Students of Barbauld will appreciate the exhaustive notes and the impressive list of sources. Butthe book should also succeed in making the subject interesting for the non-academic reader; indeed,McCarthy’s passion for Barbauld is infectious. He highlights how her way of addressing issues is stilltopical and fruitful. In the Afterword, headed ‘Wisdom in Time of Need’, he explains how he firstencountered Barbauld through Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation, which he read during the FirstGulf War. What McCarthy succeeds in making abundantly clear is how Barbauld’s defence ofEnlightenment values is still meaningful in our world.

Silvia GranataUniversity of Pavia

Mémoires. By Jean-François Marmontel. Edited by John Renwick. Paris: Honoré Champion. 2008.876 p. €135 (hb). ISBN 978-2-7453-1714-8.

Marmontel, a major figure in his own time, was a remarkable phenomenon. From the most modestorigins (a poor family in the upper Dordogne), the boy develops his talents with his Jesuit teachers,first locally and then in Toulouse, where he wins poetry prizes at the Jeux Floraux. At Voltaire’sinvitation he comes to Paris, where he duly composes tragedies, initially with great success, whichmakes him all the rage. He spends five years at Versailles working for Pompadour’s brother Marigny.He is given the directorship of the Mercure, for which he also composes the Contes moraux, a serialbest-seller which founds a new sub-genre. He writes for the Encyclopédie, developing his literaryarticles as a Poétique française, which aids his entry in 1763 to the Académie. His Bélisaire is a succèsde scandale and starts another fashion. Earlier a librettist for Rameau, he now collaborates moresuccessfully on comic operas with Grétry, and will subsequently work with Gluck’s rival Piccini. Atfifty-four he weds a woman of eighteen. Domestic happiness and prosperity are complemented byhis election in the 1780s as Perpetual Secretary of the Académie and appointment asHistoriographe du Roi. But then this astonishing career within the ancien régime comes up againstthe Revolution. Marmontel weathers the first wave, and is re-appointed to the Mercure but in 1792

deems it wise to retreat with his family to Normandy. There he lives modestly, composing hismemoirs and other works, until his death, which occurs fittingly on the day before the eighteenthcentury ends.

The Mémoires, purportedly written for his children, are less intimate than socially oriented, thenarrative portrait of an age. Implicitly they also show how, with charm, application and luck, asmart young man may succeed in the privileged world while remaining ‘simple et vrai’. Marmontelmixes with almost everyone. He moves easily between the court and the philosophes, actresses andwell-born salonnières, gens de lettres (essentially his own group) and administrators, bohemians andchurchmen. In retrospect he sketches each milieu and its leading figures, often by a rapid series ofepithets or short clauses which still owe more to witty moraliste writing than to sensibilité. Butaffectionate evocations are many, and antipathies few (Caylus, Rousseau, with whom he issomewhat obsessed, and more surprisingly Helvétius). In his own account he is always up to thesituation, amiable in personal dealings but rarely fooled, keen to please but with a sense of his owndignity, pleasure-loving but moderate, principled but with a genius for reconciliation, consistentlyambitious while retaining a certain distance – prudential, Christian or stoic – from the world. Asuccessful practitioner in many genres, Marmontel the memorialist strikingly changes hisdiscursive mode when he arrives at the Revolution. The sociable and distinctly ‘literary’ character ofthe first eleven Books is displaced by a close historical account and analysis of public events,admirably informed and clear, if increasingly hostile, in the next eight. This reflects the radicalchange in his own life, and in the collective life of France.

The present volume is a second and substantially revised version of John Renwick’s earlier criticaledition (although, strangely, this is not stated on the title page). From 1972 to 2008 there have beena number of modifications.The text itself is now modernised.The notes, while still mainly factual, areconsiderably more numerous and extensive (drawing on another thirty-five years of research). Thelengthy Introduction is mainly the same, with the bibliographical sections duly expanded to include

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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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