more recent material, but a new and detailed biographical chronology has been added. This in effectreplaces the ‘Table analytique’ from the original 1804 edition, listing the contents of each Book,included at the end in 1972. Retaining the table of the (700-page) Life as well as of the life, so to speak,would have been useful. But the modern Index is exceptionally good.The notes, formerly placed at theend of the work, are now footnotes, which greatly eases consultation. Needed next is a modernedition of Marmontel’s Contes moraux, ideally to an analogous editorial standard.

Robin HowellsBirkbeck, University of London

Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices. Edited by MaryHilton and Jill Shefrin. Farnham: Ashgate. 2009. ix + 243 p. £55.00 (hb). ISBN 978-0-7546-6460-4.

Although the long eighteenth century is heralded as the century of innovation in ideas aboutchildhood and child-rearing, the history of children’s education is too often isolated frommainstream historical studies. This volume’s editors succeed in their aim to rectify this situation byreformulating children’s education as cultural history. Education is thus rethought as thetransmission of ideas, with contributors exploring the theories that informed them and thepractices by which they were circulated. Several themes emerge: that virtue was a key objective ofeducation: that ideas, theories and practices cross-fertilised thanks to a shared broader culture; andthat education occurred in a variety of settings.

The contributions are organised along the lines suggested by the volume’s subtitle, into ‘beliefs,cultures, practices’, although all chapters offer something on each theme. Sophia Woodleyexamines ideas underlying the debate about the respective merits of private (home) and public(school) education. It was not driven solely by gendered beliefs that girls were suited for the former,boys for the latter, since home education was perceived to produce virtuous adults of both sexes.Demonstrating the shared origins of educational beliefs, Woodley shows that proponents of homeeducation were drawn from several ideologies, primary radical political beliefs and Evangelicalimperatives. Developing this theme, Anne Stott suggests that Lockean principles informed theEvangelical Hannah More’s pedagogy. Mary Clare Martin also places Methodist educationalinstitutions in their wider context, thereby highlighting similarities over differences. She shows thatMary Bosanquet’s endeavours were influenced by European religious communities, institutions forthe poor and contemporary educational establishments such as charity schools and elite boardingschools.

The next four chapters show how educational practice was informed by cultural trends. CarolPercy reveals that understanding English grammar demonstrated elite girls’ social superiority, theirhigh moral standards and industriousness. Nonetheless, it also rewarded female rationality.Teaching grammar also provided female educationalists with professional authority and status.Therefore, although grammar instruction was informed by gender constructions, it also offeredopportunities. Michele Cohen traces the cultural derivation of a newly prevalent method ofinformal teaching: the ‘familiar’ conversation. She shows that this rigorous technique of mentaltraining and social improvement was rooted in ideals of polite sociability as well as pedagogicaltheories. The conventions of appropriate social behaviour are also traced in Jennifer Mori’s accountof another less formal mode of education: the Grand Tour. This aimed to polish elite youths intogentlemen through cosmopolitan sociability and activities. Mori suggests that English diplomatsguided youths on spending their time in a manner appropriate to the development of the requisitesocial and cultural skills. Examining the impact of cultural suppression on educational provision,Maurice Whitehead demonstrates the creativity of Jesuit schools and colleges in the face of set-backs. Despite repeated closures across Europe, these institutions thrived and remodelled theircurricula.

With a focus on practice, the remaining chapters explore the material culture of Britisheducation. Deirdre Raftery demonstrates that much of the reading material deployed in schools inIreland was in English by English writers. An English objective of cultural conquest was only

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partially achieved, however, because its delivery was hampered by Irish monolingualism and manypoor pupils’ inability to read either Irish or English. Even so, as is evident from the National Boardschools’ reading materials after 1831, Irish culture, history and literature were eradicated from theformal curriculum. Jill Shefrin shows that there was more to the education of poor children thansocial control. The infant schools set up to educate pre-school-age poor children in the earlynineteenth century taught through pictures and objects, a pedagogical technique first deployed forchildren from higher social ranks. Finally, Matthew Grenby considers the child’s perspective bycomparing the marks made on instructive children’s books with reports of how and whenchildren’s reading was supposed to occur. He concludes that practice may have followed theory,with reading aloud under parental supervision, the use of books as a spur to further conversation,timetabled set reading and rote learning. Yet all these practices were criticised by other educationaltheorists, and there is evidence for different forms of interaction between children and their books.In short, the cultural history of eighteenth-century educational provision offered by this volumedemonstrates that it was extensive, complex, dynamic and interactive, and that ideas and cultureswere not determined by specific social groups or religious denominations.

Joanne BaileyOxford Brookes University

Anna Seward: A Constructed Life. A Critical Biography. By Teresa Barnard. Farnham:Ashgate. 2009. viii + 200 p. £55 (hb). ISBN 978-0-7546-6616-5.

Anna Seward is an enigmatic literary figure, judging by the contrasting ways in which she has beenread and received. Her monodies and elegies found her fame in her lifetime, her Lichfield circleincluded Samuel Johnson and Erasmus Darwin, and her reputation brought correspondence withJames Boswell, William Hayley and Helen Maria Williams. Her reception suffered from the Romanticbacklash – begun in the last years of her life – against the excesses of sensibility and the picturesque,but she was rediscovered somewhat last century as a valuable source of literary anecdote, and shehas latterly come to be rehabilitated as an important poet in her own right.

Teresa Barnard’s biography acknowledges the vicissitudes inflicted on Seward in her afterlife,rescuing her from caricature as a prim provincial poetess and revealing her to be an acute,forthright social observer and confident poet. Barnard strips back the layers of construction andreconstruction effected by Seward’s posthumously published letters and, to a lesser extent, collectedpoetry. It is well known that Seward began that process of construction herself by re-drafting manyof her letters for publication. What Barnard usefully demonstrates is the extent of this self-construction, including an early fictitious correspondence with an imaginary friend, intended bythe young poet as an exercise in epistolary ability. Most valuable of all is Barnard’s analysis of theeditorial decisions taken by Seward’s literary executors, Walter Scott and Archibald Constable, whoeffectively bowdlerised the poetry and letters, removing whatever was left of their immediacy,honesty and thus value.

Turning to now forgotten stashes of letters, Barnard unearths a fascinating store of informationabout Seward. Highlights include a sensitive treatment of her relationship with John Saville (long apoint of speculation for Seward’s biographers), the sexual skirmishes played out in Seward’scorrespondence with Boswell and a thoroughgoing analysis of Seward’s will, including theintricacies of her literary bequests to Scott.

However, this biography surprisingly and disappointingly fails to engage in any meaningful waywith Seward scholarship. This is no minor oversight, given that the book’s premise is that Scott andConstable’s stewardship of Seward’s reputation is to blame for subsequent misreading andmisrepresentations. Barnard reminds us that there have been ‘biographies written about Sewardwhich do nothing to dispel the image of the unreliable narrator, amateur provincial poet anddomesticated carer of sick elderly parents’ (p.6). Yet one has to scan the bibliography to recover thebest-known of these, Margaret Ashmun’s Singing Swan (1931), while other representative versionsof Seward’s life, such as Hesketh Pearson’s selection of the letters from 1936 and Samuel Monk’s

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© 2012 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies