SOURCE: Cohen, Michael. “Godwin's Caleb Williams: Showing the Strains in Detective Fiction.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10, no. 2 (January 1998): 203-19.

[In the following essay, Cohen discusses Caleb Williams as the precursor of the detective novel, maintaining that inconsistencies within the novel anticipate different strains within the genre.]

According to Julian Symons in his Mortal Consequences: A History—From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, “The characteristic note of crime literature is first struck in Caleb Williams.”¹ Symons argues that however ingeniously others mine biblical or classical texts as sources for detective fiction, the genre's characteristic features do not come together before the end of the eighteenth century. William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) “is about a murder, its detection, and the unrelenting pursuit by the murderer of the person who has discovered his guilt.” Moreover, says Symons, Godwin's novel has the crime story's distinctive construction “from effect to cause, from solution to problem,” Godwin having conveniently admitted that he “invented first the third volume … then the second, and last of all the first.”² Ian Ousby also treats Caleb Williams as the first detective novel. He begins Bloodhounds of Heaven, his survey of detective fiction up to Doyle, with a discussion of Godwin's novel, which “demonstrated for the first time that the detective could become the focus of serious literary interest.”³ Other voices concur in Symons's and Ousby's choice for the first begetter of English detective fiction—Stephen Knight, A. E. Murch, Régis Messac; if not unanimity, there is at least consensus in the choice.⁴ Yet these writers argue that Caleb Williams is not, like Edgar Allan Poe's stories, for example, the sort of grandparent in whose face we can discover all the features of the descendants. They see it as an antitype of the detective story as it has been theorized by modern critics of the genre: Godwin's novel is unlike any later detective story in its tragic mode, its anarchism, and its condemnation of law and lawful punishment. I argue that Caleb Williams, because of its inconsistencies, is a remarkably accurate anticipation of what is to come in mystery and detective fiction. The novel grows out of Godwin's theories about political justice, and, like those theories, it contains tensions and contradictions between ideas. Caleb Williams dramatizes Godwin's theory of political justice and, in doing so, enlarges the fissures and exaggerates the slippages in his theory. Because of its contradictions, Caleb Williams can be seen as a precursor of very different strains in the detective story—strains in every sense of the word—that are still with us. It is necessary to look briefly at Godwin's theoretical difficulties in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice to see the ways in which some of the ideas there are transformed into a philosophical fable in the novel, and hence how the novel anticipates a continuing epistemological rift in modern popular fiction.

GODWIN AND POLITICAL JUSTICE

Godwin was, like his contemporary William Blake, a thinker bold in conception but not without inconsistencies. Godwin was born into a dissenting family and became a nonconformist preacher, but his reading, his friendship with the radical Thomas Holcroft, and the events of the late eighteenth century made him an atheist. The combination of the publication in 1793 of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and the appearance the following year of his novel Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams brought him brief fame and success that was seen by some, Hazlitt for example, as “a sultry and unwholesome popularity.”⁵ The proximity of publication of the two books concerns us because Caleb Williams is a narrative that enacts many of the ideas of Political Justice.

Godwin argues in Political Justice that, like any human endeavour, political institutions ought to be subject to reconsideration and improvement.⁶ He believes an inquiry into political justice is a moral investigation. His moral philosophy, which is utilitarian, he seems to have adopted about the same time as Bentham, though without Bentham's influence.⁷ Godwin thinks the general good ought to determine the kind of political system one has and the kind of authority it wields, the kind of social distinctions that are made in it, and the way property is handled within it.

Godwin is a philosophical anarchist who is convinced that government, which “was intended to suppress injustice,” has had the effect of perpetuating it (1:xxiv). The main problem is that government operates by coercion, and for Godwin coercion is always wrong (2:333-37). He looks at legitimate and illegitimate authority and at the kinds of obedience demanded from those upon whom authority is exercised. We obey for three reasons, he says: because of an “independent conviction of our private judgment”; because another has a “superiority of intellect or information” that we acknowledge; or “merely on account of the mischievous consequences” of not obeying (1:226-28). Governments can only claim the last kind of obedience, by coercion, although they attempt to claim the second kind, by pretending to the superiority of intellect or information of the governors over the governed. Godwin believes that obedience exacted by coercion is always wrong, and that the second kind of obedience can only occasionally be justified. The only political system that could be founded upon the first kind of authority and obedience is a small and completely voluntary federation—what Godwin calls, from lack of a better name, a parish (2:198). Such a nonbinding federation is Godwin's ideal society.

In such a community, social distinctions of birth or wealth would not be known. The aristocracy—in Godwin's view a pernicious system for “rendering more permanent … the inequalities of mankind … founded in falsehood” and “supported by artifice and false pretences” (2:103)—would be no more. Although distribution of property would be communally decided, Godwin reserves certain rights in property: “every man is entitled” to “the produce of his own industry” (2:433), for example.

Most radical of the corollaries from Godwin's belief in the injustice of coercion is his condemnation of state-sponsored punishment. He examines in turn the reasons for legal punishment of criminals—that it is just retribution, that it reforms, that it restrains the criminal himself, that it deters others—and he dismisses them. The idea of retribution does not stand up to his determinism, for although Godwin believes that society as a whole may be improved, he thinks individuals are the products of their circumstances and do not exercise free will, and that an act must be freely performed in order for it to “deserve” retribution. As for punishment intended to reform, Godwin argues that coercion causes resentment, not conciliation. Incarceration does restrain, but Godwin points out that the crime is over when the punishment happens. Why assume it will happen again? Of punishment administered as an example to others, Godwin says that besides being barbarous, it does not work; one has to keep coming up with newer and more horrible examples in order to deter because the intent is to create aversion and horror, and watchers of vengeful spectacles become inured to them.

The features of Godwin's political philosophy—its anarchism, its ethical, utilitarian base, its individual determinism and social meliorism, and its egalitarianism—are complemented by a Platonic conviction that rational behaviour is possible because truth will prevail. Truth's force for convincing citizens to act rightly can be opposed by considerations of power and influence; hence the danger of governments and social classes that not only perpetuate material injustice, but also have the power to obscure truth. But “sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error” (1:86).

GAPS IN THE SYSTEM

This much of Godwin's moral and political philosophy seems to hang together. But when we look more closely, gaps begin to open up, starting with a discrepancy between Godwin's determinism and his insistence that “man is perfectible” (1:86). Godwin bridges the gap by writing (to borrow his chapter titles for book 1, chapters 3 and 4) that “the characters of men originate in their external circumstances,” but “the voluntary actions of men originate in their opinions.” He argues that those under the control of wrong opinion act as automatons, perpetuating the injustices of government and class difference, while those who are rightly instructed can act by rational principles. Free will is thus a product of instruction in truth. To put it another way, he has redefined any action under wrong principles as constraint. But since truth is invincible it also operates as constraint. Semantically, at least, Godwin eliminates free action, and with it go both merit and guilt.

Other slippages become evident when we examine Godwin's ideas about property and class. Godwin begins with assertions about the evils of private property and about the collective right of everyone to property (2:423). But he backs away from the implications of these assertions in several important ways. In Godwin's system everyone is entitled to the fruits of his own industry (2:433), and no one is to be enriched by a “legal” claim to what is produced by someone else. But the most important individual right of property has to do neither with one's own production nor with necessity. Godwin confounds a utilitarian principle with an individualistic one in saying that the first right of property is “my permanent right in those things, the use of which being attributed to me, a greater sum of benefit or pleasure will result, than could have arisen from their being otherwise appropriated” (2:432).

The inconsistencies in Godwin's treatment of property rights are connected with other inconsistencies concerning class. Godwin's principles seem clearly egalitarian when he discusses the pernicious effects of the aristocracy (2:93-99) or when he talks about the levelling that will occur when community sentiments control wealth (2:440-41). Godwin reintroduces a class system, however, in his discussion of a “scale of happiness” and the “benevolent man” (1:444-48). He argues that we can construct for human beings a scale of happiness according to their moral capacities—that is, in utilitarian terms, their capacity to enjoy their own pleasure and that of others. At the bottom is the labourer, who, if healthy, “is in a certain sense happy. He is happier than a stone.” Next comes the man of “rank, fortune and dissipation”; he is “happier than a peasant” (1:445). “The man of taste and liberal accomplishments” is a further step up: he has “new senses, and a new range of enjoyments” (1:446). At the peak of this scale is “the man of benevolence,” who gets “true joy” from “the spectacle and contemplation of happiness,” and thinks only of the “pleasures of other men” (1:447-48). In Godwin's description of the benevolent man, readers of Caleb Williams will recognize Falkland when he is not thinking of his honour or persecuting Caleb. Godwin's Utopia will contain no men of “rank, fortune and dissipation.” Moreover, there will be pressure upward along the scale, since it is our duty “to endeavour to raise each class, and every individual of each class, to a class above it” (1:448). But class distinctions will remain and the benevolent man will still be at the top of the scale.

The benevolent man is the one whom Godwin has in mind when he writes about right to property through its most beneficial use: “Every man has a right to that, the exclusive possession of which being awarded to him, a greater sum of benefit or pleasure will result, than could have arisen from its being otherwise appropriated” (2:423). The man with a natural right to property is the man who will use it in such a way as to create the most good. Presumably the community sentiments will be unanimous that such a man should control wealth. When he considers the claims of aristocracy, Godwin rejects outright the possibility of moral excellence accompanying hereditary privilege (2:88), but in the benevolent man he has reinvented the aristocracy according to its own self-description as the moral class.

RIFTS IN CALEB WILLIAMS

Caleb Williams enlarges the inconsistencies of the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice into rifts. In the novel, Godwin confronts the genuine incompatibility of human experiences in a way that his theoretical political treatise cannot. He imaginatively grapples with problems of truth and justice in ways that specifically anticipate the approaches of later popular fiction. In fact, Caleb Williams is two books. One of them is a demonstration of Things As They Are (not, as in some later editions, the subtitle of the book, but its original main title), showing that in the world as we know it power and place will triumph over truth and merit every time. This part of the book, despite an equivocal ending, shows again and again that since material goods are not distributed equally in the world, those with a lot of them will always get a biased hearing over those with few. Rich Falkland's accusation against poor Williams, though false, prevails over William's true charge against Falkland. In Falkland's world, status and wealth control not only material things but opinion as well, yet he argues for a still greater hold of aristocratic authority: “I am sure things will never be as they ought, till honour and not law be the dictator of mankind, till vice be taught to shrink before the resistless might of inborn dignity, and not before the cold formality of statutes” (p. 182).

The other narrative in Caleb Williams is also an illustration of things as they are, but this one concerns the opacity of both evil and good. Falkland's exterior appearance of the benevolent gentleman is impenetrable; Williams's innocence cannot be spied out through either his rags or the obloquy cast on him by Falkland. In a material culture, only the material commands attention, and since evil and good are spiritual qualities, they will necessarily be invisible in such a culture. The two books within Caleb Williams are separable, but linked by the theme of concealed truth. One part of Godwin's narrative asserts that the class system, driven by economics, can conceal truth to favour the economically privileged. Another part of his narrative asserts (despite Godwin's professed belief to the contrary) that even in the best of worlds appearances will still deceive.

Within these two connected narratives there are further splits. Caleb Williams has two opposed ideas about wealth and power, as well as two views about the occulted or obvious nature of guilt and innocence. The book has two of everything: two representatives of power in Tyrrel and Falkland, two detectives in Caleb and Gines, two attitudes about detection, two narratives, two endings—though only one was published.

On the one hand, Godwin demonstrates the inherent corruption of the squirearchy along with the dependence and inequalities that result from the concentration of land under one ownership. Tyrrel arbitrarily uses the power that results from his economic station, ruining his tenant Hawkins and killing his poor relative Emily Melville. Godwin also demonstrates such corruption through Falkland, whom he shows exercising arbitrary power in his persecution of Caleb and allowing the Hawkinses to die for his own crime. On the other hand, Godwin wants to show the benevolence possible in the privileged classes; he has used much of the first volume in depicting Falkland's exemplary behaviour abroad and in sketching the portrait of a benevolent man. Caleb, after he has felt the worst of Falkland's reprisals, still acquits him of blame, indicting society instead: “A nobler spirit lived not among the sons of men. Thy intellectual powers were truly sublime, and thy bosom burned with a godlike ambition. But of what use are talents and sentiments in the corrupt wilderness of human society? It is a rank and rotten soil, from which every finer shrub draws poison as it grows” (p. 336). Through the limited view of this narrator, we can glimpse Godwin's deep ambivalence about the character of Falkland. He seems to be suggesting that Falkland is as close to his utilitarian aristocrat as a flawed society will allow a man to be. Though some critics have suggested that Falkland reflects Godwin's wavering between admiration and disgust for Edmund Burke,⁸ I think Falkland is less a personal portrait than a type constructed of Godwin's unresolved feelings about the squirearchy, feelings he struggled with in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

The most serious fissure in Caleb Williams has already been pointed out: the gap between two answers to the epistemological question about the power of truth to make itself obvious. The two answers are not equally convincing. “Sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error: Sound reasoning and truth are capable of being so communicated: Truth is omnipotent.” These are axioms of Political Justice (1:86), but they are given many trials—literally—in Caleb Williams. The novel contains highly dramatized trial scenes, with Falkland as accused, accuser, or magistrate. In other scenes trials are averted, refused, or dismissed. Since trials turn on the ability of those present to recognize truth, those in the novel test Godwin's axioms about truth's patency, and in several of them truth is neither adequately communicated nor recognized as truth.

In the first of the trial scenes, Falkland defends himself against the charge of murdering Tyrrel; the occasion is a meeting of the neighbouring magistrates that is not quite a formal trial. Falkland begins by claiming his innocence and asserting “I have no fear that I shall fail to make every person in this company acknowledge my innocence” (p. 104). He appeals to his honour and reminds everyone of his philanthropy. He says he would have called Tyrrel out for a duel had he lived, and that “the greatest injustice committed by his unknown assassin was that of defrauding” him—Falkland—of his “just revenge” (p. 105) for the physical insults Tyrrel inflicted on Falkland immediately before the former's death. Finally Falkland pleads that he does not care about his life, but his honour is in their hands. He is “discharged with every circumstance of credit” (p. 106). So guilt successfully masquerades as innocence.

The second “trial” is a kangaroo court in which Falkland's friend Forester sits in judgment over Caleb on the charge of theft that Falkland has invented.⁹ Only this trial presents any physical evidence, and it is falsified: Falkland has planted his own valuables in Caleb's trunks and boxes. Despite what Forester calls “considerable dexterity” in Caleb's answers to the charges (p. 178), everyone present (except Falkland) concludes that Caleb is guilty, and he is sent to prison to await a real trial that never occurs. True innocence is not perceived to be so.

When Caleb decides to accuse Falkland, he is unsuccessful in his first attempt to bring his former master to trial. “A fine time of it indeed it would be,” says the magistrate, “if, when gentlemen of six thousand a year take up their servants for robbing them, those servants could trump up such accusations as these, and could get any magistrate or court of justice to listen to them! … There would be a speedy end to all order and good government, if fellows that trample upon ranks and distinctions in this atrocious sort were upon any consideration suffered to get off” (p. 286). Finally, however, Falkland is “solemnly brought before a magistrate to answer a charge of murder” (p. 331). Although Caleb has no evidence, Falkland confesses, saying Caleb's “artless and manly story … has carried conviction to every hearer” (p. 335). Caleb's equally artless and manly story failed earlier to convince Forester of his innocence, and Falkland's artful and manly—though false—story did not fail to convince his hearers in his original trial for Tyrrel's murder. Even the one-out-of-three triumph of truth record for Caleb Williams is undercut because the first ending Godwin wrote for the book shows the magistrate dismissing Caleb's accusations against Falkland. In the original conclusion, Caleb is last seen in a cell, going mad or perhaps poisoned by Gines, who is called Jones in this version.¹⁰ Truth is subverted in all three trials, in the original version, and in two out of three in the book's final form. In the book as published, a murderer's eloquence convinces everyone of his innocence; an innocent man cannot convince anyone of his innocence, regardless of his eloquence; and, finally, the same innocent man convinces everyone of the same murderer's guilt, without evidence, solely by “a plain and unadulterated tale” (p. 334). The afflictions of truth and innocence, when not caused by arbitrary power in the novel, are aggravated by it—what Godwin calls the “present state” of society. If change is to occur, however, truth has to be able to triumph even in adversity. Judged from the events in Caleb Williams, Godwin's opinion about the triumph of truth looks more like a hope than a conviction. I emphasize the equivocal answer to the question of occulted versus obvious guilt or innocence in Caleb Williams and the way power or wealth affects the perception of truth because these are the problems of the two strains of detective fiction after Godwin. Caleb Williams not only examines them, but explores and rejects “solutions” to them.

The last Janus-like feature of Caleb Williams is its doubling of detectives, the amateur Caleb and the professional thief-taker Gines. Here, we must acknowledge Godwin's anticipation of detective fact as well as fiction. Although the Bow Street Runners were in existence throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, they were an extension of the magistrate's court, and nothing like a detective for hire appears before Vidocq set up shop at his retirement from the Sûreté in 1827, while an amateur detective is a later matter still, in fact as in fiction: Dupin seems to be an amateur at first, in the Rue Morgue and Marie Roget cases, though he is definitely working for money in “The Purloined Letter.”

Caleb is the amateur whose importance as detective lies in his conviction that Falkland's guilt is detectable through physical traces of some sort. Caleb's detective work does not go on very long. He listens to Collins's narrative, which takes up most of volume 1, and begins thinking about Falkland at the beginning of volume 2: “Was it possible after all that Mr Falkland should be the murderer?” (p. 112). He begins to take pleasure in being a “spy” on Falkland—the word is his—and feigns innocence as he interrogates his master (p. 114). He finds a letter from the elder Hawkins that makes him doubt that such a man could commit murder; he grows “watchful, inquisitive, suspicious” (p. 128). He is not sure how he could satisfy himself of Falkland's innocence; “As to his guilt, I could scarcely bring myself to doubt that in some way or other, sooner or later, I should arrive at the knowledge of that, if it really existed” (p. 129). Then the trial of a peasant for the accidental killing of a bully causes Falkland to leave his seat as magistrate and rush from the room (p. 135). Caleb is convinced of Falkland's guilt, and seeks evidence in the trunk his master keeps locked in his study. Though Caleb is interrupted before he can find anything, Falkland confesses the murder a few pages later (p. 141). The whole course of Caleb's detection occupies less than six chapters at the beginning of the second volume. His amateur detection is “successful” in the sense that he finds the truth he is seeking, although physical evidence scarcely figures in this effort.

The “diabolical Gines,” as Caleb calls him (p. 200), is the hired professional detective who has no interest in detecting; he accepts the story his employers tell him as the truth and acts on it, even though Gines has himself been a member of the classless alternative society of Captain Raymond, where truth, justice, and law have meanings opposed to those in the class culture of Falkland. Gines's depiction breaks the pattern of such thief-takers as Jonathan Wild and the later Vidocq, who were thieves before they were thief-takers. Gines “had fluctuated during the last years of his life, between the two professions of a violator of the laws and a retainer to their administration. He had originally devoted himself to the first; and probably his initiation in the mysteries of thieving qualified him to be peculiarly expert in the profession of a thief-taker—a profession he had adopted, not from choice, but necessity” (p. 269). Gines would much rather be a thief, the more honourable “profession”—according to the inverted scale of values of the thieves: Godwin makes the scenes among the highwaymen a Beggar's Opera without humour or music, and has his Captain Raymond insist, “Our profession is the profession of justice. … We, who are thieves without a licence, are at open war with another set of men who are thieves according to law” (p. 224). Gines thinks that “there was no comparison between the liberal and manly profession of a robber from which I [Caleb] had driven him, and the sordid and mechanical occupation of a blood-hunter, to which he was obliged to return” (p. 270). Gines starts out after Caleb to claim the reward on his head, but after the charges against Caleb are dismissed without a trial, Gines is employed by Falkland to watch and harass Caleb.

Two detectives, two narratives, two attitudes about economic power and about discovering truth—these doublings are “strains” in the unity of Caleb Williams and they anticipate two “strains” in later detective fiction, two separate varieties of stories, each with its own internal tension or strain.

TWO STRAINS OF DETECTIVE FICTION

The two varieties of detective fiction anticipated in Caleb Williams might be called the tough and the technical. Although in accidentals the difference between the two looks like that between American mean-streets stories and English country-house stories, the real distinction is epistemological. Each strain is at bottom pessimistic and employs a mechanism to keep its fundamental pessimism under control without denying it outright. The two strains can be no better described than by using the terms with which I began separating the strands of Caleb Williams: in one of these strains—the tough one—the world is known as a place where power and money will triumph over truth and merit; where, since material goods are not distributed equally, those with a lot of them will always get a biased hearing over those with little; and where status and wealth control not only material counters but opinion as well. Raymond Chandler describes this world near the end of his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944):

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.¹¹

It is the world we live in, he tells us, and in similarly melodramatic fashion he outlines the mechanism this strain of fiction uses to keep its horrors under control: the loner who is untouched by all the corruption because he is alienated, the individual who has no ties and thus nothing to lose but his life by attacking the system. Chandler sees no contradictions in this scheme, no absurd self-satisfaction in talking about society as all them and no us; it looks for a moment as if the clause “because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising” means what it says, but then we realize it is only a formula and that Chandler is not talking about our responsibility for making society better but about stepping aside from it. Yet he has no idea what it would take to alienate oneself from such a society: his hero is “a common man” who can “go among common people.” And the ultimate contradiction comes at the end of the essay, where he imagines a community of alienated individuals: “If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in” (p. 237)!

Caleb Williams, by contrast, demonstrates a very clear awareness of the problems in any scheme for conquering the world's evil by attacking it from outside. Caleb learns that one must conform or die. In the two endings Godwin wrote for the book, Caleb either adopts the values of a society that has persecuted him, considering himself a murderer for having destroyed the sublime and godlike Falkland (p. 336), or (in the rejected ending) he is ignored by society's authorities and destroyed by its goons. Caleb himself recognizes that in fighting Falkland he has everyone's hand turned against him. What he does not see is the extent to which he has always internalized Falkland's values. He is only able to catch a temporary glimpse of some alternate value system when he watches others die in prison and is convinced he will soon be next. In the company of the robbers he takes their anti-establishment morality for cant—as of course it is, though Caleb cannot disentangle their criticism of present society from their rationalization of their own behaviour. Near the end of the book, when Falkland has succeeded in destroying Caleb's Welsh idyll with Laura Denison, the narrator writes about the necessity of human community:

The pride of philosophy has taught us to treat man as an individual. He is no such thing. He holds necessarily, indispensably, to his species. He is like those twin-births, that have two heads indeed, and four hands; but, if you attempt to detach them from each other, they are inevitably subjected to miserable and lingering destruction.

(p. 314)¹²

There could be no better emblem than Caleb's Siamese twins to show Godwin's awareness of how futile is the vision of reforming society from without, by means of the strong individualist who is alienated from it. And it is only fair to say that the futility of that vision has never been far from the surface of the best hard-boiled detective fiction, at least in America. When Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy not to be so sure he is as crooked as he seems to be—because such an appearance might just be good for business—he reveals a confusion of values and the untenability of the outsider's position.¹³ Hammett's Continental Op is perhaps more self-aware when he finds himself going “blood-simple” in the midst of the slaughter of Red Harvest: he begins to go native and to enjoy the killing of the killers for its own sake (p. 104). Later he shows no illusions about his own role when he tells his client he is giving the town back to him, “all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again” (p. 134). Even Chandler's Marlowe is not always so besotted with his role as knight freeing the lady from the dragon that he fails to appreciate his equivocal position in being hired by the rich to find their decadent daughters.

The other strain in detective fiction—the technical—has to deal with a more profound subversion, and it does so with a mechanism that is correspondingly more powerful than the myth of the individualist reformer. While the tough strain addresses the suspicion that judgments about right and wrong follow money and power, a deeper and more disquieting suspicion is that right and wrong are not discoverable, that character is opaque, that guilt can face it out forever without being discovered, and that innocence has no power to make itself known.

This suspicion is awakened whenever a criminal trial comes down to a question of the word of the accuser against the word of the accused. The judicial answer we have evolved to deal with the abyss of the unknowable here is the jury system: we place our faith in the “commonality” of those who judge—that is what a jury of one's peers means—and in multiples—it comes down to an idea that truth is communicable somehow, if the listeners to the tale, rather than the tale itself, are plain and unvarnished, and there are numbers of them. For Socrates, five hundred of them were not enough, but we go with twelve—in some cases six—and sometimes require only a majority rather than unanimity for a verdict. Detective stories always stop us before we come to that abyss of decision.

The myth of the technical strain of detective fiction is simply that guilt is detectable by means of evidence, that what is latent can be made patent. It is an idea that is late in developing, as Howard Haycraft has argued in Murder for Pleasure, because it lays emphasis on physical traces rather than psychology or metaphysics.¹⁴ When God cross-examines Cain in the Book of Genesis, when Daniel interrogates the elders separately to uncover discrepancies in their stories about Susanna, and when Oedipus examines eyewitnesses and pieces their stories together, the myth of the detective's seeing into the secret mystery of things has not yet been awakened. Those stories reveal that God sees all, that people tell truth if they are cleverly asked the right questions, and that Oedipus can know himself if he has the courage of self-destruction. Those myths are older ways of dealing with ultimate mysteries than the one with which people console themselves in the detective story. All Holmes or Dupin or Poirot insist upon is that human acts—even those of thought—leave traces that can be detected. The reader turns that insistence into assurances about the patency of guilt and innocence. The myth of the detector is a very powerful antidote to the fear that subverts all our fondest hopes about what ought to happen to good and evil people in this world. The detector's power of seeing the truth accounts for the tremendous appeal of one strain of detective fiction, and that power is suggested but also frustrated in Caleb Williams. Caleb believes in physical evidence but is unsuccessful in his attempts to find any that would unequivocally point to Falkland.

The results Caleb gets from his investigations come from many causes other than his own power of detection: his character assessment of Hawkins as incapable of murder, the guilt of Falkland becoming visible at the trial of a case only a little like his own, and especially Falkland's spontaneous confession. Yet Caleb continues to search for physical evidence, although he never discovers any. He is examining Falkland's locked trunk when Falkland finds him and attempts to kill him—and it is this incident that prompts Falkland's confession. The trunk is thus a centre for Caleb's conviction that physical evidence—perhaps even a confession—exists against Falkland. Caleb holds this conviction even to the end of the book:

The contents of the fatal trunk, from which all my misfortunes originated, I have never been able to ascertain. I once thought it contained some murderous instrument or relic connected with the fate of the unhappy Tyrrel. I am now persuaded that the secret it encloses is a faithful narrative of that and its concomitant transactions, written by Mr Falkland, and reserved in case of the worst, that, if by any unforeseen event his guilt should come to be fully disclosed, it might contribute to redeem the wreck of his reputation. But the truth or the falsehood of this conjecture is of little moment. If Falkland shall never be detected to the satisfaction of the world, such a narrative will probably never see the light. In that case this story of mine may amply, severely perhaps, supply its place.

(p. 326)

The incompatibility of Caleb's beliefs (truth makes itself obvious; hidden truth may need to be inferred from traces) leads to this passage's absurd requirement that the revelation of Falkland's guilt must precede the production of evidence for his guilt! Caleb sees his own account as evidence equivalent to physical proof or to Falkland's confession, but his own account is in a sense locked away by his promise never to divulge the admission Falkland made to him. Even when Caleb unlocks this evidence, it is at first ineffective in getting a hearing, and later, in the book's first ending, ineffective in convincing anyone. Physical evidence is only misleading or elusive in Caleb Williams: the knives found in Hawkins's cottage whose broken pieces fit the fragments in Tyrrel's wounds, Caleb's trunks and boxes salted with Falkland's “stolen” property, the locked chest that is never opened to reveal its contents. Consider, by contrast, the fantastic confidence that Conan Doyle's stories invest in the power of physical evidence to reveal truth.

Caleb Williams thus introduces the myth of the detector and at the same time questions it. The novel functions in this equivocal way for both strains of detective fiction. The mechanisms of these two strains are presented in Caleb Williams, but they are undercut as well. Godwin shows us the abyss: truth is dependent on money and power, or worse, unknowable even in an egalitarian world. He briefly presents what could save us: individuals can defy and reform society, a careful looker can see past appearances into the secret heart of things. But both these palliatives are withdrawn, and Caleb Williams ends as tragedy. George Sherburn thinks it is “the first impressive tragic novel since Richardson's Clarissa,” a judgment with which Ian Ousby concurs, and Sherburn goes farther: “its tragic themes seem more modern and less special than those of Clarissa.”¹⁵

The tragic mode in Caleb Williams strikes its commentators as disqualifying it as pattern for subsequent detective fiction. Both Ousby and Murch miss the detective's triumph at the end, which they think makes it “profoundly dissimilar” from, if not “a complete antithesis to the conception of detective fiction.”¹⁶ Other features in Caleb Williams separate it from later detective fiction in the minds of critics: the novel is, in Ken Worpole's words, “an admirable anarchist text”; most of its principal characters speak out against law; and many of its episodes demonstrate the cruelty, injustice, and futility of punishment.¹⁷ Such critics see detective fiction as written in a comic mode, defending law as the agent of a just government, and endorsing punishment for offenders of the law. This pattern may well fit some of the more simple-minded examples of detective fiction, but not the ones we remember as great. For every comic resolution, as in The Thin Man, Hammett has at least two that separate lovers, compromise the “hero,” and suggest a reversion to the way things have been, as in The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest. Detective stories have never been preoccupied with law, although they do concern themselves with justice. But legal sanctions almost always give way to either revenge or mercy, which may or may not invoke a higher law. “I suppose that I am commuting a felony,” says Holmes, as he lets a thief go, “but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. … Besides, it is the season of forgiveness.” And again, as he lets a killer go: “Once or twice in my career I feel that I have done more real harm by my discovery of the criminal than ever he had done by his crime. I have learned caution now, and I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience.”¹⁸

The subjects of the individualist reformer strain, the tough strain of detective fiction, like the subjects of Caleb Williams, are power, crime, and justice. The main character may be an actual criminal, like Hammett's Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key, or some of Elmore Leonard's characters, but even if he seems to be on the side of law he will more than likely operate with the conviction, in the words of William Ruehlmann, that in dealing with the corruption of society, “the law can't help, but somebody with a gun can.”¹⁹ The subjects of the technical strain of detective fiction are also power, crime, and justice, but power here is not brute force exercised by a repressive society or by its lone reformer. Power resides in magic vision into guilt, revealed ultimately as not magic at all but resting securely on material reality and natural law. Caleb Williams forecasts each strain of fiction, anticipating and interrogating its palliative mechanism for dealing with the world's evil.

Notes

1. Julian Symons, Mortal Consequences: A History—From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 19.

2. Symons, p. 19. William Godwin, Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 349. References are to this edition. Critics who echo this observation about the construction of Caleb Williams do not seem to notice its problematic relation to later mystery fiction, since the mystery here is contained almost entirely in the first volume. Godwin did not say he constructed that volume backwards.

3. Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 44.

4. Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Régis Messac, Le “Detective Novel” et l'influence de la pensée scientifique (Paris: Champion, 1929); Alma Elizabeth Murch, The Development of the Detective Novel (1958; reprinted, New York: Greenwood Press, 1968).

5. William Hazlitt, “William Godwin,” in The Spirit of the Age, vol. 9, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (1932; reprinted, New York: AMS Press, 1967), p. 16.

6. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, Facsimile of the 3rd edition, with critical introduction by F. E. L. Priestley, 3 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946), 1:v. References are to this edition. The best short summaries of Godwin's ideas about political justice can be found in K. Codell Carter's introduction to the 1971 abridgment of the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) and in Basil Willey's The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940). I lean heavily on these two sources in the following paragraphs.

7. Carter, p. xiii.

8. See, for example, Marilyn Butler, “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams,” Essays in Criticism 32 (1982), 255.

9. In an intervening trial scene, Falkland as magistrate hears the story of a young peasant who accidentally killed a vicious bully. Like the Mousetrap in Hamlet, the incident “unkennels” the secret guilt of Falkland, who rushes from the room just as Claudius does in the play. This occurrence convinces Caleb of Falkland's guilt, and shortly afterwards Falkland confesses to Caleb (p. 141). Despite its importance for Caleb's detection, the peasant's trial does not test Godwin's axiom about the obviousness of truth, illustrating as it does either a superstitious conviction that murder will out or a feature of the psychology of guilt, rather than testing an assertion of how truth is perceived to be such.

10. The original ending is included by Hindle as an appendix to his edition. Did Godwin change the name of his detective from Jones to Gines because he remembered the Don Quixote episode of Gines de Pasamonte, an episode in which don Quixote pronounces the Platonic—later Godwinian—doctrine that a prisoner should not be punished against his will?

11. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1946), p. 236. References are to this reprint of Chandler's essay, which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in December 1944.

12. Masao Miyoshi quotes this passage as an illustration of a division in Caleb's personality, but he never quite seems to grasp how divided a book Caleb Williams is; The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York University Press, 1969).

13. Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, in The Novels of Dashiell Hammett (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 439. References are to this edition.

14. Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (1941; reprinted, New York: Carrol and Graf, 1984), p. 7.

15. George Sherburn, “Introduction,” The Adventures of Caleb Williams, Or, Things As They Are (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. viii; Ousby, p. 22.

16. Ousby, p. 22; Murch, p. 32.

17. Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives: Popular Reading: Popular Writing (London: Verso, 1983), p. 32. Hawkins's experience with his two landlords convinced him that “law was better adapted for a weapon of tyranny in the hands of the rich than for a shield to protect the humbler part of the community against their usurpations” (p. 76). Captain Raymond believes that “law is not the proper instrument for correcting the misdeeds of mankind” (p. 231). Falkland is convinced that “things will never be as they ought, till honour and not the law be the dictator of mankind” (p. 182). These statements—some of them admittedly parti pris—join those of Caleb, who through much of the book laments that the law lacks “bowels of humanity.”

18. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1930), pp. 257, 646.

19. William Ruehlmann, Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 114. Ruehlmann wants to make an exception of Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer, whose self-awareness separates him from other protagonists in this strain of fiction: “Archer knows he is guilty; the prototypical private eye knows everybody else is” (p. 114). But he catalogues fictional American detectives from Philo Vance to Mickey Spillane who act illegally and are sure they are right.