e, but all governments, the worst and the best.
Writing specifically of the novel and what he intended to portray, Godwin declared that
It is now known to philosophers that the spirit and character of the government intrudes itself into every rank of society. . . . Accordingly it was proposed, in the invention of the following work, to comprehend . . . a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man (Smith and Smith 85).
Bernard Grebanier writes of the novel that it is "a propaganda novel, . . . above all an indictment of England's penal system and of the injustice that wealth can extend over poverty" (Grebanier 353). Boris Ford concurs with Grebanier and with Godwin's own assessment of the novel's message. Godwin, says Ford, saw "personal and psychological problems as rooted in the organization of society." We are reminded that Godwin did not want merely to reform government, but to gradually do away with it so that its obstacles to the natural development of man's reason could blossom and serve as a form of self-government: "The struggle is always against 'prejudice' and 'superstition,' the appeal to enlightened reason." (Ford 172-173). As Smith and Smith conclude, the world portrayed by Godwin in this novel is one "in which the rich and well-born can exercise any kind of tyranny and violence, except against a member of their own economic class" (Smith and Smith 87).
It is telling that Caleb Williams finds justice in his pursuit of the truth of the crimes of Falkland not through the direct workings of the judicial system itself, but through his appeal to Falkland's better nature, which leads Falkland to confess, even though Caleb could not have succeeded in using the corrupt system of "justice" to expose Falkland's guilt. It is also telling that Falkland himself is shown to be a victim of his sociopolitical environment:
Falkland! thou enteredst upon thy ca...