Caleb Williams (William Godwin)

William Godwin, in his novel Caleb Williams, portrays a corrupt English society and government in which political, economic, legal and extra-legal power is abused by those with that power in oppressing those with little or no power. As Smith and Smith write, as much as the book might succeed on an artistic level, it is also "clothed political theory in flesh" (Smith and Smith 22) in terms of its indictment of public and private corruption in general, and corruption in the legal system specifically. Accordingly, this study will show how the novel reflects the author's dissatisfaction with the legal system and the administration of justice in the England of the late eighteenth century.

Godwin argues in another work that one of the major functions of government is "the suppression of injustice against individuals within the community" (Smith and Smith 25). This novel is a passionate indictment of the government of England for failing to fulfill that obligation to protect the individual, and for, in fact, abusing its power to expose individuals to that very injustice. However, Godwin was hardly arguing that government could or should be perfected to right its own wrongs as portrayed fictionally in this book. To the contrary, he believed that government by its very nature was corrupt. He saw government as a "great obstacle" to the development of the individual, especially the rational part of man which Godwin held in such high regard. Godwin saw government "as a necessary ins

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himself, turned from a good man into a tyrant as a victim of that very machine himself, who will serve as the victimizer of the poor and weak. Tyrrel maintains his despotic stance, however, correctly assessing the law as an instrument of the rich and powerful against the poor and powerless. When Barnes protests Tyrrel's order to have the former take action leading to innocent Emily's arrest for a debt, saying that Emily has no debt, Tyrrel exclaims: "Ass! Scoundrel! I tell you she does owe me,---owes me eleven hundred pounds.---The law justifies it.---What do you think laws were made for? I do nothing but right, and right I will have" (Godwin 85). The agents of the law are shown by Godwin to have been reduced to robots carrying out orders without a will or a moral sense of their own, as when such agents come to arrest Emily at Tyrrel's orders. They are told Emily is seriously ill, and one responds: "The law says nothing about that. We have orders to take her sick or well. We will do her no harm; except so far as we must perform our office, be it how it will" (Godwin 88). This statement recalls the claims of the Nazis that they were merely following legal orders which they were bound to carry out. When Emily dies as a resul

Category: Literature - C