Godwin’s Caleb Williams: Showing the Strains in Detective Fiction
Michael Cohen, Murray State University
Volume 10, no. 2, January 1998
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ABSTRACT
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.” 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.” … 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.
Other ECF articles on the Topic of “William Godwin” include:
Rewriting Radicalism: Wollstonecraft in Burney’s The Wanderer
by TARA GHOSHAL WALLACE (ECF 24.3, Spring 2012)
“An Outlandish, Foreign-Made Englishman”: Aristocratic Oppression and Ethnic Anomaly in Caleb Williams
by CHARLIE BONDHUS (ECF 23.1, Fall 2010)
“Extraordinary and dangerous powers”: Prisons, Police, and Literature in Godwin’s Caleb Williams
by QUENTIN BAILEY (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
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