SOURCE: Logan, Peter Melville. “Narrating Hysteria: Caleb Williams and the Cultural History of Nerves.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 29, no. 2 (winter 1996): 206-22.

In the following essay, Logan discusses Godwin's use of the nervous condition of his narrator as a way of engaging in criticism of the social and political conditions of British life.

England experienced an epidemic of nerves in 1800. As one physician noted, “nervous diseases make up two-thirds of the whole with which civilized society is infested” (Trotter, View viii).¹ He could make such a claim because “nerves” was a broad, undifferentiated disease that took on the appearance of other diseases. Every complaint was potentially nervous in origin, and so nerves became the leading category of illness in the late-Georgian period. The explanation for this epidemic was social. Since the physician George Cheyne, in The English Malady (1733), had tied the stereotypical gloom of the English aristocracy to...