Episode 85: Caleb Williams

This week, we bring you the OG ACAB novel, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). We very much stan Godwin, awesome radical, proto-anarchist, Mary Wollstonecraft wifeguy AND Mary Shelley daughterguy. Caleb Williams is about a rich dude who really does mean well, but does that matter? Of course not! It’s structure, structure, structure, so he does murder and then hounds his poor servant (Caleb Williams) all over Britain when his servant finds out about it. We talk Jacobinism, 1790s politics, and Godwin’s utopia of reason. This book rocks so much it almost made Meg an eighteenth-centuryist.

We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by Pamela Clemit. For more on Godwin, his politics and fiction, and his connection to other BRtD favorites, check out Clemit’s The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley.

Note to listeners: we’re off next week (blame capitalism, for real). But then we’ll be back with an epic two-parter on Herman Melville’s Pierre!

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.