The Promise and Frustration of Plebeian Public Opinion in Caleb Williams
Nicolle Jordan, University of Southern Mississippi
Volume 19, no. 3, Spring 2007
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Crowd uprisings, public meetings, courtroom drama, statusdriven one-upmanship — together, these narrative elements form a central axis of William Godwin’s convoluted political thriller, Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. Each of the elements brings Caleb, the narrator and protagonist, into contact with the public in one form or another, and so the public sphere, though a notoriously amorphous concept, is a term uniquely equipped to elucidate his politicized encounters with his community and with English society at large. Critical discussion of the novel has acknowledged the importance of the public, but primarily in ways that subordinate it to the putatively more significant role of the private. In various ways, critics have conducted psychological interrogations of how Caleb’s self-serving private assessment of the public domain undermines his narrative reliability. Though an important issue with regard to Godwin’s individualistic political philosophy, the question of private judgment can eclipse the equally significant problem that the novel poses with regard to the definition and function of the public itself.
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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