Barbauld's Lessons: The Conversational Primer in Late Eighteenth‐Century British Children's Literature

Abstract

AbstractThis 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.