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Le fabricant de Londres, drame en cinq actes et en prose; représenté à la Comédie Françoise le 12 Janvier 1771. 

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First edition of a London-set play by the French dramatist and contributor to the Encyclopédie, Fenouillot de Falbaire (1727–1800), illustrated with five fine plates after Gravelot. 

Le fabricant de Londres tells the story of a bourgeois English cloth merchant named ‘Vilson’ who suffers bankruptcy, plunging his two young children and beloved Fanni into penury.  On the point of throwing himself in the Thames, he is saved through the generosity of the wealthy Scottish Lord Falkland, whom he encounters on a bridge contemplating the same demise.  Fenouillot explains in his preface that he was prompted to write the play by a desire to promote charitable acts towards society’s less fortunate. 

The play flopped on its opening night, a witty spectator joking at the revelation of Vilson’s bankruptcy that he too was bankrupt to the sum of twenty sous (the price of his ticket), but it was translated into German and Italian nonetheless and was performed with great success in Vienna.  Fenouillot acknowledges the play’s frosty reception in his preface, blaming the acoustics of the theatre. 

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