ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author tries to define the nature of Crabbe's longstanding interest in the politics of domestic life and the effect on that interest of the Revolution in France. Crabbe's letter to Burke and the biographical details it helps us to establish are illuminating in a number of respects. Crabbe pictures Duckling Hall as a miniature version of the French State plunged into revolutionary turmoil by the removal of its head. For the middle-aged Crabbe, fear of egalitarian disorder on the French model seems to have superseded fear of slavery on the imperial model. By comparison with the complexities of 'The Frank Courtship' the analogies – between State and household, France and Ducking Hall – in the 1793 letter to Cartwright seem quite straightforward. Crabbe implies that Ducking Hall and France are aberrations, deviations from the normal State and the normal household.
