Recommendations
Books Like Caleb Williams
Best books to read after Caleb Williams by William Godwin
Readers who love Caleb Williams — Godwin's radical Gothic novel of persecution, in which Caleb's discovery of his employer's secret murder turns him into a hunted man pursued by wealth and social power — will enjoy these works of political fiction, radical Gothic, and the great tradition of the novel of pursuit and injustice.
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Buy on AmazonFrankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Godwin's daughter wrote Frankenstein under the direct influence of Caleb Williams — the creature's first-person account of persecution by his creator (and by all of society) amplifies Caleb's situation into Gothic myth; the two novels together are the founding texts of radical Gothic fiction.
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Buy on AmazonSt. Leon
by William Godwin
Godwin's second major novel — a man cursed with the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life finds that unlimited wealth and immortality bring only persecution and alienation; darker and more Gothic than Caleb Williams, and essential for understanding Godwin's full range.
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Buy on AmazonBleak House
by Charles Dickens
The Victorian heir to Caleb Williams' vision of the law as an instrument of persecution and destruction — Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce grinds its victims to dust exactly as Falkland's legal power grinds Caleb; Dickens knew Godwin's novel and the debt is profound.
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Buy on AmazonThe Trial
by Franz Kafka
The twentieth-century heir to Caleb's situation — Josef K., like Caleb, is accused of an unspecified crime by a system of power that refuses to reveal its grounds or its procedures; Kafka's bureaucratic nightmare is Godwin's social nightmare translated into the language of modernity.
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Buy on AmazonThe Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad's political novel about anarchism, terrorism, and the corrupt interplay between radical politics and the establishment is the Edwardian heir to Godwin's tradition — the ordinary people destroyed by political forces they barely understand.
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Buy on AmazonPolitical Justice
by William Godwin
The theoretical framework for Caleb Williams — Godwin's philosophical masterpiece argues that social institutions corrupt human nature; reading it alongside the novel shows exactly what Godwin is demonstrating through the fiction of Caleb's persecution.
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Buy on AmazonThe Confessions of a Justified Sinner
by James Hogg
The Scottish Gothic that most powerfully develops the tradition of the psychological double and the man destroyed by an ideology — Hogg's antinomian murderer, like Falkland, has a theological framework that justifies his crimes; one of the great successors to Godwin's novel.
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Buy on AmazonHard Times
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's most programmatic social novel, in which an educational and economic ideology grinds down its victims exactly as Falkland's social ideology grinds down Caleb — the Gradgrind system is Godwin's critique of property and social hierarchy in Victorian industrial form.
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