My servant Caleb: Godwin’s Caleb Williams and the political trials of the 1790s

IAN OUSBY 'My servant Caleb': Godwin's Caleb Williams and the political trials of the 1790S In an article published some years ago in this journal Eric Rothstein argued persuasively against the view that Godwin's Caleb Williams is merely an unsuccessful roman il these, an attack on social injustice flawed by troubling psychological undertones.' While conceding Godwin's obvious preoccupation with contemporary social issues, Mr Rothstein found the novel to be centred on 'individual recognition, not social exposure'; it is, in fact, Caleb's 'spiritual autobiography." One consequence of this view, as Mr Rothstein points out, is that Caleb comes to seem an unreliable narrator of his story and a less than immaculate hero. His suffering at Falkland's hands is not simply, as he himself believes, evidence of the malice of fate and of the social system but also a symbolic punishment for his earlier callous treatment of his master. The purpose of the present article is to suggest a new dimension to Godwin's criticism of Caleb's conduct as detective. Of course, some of this criticism springs from one of Godwin's more eccentric principles, his belief in absolute sincerity in all social dealings. But his dislike of detectives also originated in current political affairs. For at the time he wrote the novel a number of his fellow radicals were the victims of political trials at which the main prosecution witnesses were government informers. Eighteenth-century society had never been fond of detectives; it shared Godwin's liking for sincerity, if in a milder and more pragmatic way. The effect of government policy towards the radicals , as the course of the trials showed, was to reawaken this old dislike, not merely in radicals like Godwin but also in the larger public whom he hoped to reach in Caleb Williams. rn the novel Caleb is not called a 'detective: for the term did not gain currency until the midclle of the nineteenth century. He is called a 'spy.' The word first appears near the beginning of the narrative as part of Falkland's hysterical reaction to Caleb's accidental intrusion on him: 'You set yourself as a spy upon my actions. But bitterly shall you repent your insolence. Do you think you shall watch my privacies with impunity ?' (8).3 Later Caleb himself owns to the term here applied so contemptuously to him. After his decision to seek out the truth about Tyrrel's murder he reflects gleefully on the prospect of being 'a spy upon Mr Falkland!' (107). Then, as now, the term could simply mean 'one who UTQ, Volume XLIV, Number 1, Fall 1974 spies upon or watches a person or persons secretly," In its more specialist senses it was applied to the professional snooper; it was particularly associated, though, with the spy whose investigations served matters of foreign or military policy, or of internal security. As the withdrawn 'Preface' to the first edition indicates, Godwin aimed to write a novel of immediate relevance to contemporary political and social issues. In the 1790S internal political spying was just such an issue. During this period English radical agitation, catalyzed by events in France, became the target of popular resentment and governmental repression. The process began with the activities of the Church-andKing mobs and culminated in the passing of a series of emergency laws and in several political trials. From the start the radicals were convinced that the government was using spies against them. At times their suspicions could verge on the hysterical: Ha Citizen made a Motion which seemed anyways spirited he was set down as a Spy sent among them by Government. If aCitizen sat in a Comer& said nothing he was watching their proceedings that he might the better report it.... Citizens hardly knew how to act,S Though sometimes ludicrous in their manifestations, the fears were well founded. In its reaction to the threat posed by radical organizations Pitt's government had set a precedent which later administrations were to follow during the Luddite and Chartist disturbances. At the trial of Thomas Muir in August 1793, Anne Fisher - a spy and ex-servant in the Muir household - appeared as a prosecution witness. The follOWing...