is not that I chose a subject unworthy of elevated fiction, but that such
a subject did not occur to some one capable of treating it as it
deserves; and I never felt this more strongly than when the late Mr.
Godwin (in conversing with me after the publication of this romance)
observed that he had always thought the story of Eugene Aram peculiarly
adapted for fiction, and that he had more than once entertained the
notion of making it the foundation of a novel. I can well conceive what
depth and power that gloomy record would have taken from the dark and
inquiring genius of the author of "Caleb Williams." In fact, the crime
and trial of Eugene Aram arrested the attention and engaged the
conjectures of many of the most eminent men of his own time. His guilt or
innocence was the matter of strong contest; and so keen and so enduring
was the sensation created by an event thus completely distinct from the
ordinary annals of human crime that even History turned aside from the
sonorous narrative of the struggles of parties and the feuds of kings to
commemorate the learning and the guilt of the humble schoolmaster of
Lynn. Did I want any other answer to the animadversions of commonplace
criticism, it might be sufficient to say that what the historian relates
the novelist has little right to disdain.

Before entering on this romance, I examined with some care the
probabilities of Aram's guilt; for I need scarcely perhaps observe that
the legal evidence against him is extremely deficient,--furnished almost
entirely by one (Houseman) confessedly an accomplice of the crime and a
partner in the booty, and that in the present day a man tried upon
evidence so scanty and suspicious would unquestionably escape conviction.
Nevertheless, I must frankly own that the moral evidence appeared to me
more convincing than the legal; and though not without some doubt, which,
in common with many, I still entertain of the real facts of the murder, I
adopted that view which, at all events, was the best suited to the higher