Godwin, William:

$3,500 · Offered by William Reese Company

THINGS AS THEY ARE; OR THE ADVENTURES OF CALEB WILLIAMS. First American edition of Godwin's scarce first novel, written just after his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), and "a near-masterpiece, the finest work of fiction to appear in the long and prolific interval between the age of Richardson and the emergence of Jane Austen and Walter Scott" (St. Clair).The book was designed to show "the tyranny and perfidiousness exercised by the powerful members of the community against those who are less privileged than themselves," was a great popular success in Godwin's day, and provided the plot of successful play version. It is also a very early example of the novel of detection, "the latter carried out by the secretary of the suspected man, himself a recluse. There is much psychology (some of it shrewd and anticipatory of a later day), considerable drama (including blackmail frame-up, low life, and trial scene)" (Barzun & Taylor).The American edition was published a year after the London edition. Godwin's work exercised a profound influence upon a generation of writers, in particular American Charles Brockden Brown, whose first four novels "are dramatic, suspenseful tales of crisis and psychological derangement that successfully combine the conventions of British 'Jacobin' fiction (the progressive fiction associated with Godwin), and of Gothic, seduction, and picaresque, or adventure, novels with an emphasis on the period's deepest social and political anxieties" (ANB).An

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