Caleb Williams

r attempts, renders me doubly solicitous not to forfeit the kindness I have experienced.One caution I have particularly sought to exercise: “not to repeat myself.” Caleb Williams was

carcely find anything to “elevate and surprise;” and, if it has any merit, it must consist in the liveliness with which it brings things home to the imagination, and the reality it gives to the scenes it pourtrays.[Footnote A: I confess, however, the inability I found to weave a catastrophe, such as I desired, out of these ordinary incidents. What I have here said, therefore, must not be interpreted as applicable to the concluding sheets of my work.]Yes, even in the present narrative, I have aimed at a certain kind of novelty — a novelty which may be aptly expressed by a parody on a well-known line of Pope; it relates:“Things often done, but never yet described.”In selecting among common and ordinary adventures, I have endeavoured to avoid such as a thousand novels before mine have undertaken to develop. Multitudes of readers have themselves passed through the very incidents I relate; but, for the most part, no work has hitherto recorded them. If I have hold them truly, I have added somewhat to the stock of books which should enable a recluse, shut up in his closet, to form an idea of what is passing in the world. It is inconceivable, meanwhile, how much, by this choice of a subject, I increased the arduousness of my task. It is so easy to do, a little better, or a little worse, what twenty authors have done before! If I had foreseen from the first all the difficulty of my project, my courage would have failed me to undertake the execution of it.Certain persons, who condescend to make my supposed inconsistencies the favourite object of their research, will