Unjustly incarcerated on a charge contrived by his former master Ferdinando Falkland, the eponymous hero of William Godwin's Things As They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) discovers in his prison cell a revolutionary spirit of resistance. Like Rousseau on the road to the prison of Vincennes, suddenly overcome with an overpowering sense of the depravity of modern society, Caleb responds to the spectacle of despotism by undergoing a powerful revolution of mind; in a moment the last trappings of feudal deference have fallen from him, and he has resolved to defy the law and attempt his escape. In this way the double title of Godwin's novel advertised its double nature: it was at once a biting critique of the English social order and a suspenseful gothic novel. Thirty years after the first appearance of Godwin's first novel the republican journalist William Hazlitt could still remember its impact: ‘We conceive no one ever began Caleb Williams that did not read it through: no one who 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.’