This essay examines the alterations made by George Colman the Younger in adapting William Godwin’s tragic novel, Caleb Williams (1794), for the stage, as the three act musical comedy, The Iron Chest (1796). Colman’s extensive modifications were of both a political kind, to satisfy the Examiner of Plays, and of a dramaturgical kind to satisfy the expectations and interests of playhouse audiences. Paying particular attention to the ways in which Colman’s choices open up our understanding of the distinctions and differences between the narratological and the dramaturgical, the essay illustrates why Colman could expect any political content to be overlooked in the play’s performance and reception, even if he retained some elements of the political critique embedded in Godwin’s novel. In this manner, the essay both illuminates the formal affordances and constraints that regulated representation on the late eighteenth-century stage and makes a case for why performance conventions, and not just printed play texts, should be taken into consideration in our assessments of the politics of popular plays in the period.

Chapter 3 contends that the crime novels of the Newgate school stage the emergence of novelty, spectacle, and celebrity in the everyday lives of the low-born and ordinary. Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s examine how, in an emergent mass media culture, notorious figures and extraordinary actions reverberate through the collective consciousness. I argue that Newgate novelists develop a notion of demotic celebrity, showing how the criminal’s talents and achievements might capture the public’s imagination and bring celebrity within reach of insignificant individuals. Reading W. H. Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) in relation to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–38), the chapter shows that the criminal in these novels is a figure aware of his own visibility and conscious of how best to present himself to an audience. The Newgate novels interest in the production of celebrity reflects the permeation of fashion’s logics of contingency and spectacle into quotidian experience across the social spectrum.

Prompted by what he perceived as the chaotic tendencies of the Jacobins, Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, proposes a modern revival of honor, a virtue derived from the time-tested principles of chivalry, hierarchy, and, above all, the shared sentiments that bound together the social order. William Godwin’s preeminent Jacobin novel Caleb Williams represents one outcome of living under Burkes sentimentalist honor code: its relentlessly skeptical protagonist is cowed by the emotional demands of chivalry and is ultimately left unable to think about anything but his master, with whom he shares a psychic bond. Instead of eliminating a sense of honor from public life, however, Godwin offers an alternative version of honor. Sharing with Burke a similar fear of post-revolutionary atomization, Godwin presents what he calls “true honor,” a virtue that avoids the sentimentalism and obsession with rank that characterized Burkean chivalry. In commiting to the general good whose circumference expands beyond white, propertied citizens, Godwin presupposes – or even exceeds – the ideals of liberal social democracy by more than a century.

The idea of capacity is central to Godwin’s political theory. In spite of his assurance that equality is unrelated to physical or intellectual ability, Godwin makes individual and social liberty contingent upon the types of contributions one’s capacities allow. His political system inevitably produces exceptions (those who do not or cannot contribute to the general good) for which he needs to devise additional measures. People who lack the right kinds of mental and physical capacities prove to be an intractable difficulty. In his fiction, Godwin centralizes the idea that the mind should work in concert with the body, and sees incapacity in either of these as socially and personally problematic. We see this in his repeated use of automata, dolls, and characters who disengage from their bodies in various ways; and in his fictional use of rejuvenation and cure. Godwin speculates that when reason governs society, illness and incapacity will no longer be present. His attitude towards deformity is quite separate from his views on capacity. Deformity, in Godwin’s fiction, is usually a visual sign of an evil character, and he does not articulate the prodigious phase of disability.

The conclusion moves beyond Richardson, Burney, Austen, and Edgeworth to demonstrate the wide-ranging ramifications of networked authorship for other authors during the period.It was not necessary to be a member of an underprivileged group in order to be situated within an authorship network.Three of their well-educated male contemporaries were influenced by literary networks that inspired significant revisions to their most famous novels: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794).The case studies of these three novels show that revision was a major tool of eighteenth-century composition practices and was linked to networked authorship, overturning spontaneous, individual conceptions of literary production during the period.The larger consequences of this study are for the categories of novel and author: by concentrating on revision, we can understand the mutability of the novel form and the networked nature of authorship.