‘The Link between the Literary Class of Mankind and the Uninstructed’: St Dunstan and Caleb Williams

Political Justice and Caleb Williams are texts which must be read together, as Godwin himself argued in the preface to the novel. He wanted to provide a ‘general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism’ but ‘without subtracting from the interest and passion by which a performance of this sort ought to be characterised’ [my italics].1 Political Justice is the conversation piece (for the ‘favoured few’) while Caleb Williams is the oratorical device, the emotional appeal attached to the rational argument.