The Subject of Detection: Legal Rhetoric and Subjectivity in Caleb Williams
Nicholas M. Williams, Indiana University
Volume 9, no. 4, July 1997
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ABSTRACT
In a letter dated 23 January 1794 and addressed to Joseph Gerrald, then in prison awaiting trial on a charge of sedition, William Godwin suggests that the best path to acquittal lies in a strict attention to the rhetorical situation of the courtroom. … The composition of this letter, coming, as it does, shortly before Godwin’s completion of Caleb Williams (30 April) and his subsequent revision of the “Postscript” (finished 8 May), has itself been entered as an evidentiary exhibit in the various cases made by modern critics. It has, in particular, been used to assess the two versions — one published, one left in manuscript — of the climactic trial scene at the end of the novel, their status as either the confirmation or the betrayal of Godwin’s radical political beliefs. Gary Kelly, for instance, cites the letter as evidence of Godwin’s growing political sophistication, his refusal to indulge in the rhetorical excesses of the Jacobin radicals, their (in the terms of the letter) “vain defiance and empty vaunting.” It is along these lines that Kelly can go on to defend the revised ending of the novel, which features a chastened, contained rhetoric, against the discarded manuscript ending, which features an unrepentant, vitriolic Caleb accusing his aristocratic oppressor, Mr Falkland, in open court. Not surprisingly, other advocates read the evidence differently: Maurice Hindle, for example, condemns the published ending, with its tearful reconciliation of Caleb and Falkland, as Godwin’s cowardly flight from historical reality, a reality represented for Hindle by Gerrald’s eventual conviction and deportation for his “crime.”
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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