Godwin's Caleb Williams: Showing the Strains in Detective Fiction

Godwin's Caleb Williams: Showing the Strains in Detective FictionMichael Cohen 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."1 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." Moreover, says Symons, Godwin's novel has the crime story's distinctive construction "from effect to cause, from solution to problem," Godwin having conveniently admitted that he "invented first the third volume ... then the second, and last of all the first."2 Ian Ousby also treats Caleb Williams as the first detective novel. He begins Bloodhounds of Heaven, his survey of detective fiction up to Doyle, with a discussion of Godwin's novel, which "demonstrated for the first time that the detective could become the focus of serious literary interest."3 Other voices 1 Julian Symons, Mortal Consequences: A History—From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 19. 2 Symons, p. 19. William Godwin, Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 349. References are to this edition. Critics who echo this observation about the construction of Caleb Williams do not seem to notice its problematic relation to later mystery fiction, since the mystery here is contained almost entirely in the first volume. Godwin did not say he constructed that volume backwards. 3 Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 44. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 2, January 1998 204 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION concur in Symons's and Ousby's choice for the first begetter of English detective fiction—Stephen Knight, A.E. Murch, Régis Messac; if not unanimity , there is at least consensus in the choice.4 Yet these writers argue that Caleb Williams is not, like Edgar Allan Poe's stories, for example, the sort of grandparent in whose face we can discover all the features of the descendants. They see it as an antitype of the detective story as it has been theorized by modern critics of the genre: Godwin's novel is unlike any later detective story in its tragic mode, its anarchism, and its condemnation of law and lawful punishment. 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. Godwin and Political Justice Godwin was, like his contemporary William Blake, a thinker bold in conception but not without inconsistencies. Godwin was born into a dissenting family and became a nonconformist preacher, but his reading, his friendship with the radical Thomas Holcróft, and the events of the late eighteenth century made him an atheist. The combination of the publication in 1793 of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and the appearance the following year of his novel Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams brought him brief fame and success that was seen by some, Hazlitt for example, as "a sultry and unwholesome popularity."5 The proximity...