[Rarebooks] fa: WILLIAM GODWIN - THINGS AS THEY ARE, or CALEB WILLIAMS - 3 vols. 1816

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, March 29. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/qgtya4x

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

William Godwin: Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. In Three Volumes. London: Printed for W. Simpkin and E. Marshal, 1816. Fourth edition. Three volumes, small 8vo (17.5 cm), in recent quarter calf and marbled boards, gilt-lettered spine labels; 296, 292, 345 pp.; with the half-titles.

A solid and attractively rebound early edition of Godwin's first, most successful, and most important novel. An early example of the propagandist novel, designed to show "the tyranny and perfidiousness exercised by the powerful members of the community against those who are less privileged than themselves," the work is also considered one of the first psychological novels and a forerunner of the crime and detective genres. No less a critic than William Hazlitt, Godwin's near contemporary, wrote: "no one ever began Caleb Williams that did not read it through; no one that ever read it could possibly forget it, or speak of it after any length of time but with an impression as if the events and feelings had been personal to himself."

Edges of the text blocks a little darkened and dust-soiled; leaves lightly toned with a few occasional spots and small stains; last page of vol. II with a faint penciled sketch of a man's profile (from the prominent proboscis, it might be Godwin himself); vol. III with a few underlines and marginal marks by an early and apparently rather disgruntled reader: under the last line of the text, in which the narrator explains that he has written his story so that "the world may at least not hear and repeat a half-told and mangled tale," this reader has inscribed in a neat, tiny hand: "mangled indeed — [the] most wretchedest tale I ever read."