Literary Apologies & The Construction ofMeaning:

Making Selves in Wordsworth’s The Pre l ude and Godwin’s Caleb Wi l l iams

One fundamental characteristic of the novel, as Ian Watt has

shown, is its formal realism, or the way the novel replicates

elements of actual lived life. The imaginary realism of the novel

and how it has been able to affect the lives of real people has

been a key part of its dominance over other literary forms. Nancy

Armstrong begins her 2005 book How Novels Think with the claim that

“the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject

are, quite literally, one and the same” (7). In order to create

the individual, Armstrong argues, novels had to overcome

competing visions of the subject offered by other kinds of

writing. Historically the pre-eminent form of imaginative

literature had been the poem, and the rise of the novel is

simultaneously the story of the fall of poetry from its once

secure position at the apex of literary influence. This fall was

directly related to how Romantic poetry conceived of the subject.

Poetry, between the time of Milton and Wordsworth, instead of

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turning towards the realism of the novel, turns sharply away from

it.

Novels, with their focus on quotidian relations, were

inevitably full of human interactions. In contrast, Romantic

poetry, with its ideal of “emotion recollected in tranquility”

studiously avoided such interactions. The presence of others in

the Romantic poem is not something to be welcomed, but to be

viewed as a threat. Think, for example, of Wordsworth’s

discomfort with another human presence in “The Discharged

Soldier,” or the way the wedding-guest must be “compelled” to

listen to the mariner’s story in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the

Ancient Mariner.” Novels, on the other hand, even when the

presence of other people is unpleasant, view the discomfort of

the human encounter as a necessary prelude to better social

relations. Mr. B’s violations of the body and spirit of Pamela in

Richardson’s novel are part of what she must endure to achieve

their reconciliation and marriage. The wrongs he does to her lead

to his personal reformation and their eventual domestic

happiness. So too does Moll, in Defoe’s Moll Flanders, tell her

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story of personal sufferings as part and parcel of her later

redemption and social acceptance.

This pattern of moving from relative isolation to a position

of social integration in many early British novels stands in

sharp contrast to the poetic Romanticism of Wordsworth that

traces a movement from a life among people—in schools,

universities, and cities, to the glories of his near-solitary

ascent of Mount Snowdon in the final book of The Prelude. In a

sense, Wordsworth’s prototypically modern epic is about the

disappearance of other people. The individual of his poem is

formed not through any relationship with society, in the fires of

the face-to-face encounter, but through the conscious avoidance

of others. For example, Wordsworth informs us in Book XII that

cities are “where the human heart is sick.” The sorts of

encounters one has in cities—the inevitable bumping into

strangers on the street, the serendipitous meeting—is the logical

source of that sickness. Though many English novels of the 18th

and 19th centuries avoid cities with equal ardor, yet most remain

narratives of social encounter. Austen’s famous quip about three

or four families in a country village being the proper plot

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setting for a novel, nonetheless leaves her stories populated

with numerous rides in carriages, evenings of dancing, and

discussions in parlors. People are everywhere and are everywhere

together.

I want to illuminate these different perspectives on realism

in the novel and the modern poem by looking one particular kind

of human encounter—that of the apology. More than just a

rhetorical trope, the apology is a negotiation between different

parties about the proper bounds of their behavior. In the novel’s

terms the apology is an encounter involving moral argument. This

everyday social ritual plays an important role in many 18th

century British literary works. My claim in this paper will be

that the apology helps form Armstrong’s modern subject. To write

a complete history of the individual one must, in my view, also

consider the language of apologies. The differences in how poems

and novels treat the apology is closely linked to how they view

subjects. Burney’s Evelina, for example, contains over seventy

apologies, while Fielding’s Tom Jones features well over a hundred

apologies of many rich and varied sorts. In poems of the same

era, however, even a long narrative poem such as Wordsworth’s The

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Prelude, moments of apology are quite rare. Poetic apologies

differ from novelistic ones not only in number, but also in kind.

Most apologies in novels are what we might call apologies of

manners—one character does some wrong to another, and then offers

an explanation or justification for that action. Poetic apologies

also explain and justify actions, but tend to avoid direct human

encounters. In particular, Wordsworth’s strain of Romantic poetic

idealism is caught between two imperatives: one recognizes the

source of wrongdoing in the human encounter itself; the other

wants the text to serve, nonetheless, as a form of moral

instruction. The tension between these two needs often gives

poetic apologies a very different shape from their novelistic

counterparts. To illustrate these differences I want to look at

some key apologetic moments in two Romantic era works:

Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude and William Godwin’s 1793 novel Caleb

Williams.

In Book I of The Prelude Wordsworth describes the commission

of two wrongs—his thefts of birds and of a boat. How Wordsworth

describes and rhetorically responds to these wrongs is an

important element in how he conceives of the subject. In the

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first case Wordsworth steals game birds from traps set by other

hunters.

…Sometimes it befellIn these night wanderings that a strong desireO’erpowered my better reason, and the birdWhich was the captive of another’s toilsBecame my prey; and, when the deed wasdoneI heard among the solitary hillsLow breathings coming after me, and soundsOf undistinguishable motion, stepsAlmost as silent as the turf they trod. (I, 324–332)

From the perspective of the encounter, what are we to make of

this sort of language? Note first the situation: Wordsworth is

walking alone through the countryside late at night. We are miles

from the bustling streets of a city or the domestic interiors of

a home—places where Wordsworth might conceivably meet someone

else. His “deed” is done in darkness, away from the physical

presence of any potential accuser. Since no one but Wordsworth

himself can testify to the commission of this wrong, its moment

of revelation here should really be viewed as a confession.

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But Wordsworth’s claim that a “strong desire o’erpowered

[his] better reason” is an attempt to justify these confessed

actions to the reader. Even as the poet admits to a wrong, he

precedes that admission with a denial of his responsibility. This

combination of rhetorical confession and defense is what we

conventionally think of as an apology. However, since there is

neither accusation nor any negotiation about the status of his

deed, this attempt to justify lacks the social aspect of a true

apology. Rather, Wordsworth’s language here is closer to that of

an excuse. Like the criminal who defends himself with the

convenient claim of temporary insanity, the idea that desire

overpowers reason works to wholly absolve the poet of his crime.

The use of the passive “it befell” supports the contention that

these actions were really beyond any human control. This passive

construction denies causality—the existence of any link between

the wrong and a motivating cause; the wrong has simply happened.

Like Wordsworth’s definition of poetry itself, the bird theft

happens as a result of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful

feelings.” In this case neither the theft nor the act of writing

involves society at large; both are essentially private acts. The

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reader is not a participant in this scene so much as a voyeur—

someone who, through writing, is permitted to peer into the

poet’s private life.

Despite his language of excuse in the first part of the

passage, Wordsworth is not quite finished with his confession,

for he tells us that his misdeed results in the rise of a

frightening figure that follows him. This figure is a spectral

form, limited in its emanation to breaths and steps. The poet

cannot tell whether the figure is human or animal. This figure

breathes but never speaks; its steps approach but don’t ever

reach him. Despite this experience Wordsworth continues his

nocturnal meanderings, and like a guard dog on a leash, closely

bound to the place where the wrong was committed, the specter

gradually falls behind. In the end Wordsworth permits himself

neither self accusation nor any overt penance for this wrong.

Society, with its explicit laws and punishments, remains here

largely mute and powerless—present only as a vague, inhuman

figure that momentarily terrifies the poet before it drops behind

him and is forgotten.

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Wordsworth’s famous boat-stealing episode occurs only a few

lines later. The first spectral figure has apparently not

deterred him from the commission of nighttime thefts. This new

misdeed is similar in form to the first, and perhaps equally

wrong: “It was an act of stealth/And troubled pleasure...(I, 388–

9) Wordsworth admits. But because the poet has not learned the

lesson he attempted to teach himself—the injunction against

stealing—the figure that frightens the poet after this second

theft is stronger and far more terrifying than the first.

When from behind that craggy Steep, till thenThe bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff,As if with voluntary power instinct,Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again,And growing still in stature, the huge CliffRose up between me and the stars, andstill,With measured motion like a living thing,Strode after me… (I, 405–412).

Whereas in the bird theft the presence always trailed behind him,

here the figure rises in front, blocking his way forward. Instead

of being merely breaths or steps, this new form has a head. The

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poet strikes at the figure several times, but like the Medusa of

ancient legend, this violence only makes it more powerful.

Finally, unable to beat this terrifying figure off, the poet

returns the stolen boat to its mooring.

This new figure is closer to a monster than the former, and

though this presence too neither speaks to condemn nor arrives to

punish, yet the fear it causes pushes the social, dialogic aspect

of the apology even further away. The poet satisfies his

conscience here not through any acknowledgement of stealing as a

social and public wrong, but instead through the physical action

of restitution. Because what was taken has been returned, in the

poet’s mind no wrong was committed. The earlier language of

excuse has largely disappeared: Wordsworth’s description of his

theft as an act of “stealth” and “troubled pleasure” is largely

descriptive and almost clinically distant. The moral status of

the deed is framed in rigorously analytical language. Justice, a

social ideal arrived at only through face-to-face encounter and

negotiation, has been essentially reduced here to action and

reaction.

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The bird and boat thefts exist on a similar plane of

apologetic form—in each instance a misdeed done to people is

recognized, but the human interaction that would ordinarily

demand an apologetic performance is subverted by a natural

presence that arouses fear in the poet. Though in each instance

the presence produces frightful emotions, in neither does it

accuse, condemn, or punish. Since neither figure ever speaks, the

conventional apologetic elements of verbal accusation, acceptance

of a limited measure of wrong, and then negotiation leading to

agreement have disappeared. Wordsworth’s attempts at trying to

convert social wrongs into natural ones shows how his moral

individual is created far from the presence of other people, in a

sublime encounter with the primordial forces of nature. Since

apologies are distinguished from events in the world through

being verbal acts, their absence in these scenes means that

Wordsworth’s apologetic performances happen only when the

incidents he has experienced are replayed for an imaginary

audience of readers. In Wordsworth’s The Prelude we find the

apology not in the action of the poem, but in the act of writing

it—in the imagined interaction between the poet and his readers.

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As we move from bird to boat thefts and away from the language of

excuse towards that of description, this element of writing as

apology comes to assume a larger role in the work.

Alan Liu, in Wordsworth: The Sense of History has argued that for

Wordsworth the past is merely a referent, an abstract background

against which the poet seeks to define a sense of self. In Liu’s

reading, while Wordsworth recognizes the past, history is always

constituted as a set of recollections from which the poet stands

apart. For Wordsworth the recollected event is a looming presence

behind, but the realities of that past are never directly

confronted. Liu suggests that the escape from the consequences of

wrongdoing is an important part of how Wordsworth constitutes the

self. In Liu’s view, history for Wordsworth is not narrative or

linear, but is composed of “spots of time” that help define the

individual. These spots of time, interrupting the narrative flow

of life, provide a framework for making sense of wrongdoing.

Caleb Williams takes the conventional novelistic apology

involving a human encounter and takes it to its logical

conclusion—a situation where the face-to-face verbal exchange has

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so intimately bound two characters that responsibility for the

crime is wholly transferred from one character to the other. In a

key incident, Ferdinando Falkland has confessed to his secretary,

Caleb Williams, that he, Falkland, is a murderer. That confession

turns Caleb into the unwitting bearer of Falkland’s wrongs. Their

relationship in the novel is based on the conceit that Caleb

cannot escape the history this confession recounts, and so cannot

perform the apologetic negotiation necessary for the two men to

restore their relationship. Caleb’s continual attempts to flee

from his master are at the same time his attempts to avoid the

consequences of being Falkland’s confessor. But Godwin constructs

his novel so that Caleb cannot escape from this acquired

responsibility. Wherever Caleb goes, whatever he does—even when

in desperation he tries to flee England—Falkland will always be

there, either in person, or indirectly through his influence on

other people. In order to recognize this responsibility Caleb

will ultimately have to make a public apology for Falkland’s

crimes.

In the final stage of his flight, Caleb settles in a small

town in rural Wales, where for a moment he believes he has

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finally found freedom from Falkland’s predations. While there he

comes into contact with a woman called Laura Denison whom he

believes to be kind, virtuous, and of unprejudiced feelings. But

Caleb fails to grasp that even where Falkland cannot physically

reach, a printed text can. In his attempts at securing Caleb from

the revelation of his confession Falkland has had published a

pamphlet called “THE WONDERFUL AND SURPRISING HISTORY OF CALEB WILLIAMS.”

As with the murder Falkland admits to in his oral confession, the

history told in the printed pamphlet makes Caleb responsible for

acts and crimes he did not commit. After Laura reads about

Caleb’s story, Caleb tries to persuade her of the falsity of its

narrative, but she refuses to hear him. As Falkland no doubt

intended, she accepts only the manufactured version of Caleb’s

story told in the text. Her response to Caleb’s attempt at a

defense is to reply:

Your conduct, even at this moment, in my opinion, condemns you. True virtue refuses the drudgery of explanation and apology. True virtue shines by its own light and needs no art to set it off…Virtue sir, consists in actions, and not in words (404).

For Laura, any act of verbal apology would itself be immoral.

Apologies, in her view, can never be virtuous. Though she does

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not say so directly, this is because there is a difference

between oral and written apologies. Oral apologies, in her view,

are merely excuses; virtue comes strictly from actions. The

pamphlet, however, convinces people to believe that the stories

told there recount real actions and events. Indeed, the

representation of real life in print is better than reality, for

it persuades Laura that all the real-world evidence she has had

of Caleb’s goodness and esteem for her is false, and the false

story told in the pamphlet is true. Even as Laura claims to value

actions over words she mistakenly accepts the printed text as a

substitute for what happens in the world. Because of the power of

print, Caleb cannot perform a spoken apology. Explanation and

apology have become one and the same here, so that any attempt to

orally revise a past wrong has become impossible. The power of

the history told in the pamphlet has left Caleb with only one

option: to remain mute or confess to the lies it recounts and

become the false individual the printed text maliciously

represents.

In trying to make sense of Caleb’s aborted apology we should

remember that he was first employed by Falkland as a secretary

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and therefore as someone whose role it is to write for another.

Though Caleb Williams is written by William Godwin, the novel

itself, presented in the form of a memoir, asks us to believe

that Caleb is the author of his own history. We might therefore

call Caleb Williams a fictionalized autobiography. I want to suggest

that in confessing to Caleb, Falkland is merely using Caleb for

the purpose for which he first employed him—to write. Within the

context of the true memoir this eponymous novel pretends to be

then, Caleb has become a writer. As a writer he has the ability

to do something Falkland could never do—to apologize. It is

specifically as a writer, as a creator of written texts, that

Caleb can bear responsibility for Falkland’s crimes. Falkland

signals as much when he circulates the false pamphlet about

Caleb. Only by writing and publishing the text called Caleb Williams

can Caleb hope to overwrite and overcome the fictional history

invented by Falkland. To acknowledge his acquired responsibility

for Falkland’s crimes Caleb must tell Falkland’s story and how it

is intimately bound up with his own. For Godwin the innocent

person takes on the responsibility of absolving the guilty one

because in their publically-shared moral responsibility the

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abstract ideal of justice is created. Godwin views this

establishment of a public moral responsibility through the

creation of a published text as a fundamentally social act.

Godwin argues in Political Justice that, “The actions and

dispositions of men…flow entirely from the operation of

circumstances” (28). The important word “entirely” here leaves

the task of moral judgment exclusively to the rational individual

and argues, as Godwin did elsewhere, that the justice system,

because it is a system, cannot be just. As David Collings has

understood, “both Falkland and [Caleb] are to be found not in the

tale of their errors, but in its interpretation” (861). Godwin

wants to show us that determining the moral status of Falkland’s

murder is less about ascertaining the facts involved than about

understanding the circumstances that surround it. How people,

including we the reading public, interpret Falkland’s crime, will

be a key part in this establishment of justice. Though Godwin’s

text does not mandate our forgiveness of Falkland’s crime, yet it

does argue that we cannot properly judge Falkland until we have

fully understood him.

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Caleb’s job will be to use his memoir to arrange the

circumstances of Falkland’s life into a narrative that

contextualizes the reasons for his crime. Caleb must use writing

to help right a wrong. His interpretation of Falkland’s actions,

by putting them in their necessary context, will convert the

facts of history and biography into the sympathies of fiction. As

Godwin sees it, for justice to be established, the facts of

history must be converted into the sympathies of fiction because

only in this way can the operation of circumstances be properly

understood. Facts themselves, like the systems that use them,

largely ignore things as they are, and so are inherently unjust.

Even if Falkland and Caleb were real, both would have to be

partially constructed as fictional characters because this

process is necessary to allow us to enter human minds and motives

with enough detail to promote sympathy and begin to establish the

fundamental social value of justice. Fiction provides the

contexts and arguments that strictly factual narratives cannot.

Though Falkland is a fictional character, he is a fiction

twice over—once in Godwin’s novel, and once in Caleb’s memorial

reconstruction of him. This process of memorial reconstruction

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becomes an act that even as it aims to truthfully recount

adventures, at the same time prompts our forgiveness of the

person being constructed. The story Falkland wants and needs to

tell—the story of his murder of Barnabas Tyrell, cannot be told

by him. Justice, by its nature, is a public not a private virtue,

and so to establish justice someone else must tell Falkland’s

story. That other person happens to be Caleb. By writing a text

about Falkland Caleb can begin to generate society’s necessary

sympathy for him. In order for Caleb Williams to become the

person he was meant to be, e.g. the person the novel Caleb Williams

represents to us, he must help establish justice by writing an

apology for Falkland’s actions. Without justice, in Godwin’s

view, there can be no independent selves, for otherwise the legal

system will annihilate all independent selves. Caleb Williams the

text, therefore, is both Falkland’s apology and Caleb’s self-

constituting act. Only when a text has become an apology for the

behavior of a character can justice come about. Because the

apology is necessary for invoking the idea of justice, it is

through the specifically literary form of the apology that the

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individual begins to emerge and to take his or her place in

society.

Godwin and Wordsworth both locate the site of the apology in

the act of writing itself, and both see in it a method for

dealing with moral wrongs. But whereas Wordsworth writes an

essentially private work that forms the individual in a sublime

encounter with an animate and morally-virtuous natural world,

Godwin inexorably ties individual selves to social interaction.

For Godwin the novel promotes a broad-based sympathy necessary

for living in the world; for Wordsworth, the individual’s sublime

encounter with nature is all that is needed.

Charles Carroll: The City University of New York

Works Cited

Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think. New York: Columbia U. Press, 2005.

Collings, David. “The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason.” ELH 70 (2003): 847–874.

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Godwin, William. Caleb Williams. Ed. Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley.Peterborough, ON: The Broadview Press, 2000.

Godwin, William. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Other Writings. Ed. K. Codell Carter. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1971.

Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1989.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Fielding, Richardson. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1957.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: The Four Texts. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

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