Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Hannah More and David Garrick: Patronage and Friendship
- 2 A Middling-Class Poet-Maker: Hannah More and Ann Yearsley
- 3 Patronage, Gratitude and Friendship, 1785–90
- 4 ‘Such is Bristol's Soul’: Patronage and Rivalry
- 5 Novel Writing and the French Revolution
- 6 Romantic Bristol: Creative Networks in the 1790s
- 7 Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - Novel Writing and the French Revolution
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Hannah More and David Garrick: Patronage and Friendship
- 2 A Middling-Class Poet-Maker: Hannah More and Ann Yearsley
- 3 Patronage, Gratitude and Friendship, 1785–90
- 4 ‘Such is Bristol's Soul’: Patronage and Rivalry
- 5 Novel Writing and the French Revolution
- 6 Romantic Bristol: Creative Networks in the 1790s
- 7 Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In September 1789 Hannah More wrote to her old friend Horace Walpole:
Poor France! though I am sorry that the lawless rabble are so triumphant, yet I cannot help hoping that some good will arise from the sum of human misery having been so considerably lessened at one blow by the destruction of the Bastile.
In this, More's opinion mirrored not only Yearsley's, (‘And, daring now to ACT, as well as FEEL, / Crushes the convent and the dread Bastille!’, as she wrote in the Epilogue to Earl Goodwin), but a significant number of observers in England. They, like More, were optimistic that the French would now move towards a system of government like Britain's own; the destruction of the Bastille symbolized, it was felt, the end of arbitrary and repressive powers wielded by a superstitious state against its subjects. But as the Revolution descended into violence, and as the position of the French royal family became increasingly precarious, many who had hoped for reform across the channel began to change their minds. In the spring of 1792 the Revolutionary government declared war against Austria and Prussia, and in September over one thousand prisoners, many of them priests, were massacred. By the end of the year the monarchy had been abolished and Louis XVI was to stand trial; in late 1792 Walpole wrote to More to tell her, as Anne Stott notes, ‘that the whole [French] nation should be exterminated’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and PoetryThe Story of a Literary Relationship, pp. 99 - 120Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014