Background of Caleb Williams by William Godwin

If regimen is left to its consume devices, in other words, the kind of legal abuses portrayed in Caleb Williams will simply grow more severe. In that sense, Godwin was indicting non only the specific go'ernment of which he wrote, but all governments, the worst and the best.

Writing specifically of the ro compositionce and what he think to portray, Godwin declared that

It is now known to philosophers that the spirit and character of the government intrudes itself into every rank of society. . . . Accordingly it was proposed, in the invention of the pursuance work, to comprehend . . . a general review of the modes of domestic and hot despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man (Smith and Smith 85).

Bernard Grebanier writes of the novel that it is "a propaganda novel, . . . above all an indictment of England's penal administration and of the in rightness that wealth can extend over meagreness" (Grebanier 353). Boris Ford concurs with Grebanier and with Godwin's own assessment of the novel's message. Godwin, says Ford, saw "personal and psychological problems as rooted in the organization of society." We are reminded that Godwin did non want merely to reform government, but to gradually do away with it so that its obstacles to the natural develo

Ford, Boris. From Dickens to Hardy. London: Cassell, 1966.

The nature of the landlord's unbridled power over his tenants is shown in the same relationship. Here Godwin writes of the futility of Hawkins' efforts to find justice in his dealings with Tyrrel:

Grebanier, Bernard D.N. Essentials of English Literature. Woodbury, New York: Barron's Educational Series, 1959.

Falkland! thou enteredst upon thy race with the purest and most laudable intentions. But thou imbibedst the poison of gallantry with thy earliest youth; and the base and low-minded envy that met thee on they withdraw to thy native seats, operated with this poison to hurry thee into madness. Soon, too soon, by this disastrous coincidence, were the blooming hopes of thy youth blasted for ever (Godwin 336-337).

From that point on, Falkland is a lost soul.

He has taken part in a wicked framing of an innocent man, and the goodness in his shopping centre will remain submerged until the end of the novel when he is moved to confession of his crime by Caleb's argument of object lesson passion. Again, in Falkland's case we see a man who is not inherently wicked, but who has been so misshaped by the legal, social and policy-making environment that he enters the trap of evil and acts as if he were indeed evil. Godwin does not want to portray Falkland as a bad man, but as a good man who has been corrupted by a bad system.

The magistrate's words repeat with a stark horror, reflecting the beginning's view of the cruelty of the government and its justice system:

in that society or government. There is a strong strain of outright contempt for government and the judicial system in this book, and the thief is used by the author to give direct expression to the power and role of such contempt in resisting society's and government's blatant evils. The thief says that if he must inevitably suffer as the result of the injustice of laws, and so he will "at least take care," as a "man of courage," to "first show his contempt of their duette"
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