THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

of virtue, and steadily resist the temptations to which we are exposed.” Britons wept for
the king and sobbed at tragedy of Oronooko, yet failed to act against the slave trade, a
crime which British consumers daily committed. Indeed, through the consumption of
Oronooko and other sentimental literary works about the African slave trade, Britons
relived their crimes, “gratifying [their] appetite with a despicable luxury.” 88 The false
sensibility, which had worried many abolitionists, had indeed traveled full circle as
events in France distracted Britons away from their own crimes.
The boundary between titillation and sympathy was very fine, Fox pointed out.
Noting that Britons sympathized with the victims of the very crimes they committed, Fox
raised uncomfortable questions about the nature of sympathy and the pleasure that the
spectacle of death could invoke. In 1793 and 1794, three tragedies were written about the
execution of the King of France. Thus, the institution of the monarchy had become
heavily invested in the language of sentiment, which was the only way to communicate a
sense of the dangers of revolution. Yet, using the language of sympathy to evoke love for
king and country also evoked a range of other disturbing emotions. 89
In the wake of violent revolution in Haiti and France, conservative members of
the London Committee distanced its members and the movement from grassroots protests
such as signing petitions and boycotting sugar. The London Committee attempted to
88 William Fox, Thoughts on the Death of the King of France (London: J. Ridgway, W.
Richardson, T. Wheldon and Butterworth, and M. Gurney, 1793), 16. See John Barrell, Imagining the
King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-1796 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), 1, 81. Barrell describes Fox as the “wittiest of the reforming pamphleteers” and his pamphlet on the
death Louis XVI as “the most intelligent commentary on the attempt to define public policy in the language
of private sentiment.”
89 Barrell, Imagining the Death of the King, 82, 86.
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