A Link with the French Revolution

Wilberforce’s friend Hannah More also had an intriguing personal connection with the French Revolution. As she told her friend Eva Garrick, widow of the great actor-manager, David Garrick, in the early years of the Revolution, two French sisters had been teachers at the school in Park Street, Bristol, run by More’s sisters. The young women were ardent revolutionaries. (See Anne Stott, Hannah More. The First Victorian, Oxford, 2004, p. 151.) When one of them, Félicité Dupont, left the school and returned to France, she married , Jacques-Pierre Brissot. Brissot subsequently became the leader of the moderate Girondin faction in the revolutionary Convention, and he was guillotined in October 1793 (the same month as Marie Antoinette).  I wonder if any French scholars are aware of the relevant letter in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC (W.b.487, fo. 87, Hannah More to Eva Garrick, 21 November 1793), which shows Félicité’s links with Bristol.

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