SOURCE: Butler, Marilyn. “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams.” Essays in Criticism 32, no. 3 (July 1982): 237-57.

In the following essay, Butler illustrates the centrality of politics in Caleb Williams, particularly in relation to the conservatism of Edmund Burke.

Where politics appears in English novels, it is commonly at the margins; in Caleb Williams it is central. Godwin's most significant creative period was during the political crisis of 1791-6, when a native English radical movement first blossomed, warmed by events across the Channel, and then withered and died in the national crisis of full-scale war with France. He wrote continuously in these years: pamphlets, letters to newspapers, and the two most important books of his career, the treatise Political Justice (1793) and the novel Caleb Williams (1794). The two books both went into revised second editions by 1796, with Political Justice so materially changed that its second edition represents a new political statement.

This...