SOURCE: Barker, Gerard A. “The Narrative Mode of Caleb Williams: Problems and Resolutions.” Studies in the Novel 25, no. 1 (spring 1993): 1-15.

[In the following essay, Barker examines Godwin's original purpose in writing Caleb Williams, his initial use of third-person narration, and the changes he made to accommodate the shift to first person.]

The inherent limitations of first-person narratives in which the hero recounts his own story have often been described.¹ Character analysis in memoir novels is usually limited both by the narrator's inability to view himself with the detachment of a privileged third-person narrator as well as enter the minds of other characters. As Mrs. Barbauld long ago observed, “what the hero cannot say, the author cannot tell.”² Or, to quote a more recent critic, “the author using the I-narrator deliberately goes forth to battle with one hand tied behind his back.”³ We know that Dostoevski abandoned his first-person version of Crime and Punishment for the third person⁴ and that Henry James decided against making Strether “at once hero and historian” of The Ambassadors.⁵

Curiously enough, William Godwin took precisely the opposite direction in creating Caleb Williams (1794). Looking back in 1832, he recalled in his preface 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.”⁶ While it would be empty speculation to try to imagine what shape Caleb Williams would have taken if he had preserved its original form, we can examine the effect his change had on the novel. Though confronting Godwin with a number of problems inherent in first-person narratives (a form he was inexperienced in),⁷ many of these challenges enriched Caleb Williams, leading to innovations that significantly modified the eighteenth-century memoir novel.

The real reason why Godwin abandoned the third for the first person may never be known with certainty. What is clear, however, is that the Fleetwood Preface, written “nearly forty years” (p. 338) after the novel was composed, needs to be approached with some skepticism. Godwin claims, for example, that after his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) had been written and favorably received, he was “unwilling to stoop to what was insignificant” (p. 336). Yet in an autobiographical fragment, he notes: “In 1793 I commenced my ‘Caleb Williams,’ with no further design than that of a slight composition, to produce a small supply of money, but never to be acknowledged: it improved and acquired weight in the manufacture.”⁸ In other words, Caleb Williams was originally intended to be merely another “narrative of fictitious adventure … of obscure note” (pp. 335-36), such as the three short novels written ten years before; however, during its composition, the story may have taken on new significance in Godwin's imagination as a potential vehicle for the doctrine espoused in his Enquiry: “it improved and acquired weight in the manufacture.”

This of course would make the composition of Caleb Williams more fortuitous than Godwin's account of 1832 would have us suppose: “I formed a conception of a book of fictitious adventure, that should in some way be distinguished by a very powerful interest. Pursuing this idea, I invented first the third volume of my tale, then the second, and last of all the first” (pp. 336-37). Using the same reverse order, he claims next to have “devoted about two or three weeks to the imagining and putting down hints for [his] story, before … engag[ing] seriously and methodically in its composition” (p. 338).

While these “hints” or “memorandums” are no longer extant, most of the holograph manuscript of Caleb Williams remains in existence. Although it contains no evidence of a change in narrative person (probably because the first thirty-six pages are missing), a significant deletion appears only six pages into the extant manuscript. After the dying Mr. Clare tells Falkland that he has made him his executor and referred to “some legacies,” there follow four sentences later crossed out: “I have left a daughter. I do not desire any thing in her behalf because she is mine, but because she is a human creature. She stands in need of a protector. Be you that protector.”⁹

Since there is no other reference to Clare's daughter later in the manuscript, one may conclude that here was a potential strand of the story that Godwin decided to discard. Given the conventions of the sentimental novel, he may have been toying with the idea of creating a love plot between Falkland and Clare's daughter. He could, in fact, have derived his idea from Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791), where a similar situation takes place when the dying Mr. Milner requests Dorriforth to become his daughter's guardian.¹⁰ What this deletion suggests, in any case, is that the outline of his story was less predetermined than Godwin would have had us later believe since he could still, a third of the way into the first volume, entertain a possibly radical shift of emphasis in his novel.

More seriously, the Fleetwood Preface conveys the unfortunate impression that Godwin's sole purpose was to create a “book of fictitious adventure” capable of arousing an “overpowering interest.” But such an objective cannot be reconciled with the novel's preface of 1794, not to mention its ironic original title, Things as They Are.¹¹ Believing “that government by its very nature counteracts the improvement of the individual intellect” but that such a truth cannot be conveyed to the “multitude” through philosophical discourse,¹² Godwin resorted to fiction as a means of persuasion: “it was proposed in the invention of the following work, 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” (p. 1). One is reminded of Samuel Richardson, more than forty years earlier, proposing to “investigate the great doctrines of Christianity under the fashionable guise of an amusement.”¹³ And like his great predecessor, Godwin faced the problem of integrating his didactic theme into his novel without undermining its “overpowering interest”: “If the author shall have taught a valuable lesson, without subtracting from the interest and passion by which a performance of this sort ought to be characterised, he will have reason to congratulate himself upon the vehicle he has chosen” (p. 1).

To have preached his “lesson” through a privileged narrator or authorial mouthpiece would likely have diminished the novel's “interest and passion.” It was necessary, he repeatedly advised his fellow-novelist Thomas Holcroft to keep “characters in action, and never [suffer] them to sermonize.”¹⁴ Under the circumstances, Godwin's dissatisfaction with a third-person narrator, once he envisioned his story as teaching “a valuable lesson,” is not surprising. “Making the hero … his own historian” gave him an opportunity to voice his political beliefs through his first-person narrator's gradual education.

Thus he argues in his Enquiry against the punishment of wrongdoers not only because, as a necessitarian, he believed that “the characters of men originate in their external circumstances,” but also because “the only measure of equity is utility.”¹⁵ Hence “there is no such thing as desert; in other words … it cannot be just that we should inflict suffering on any man, except so far as it tends to good,” namely, “preventing future mischief.”¹⁶ And such sentiments find expression in his novel as well when Caleb, convinced of his master's guilt by Falkland's reaction to the peasant murderer, is surprised to discover that “it was possible to love a murderer”:

I felt, what I had had no previous conception of, that it was possible to love a murderer, and, as I then understood it, the worst of murderers. I conceived it to be in the highest degree absurd and iniquitous to cut off a man qualified for the most essential and extensive utility merely out of retrospect to an act which, whatever were its merits, could not be retrieved.

(p. 130)

The passage is effective didactically because Caleb's realization appears to be the natural outcome of his experience rather than merely an artificially contrived interjection. The integration of the novel's narrative and didactic elements (“overpowering interest” and “valuable lesson”) thus succeeds because the “secret murder” Godwin devised “to account for the impulse that the pursuer should feel, incessantly to alarm and harass his victim” (p. 337), also enabled him to voice his “Doctrine of Punishment” through that victim.

As the Fleetwood Preface, however, makes clear, Godwin's ambition went beyond merely teaching a “valuable lesson.” While composing Caleb Williams, he had vowed “a thousand times” to “write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before” (p. 338). Such an effect is brought about, as he later explained, by the “intellectual tendency” of a literary work, by its ability to “increase the powers of the understanding” and change the reader from “what he was.”¹⁷ Responding to the true intellectual tendency of a novel depends for Godwin upon incident: “an event that occurs, & which is related with a sufficient number of particulars, to make the reader feel it as a reality. An incident to produce its effect in a work of fiction, must be accompanied with an exhibition of the successive feelings it inevitably creates in the person that is the subject of it.”¹⁸

A first-person narrative is particularly suited to make “the reader feel it as a reality” because, by its very nature, it can authenticate not merely its subject matter but also the means by which that subject matter is narrated. It gains that power because, in a sense, its creator has abdicated the function of storyteller to someone inside the fictional world he himself created.¹⁹ As Franz Stanzel observes, “The incorporation of the narrative process into the realm of the fictional world causes the reader to forget the division into a presenting and a presented reality. Everything, even the narrative process, appears with a fictive claim to a quasi-real existence.”²⁰ Godwin's decision of “making the hero … his own historian” thus offered him two advantages that he had lacked in his three earlier works of fiction: it provided him with a viable means not only of inculcating his “valuable lesson” but also of strengthening his reader's intellect by “increas[ing] the powers of the understanding.”

In creating a first-person narrative, one invariably deals with a narrating self (Godwin's historian) who addresses the reader directly and an experiencing self (Godwin's hero) whom we meet indirectly through the recollections of the former.²¹ In many memoir novels, such as Roderick Random (1748) and The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), this distinction is difficult to infer because the narrating self only infrequently uses his obvious advantages, foreknowledge and maturity, to separate himself from the experiencing self. In pure “consonant self-narration,” to use Dorrit Cohn's useful term, the narrator “identifies with his earlier incarnation, renouncing all manner of cognitive privilege.”²² He is essentially a storyteller, preoccupied with describing events in the way they originally occurred rather than modifying them through hindsight. On the other hand, in a “dissonant self-narration”²³ such as Moll Flanders (1722), the distinction between narrating and experiencing selves obtrudes upon us not only from the foreknowledge of the narrating self but also from her presumable maturation during the time interval (the narrative distance) separating her from the experiencing self. This type of narrator is more autobiographer than storyteller, for he/she is usually preoccupied with the discrepancies existing between the way an event is perceived when it occurs and when it is recalled.

Didactic considerations, relying on Caleb's progress from innocence to experience as a means of voicing his own political sentiments, led Godwin in the direction of Moll Flanders rather than Roderick Random. Claiming, after his imprisonment, that he “had for some time learned not to judge by appearances” (p. 201) implies Caleb's education, something already confirmed earlier by his disillusionment upon being imprisoned and expecting to be executed: “My resentment was not restricted to my prosecutor, but extended itself to the whole machine of society. I could never believe that all this was the fair result of institutions inseparable from the general good. I regarded the whole human species as so many hangmen and torturers” (p. 183).

Yet, strictly speaking, only the last two volumes of Caleb Williams are dissonant. In the first volume, merely the opening chapter can be viewed as part of Caleb's history. Cut off from Falkland's past, Caleb can only report Collins's account with the assurance that “scrupulous fidelity restrains me from altering the manner of Mr. Collins's narrative to adapt it to the precepts of my own taste” (p. 106). But if Godwin wants us to believe that the observations, which exploit didactically Tyrrel's brutal treatment of the Hawkinses and Emily Melville, are Collins's own reflections, why did he not give the old steward's account of Falkland directly, as he does in the last chapter of the first volume? The truth is that Godwin is deliberately ambiguous on this question: “To avoid confusion in my narrative,” Caleb announces in a sentence added to the third edition, “I shall drop the person of Collins, and assume to be myself the historian of our patron” (pp. 9-10).

Such equivocation stems from the inherent problem of integrating the first volume with the rest of the novel. Essentially, the initial third of Caleb Williams is expository, giving us an account of the “secret murder” that will arouse the hero's curiosity in the second volume and lead to a “series of adventures of flight and pursuit” (p. 337) in the third. It is the weakest part of the novel, as Elizabeth Inchbald quickly recognized after reading Godwin's manuscript: “Your first volume is far inferior to the two last. Your second is sublimely horrible—captivatingly frightful.”²⁴ James Marshall, after reading the “nearly three-fourths of the first volume” then written, was even tempted to burn his friend's manuscript: “The incidents are ill chosen; the characters unnatural, distorted; … the style uncouth; everything upon stilts; the whole uninteresting; written as a man would make a chair or a table that had never handled a tool.”²⁵

Filtering Collins's account through Caleb's retrospective point of view rather than letting Falkland's steward tell his own story may have been an effort to arouse interest in what was essentially a weak but, for Godwin, a necessary introduction to his hero's story.²⁶ It may, in fact, have been a factor in his decision to switch from a third to a first-person narrative. Caleb tends to vitalize Falkland's aloof and rather improbable character by relating his master's tragedy to his own: “To his story the whole fortune of my life was linked; because he was miserable, my happiness, my name, and my existence have been irretrievably blasted” (p. 10).

There was, however, another more important reason for avoiding Collins's direct narrative perspective. Had Caleb, as in the last chapter of Vol. 1, given us Collins's own words, an accepted convention in eighteenth-century novels, we would have had to assume that we were hearing essentially the same account the experiencing self had long ago heard from Collins. Under the circumstances, it would be hard to believe in Caleb's later progression from innocence to experience. Had he at the outset been enlightened about “things as they are” by directly hearing, for example, not only Collins's account of Tyrrel's cruel treatment of Hawkins but also the sardonic moral drawn from it, “wealth and despotism easily know how to engage those laws as the coadjutors of their oppression which were perhaps at first intended [witless and miserable precaution!]²⁷ for the safeguards of the poor” (p. 72), his own later disillusionment would have lost much of its credibility: “Since my escape from prison, I had acquired some knowledge of the world; I had learned by bitter experience by how many links society had a hold upon me, and how closely the snares of despotism beset me. I no longer beheld the world, as my youthful fancy had once induced me to do” (p. 277). Instead, by offering Collins's story indirectly, it is the narrating self looking back on the events he had long ago heard who now comments about them in a manner that would have been completely foreign to the naive experiencing self, for whom Tyrrel is merely “that devil incarnate” (p. 107) rather than the manifestation of an inherently unjust society.

Significantly, the narrating self is temporarily suspended in the last chapter of the first volume: “I shall endeavour to state the remainder of this narrative in the words of Mr. Collins” (p. 97). It occurs right after the murder of Tyrrel is reported because, as in the best tradition of the detective story, Godwin wants to lure the reader into believing, as long as possible, that his murderer is innocent. Hence his decision to use temporarily as narrator the man who has “always admired him [Falkland] as the living model of liberality and goodness” (p. 310). To have continued to use Caleb's retrospective point of view here would have proven awkward since the narrating self of course knows the real truth.

Godwin's dilemma of having to switch narrators for one chapter points up, moreover, an inherent weakness in dissonant self-narration: there is no simple, unobtrusive means of silencing for a whole chapter the narrating self in the way a privileged narrator, its third-person equivalent,²⁸ can be controlled. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), for example, Jane Austen can at will suspend access to her narrator, leaving us momentarily dependent on Elizabeth Bennet's limited point of view. Probably, it was, in fact, this flexibility that attracted Austen to the third-person narrative and led her to abandon the epistolary versions of her early novels.²⁹ Godwin, on the other hand, after his own early experiment in epistolary fiction (Italian Letters), rejected the third-person for the first-person narrator, though thereby limiting his own authorial freedom.

Abdicating one's narrative function to someone inside the fictional world can, as was said earlier, enhance a novel's verisimilitude, but it comes at a high price. Switching to Mr. Collins's direct point of view calls attention to an underlying clash of interest between the author and his created narrator: while Godwin, desiring to gain “a powerful hold on the reader” (p. 337), deliberately withholds information about Tyrrel's murder, Caleb is penning his memoirs in the hope “that posterity may by their means be induced to render [him] a justice which [his] contemporaries refuse” (p. 3). Winning posterity's sympathy and trust, needless to say, is unlikely to be enhanced by temporarily switching to an unreliable narrator.

If Godwin, moreover, withholds information from the reader by gagging his narrating self, there are other times when, on the contrary, the narrating self gives away information to the reader before the experiencing self has learned about it. After Caleb, for example, has fled to London and before he is warned by Mrs. Marney that someone is searching for him, we are given a detailed account of how Gines came to pursue him as well as how he accidentally found his trail through Mrs. Marney (pp. 259-65). The experiencing self, at this point, knows only that he is in danger and does not realize that Gines is his pursuer until his appearance some seven pages later. Likewise, we discover that Gines is in Falkland's employment before Caleb learns about it (p. 304), just as the narrating self tells us about Laura's connection with Falkland, through her dead father (p. 294), seven pages before the experiencing self confronts Laura with a statement that is bound to seem inconsistent to us: “I see that you have by some means come to a hearing of the story of Mr. Falkland” (p. 300). Presumably, these are Godwin's means to sustain his reader's “overpowering interest” by substituting anxiety for mere surprise but, since the narrating and experiencing selves are essentially different facets of the same character, such instances tend to be awkward despite his efforts to account for them: “I shall upon some occasions [Caleb cautions the reader] annex to appearances an explanation, which I was far from possessing at the time, and was only suggested to me through the medium of subsequent events” (p. 118).

Here again it is Godwin's use of a narrator who is part of the fictional world rather than outside of it that complicates what would have been an easy maneuver for a privileged third-person narrator. One gets the impression that Godwin embraced the first-person narrative as his mode of fiction without also being willing to accept what David Goldknopf calls its “generic limitations”—“a lower potential of discernment and expressiveness than his creator.”³⁰ He does not, in fact, hesitate to endow Caleb with the ability to give us an inner view of his fellow-characters. Inexplicably, we are made privy to the thoughts and feelings of Falkland, Tyrrel, Emily, Forester, Gines, even Spurrel and Gines's brother. Yet somehow we accept such inconsistency, just as we do in Tristram Shandy, largely, I suspect, because it is the narrating self, detached by his retrospective vantage point, that takes such liberties. Our reaction is far less tolerant when it is the experiencing self who assumes such a privilege; as when Caleb, having magnanimously decided not to seek Mr. Collins's help against Falkland, gives us his thoughts: “Mr. Collins was deeply affected with the apparent ingenuousness with which I expressed my feelings. The secret struggle of his mind was, Can this be hypocrisy? The individual with whom I am conferring, if virtuous, is one of the most disinterestedly virtuous persons in the world” (p. 311). Caleb's involvement, having, like Pamela, to report his own praise, calls attention to the incongruity of his privileged role, whereas his detachment as narrating self tends to blur it.

While this scene underscores one of the limits of self-narration Godwin had difficulty overcoming, he proved much more resourceful in managing another potential trouble spot—the novel's ending. Having one's hero not only be imprisoned but also go insane, as occurs in the original unpublished ending, creates problems in the memoir novel since the narrating self normally begins to write his story sometime after the events he relates have concluded. Under the circumstances, there is obviously little time or opportunity, not to mention capacity, for Caleb to pore over his past life and create a coherent history. Nor is the dissonant self-narrative well equipped to handle the radical shift in attitude that Caleb undergoes towards Falkland in both the original and published endings. However, if most of the actual composition takes place earlier, such problems recede. Godwin thus abandoned the traditional self-narrative written retrospectively from one temporal point, what I will call its narrative present, by shifting its position a number of times, in the process creating an unexpectedly complex but effective narrative form.

At the beginning of the penultimate chapter, after Caleb's hasty departure from Wales, the narrating self announces: “I hasten to the conclusion of my melancholy story. I began to write soon after the period to which I have now conducted it” (p. 302). There follows his reason for “writing of these memoirs … for several years”:

I conceived that my story faithfully digested would carry in it an impression of truth that few men would be able to resist; or at worst that, by leaving it behind me when I should no longer continue to exist, posterity might be induced to do me justice, and, seeing in my example what sort of evils are entailed upon mankind by society as it is at present constituted, might be inclined to turn their attention upon the fountain from which such bitter waters have been accustomed to flow.

(pp. 303-04)³¹

This, the narrating self tells us in retrospect, is what motivated him to compose his history. By now, however, having written three hundred pages and lost the support of his only true friends, first Laura Dennison and now, in “what remains to be told,” Mr. Collins, Caleb's desire to tell his story has waned: “But these motives have diminished in their influence. I have contracted a disgust for life and all its appendages. Writing, which was at first a pleasure, is changed into a burthen. I shall compress into a small compass what remains to be told” (p. 304).

Caleb's surprise encounter with Collins thus terminates the role of the primary narrating self since he has told everything he knows about.³² As he announces in a passage added to the second edition: “This is the latest event, which at present I think it necessary to record. I shall doubtless hereafter have further occasion to take up the pen. Great and unprecedented as my sufferings have been, I feel intimately persuaded that there are worse sufferings that await me” (p. 312). He can only vaguely speculate about the future because what will happen in vol. 3, ch. 15 and the Postscript has at this point not yet occurred and, therefore, cannot be part of the knowledge he possesses when recording past events.

The narrator who introduces vol. 3, ch. 15 is thus a new or what I will call a secondary narrating self, having not been involved in recording the previous events: “It is as I foreboded. The presage with which I was visited was prophetic. I am now to record a new and terrible revolution of my fortune and my mind” (p. 312).³³ What he characterizes as an “instantaneous revolution in both my intellectual and animal system” (p. 313) stems from his surprise encounter with Gines. Learning through him that his “last consolation,” escaping Falkland's persecution by leaving Great Britain, is denied him, Caleb is overcome with uncontrollable anger. Where before, prior to losing interest, he wanted to tell his story to vindicate himself, he now comes to see his memoirs as a weapon against his adversary: “With this engine, this little pen I defeat all his machinations; I stab him in the very point he was most solicitous to defend!” (p. 315). Where, in the previous chapter, he promised Collins “not [to] hurt a hair of his [Falkland's] head, unless compelled to it by a principle of defence” (p. 310), he is now openly vindictive: “Thou hast shown no mercy; and thou shalt receive none!” (p. 314). Helping to make such an abrupt shift believable is the presence of a secondary narrating self whose vengeful attitude has not been able to color the recording of earlier events or, to view it from another angle, whose very presence infers curtailment of the primary narrating self's foreknowledge.

Equally important is the fact that the secondary narrating self, in contrast to the primary, is too close to what he is describing to objectify the inevitable subjectivity of the experiencing self:

It is now three days since I received it [Gines's warning], and from that moment to the present my blood has been in a perpetual ferment. My thoughts wander from one idea of horror to another with incredible rapidity. I have had no sleep. I have scarcely remained in one posture for a minute together. It has been with the utmost difficulty that I have been able to command myself far enough to add a few pages to my story. But, uncertain as I am of the events of each succeeding hour, I determined to force myself to the performance of this task.

(p. 313)

Throwing doubt on his objectivity helps to make plausible Caleb's new role as Falkland's inexorable accuser. To call his antagonist an “unfeeling, unrelenting tyrant” and identify him with “Nero and Caligula” (p. 314) is to exaggerate Falkland's failings and underline Caleb's present exasperation, foreshadowing his loss of sanity during his later imprisonment. As he admits in resuming his pen: “All is not right within me. How it will terminate God knows” (pp. 313-14).

At the same time, such temporal proximity to the experience being described lends a sense of immediacy to the events reminiscent of an epistolary novel: “The pen lingers in my trembling fingers!—Is there any thing I have left unsaid?” (p. 315). With the narrating self deprived of most of his prescience, it is the experiencing self who comes to dominate much of vol. 3, ch. 15, encouraging that suspense and involvement on the part of the reader, that “overpowering interest” Godwin was striving for.

Chapter 15 marks the end of the second narrative present, with Caleb assuring Collins that he “has taken care to provide a safe mode of conveying them [his papers] into your [Collins's] possession” (p. 315). A new secondary narrating self thus introduces the Postscript, the third narrative present: “All is over. I have carried into execution my meditated attempt. My situation is totally changed; I now sit down to give an account of it. For several weeks after the completion of this dreadful business, my mind was in too tumultuous a state to permit me to write. I think I shall now be able to arrange my thoughts sufficiently for that purpose” (p. 316).³⁴ Although Godwin radically changed his ending before publication,³⁵ he managed to utilize the first eight paragraphs of the Postscript for both versions, which only diverge after Caleb catches sight of the emaciated figure of Falkland. In the above passage, “dreadful business” originally referred to Caleb's defeat, his accusation against Falkland having been peremptorily dismissed by the magistrate; while in the published version, what has ironically become “dreadful” is that Caleb has unwittingly triumphed over his former foe.

Difficulties arise in trying to establish where the third narrative present originally ended. We possess only an incomplete manuscript version of the first ending, two holograph pages being missing that cover the end of the trial and a “period of insanity” during Caleb's ensuing imprisonment by Jones.³⁶ Most likely, there was another temporal break between these two events and hence a fourth narrative present. This can be deduced not only because the subsequent heading, “Postscript No. II,” infers the existence of a prior Postscript No. I within the missing pages but also because of a significant change within the extant manuscript. Originally, “For several days” opened the fourth sentence of the above quotation, though Godwin later changed it to “For several weeks.”³⁷ “Several days” obviously could not have sufficed for Caleb to regain his composure after the trial, his imprisonment and subsequent “period of insanity” unless another temporal break existed somewhere within the two missing manuscript leaves.

What follows the gap in the manuscript thus takes place in the fourth narrative present, whereas the third, covering the trial and the circumstances leading to Caleb's imprisonment, presumably ended with his insanity. Now, with the “dawn of returning reason,” also recurs the wish “of recording these recent and tragical transactions which had occurred subsequently to my putting out of my possession the body of my memoirs. Surely, said I, such a story is worth recording!” (pp. 331-32). But what we get is less a “story” than journal entries, impressions and musings of an impaired intellect: “I am subject to wanderings in which the imagination seems to refuse to obey the curb of judgement. I dare not attempt to think long and strenuously on any one subject” (p. 331). With the experiencing self, rather than the enfeebled narrating self, thus dominant for much of the original ending, Godwin's self-narrative becomes more and more consonant where before it had been dissonant. The fourth narrative present ends with Caleb sensing that he is being drugged and managing somehow to smuggle out his additional papers through a female attendant: “I feel now a benumbing heaviness, that I conceive to have something in it more than natural. I have tried again and again to shake it off. I can scarcely hold my pen. Surely—surely there is no foul play in all this! My mind misgives me. I will send away these papers, while I am yet able to do so” (p. 333).

Finally, there is the vaguely defined fifth narrative present during which Postscript No. II is written. By now the secondary narrating self has been nearly effaced by the experiencing self since Caleb's memory is so weakened that he can no longer recall past events: “I should like to recollect something—it would make an addition to my history—but it is all a BLANK!” (p. 333).

Although rejecting this ending before publication eliminated Godwin's problem of having to deal with an imprisoned and eventually insane first-person narrator, not only did he preserve his system of multiple narrating selves but also, as we have seen, improved it in the second edition by adding temporal breaks between Chs. 14 and 15. The fact is that the introduction of a new narrative present, though fulfilling different functions, proved as useful for the new Postscript as it had for the old. Describing events only “several weeks after the completion of this dreadful business” now throws doubts on Caleb's reliability in condemning himself. He can, at this point, no longer accept his own very human failings: “Why should my reflections perpetually centre upon myself? self, an overweening regard to which has been the source of my errors!” (p. 325). The truth is that it would have been humanly impossible to have avoided developing hostility and vindictiveness towards Falkland when we consider the suffering he inflicted directly or indirectly on Caleb.³⁸

Had this, moreover, been the ending of a traditional memoir novel written retrospectively from a single narrative present, Caleb's final sense of guilt and remorse would presumably have affected and transformed the narrating self and hence also the novel. As it stands, for example, the narrating self of the Postscript cannot report Falkland's praises of himself without deflating them: “I record the praises bestowed on me by Falkland, not because I deserve them, but because they serve to aggravate the baseness of my cruelty” (p. 325). Yet this present sense of guilt has had no effect on earlier parts of the memoirs since they were recorded before the events that originally caused his guilt had occurred. Had it been otherwise, had there existed only a single narrative present, Collins's reflection about Caleb as “one of the most disinterestedly virtuous persons in the world” (p. 311) could not easily have gone unchallenged. Nor, for that matter, could Caleb's professed purpose have been the vindication of his character if the self-reproach expressed at the end of the novel had existed from the outset: “I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate” (p. 326).

Although Godwin had begun Caleb Williams merely “to produce a small supply of money,” it had obviously “improved and acquired weight” as its author came to envision his “adventures of flight and pursuit” as a potential “vehicle” for a “valuable lesson.” It was, however, his decision to make “the hero of [his] tale his own historian” that had, as I have tried to show, the most profound effect on the novel, challenging him to experiment and improvise in an effort to give his constraining first-person narrative sufficient flexibility to fit his story. He may, as he claims in the Fleetwood Preface, have invented the general outline of his plot in reverse order before commencing “to write [his] story from the beginning” (p. 338).³⁹ But despite such preparations, it is doubtful whether Godwin could have anticipated the technical obstacles he would face, particularly since his decision to replace the third person, “the more usual way,” with a first-person narrative came only after he had already begun his story. More likely, such problems were faced and resolved as they confronted him, converting Caleb Williams in the process into one of the most innovative works of eighteenth-century fiction.

Notes

1. See Leon Surmelian, Techniques of Fiction Writing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 74-75; Bertil Romberg, Studies in the Narrative Technique of the First-Person Novel (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1962), pp. 59-60; Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 259.

2. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “Life of Samuel Richardson,” The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 6 vols. (London: Printed for Richard Phillips, 1804), 1:xxv.

3. David Goldknopf, “The Confessional Increment: A New Look at the I-Narrator,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (1969): 19.

4. The Notebooks for “Crime and Punishment,” ed. and trans. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 98-148.

5. The Art of the Novel (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937), p. 320.

6. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 339. All further references to the Fleetwood Preface as well as to the novel and its original ending are to this edition and will be cited in my text.

7. Of Godwin's three early works of fiction, all published in 1784, Damon and Delia and Imogen: A Pastoral Romance utilize a privileged third-person narrator, while Italian Letters is an epistolary novel.

8. C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876), 1:361.

9. Holograph MS. Forster 47. C. 1; 1:42. Permission to quote granted by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

10. Godwin “read and criticised” an epistolary version of A Simple Story in manuscript in 1790. See my Grandison's Heirs (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985), p. 104, n. 18.

11. Mitzi Myers focuses attention on this same problem in “Godwin's Changing Conception of Caleb Williams,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 12 (1972): 597-98. See also Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780-1805 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 180-83.

12. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, ed. F. E. L. Priestly, 3 vols. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1946), 1:viii; 3:241.

13. Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript, Augustan Reprint Society Publication No. 103 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1964), p. 350.

14. Paul, 2:25.

15. Enquiry, 1:24; 2:324; see also 2:323.

16. Enquiry, 2:327.

17. William Godwin, “Of Choice in Reading,” The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965), pp. 138, 140.

18. Part of Godwin's unpublished critique of Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman, quoted in David McCracken, “Godwin's Literary Theory: The Alliance between Fiction and Political Philosophy,” Philological Quarterly 49 (1970): 128. I am indebted to McCracken's valuable essay.

19. See David Goldknopf, The Life of the Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 25.

20. Franz Stanzel, Narrative Situations in the Novel (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971), p. 91.

21. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 143-45.

22. Cohn, p. 155. See also Stanzel, pp. 64-65.

23. Cohn, pp. 145-53.

24. Paul, 1:139.

25. Paul, 1:89-90.

26. Given Caleb's inordinate curiosity, it seems improbable that he had never heard of the events arising from Tyrrel's violent death (p. 100) “in the very neighbourhood where [Caleb] lived” (p. 106). As a remedy, Godwin had his hero in the third edition of 1797 claim that “village anecdotes and scandal had no charms for [him]” (p. 4).

27. Brackets inserted by Godwin.

28. Cohn, p. 143.

29. Just as Sense and Sensibility (1811) was originally composed as an epistolary novel called Elinor and Marianne, so First Impressions, an early version of Pride and Prejudice, may also have been written in letter form. Apart from her juvenilia, Austen's only extant epistolary work, Lady Susan, ends abruptly with a “Conclusion” that mocks the very letter form heretofore utilized. See B. C. Southam, Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 54-59.

30. Goldknopf, Life of the Novel, p. 38.

31. Though Caleb is recalling the original reason for writing his memoirs, curiously he is more optimistic and didactic here than when he actually began its composition “several years” before: “a faint idea that posterity may by their means be induced to render me a justice which my contemporaries refuse” (p. 3).

32. For Kenneth W. Graham, the first narrative present, or what he calls “the first narrative moment,” ends with vol. 3, ch. 13, although the role of the primary narrating self does not actually terminate until the end of vol. 3, ch. 14, The Politics of Narrative: Ideology and Social Change in William Godwin's “Caleb Williams” (New York: AMS Press, 1990), p. 84.

33. Added in the second edition of 1796.

34. Three deleted sentences follow in the manuscript that make the presence of a new secondary narrating self more explicit: “I have not now the narrative already written in my possession. But I will relate what has lately occurred upon separate leaves. Perhaps they will one day be joined to the principal story” (MS. Forster 47. C. 1; 3:104).

35. D. Gilbert Dumas, “Things As They Were: The Original Ending of Caleb Williams,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 6 (1966): 575-97.

36. Changed to Gines in the second edition.

37. MS. Forster 47. C. 1; 3:104.

38. See my “Justice to Caleb Williams,” Studies in the Novel 6 (1974): 385-86.

39. Charles Dickens's misconception that “Godwin wrote it backwards—the last Volume first” (Letter to E. A. Poe, March 6, 1842, Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House et al., 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974], 3:107) has been perpetuated by a surprising number of scholars. See, for example, A. A. Mendilow, Time and the Novel (London: Peter Nevill, 1952), p. 26; Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984), p. 146.