SOURCE: DePorte, Michael. “The Consolations of Fiction: Mystery in Caleb Williams.” Papers on Language and Literature 20, no. 2 (spring 1984): 154-64.

[In the following essay, DePorte discusses Godwin's use of standard mystery story elements in Caleb Williams.]

Caleb Williams has long been recognized as a prototype of the mystery story. It contains a notorious, supposedly solved murder; an amateur detective who gets more than he bargained for; a compelling sequence of capture, escape, and pursuit; and a climax in which the true murderer makes a public confession.¹ Of course, the novel can also be read as a good deal more than a mystery story. It can be read as a powerful dramatization of the arguments Godwin had made a year before in Political Justice,² or as a psychological novel, the intensity and insight of which anticipate Dostoevsky and Kafka.³

Much recent Caleb Williams criticism calls attention to the curious lack of resolution in the novel and to the way Godwin derives many of his most striking effects from that lack of resolution.⁴ For Caleb Williams is a kind of mystery story in reverse: as the facts become clearer, the meaning of those facts becomes more mysterious; the closer one gets to the truth, the more complicated truth seems. I view the mystifications of the narrative as devices of entrapment, devices which draw us ever more deeply into its moral and psychological complexities, and ultimately lead to revelations about the nature of fiction itself.

The opening sentence—“My life has for several years been a theatre of calamity” (3)—thrusts the reader into a puzzling and uncertain realm.⁵ One asks what has happened to make Caleb regard his life as a calamity. Other questions quickly follow: How does the account of Falkland's earlier years bear on Caleb's story? Did Falkland really kill Tyrrel? What will Falkland do to Caleb for having discovered his secret? The excitement of the novel stems from desire to see these mysteries solved, as by and large they are. Even if the reader never finds out what is in Falkland's trunk or how Hawkins got possession of the dagger that killed Tyrrel, the text at least offers plausible conjectures in each case. And though Falkland's uncanny ability to track Caleb down—no matter where he goes or what disguises he assumes—is never adequately explained, most readers can accept Falkland's extraordinary powers as one of the book's givens.

Yet a more elusive mystery remains: Why do the characters act as they do? As Caleb comes nearer and nearer to Falkland's secret, the reader focuses more on Caleb's almost sexually intense passion to know, and his sadistic delight in spying on his master, than on the secret itself. Questions about Caleb's state of mind are most pressing in the final pages, just as the last major issue of the plot is settled. Falkland admits to the murder, repents having “spent a life of basest cruelty,” and praises Caleb's heroic fortitude (324). Caleb, contrary to all expectations, feels no sense of vindication, no triumph, no relief that his long ordeal is over. He feels instead that by exposing Falkland's crime he himself has become a murderer, and more than a murderer, “the basest and most odious of mankind” (323).

In the original ending of Caleb Williams, Falkland adheres to his story, and Caleb is shut away in a madhouse. This ending is perhaps more credible than the published ending, and it is surely more horrifying for its haunting evocation of Caleb sinking into stuporous confusion, unable to remember who Falkland is, unable even to tell the difference between himself and his chair.⁶ Still, the original ending is less disturbing in two important ways. First, because it provides a definite, if unpleasant, resolution to the problems of justice posed by the narrative: in society as it is the rich do get away with murder. While those condemned to positions of unequal power can assert themselves by acts of open or covert defiance, in the end they—like Emily, the Hawkinses, and Caleb himself—will be destroyed for their audacity. This may not be a pleasing state of affairs, but the conflict between good and evil is clear-cut. The original ending gives Caleb Williams more force as a novel of social protest, thus allowing one to preserve the feelings Godwin cultivates in the latter half of his story: rage against Falkland as tyrant, sympathy with Caleb as a victim, and disgust for all aspects of the legal system. Secondly, the original conclusion is less disturbing because while Caleb's madness inspires pity, the reader remains securely outside that lunacy in the madhouse. We may shudder and put the novel down, leaving Caleb rotting in his cell. But the horror is locked away: Caleb is as good as dead.

The Caleb of the published ending, however, is very much alive. And the extremity of his remorse provokes questions not easily locked away. Why does Falkland's corpse-like appearance have such a profound effect on Caleb? Earlier Caleb has seen Falkland in a condition nearly as miserable—his face “haggard, emaciated and fleshless,” his body “thin to a degree that suggested … a skeleton” (280-81)—without being moved to repent. Since that time Falkland has shown himself merciless in denying Caleb any semblance of normal life. Caleb accuses him of being more unfeeling and implacable than Nero or Caligula (314). Even granting that the sight of Falkland moves Caleb to a change of heart, the violence of that change is unsettling. Is Caleb truly a murderer—“the basest and most odious of mankind”? Is it really likely, after what we have seen of Falkland's previous meeting with Caleb, that Falkland would have responded to “a frank and fervent expostulation” if Caleb had sought him out in private? What has happened to Caleb's loathing of officialdom if he can speak here of wishing he had heeded the “well-meant despotism” of the magistrate who warned him not to bring charges against Falkland? (320) Why does Caleb continue to envision Falkland—both in his dreams and in his waking hours—expostulating with him for his “unfeeling behavior” (325) when Falkland did nothing of the sort at the hearing? And why, after all he has been through, after his resourcefulness in prison and his survival as a fugitive, does Caleb decide that he now has “no character” to vindicate? (326).

Godwin wanted to write a book readers would never forget (338). What better way could he have accomplished this than by ending his novel on a mysterious note? Caleb's sudden contrition forces the reader to reconsider everything that has happened.

As he thinks over Caleb's story, his abrupt reversal at the hearing seems less surprising. From the beginning, Caleb's attitude toward Falkland has been intensely ambivalent. He idealizes Falkland as a superior being; still, to use his own metaphor, he lays out bait to trap him like a fish (109). He knows his stratagems cause Falkland exquisite pain, but despite his misgivings, he persists. When Falkland upbraids him he can scarcely abase himself enough: “For God's sake, sir … Punish me in some way or other, that I may forgive myself. … I cannot bear to think what I have done. … I could die to serve you!” Caleb swears “a thousand times” that he will “never prove unworthy of so generous a protector” (119-21). The more he feels he is hurting Falkland, the more he makes amends by admiring him; this admiration then promotes new thoughts of betrayal. “Is it not unaccountable,” he asks, “that in the midst of all my increased veneration for my patron, the first tumult of my emotion was scarcely subsided, before the old question that had excited my conjectures recurred to my mind, Was he the murderer?” (121).

Once certain of Falkland's guilt, Caleb recognizes that Falkland is not diminished in his eyes, that it is possible for him to “love a murderer” (130), and this surprises him. In fact, Caleb's devotion to Falkland is fueled by his sense of having injured him. That this devotion persists in prison is a measure of how much damage Caleb thinks he has caused. True, Caleb suffers no remorse after revealing Falkland's secret to the London magistrate. But this is mostly owing to the magistrate's refusal to believe the story, just as his failure to be swayed by Falkland's haggard appearance at the inn owes much to Falkland's assuming the initiative. Believing Falkland to have the upper hand, Caleb concentrates his energies on resisting Falkland's power. Anger proves a powerful anesthetic in this novel.

When Caleb meets Falkland for the last time, though, the initiative, is his. He works himself into a frenzy much like that which drove him to spy on his master years ago: He “pant[s]” for the hour of reckoning “with incessant desire” (318).⁷ Caleb feels that the power is his. The sight of Falkland—being carried in a chair and barely able to hold up his head—revives the old guilt about violating his patron's privacy. Caleb's final remorse seems to show the latest swing of his emotional pendulum. Again he longs to be punished so that he may forgive himself, but he is appalled that in winning his case he has lost the possibility of external punishment, so now he will have to punish himself. At the hearing, however, Caleb talks as much about his own undeserved misery as about his folly in giving evidence against Falkland, and the language is every bit as charged:

Where is the man that has suffered more from the injustice of society than I have done? … I will not enumerate the horrors of my prison, the lightest of which would make the heart of humanity shudder. I looked forward to the gallows! Young, ambitious, fond of life, innocent as the child unborn, I looked forward to the gallows! I believed that one word of resolute accusation against my patron would deliver me, yet I was silent, I armed myself with patience, uncertain whether it were better to accuse or to die. Did this show me a man unworthy to be trusted?

[321]

Yet Caleb's despair in the last scene may not, after all, be so absolute. One should not try to predict Caleb's future nor take his statements about losing his character and discovering misery, at face value. Caleb has repeatedly made extreme statements on Falkland's behalf. In finding a solution to one mystery—why Caleb reverses himself at the hearing—the door to another opens: why does his ambivalence run so deep? Here matters become truly problematical because Caleb's explanation of his motives is often suspect. When, for example, Caleb says that his object in trying to uncover Falkland's secret has been “neither wealth, nor the means of indulgence, nor the usurpation of power,” and that in all his toying with Falkland's conscience he has harbored “no spark of malignity” (133), the effect is surely to plant suspicions.

No wonder Caleb's treatment of Falkland has become the subject of lively critical debate. Is his obsessive curiosity merely the consequence of Falkland's evasions? “To curiosity,” Godwin wrote elsewhere, “it is peculiarly incident, to grow and expand itself under difficulties and opposition. … Many an object is passed by with indifference, till it is rendered a subject of prohibition, and then it starts up into a source of inextinguishable passion.”⁸ Or is his treatment of Falkland a response rather to social inequalities? An intelligent man when pressed into the role of an underling will soon find underground means of redressing the balance.⁹ Or is it possibly an expression of frustrated love for his master? Caleb seeks intimacy with Falkland by gaining possession of his deepest secret.¹⁰ None of these explanations really excludes the other or dispels the mystery of Caleb's obsession. Falkland, himself, is largely an enigma. Even though honor is more important to him than life, something is mysterious about his impulse to stab Tyrrel in the back. The killing itself is believable, but it affects Caleb, and the reader, with a certain wonder. There is, Godwin suggests, an element of mystery in all passion. The depth of Tyrrel's hatred for Falkland, and of Gines for Caleb, is in the end mysterious, as is the murderous fury of the old hag who attacks Caleb with a cleaver. The very words “mystery” and “mysterious” appear again and again.

Godwin's constant evocation of unearthly forces adds to the aura of mystery. Falkland insists that he was prevented from taking honorable revenge against Tyrrel by the “pestilential influence of some demon” (120); Caleb speaks of his curiosity as a possessing “demon” (119), complains that his woes pursue him with “demoniac malice” (184), calls Falkland a “devil” (174), Gines a “fiend” (313), and Spurrel's betrayal of him “diabolical” (273), a term he later fixes on his own decision to betray Falkland. Such language saturates the novel. Caleb's enemies repeatedly accuse him of being a devil,¹¹ while the young peasant, who killed a man for love of his sweetheart, says the murder so haunts him that the very sight of the girl now brings a “tribe of fiends in its rear” (128). Tyrrel complains that Falkland torments him “like a demon” (31). He would like to leave the room when Falkland recites his “Ode to the Genius of Chivalry,” but cannot rise from his chair: “there seemed to be some unknown power that as it were by enchantment retained him in his place, and made him consent to drink to the dregs the bitter potion which envy had prepared for him” (25).

This is not to say that agencies of the supernatural have any real place in Caleb Williams. The “unknown power” that freezes Tyrrel in his chair, the “demon” that prompts Falkland to kill Tyrrel, or Caleb to provoke Falkland, are all internal impulses. Men cast their own spells of enchantment, yet Godwin's use of supernatural language calls attention to the mysterious forces latent in their most ordinary actions, thus undermining the reader's sense of certainty about who these characters are, what possesses them, and what they are likely to do next. Godwin's characters are noticeably inconsistent. Although Falkland and Caleb are the most obvious cases, Godwin also takes pains to show the complexity of other characters. Tyrrel is a crude, uneducated bully, but he is by no means stupid, nor altogether insensible to finer feelings. He is touched by music, sympathetic at first to Hawkins, and genuinely grieved by Emily's death. His stooge Grimes is unspeakably brutish, violent, and self-willed, but the reader is twice assured that Grimes has no spite or malice in his nature (47, 58). Even the depraved, vindictive Gines has virtues: he is called “enterprising, persevering and faithful” (217). Nor is the treacherous Spurrel merely a monster: he is a man torn between base and benevolent impulses. The balanced view of characters one might expect to be represented as outright villains may have a political aim, demonstrating how men are corrupted by the pressures and privileges of class. But this view also makes one less secure in his judgement by revealing how complicated and unpredictable men can be. Considered abstractly, issues of justice and morality are comparatively easy to resolve. Judging individuals is another matter.

The problem of judgment is almost impossible because Caleb Williams has no normative characters. Clare and Brightwel may be exemplary figures, but they are too detached from the central events of the narrative, and too fleetingly present, to serve as useful standards for measuring the aberrations of the others. Almost everyone in the novel is inclined toward extreme courses of thought or action. It is impossible to gauge the excesses of one character by weighing them against those of another. The more the reader compares characters, the more they seem like warped reflections of one another than like wholly discrete personalities.¹² Falkland, Tyrrel, Caleb, Emily, Young Hawkins, Gines, the old hag, Mrs. Marney, and Laura are all described as having uncommon energy of mind and body. Falkland, Tyrrel, Forester, Spurrel, and Laura all encourage protégés they later abandon or betray. Most of the characters are trapped in some way: by the logic of a powerful obsession, by situations they feel helpless to alter, or by both. There are no fully developed relationships between men and women, no enduring friendships.¹³ Everyone in the novel seems very much alone.

The dizzying network of correspondences contributes to the reader's sense of disorientation. The original ending leaves a vision of Caleb disintegrating in a madhouse. By reconsidering the significance of previous events, the published ending makes the reader realize that Caleb's world is a kind of madhouse in which even the most normal inhabitants have fragile, highly selective perceptions of reality. The kindly old fellow who listens sympathetically to Caleb's story about falling into the hands of the thief-takers turns to ice the moment he learns Caleb's true identity. He has inflexible opinions about servants who defy masters. Laura's response is similar. Because her beloved father admired Falkland, she readily embraces Falkland's slanders about Caleb and refuses to let him defend himself. Both Laura and the old man react with what can only be described as panic.

When Caleb later meets his former mentor Collins on the road and makes the same appeal for a hearing, Collins does not refuse him directly. He asks instead an arresting question, one which illuminates the source of Laura and the old man's panic: What good will it do him to be convinced that Caleb is innocent and Falkland a murderer? “If you could change all my ideas, and show me that there was no criterion by which vice might be prevented from being mistaken for virtue, what benefit would arise from that? I must part with all my interior consolation, and all my external connections. And for what?” (310). Collins has always admired Falkland “as the living model of liberality and goodness” (310). Faith in Falkland's virtues underlies all his other beliefs. To resign that faith would be to set himself adrift on a sea of endless and ominous possibilities, a course Collins is unwilling to risk.

Falkland raises the issue of “inner consolation” in a different way during his encounter with Caleb at the inn. Urging Caleb to sign the false confession, he anticipates that Caleb may scruple to lie: “is truth entitled to adoration for its own sake, and not for the sake of the happiness it is calculated to produce? Will a reasonable man sacrifice to barren truth, when benevolence, humanity, and every consideration that is dear to the human heart require that it should be superseded?” (282). The question is barbed in one respect and ironic in another: Caleb has already made that very sacrifice in ferreting out Falkland's secret, but Falkland is hardly the person to appeal to benevolence and humanity given his treatment of Caleb. All the same, Falkland directly addresses what is most disturbing about Godwin's vision in Caleb Williams: Truth, more often than not, does injure all “that is dear to the human heart”.

In Political Justice Godwin says that “sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error.”¹⁴ In Caleb Williams, however, quite the reverse occurs whenever truth takes arms against a cherished notion of self. Clare explains to Falkland the danger of his passion for chivalry. He begs Falkland to be careful of his impetuous temper and his “impatience of imagined dishonor.” Falkland promises to take the warning to heart: “Your admonitions shall not,” he insists, “be lost upon me” (35). Yet, as subsequent events reveal, Clare's eloquent appeal has no more effect on Falkland than Falkland's own vigorous appeals to reason and moderation have on Tyrrel. The truth of Clare's warning reaches Falkland only after he murders Tyrrel and stands by while the Hawkinses are hanged for the crime.¹⁵ Then, he suffers terrible anguish, no longer entertaining illusions about his honor, but determined that others shall. The hope of sustaining public illusions becomes his sole consolation.

Caleb, on the other hand, is sustained through most of the novel by a private illusion: that he is a well-meaning, if reckless, innocent. Godwin presents Caleb's history as a strange collage of biblical archetypes. Caleb first commits the sin of Adam by trading obedience for forbidden knowledge and a moment of ecstasy in the garden: “[I] plunged into the deepest of its thickets. … I exclaimed in a fit of uncontrollable enthusiasm: ‘This is the murderer!’ … My blood boiled within me. I was conscious of a kind of rapture for which I could not account. … I was never so perfectly alive as at that moment” (129-30). He next seeks to atone for his disobedience by undertaking a Christ-like office—suffering for the sins of another. The vow never to betray Falkland's trust gives him strength and a sense of personal dignity. As he reflects late in the narrative, “that idea secretly consoled me under all my calamities: it was a voluntary sacrifice, and was chearfully [sic] made. I thought myself allied to the army of martyrs and confessors; I applauded my fortitude and self-denial” (276). He resolves that no prison hardship will get the better of him: “Every sentiment of vanity, or rather of independence and justice within me, instigated me to say to my persecutor, You may cut off my existence, but you cannot disturb my serenity” (187). Caleb's substitution of “independence and justice” for “vanity” is revealing, as is the mention of death which prompts him, in the very next paragraph, to think how he might cheat the hangman. For when Caleb is caught in London and sees no possibility of escaping the gallows he decides to break his own oath and inform the magistrate of Falkland's guilt. Caleb is willing to suffer for Falkland's sins, but is not, he finds, willing to die for them. After this breech of personal faith Caleb never mentions his innocence except in reference to the past, where private myths continue to hold sway. Though disenchanted with himself at the hearing, Caleb maintains that in prison he was “innocent as the child unborn,” and actually “looked forward to the gallows” (321). It is still essential for him to believe that he was ready to give his life for Falkland.

In a fine study of Caleb Williams, Jacqueline Miller maintains how Caleb and Falkland can be seen as failed artists, as men whose stories are ultimately defeated by a larger reality.¹⁶ Although this is sound, an argument can be made that the stories Caleb and Falkland tell themselves serve as exotic paradigms of stories all men tell themselves. For if Caleb Williams demonstrates the difficulty of seeing “things as they are,” it shows even more clearly the difficulty of knowing what to do once one has seen. Only Caleb and Falkland begin to acknowledge this difficulty. The rest go on believing their various tales: Tyrrel, that everything wrong in his life is owing to Falkland; Gines, that it is owing to Caleb; Emily, that Falkland will somehow marry her and put everything right; Raymond, that thieves are the freest and noblest of men. And lest one think delusions reserved for people living on the edge, there is Caleb's assessment of the stolid Forester: “As is usual in human character, he had formed a system of thinking to suit the current of his feelings” (139). The basis of what may pass in the novel for sanity is clearly irrational. Collins, Laura, Forester live by brittle fictions; they, too, struggle to preserve their equanimity by keeping truth at a distance. Only Caleb's despair remains. This despair, in its extravagant adulation of Falkland and hysterical accusation of self, seems far more like another fiction than a model for seeing things as they are.

Two years before he died, Godwin reflected on the narrative of his own life in the diaries he had been keeping for over forty years: “What a strange power is this! It sees through a long vista of time, and it sees nothing. All this at present is mere abstraction, symbols, not realities. Nothing is actually seen: the whole is ciphers, conventional marks, imaginary boundaries of unimagined things.”¹⁷ Without boundaries there is senseless vacuity. But those boundaries are themselves things of air. This is the dilemma Caleb Williams leads to in the end, its most ineluctable mystery. The novel shows how far short of truth are the fictions men live by. It shows, at the same time, how necessary those fictions are. And it exacerbates the dilemma by providing no personal fiction the reader might wish to appropriate for himself.

Notes

1. The place of Caleb Williams in the evolution of the mystery story has been considered most recently by Ian Ousby in Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 20-42.

2. For interesting discussions of the relationship of Political Justice to Caleb Williams see Alex Gold, Jr., “It's Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin's Caleb Williams,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19 (1977): 135-60; David McCracken's introduction to his edition of Caleb Williams (London, 1970), pp. vii-xxii; and Mitzi Myers, “Godwin's Changing Conception of Caleb Williams,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 12 (1972): 591-628.

3. See, for example, P. N. Furbank, “Godwin's Novels,” Essays in Criticism 5 (1955): 214-28; Rexford Stamper, “Caleb Williams: The Bondage of Truth,” The Southern Quarterly 12 (1973-74): 39-50; and Rodolf F. Storch's provocative essay, “Metaphors of Private Guilt and Social Rebellion in Godwin's Caleb Williams,” ELH 34 (1967): 188-207.

4. Robert W. Uphaus has a brilliant chapter on the irresolutions of Caleb Williams, and their effect on the reader, in The Impossible Observer: Reason and the Reader in Eighteenth-Century Prose (Lexington, Ky., 1979), pp. 123-36.

5. Citations are to the McCracken edition, cited in the text and notes by page.

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

7. When Caleb is about to pry open Falkland's trunk he describes it as “a magazine which inclosed all for which my heart panted,” p. 132, my italics.

8. The Enquirer; Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (Dublin, 1797), p. 131.

9. For discussions of Caleb's desire for power see Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 91; Myers, pp. 608-11; Ousby, pp. 35-36; and Storch, p. 196.

10. This possibility is variously advanced by Gold, especially pp. 143-44; Kiely, pp. 91-92; and Eric Rothstein, Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Berkeley, Calif., 1975), pp. 215-25.

11. Note the imprecations of Falkland, p. 8; Forester, p. 173; the old hag, p. 231; and the London magistrate, p. 317.

12. Storch observes that Falkland, Tyrrel, Caleb, and Clare seem like “elements within the mind of one person who projects them warring one against the other,” p. 194.

13. The absence of relationships between men and women is underscored by the treatment of Hawkins and Laura, the only married people in the novel: Hawkins is said to have a family, but no mention is made of a wife; of Laura's marriage we know only that “there was little congeniality” between her interests and those of her husband, p. 291.

14. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, ed. F. E. L. Priestley, 3 vols. (Toronto, 1946), 1: 86.

15. McCracken suggests that Caleb's final speech bears out the doctrine of Political Justice that truth will prevail when properly articulated (Introduction to Caleb Williams, pp. xvii-xix). It should be noted, though, that Caleb tells Falkland nothing which Falkland does not already know about himself. Years before, he admitted to Caleb that in being the “fool of fame” he had become the “blackest of villains” (135-36). What appears to touch Falkland is not the logic of Caleb's speech, but the revelation that Caleb has continued to admire him through all his trials as a prisoner and fugitive, and that he speaks now less as an accuser than as a worshipful penitent.

16. “The Imperfect Tale: Articulation, Rhetoric, and Self in Caleb Williams,” Criticism 20 (1978): 366-82.

17. Quoted by Charles Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (Boston, 1876), 2:331.