In Quentin Bailey’s article “‘Extraordinary and dangerous powers’: Prisons, Police, and Literature in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Bailey argues that through his novel Caleb Williams, William Godwin examines the expanding power of the London state in the wake of William Pitt’s rejected 1785 Police Bill, an act that proposed increased governmental intrusion in order to curtail London’s troubling crime rate. Through this examination, Bailey claims, Godwin both relates “a transcendent vision of state oppression” (532) and illustrates the government’s evolving instruments of incarceration, surveillance, and indoctrination as Caleb not only becomes arbitrarily imprisoned, but also becomes an agent of his own imprisonment. These instruments Bailey