Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams

London

B. Crosby, Stationers-Court, Ludgate Street

1794

"[T]he thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses."

I began my narrative, as is the more usual way, in the third person. but I speedily became dissatisfied. I then assumed the first person, making the hero of my tale his own historian; and in this mode I have persisted in all my subsequent attempts at works of fiction. It was infinitely the best adapted, at least, to my vein of delineation, where the thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses, which led the personages I had to describe primarily to adopt the particular way of proceeding in which they afterwards embarked.
(p. 448)

Body::Dissection::Dissection

Reading

5 entries in ESTC (1794, 1795, 1796, 1797).

William Godwin, Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 3 vols. (London: B. Crosby, Stationers-Court, Ludgate Street, 1794). <Link to ESTC>

Reading Caleb Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000).

09/14/2009

10/12/2007