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Practical Education Edgeworth11-Prelim.Fm Page Ii Friday, September 5, 2003 10:52 AM Edgeworth11-prelim.fm Page i Friday, September 5, 2003 10:52 AM THE PICKERING MASTERS THE NOVELS AND SELECTED WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH Volume 11. Practical Education Edgeworth11-prelim.fm Page ii Friday, September 5, 2003 10:52 AM THE PICKERING MASTERS THE NOVELS AND SELECTED WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH GENERAL EDITOR: MARILYN BUTLER CONSULTING EDITOR: W. J. McCORMACK Edgeworth11-prelim.fm Page iii Friday, September 5, 2003 10:52 AM THE PICKERING MASTERS THE NOVELS AND SELECTED WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH VO L U M E 11 EDITED BY Susan Manly PRACTICAL EDUCATION Edgeworth11-prelim.fm Page iv Friday, September 5, 2003 10:52 AM First published 2003 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or inany information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. © Taylor & Francis 2003 © Introductory notes and endnotes Susan Manly 2003 BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA A catalogue record for this book is available From the British Library LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA A catalogue record for this book is available From the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-1-85196-186-3 (set) Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Edgeworth11-prelim.fm Page v Friday, September 5, 2003 10:52 AM VOLUME 11 CONTENTS Introductory Note vii Acknowledgements and Dedication xxv Practical Education 1 Index 431 Endnotes 449 Textual Variants 495 Plates 513 v Edgeworth11-prelim.fm Page vi Friday, September 5, 2003 10:52 AM These volumes are dedicated to the memory of Mitzi Myers and her contributions to scholarship. Edgeworth11-intro.fm Page vii Friday, September 5, 2003 10:59 AM INTRODUCTORY NOTE Composition Practical Education first appeared in two consecutively paginated quarto vol- umes in 1798, published by the radical Unitarian bookseller Joseph Johnson, friend and publisher of many learned and literary Dissenters, including Joseph Priestley, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and her brother and co-author, John Aikin, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes, Mary Wollstonecraft and Hum- phry Davy. The intellectual and politicised sociality suggested by the names here is very much a feature of Practical Education: not only its methodology and its allusiveness, but also its origins as an Edgeworth family project, mark it as founded in communal exchange, creative community, correspondence and conversation – not as the theoretical or speculative work of a solitary author, nor as a closed, fully established system, unlike Rousseau’s Emile (1762), to which those who have not read Practical Education often compare it. Although written by Maria Edgeworth, the work has – partly because of her habit of self-denigration – frequently been attributed to Richard Lovell Edgeworth (RLE), with Edgeworth herself regarded simply as an amanuen- sis. In the second volume of the Memoirs of RLE, for instance, Edgeworth proudly claims that her father was ‘the first to recommend, both by example and precept, what Bacon would call the experimental method in education’, and in a letter to Abraham Rees, reproduced in the article on Moral Educa- tion in his Cyclopaedia, she is anxious to claim RLE as her co-author (Rees, however, expresses his belief that although the chapters on chemistry, mechanics and classical learning may not be entirely hers, these are extrane- ous to the more significant sections of the work).1 Edgeworth is careful to acknowledge the input of her father, her half-brother, Lovell, and Thomas Beddoes in the Preface to Practical Education; but, as family archives make clear, it was she who revived the registers of child observation, originated by her first stepmother, Honora Sneyd Edgeworth, which are the foundation of the work. Throughout the period of actual writing, moreover, as Mitzi Myers points out, Practical Education was regarded in the family as ‘Maria’s great work’. She habitually referred to it as my ‘toys and tasks’ until late in its genesis, when other family members were enlisted for help with topics such as chemistry and classics. Only in later years, well after its first publication, was the credit for its pioneering programme transferred to RLE.2 The present work takes this first edition of 1798 as the copy-text. vii Edgeworth11-intro.fm Page viii Friday, September 5, 2003 10:59 AM WORKS OF MARIA EDGEWORTH: VOLUME 11 RLE maintained a lifelong interest in education: he had famously attempted to raise his first child, Richard, according to Rousseau’s theory of education in Emile, although not with any success, and was the originator of a method of learning to read ‘without tears’, described in the chapter on tasks in Practical Education and subsequently published as A Rational Primer in 1799. Later he was a leading member of the Irish Board of Education, set up in 1806 to make recommendations for a national school system in Ire- land, and in 1816 set up his own non-sectarian boys’ school at Edgeworthstown under Lovell.3 But it was Honora Sneyd Edgeworth (m. 1773; d. 1780), not RLE, who first determined to rethink established ideas about educating children using her observations of her own family. As Edgeworth recalls in the Appendix to Practical Education, Honora ‘resolved to write notes from day to day of all the trifling things which mark the progress of the mind in childhood. She was of opinion, that the art of educa- tion should be considered as an experimental science, and that many authors of great abilities had mistaken their road by following theory instead of prac- tice.’ This attempt to create an experimental science based on what children actually say and do, attending to what this reveals about their thought proc- esses and trying to use this sympathetic understanding to make teaching more effective and more adapted to children’s interests, attention spans and abilities, was taken up by Edgeworth and made foundational to Practical Education: ‘Her plan of keeping a register of the remarks of children has…been pursued in her family; a number of these anecdotes have been dis- persed in this work…we hope that from these trifling, but genuine conversations of children and parents, the reader will distinctly perceive the difference between practical and theoretic education’.4 The 1798 publication was not the first Edgeworth book with the title of Practical Education, in fact: an identically entitled work, written by Honora Sneyd Edgeworth with RLE, was privately printed in 1780. This was a story about two children, Harry and Lucy, frankly educational in nature, in which children ask questions and parents answer.5 The aim of Honora’s book was ‘to unfold in a simple and gradual manner such of the leading principles of human knowledge, as can be easily taught to Children from four to ten years of age; to inculcate the plain precepts of morality, not by eloquent harangues, but by such pictures of real life, as may make a Child wish to put himself in the place of the characters intended to excite his emulation…and as much as possible to lead the understanding from known to unknown problems and propositions.’6 Like this earlier work, Maria Edgeworth’s own Practical Edu- cation is presented as an ongoing experiment in observing learning minds, not setting out to harangue its readers with moral ‘declamation’, nor to lec- ture the children who appear within its pages; not anxious to prove a theory or to promote a ‘peculiar system’, but rather to suggest ways of interacting creatively with young minds which have been tried and tested on real chil- viii Edgeworth11-intro.fm Page ix Friday, September 5, 2003 10:59 AM INTRODUCTORY NOTE dren in real life. Her Preface emphasises this lack of theoretical ostentation by stressing that Practical Education is to be regarded as a synthesis of ideas, the Edgeworth family’s own ‘practice and experience’ combined with what has been tested and proved valuable in the ideas of previous writers on education.7 Edgeworth had early been set to thinking about education herself. Nota- bly not one of the Edgeworth children to enjoy the inclusion in family life integral to the kind of education depicted in her work of 1798, she had been sent away to school soon after her father’s second marriage, and was still there when Honora died in 1780. One of RLE’s first acts on recalling her to the family circle in Edgeworthstown, aged fourteen, was to give her a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which discusses education as well as political economy; and very soon after this, in 1782, he had set her the task of translating Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis’s epistolary educational treatise, Adèle et Théodore.8 But in keeping with the emphasis on practical experience suggested in Honora’s instigation of the child register, Edgeworth derived many of the ideas later encapsulated in Practical Education from her involve- ment in the life of the family. By 1783, RLE had nine children – three of whom were the offspring of his union with his third wife – Elizabeth Sneyd Edgeworth, Honora’s sister – and six children from his first two marriages. Maria Edgeworth was soon involved in the main preoccupation of the Edge- worth women – the education of the younger children.
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