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Barbauld's Lessons: The Conversational Primer in Late Eighteenth‐Century British Children's Literature
Author(s) -
Lim Jessica Wen Hui
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12648
Subject(s) - persona , middle class , reading (process) , trope (literature) , literature , class (philosophy) , sociology , art , history , psychology , linguistics , humanities , political science , computer science , philosophy , law , artificial intelligence
This article examines how Anna Letitia Barbauld's Lessons for Children Aged Two to Three Years (1778) facilitated the development of the conversational primer. This genre is characterised by the authorial persona of the parent‐author, and by its conversational format, in which texts present themselves as verisimilar and replicable conversations in the British middle‐class family home. Through a close reading of Lessons for Children and subsequent conversational primers, this article suggests that Barbauld reshaped the history of British middle‐class children's culture, transforming the mother‐teacher into a marketable literary trope and portraying domestic spaces as accessible and immersive sites of child education.