-in-society. It is also a mythic representation of the individual's struggle with life itself, and more than one critic has written of the novel as an account of obsession.¹¹ But an individual's obsessions cut him off from other people, and if Caleb Williams were merely interesting as a piece of early psychological analysis, it would not grip the reader's attention to the extent it does. Hazlitt wrote in The Spirit Of The Age, that ‘We conceive no one ever began Caleb Williams that did not read it through; no one that ever read it could possibly forget it or speak of it after any length of time but with an impression as if the events and feelings had been personal to himself’. The obsession in Caleb Williams is indeed universal. The pursuit of Caleb is an archetypal representation of every man's fear of being trapped; it portrays a situation which most of its readers will have actually experienced in nightmares.

If we examine Caleb Williams as a report of a nightmare, we shall see that one of its most striking features has nothing to do with social analysis or propaganda, and can only be interpreted in terms of subconscious disturbance. This feature is the element of perversion of purpose or function-reversal. Very little happens in the novel as it is intended to happen: most of what the characters do results in the opposite of what was intended or what might have been expected. One could draw up a very long list, but to cite only the most obvious: Falkland's virtues bring down on him the animosity of Tyrrel, and his attempts to pacify Tyrrel only increase the latter's hatred; Falkland is pursued by Caleb, whose benefactor he is; Caleb, though guiltless, is pursued by the guilty; though admiring Falkland, Caleb feels obliged to expose him as a villain; yet the accuser becomes the accused, and his prosecution leads to his own imprisonment; Caleb's insistence on the truth causes him to be reprobated as a villain; Falkland's hounding of Caleb forces Caleb to try once more to expose Falkland; having exposed Falkland, Caleb is overcome by remorse, having, in order to vindicate himself of the crimes of which he is accused, committed the even greater one of destroying Falkland. Such a world has nothing to do with Political Justice except insofar as it cruelly lampoons Godwin's ideas on necessity.

This perversion of cause and effect is linked with the sense of dreadful inevitability which pervades the novel:

Hitherto I have spoken only of preliminary matters, seemingly unconnected with each other, though leading to that state of mind in both parties which had such fatal effects. But all that remains is rapid and tremendous. The death-dealing mischief advances with an accelerated motion, appearing to defy human wisdom and strength to obstruct its operation.

(I, ch. 6, p. 37).

The reader will feel how rapidly I was advancing to the brink of the precipice. I had a confused apprehension of what I was doing but I could not stop myself.

(II, ch. 2, p. 113).

Incident followed upon incident, in a kind of breathless succession.

(II, ch. 6, p. 131).

To some extent this inevitability derives from the logic of the social situation and the human interrelations; but though the trap is constructed out of social mechanisms, it is more than merely social. Caleb himself speaks of ‘the uninterrupted persecution of a malignant destiny, a series of adventures that seemed to take rise in various accidents, but pointing to one termination’ (I, ch. 3, p. 16). In the last resort, it is not society but fate which hounds Caleb.

A further aspect of the nightmarishness of the situation is the immense disproportion between the paltriness of apparent causes, and the horrific scale of their effect. Caleb is ‘cut off for ever, from all that existence had to bestow, from all the high hopes I had so often conceived, from all the future excellence my soul so much delighted to imagine’ (II, ch. 11; p. 163). And why? Merely because of his curiosity. ‘To gratify a foolishly inquisitive humour, you have sold yourself’, Falkland tells him. ‘… It is a dear bargain you have made. But it is too late to look back’ (II, ch. 6, p. 136). No one in the novel, except perhaps Tyrrel, deserves his fate, yet everyone brings down on his own head a monstrous punishment originating in some involuntary act. For Caleb is not the only one who is trapped: he pursues his pitiful course through a world in which his own nightmare is one among many.

Notes

1. cf. G. Woodcock. William Godwin (1946), p. 119; P. N. Furbank, ‘Godwin's Novels’, Essays in Criticism, 5 (1955), p. 215; J. T. Boulton, The Language of Politics In The Age of Wilkes And Burke (1963), pp. 227-30, 249.

2. Page references to Caleb Williams are to the 1970 O. U. P. edition edited by D. McCracken, but volume and chapter references are also given.

3. cf. E. A. Smith, ‘Earl Fitzwilliam and Malton: a Proprietory Borough in the Early Nineteenth Century’. English Historical Review, 80 (1965), pp. 51-69.

4. T. H. B. Oldfield, The Representative History of Great Britain And Ireland (1816), vol. 4, p. 464.

5. cf. An Impartial Report Of The Trial Of William Congreve Alcock, And Henry Derenzy, Esqrs. For The Murder Of John Colclough, Esq. (Dublin, 1808).

6. C. K. Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (1876), vol. 1, p. 78.

7. cf. E. Rothstein, ‘Allusion And Analogy In The Romance of Caleb Williams’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 37 (1967), pp. 18-30. It is to these chapters that Rothstein is apparently referring when he alludes with glib dismissiveness to ‘Godwin's sporadic determinism’, though in fact the discussion of Free Will in Political Justice makes it difficult to accept Rothstein's claim that Caleb Williams ‘insists on moral action and choice’.

8. W. Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), vol. 1, p. 285.

9. Ibid. vol. 1, pp. 299-300.

10. Ibid. vol. 1, p. 310.

11. cf. R. F. Storch, ‘Metaphors Of Private Guilt And Social Rebellion In Godwin's Caleb Williams’, ELH, 34 (1967), p. 189; P. Cruttwell, ‘On Caleb Williams’, Hudson Review, 11 (1959), p. 93.