Providence in the Early Novel, or Accident If You Please

Let's start with a puzzle.

In the opening pages of William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), we encounter the following peculiar passage, in which Caleb names his boyhood obsessions:

The spring of action which, perhaps more than any other, characterised the whole train of my life, was curiosity. It was this that gave me my mechanical turn; I was desirous of tracing the variety of effects which might be produced from given causes. It was this that made me a sort of natural philosopher; I could not rest till I had acquainted myself with the solutions that had been invented for the phenomena of the universe. In fine, this produced in me an invincible attachment to books of narrative and romance. ¹

Now you might ask why I have singled out these sentences as strange. It is not as though they read oddly. The language is unruffled, inconspicuous. Just try, however, to paraphrase the train of association here, and the oddness of the thing should become apparent. Here is my version: Caleb states that, because of his inbred curiosity, he had a bent for tinkering, a scientist's mind, and a love of novels. It is hardly intuitive that the third term should follow so trippingly upon the other two. But notice the breezy manner with which Caleb makes his case: In fine, I loved novels, I loved narrative. In that very terseness lies a riddle for the literary historian: how, in the final years of the eighteenth century, is it possible for a writer to claim that a knack for mechanics makes one a novel reader? It would be convenient to pigeonhole Caleb Williams as one of the 1790s' new Romantic novels or as the high-water mark of the political gothic, but then how would we account for these remarks, which make the early novel sound like some eighteenth-century Erector Set?

We could try to resolve the matter by turning to some familiar eighteenth-century debates on the novel, but this would probably make Godwin's formulation seem all the more eccentric. After all, his description ascribes to narrative, to romance even, a kind of rigor or boyish solemnity. But that, too, seems all wrong. Doesn't the eighteenth-century novel conventionally offer itself as a form of sentimentaleducation, a fastidious program in fine judgment and sociability? And isn't the century's stock polemic against the novel that it renders its readers slack and effeminate, that it is an exercise in mawkishness and wanton fancy, a universal solvent on the nation's mental faculties and moral fiber? This is, in fact, the path that we might have expected "curiosity" to take in the passage at hand. It is easy enough to think of curiosity as incubating a love of novels, ifby curiosity we mean prurience and by novels we mean strange and extravagant literary entertainments. But Godwin's is obviously not this wanton curiosity; his is something like a researcher's inquisitiveness. Curiosity here nourishes an interest in causality, not caprice. It is as though Godwin had in mind some hypothetical genre we would have to dub "the Newtonian novel"—dreary affair that this would be, billiard-ball characters careening through the narrative along precise and linear vectors, resolutions falling at story's end like apples, heavy, on our heads. If we work under the charitable assumption that this is not how eighteenth-century novels read, then we are stuck with the problem: curiosity, causality, the novel. Our task here is to account for that strange concatenation.

So how do we get from a "mechanical turn" to "an invincible attachment to books"? The answer, I would claim, is Machiavelli—to which one might reasonably respond: What was the question again? My suggestion is that if, taking our cue from Godwin, we want to understand the eighteenth-century novel as in some important way taking...