Godwin's Handshake

This essay argues that William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams uses a familiar gesture—the handshake—to contest both radical and conservative responses to the French Revolution. Instead of merely fictionalizing the arguments of his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, as critics have argued, Caleb Williams, through Godwin's representation of the repeated failure of this socially and politically significant gesture, traces an episode in the history of manners. The handshake thus points to a historical development, the emergence of commercial society, that complicates the novel's political stance by undermining the conception of politics that underwrites it.