The pedagogy of conversation in the home: ‘familiar conversation’ as a pedagogical tool in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England

Abstract

This article argues that domestic conversations taking place in a sociable context played a more important role than has hitherto been considered in the intellectual training and development of children. The centrality of conversation as an informal method of training the mind to reason had one important consequence: the publication of the highly successful ‘familiar format’, texts which used ‘conversation’ as the method of instruction. Written mainly but not exclusively by women, these texts were modelled on the instructive ‘familiar’ conversations which were part of the fabric of social and familial exchanges, and were an attempt to extend conversation’s educational effectiveness into a pedagogy. The article also explores why the format became a lost pedagogy.