SOURCE: Fludernik, Monika. “William Godwin's Caleb Williams: The Tarnishing of the Sublime.” ELH 68, no. 4 (winter 2001): 857-96.

In the following essay, Fludernik discusses Caleb Williams in relation to Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime and Adam Smith's concept of sympathy.

I. Introduction

Caleb Williams, Godwin's literary masterpiece of 1794, has recently come in for extensive interpretative analysis and wide critical acclaim.¹ The novel serves as a key text for studies of the radical novel (most recently by Schäffner in 1997) or “English Jacobin novel”; it has now acquired a firm position in the canon of the Romantic novel; it sometimes figures as the first detective or spy novel; and it is frequently discussed in its relation to the Gothic novel with which it seems to share a number of prominent features: the continual references to “horror” and “terror”; the prominence of dungeons, confinement, and persecution; and the motif of virtue...