In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Promise and Frustration of Plebeian Public Opinion in Caleb Williams
  • Nicolle Jordan

Crowd uprisings, public meetings, courtroom drama, status-driven 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.1 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 [End Page 243] public itself. The self/society conundrum, I would argue, is simply the context rather than the substance of the novel's conflict. Among the novel's multiple instances of erring judgment, most often, and most egregiously, error occurs not in an individual but en masse. Thus, one cannot overlook the pivotal role granted to public opinion in the novel, for the people—that is, the non-elite—loom large in the novel both as the source of a character's reputation and as the potential agent of social change, as in each of the scenarios mentioned above. Linking "the people" and "the public" in this way engages specific definitions of each term that challenge certain conceptions of the public sphere and will therefore require explanation. But the very need to do so highlights a heretofore unplumbed aspect of the novel: how Caleb Williams participates in the process of fixing the precise meaning and location of public opinion. Indeed, the necessity, in Caleb Williams, for the inclusion of the people in the making of public opinion deserves serious consideration. Nonetheless, an assessment of the political and social preoccupations of the novel and its decidedly bleak endings2 suggests that, rather than revolving around the individual, the novel emphasizes the process by which public opinion stymies individual integrity and leads to the gross miscarriage of justice. Ultimately, then, the foreclosure of the novel's political promises implies that including the people in the operations of public opinion was an endeavour that the political culture of the 1790s could not yet accommodate. The novel's resolution evinces a residual remorse for these lost promises, implying that the text does not decisively reject popular civic participation but rather depicts a stage in the gradual march towards political reform, which Godwin endorsed.3

By delving into historical investigations of public opinion in the eighteenth century, one discovers that Godwin's portrayal of this realm recapitulates certain key developments in its consolidation as [End Page 244] an exclusive realm at the end of the eighteenth century. The novel evidences how the issue of plebeian inclusion in this realm was a defining aspect of its development. And here I acknowledge my deliberate conflation of the terms popular and plebeian. "Popular," of course, covers a range of meanings that have evolved—among modern scholars—from, say, the "history from below" exemplified by Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson to the more recent flourishing of studies in "popular culture"; however, I centre my usage on the word's plebeian connotations. Although ever-subtler levels of distinction exist within the ranks of the class that I am referring to as popular, for my purposes this category may be understood as consisting broadly of non-elite members of Caleb's community. The novel's preoccupation with an array of disempowered figures and their contribution to public opinion is often intertwined with an egalitarian or "populist" stance, which helps explain my motive for restricting my usage of the term.

To view the novel through this popular lens challenges the critical tendency either to...

pdf

Share