Overview
This letter offers close-up portraits of the unrest in the country caused by bad harvests and high prices, and of the severe punishments handed down to protestors by the authorities, afraid as they were of starving labourers becoming sans culottes if led by radical democrats. Beddoes, a radical democrat himself, was keen to record and share information about the plight of the poor, and about the injustice they met. At the same time, his hopes that the French Revolution would offer an example to Britain were fading as it descended, after the Terror had ended, into squabbling and civil war. Others in his circle, Coleridge and Southey among them, were similarly discouraged, while espousing the cause of the poor in Britain – indeed Beddoes and Coleridge had published anti-government pamphlets in tandem with each other in 1795, A Word in Defence of the Bill of Rights Against Gagging Bills and Conciones ad Populum.

The letter is instructive in that it heralds the second volume of Darwin’s Zoonomia (1796) as a contribution to medicine; it also welcomes Count Rumford’s essays on technology that would enable domestic heating and cooking to be done in a more fuel efficient manner, thus benefiting poorer householders. In 1800-1, Rumford’s negotiations with Beddoes’s protégé Humphry Davy resulted in Davy moving from Bristol, and Beddoes’s service, to the new London organisation that, like the Pneumatic Institution, aimed to use science and technology to benefit the poorer classes — the Royal Institution.

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Thomas Beddoes to Davies Giddy, 23 April [1796]

23 April

Dear Giddy

A riot must be suppressed; that is no less clear than that a conflagration must be stopped.¹ But experience seems to have demonstrated that neither military nor civil execution will put an end to rioting. We have had our minds occupied by rioting & rioters no less than you in Cornwall, but in a manner somewhat different. Three men were tried at the last assizes for this crime; & one was condemned upon incompetent evidence. A great ferment took place; & matters are in such a train that I hope the man will obtain a pardon² — Mr Gibbs began his judicial career very unpromisingly.³ A barrister of sense & experience assured me that Burke⁴ w^d not have convicted the prisoner — I have the evidence before me & did intend to draw up an acc^t of the whole transaction (which w^d afford an excellent lesson to juries) but having just printed an attack on Mr Pitt,⁵ I do not choose to engage another person for fear of appearing another P. Pindar⁶ in prose —

The great subject of finance now principally employs the thoughts of speculative men. There are many signs of our public expences having arrived near the point at which it becomes difficult to provide for them. The new tax upon wine seems to betray want of resources.⁷ It must diminish the consumption of the article. The high triumphant tone assumed by the minister is to me very suspicious. Another year will certainly decide experimentally between the opposite doctrines of Calonne⁸ & D’Ivernois,⁹ Morgan¹⁰ & Vansittart,¹¹ Pitt¹² & Grey¹³ — If troubles break out in the S. of France, I sh^d not be surprised to see Monarchy, Aristocracy & Royal re-established.¹⁴ I much doubt whether the difficulty of procuring the full discussion of laws by two independent assemblies has been overcome by the new French constⁿ. The council of elders appears insignificant; & the 500 are fast assuming the uncontrolled authority & Billingsgate manners of the convention.¹⁵ This difficulty, I fear, has its foundation in the nature of things, for if you should equalise the powers of two assemblies, w^d not the difference in talents between the members give one the ascendancy in all times of public difficulty? & in times of tranquillity, there w^d be little to apprehend fom the rashness of a single assembly —

Darwin's second volume is out,¹⁶ & his analysis of morbid phenomena is one of the greatest exertions of the human understanding. The foundation of the most important & difficult science is fairly laid. There will be an end of medical imposture in due time; & if the profession continues to exist, the number of its members will be wonderfully diminished — Count Rumford’s is another most important publication.¹⁷ It will go far to banish the dread of want from the most apprehensive minds; & this is surely no small merit in the present state of society — I leave Miss Giddy to Mrs Beddoes¹⁸ — Pray remember me to your father & mother

I am D^r Giddy yours truly

Thomas Beddoes

It strikes me that Donne’s invention may be employed to prevent the elements of geometry from being disagreeable to young people, & that this will be its best application¹⁹

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Notes

1. In an incident widely reported in the newspapers, on 6 April 1796 a crowd of between 1000 and 3000 assembled in Truro, Cornwall, protesting about high food prices. The Riot Act was read and, when the crowd did not disperse, the Worcestershire militia, which was quartered in the county, made a bayonet charge. Ten ‘rioters’ were arrested; one was later hung. Giddy had been made Deputy-Lieutenant of Cornwall in October 1795; this office gave him greater powers to deal with food riots of the Truro kind, which had been sporadically occurring since 1793 and were caused by poor harvests and resultant high grain prices, poor pay, and unemployment. To quell these disturbances Giddy had, in summer 1795, ordered the sale of imported flour and rice at cheap prices in Penzance market.

2. This affair was taken up in the Bristol journal that Beddoes had helped Coleridge to establish — The Watchman. In 1795 food riots had resulted in fishmongers’ properties being attacked and the premises of a butcher being pulled down and his meat stolen. Troops were called in to restore order. Three people — Edward Evans, William Gage and James Selman — were subsequently arrested and, on 2 April 1796, tried. Gage was convicted of theft and sentenced to death (commuted to transportation) despite the fact that the only witness for the prosecution was another butcher, Edmund Matthew, who several had sworn was unable to identify Gage at the time of the offence and was motivated by the prospect of a £40 reward for a conviction. Witnesses who had signed affadavits stating that Gage had been at work at the time of the riot were not called by the defence. After a press campaign by Coleridge and others, Gage was reprieved. See Coleridge, The Watchman (London and Princeton, 1970), p. 232.

3. Vicary Gibbs (1751-1820), the recorder (judge) at Bristol Assizes since 1794.

4. Richard Burke (1758-94), son of the renowned politician Edmund Burke (1729-97), was Recorder for Bristol from 1783 to 1794.

5. An Essay on the Public Merits of Mr. Pitt (London: printed for J. Johnson, 1796).

6. ‘Peter Pindar’ was the pseudonym of the satirist John Wolcot. Pindar’s numerous virulent satires were aimed at the King and Queen, politicians and many in the world of fine arts and literature.

7. To raise money for the war against France, the government had more than doubled the duty on wines since 1794. In 1796, French wine duty was raised to 10s. 2½d per gallon and Portuguese to 6s. 9¾ d.

8. Charles Alexandre de Calonne (1734-1802), the finance minister of the French King Louis XVI until 1787. Calonne advocated a reform of the tax system and an increase of taxation — including a land value tax — to pay the debts France had incurred in supporting the American colonists’ war against Britain. After his dismissal, he lived in Britain.

9. François d’Ivernois (1757-1842), the expatriate Genevan economist and political writer. A critic of the French revolutionary government who was resident in Britain, d’Ivernois published Histoire de l’administration des finances de la République Française, pendant l'année 1796 (1796).

10. William Morgan (1750-1833), like Beddoes a political radical, was a critic of the government’s economic policies. He authored Facts Addressed to the Serious Attention of the People of Great Britain Respecting the Expence of the War, and the State of the National Debt (1796).

11. Nicholas Vansittart (1766-1851) was in 1796 a pamphleteer who supported the financial policies of William Pitt’s government. He later became Secretary to the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

12. William Pitt, Prime Minster, and architect of the high taxation policy designed to finance the European war with France.

13. Charles Grey, later 2nd Earl Grey (1764-1845), was a leader of the Whig opposition to Pitt’s ministry in parliament. He argued against war with France, regarding it as a financially ruinous policy.

14. In fact, long running royalist campaigns against the revolutionary government in the Vendée and in western France (the Chouan rebellion) were effectively defeated in spring 1796.

15. In France, since November 1795 the governing body had been the Directory, a bicameral body consisting of the Council of 500, responsible for drafting legislation, and the Council of Elders, an upper house containing 250 men over the age of forty. The Directory replaced the single-assembly National Convention, which had wielded power from 20 September 1792 to 26 October 1795. Billingsgate fishmarket, on the River Thames in London, was proverbial for the abusive language of the porters and fishwives who worked there.

16. Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1796).

17.In his Essays, Political Economical and Philosophical (1796), Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford had published several essays on technology that would enable domestic heating and cooking to be done in a more fuel efficient manner, thus, it was hoped, benefiting poorer householders.

18. Meaning that Anna Beddoes would write separately to Giddy’s sister Mary Philippa Giddy.

19. Beddoes had been promoting the scheme of a ‘poor & ingenious old’ Bristol mathematics teacher, Benjamin Donne, to make and sell models designed to teach geometry experientially. See Beddoes’s letter to James Watt, 24 February 1796.