Hormann sets Michel-Rolph Trouillot's claim that the Haitian Revolution was unthinkable to contemporaries against what British writers actually published between 1791 and 1805. Early abolitionist responses were warm: Percival Stockdale defended the rebels' violence as the only course open to people who could not afford to wait for a parliamentary campaign to succeed. That warmth faded after Britain's own invasion of Saint-Domingue and its defeat by Toussaint Louverture's forces. Bryan Edwards, whose history Trouillot passes over, understood perfectly well what the insurgents wanted, the destruction of slave society, and condemned it in the counterrevolutionary idiom Burke had used against Jacobin France. Among radicals, John Thelwall's novel The Daughter of Adoption pairs a rebel slave with an English servant whose clenched fist promises a rising at home. These writers grasped the revolution and what it threatened, and reading them, Hormann argues, requires attention to class and to economic interest.