Uninvolved in the debilitating routine of human affairs, they frequently displayed an energy which, from every impartial observer, would have extorted veneration. (310)

Caleb's first encounter with the band of thieves comes in chapter 1 of volume 3 of Caleb Williams when he is severely wounded, robbed of his clothes and left for dead by several thieves. The leader of the same gang finds Caleb in a ditch and, as can only take place in a Gothic novel, escorts him back to the den of the thieves where Caleb is reacquainted with the men who have just robbed him. Gines, one of the most enigmatic characters in the novel, is subsequently expelled from the gang for unhonorable thievery techniques. Gines will later apprehend Caleb as a bounty hunter of the law; his apparent indifference to popular conceptions of justice (one either agrees to live a life according to or against the law, but typically not both) mirrors a scene from The Italian in which a guard admits that

[h]e thought that to be a guard over prisoners was nearly as miserable as being a prisoner himself. 'I see no difference between them,' said he, 'except that the prisoner watches on one side of the door, and the centinel on the other.' (446)

In a similar fashion, Gines does not see a difference between thievery and law enforcement, the two occupations between which he switches.

In chapter 3 of volume 3, Godwin poignantly depicts a counterintuitive scene in which Mr. Raymond (the captain of the thieves) crumples up the one hundred guinea "prize" obtained by another member of the group. He justifies this strange move by arguing,

What use have you for these hundred guineas? Are you in want? Are you in distress? Can you be contented to purchase them at the price of treachery - of violating the laws of hospitality? (314)

This example of "honor among thieves" appears in the midst of a story in which justice is overturned - Falkland's dishonesty is accepted by society while Caleb's truth is rejected - and serves as an example of the failure of traditional categorical definitions in the novel. That is to say, Falkland's character would traditionally be portrayed as honest, which is no more true than the wonted portrayal of the thieves. Appearances in Caleb Williams are not reliable indications of character.

In her essay "The Character in the Veil: Imagery in the Surface of the Gothic Novel," Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes:

In the third section, I discuss the repetitiveness and fixity inherent in the Gothic presentation of character: incompletely linguistic markings of "character" maintain a draining but irreducible tension with a fiction of physical, personal presence. These traits, although they have often made Gothic characters seem devitalized or two-dimensional, nevertheless represent a powerfully consistent working out of a dialectic inherent in fictional writing. (256)

Here, the dialectic seems to involve traditional forms of justice and actual justice. Thieves, while rejecting the former, seem to embrace the latter to such a degree that the captain of the group "crushed the [one hundred guinea note] in his hand" (314).