The “seeds of order and taste”: Wollstonecraft, the analytical review, and critical idiom

Abstract

Mary Wollstonecraft’s attacks on sentimental fiction in her Analytical Review writings (1788–97) are now widely known. Less familiar is her engagement with the journal’s agenda of “encyclopedic” coverage for the arts and sciences—an agenda that, despite Joseph Johnson’s revolutionary radicalism, was couched in neoclassical paradigms of the early eighteenth century. This essay relates Wollstonecraft’s politics of style, especially as seen in her reviews of non‐fiction, to the Analytical’s particular bid for media reform. Understanding Wollstonecraft’s cultural criticism requires that we appreciate, first, her concern with the delivery of authentic facts, and second, her urge to trace the critical precepts of Samuel Johnson (several of which she adopted) back to what was, for her, the politically questionable but aesthetically compelling worldview of the earlier Augustans, particularly Pope. Augustan tropes of decorum, coherence, interest, and universal harmony animate her reviews of bellestristic and factual texts alike, often lending a personal immediacy to her calls for the betterment of the reading public. With enriching implications for the discussion of her feminist educational theory, Wollstonecraft’s cross‐disciplinary reviews apply an Augustan ethics of knowledge to the issue of informed readership in the 1790s.