Caleb Williams

William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams is credited as a major precursor to the popular genre now called detective fiction, a formulaic genre consolidated by three stories of Edgar Allan Poe four decades later, and acknowledged by Arthur Conan Doyle to be the model he employed with great success in his Sherlock Holmes series— and by a number of popular writers ever since. Many of the essential elements of the mystery thriller elements are present in Godwin’s story: legal system that is incapable of “solving” the case, death(s) that seem unexplained, misdirection, characters on both sides of the law, subplots, multiple characters with their own agendas, and—the key element for mystery stories ever since—a conclusion that finally unpeels the mysteries. An early and vocal liberal activist, Godwin helped to create a new age of rationalism in England; his friend and partner, Mary Wollstonecraft, was herself a feminist author and activist. They had considered marriage to be an outmoded restriction—until Mary became pregnant. Even after Mary died in childbirth, giving birth to the future novelist Mary Shelley, Godwin’s household continued to be a meeting place for the bright new stars of literature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, and Percy Bysshe Shelley (who later became Godwin’s son-in-law).