Reading very long books normally doesn't cause me any problems. “The Adventures Of Caleb Williams” isn't exceptionally long – the edition I read on line runs to 442 pages, which I consider to be the long side of medium – but it took me a couple of months to get through. I've been asking myself why that should be, and here's the closest thing to an answer that I have.
First, though, the plot. Caleb, our narrator and main character, tells us that he was born to a working class family, presumably at some point near 1831, the year of the novel's publication. He enters into the employment of a Mr. Falkland, a wealthy man of the upper class and of extremely noble character. Caleb, employed as his secretary, comes to admire him very much until he experiences the gentleman's temper, which is so violent that it's almost insane. Caleb asks Falkland's steward what's with the man, and learns that some years before, Falkland came into conflict with an egotistical neighbor, who could not stand the fact that all the neighbors hated him and loved Falkland (all too often the case with egotists, of course). This neighbor got so infuriated with Falkland that he attacked him in public. Before Falkland could challenge him and reinstate his honor, the neighbor was murdered. Falkland fell under suspicion, but no one believed him guilty for a second. Nevertheless, Falkland found the whole experience so devastating that he couldn't sustain it, and so periodically throws a dangerous fit.
Caleb hears all this and somehow concludes, upon observing Falkland carefully, that he actually murdered the neighbor and then allowed a couple of local farmers to be arrested for the crime. Falkland comes to know of Caleb's suspicions, contrives to have Caleb arrested for stealing from him (which he didn't do), but supports him while in jail so that he doesn't starve or get killed. Caleb escapes, and spends the next several years trying to live in peace from Falkland, who he still rather admires. Falkland finds ways to subtly and indirectly inform the people Caleb meets that he's an ungrateful thief to the master who was so good to him, and Caleb has to continue to flee into other areas of England because Falkland won't allow him to leave the country.
So why did I have such a time with this story? Partly, of course, because it's so uniformly unpleasant. Some sad stories have occasional flashes of humor or joy. Not this one. What's more, narrator Caleb knows perfectly well how unpleasant it is and makes no effort to mitigate its horrors. You can't really blame him, but when a novel starts off immediately by telling you “the whole world hates me” and goes downhill from there, either you get ready for a really nasty tale or you realize you're in for a few hundred pages of complaints. Or both.
While this goes on, Caleb's language, despite his supposedly humble origins, is not only formal and fancy, but often hard to follow. He uses long, complex sentences and highfalutin vocabulary; I like to think of myself as untroubled by great English, but I had to read a lot of this language several times before the meaning sank in. Right on the very first page, for instance, we read “I am incited to the penning of these memoirs only by a desire to divert my mind from the deplorableness of my situation, and a faint idea that posterity may by their means be induced to render me a justice which my contemporaries refuse.” By comparison to much of what follows over the next hundreds of pages, that's actually pretty simple.
Critical opinion tells us that the theme of this work has to do with the injustice inflicted on the poor by the rich in the England of its day. There's something to that; after all, Caleb's suffering comes largely from the fact that his oppressor has money and position and he does not. Much of the time, because of Falkland's wealth and reputation, neither the authorities nor the ordinary citizens he meets will even listen to Caleb's side of the story. On the other hand, although Caleb does complain once or twice about the injustice of the poor's dealings with the rich, he doesn't mention it often enough to make that theme clear. In other words, Caleb is frustrated at that injustice, while I as a reader was frustrated at the apparent lack of a clear theme. Ironies abound.
So all in all, “Caleb Williams”, while imaginative and written well enough, is depressing and hard to slog through. That's not in itself a reason to avoid this story in any way, it just requires a certain amount of preparation.
Author William Godwin was a well-known author and political philosopher in his day. He was also the father of Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein”. Some say that novel was the first work of science fiction. Whether that had anything to do with her father's influence I have no way of knowing, but it does incline me to give him more than an ordinary chance with me. As to whether you want to give him that chance, I'll have to leave that up to you.
Benshlomo says, Whether you push through a heavy read or not is your choice.
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