ABSTRACT
By the time that Edgeworth wrote his vignette, bracketed as it was by executions, France had ended the reign and life of Louis XVI in January 1793; he was soon to be followed to the scaffold by Marie Antoinette in October. Promise would descend into Terror in the unravelling of what had once appeared to have begun simply as a constitutional crisis, an echo of America and beloved of bourgeois reformers. In the English Midlands, across la Manche, James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood, with many others, watched with alarm as Britain and France were about to descend into war, their fears as much over the collapse of trade as political disorder. For his part, Beddoes would vigorously and publicly oppose British policy on numerous grounds.
