I began my narrative, as is the more usual way, in the third person. But
I speedily became dissatisfied. I then assumed the first person, making
the hero of my tale his own historian; and in this mode I have persisted
in all my subsequent attempts at works of fiction. It was infinitely the
best adapted, at least, to my vein of delineation, where the thing in
which my imagination revelled the most freely was the analysis of the
private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical
dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive,
and recording the gradually accumulating impulses which led the
personages I had to describe primarily to adopt the particular way of
proceeding in which they afterwards embarked.

When I had determined on the main purpose of my story, it was ever my
method to get about me any productions of former authors that seemed to
bear on my subject. I never entertained the fear that in this way of
proceeding I should be in danger of servilely copying my predecessors. I
imagined that I had a vein of thinking that was properly my own, which
would always preserve me from plagiarism. I read other authors, that I
might see what they had done, or, more properly, that I might forcibly
hold my mind and occupy my thoughts in a particular train, I and my
predecessors travelling in some sense to the same goal, at the same time
that I struck out a path of my own, without ultimately heeding the
direction they pursued, and disdaining to inquire whether by any chance
it for a few steps coincided or did not coincide with mine.

Thus, in the instance of "Caleb Williams," I read over a little old
book, entitled "The Adventures of Mademoiselle de St. Phale," a French
Protestant in the times of the fiercest persecution of the Huguenots,
who fled through France in the utmost terror, in the midst of eternal
alarms and hair-breadth escapes, having her quarters perpetually beaten