The Adventures of Caleb Williams or Things as They Are 1794 by William Godwin is a threevolume novel written as a call to end the abuse of power by what Godwin saw as a tyrannical government Intended as a popularization of the ideas presented in his 1793 treatise Political Justice Godwin uses Caleb Williams to show how legal and other institutions can and do destroy individuals even when the people the justice system touches are innocent of any crime This reality in Godwins mind was therefore a description of things as they areThe novel describes the downfall of Ferdinando Falkland a British squire and his attempts to ruin and destroy the life of Caleb Williams a poor but ambitious young man that Falkland hires as his personal secretary Caleb accidentally discovers a terrible secret in his masters past Though Caleb promises to be bound to silence Falkland irrationally attached in Godwins view to ideas of social status and inborn virtue cannot bear that his servant should possibly have power over him and sets out to use various meansunfair trials imprisonment pursuit to make sure that the information of which Caleb is the bearer will never be revealedGodwin described the book as a series of adventures of flight and pursuit the fugitive in perpetual apprehension of being overwhelmed with the worst calamities so that Caleb Williams can be classified as an early thriller or mystery novelIn order to evade a censorship ban on presenting the novel on the stage the impresario Richard Brinsley Sheridan presented the piece on the stage of his Drury Lane Theatre in 1796 under the title The Iron Chest his pretext for avoiding censorship being that his resident composer Stephen Storace had made an operatic version of the story