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This chapter looks at the period 1790–1811. It argues that the French Revolution and subsequent wars with France created a sense of national emergency that caused writers such as Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, Jane West, Henrietta Maria Bowdler, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld to try to defend their nation and religion by venturing into traditionally male areas of theology and politics. These years marked a turn in popular opinion against women’s involvement in politics and print culture, so the women I discuss were trying to fulfil what they understood to be their ‘Christian profession’ at a time when the extent of female activity was being curtailed. (This is evident in the very proper Britannias who appear during these years contrasted with a Medusa-haired, rampaging French Liberty.) The writers I discuss negotiated the constraints of propriety by being published anonymously, pseudonymously, or posthumously.

The chapter focuses on “monitorial education,” schooling built on a pyramid system in which one master teaches several students, who teach several more. Two British teachers, Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell, each developed his own version of this pedagogical strategy at the end of the eighteenth century. In Britain, the question of whose system to use became heated: nonconforming evangelicals supported Lancaster, a Quaker layman; strict Anglicans supported Bell, a Church of England cleric. America picked up on the Lancasterian brand of monitorial instruction, dismissing Bell as tainted by antirepublican ecclesiasticism. In doing so, reformers across the religious spectrum supported monitorial education as a way to instruct America’s youth in a broad Christianity that was not sectarian. Lancasterianism thus introduced educational leaders to the idea of regimented schooling and offered a concrete example of religious schooling anchored in a broad evangelical consensus but not tied to any distinct denomination.

This chapter discusses the animals of early children’s fiction, showing that their didactic and affective purposes are rooted in the period’s conception of childhood as a time of special closeness to animal being. Children’s writers teach children to grow away from animality, but also use animals to encourage the child reader’s sympathy. The fiction’s message of kindness to animals depends both on reminding children of feelings they share with nonhuman creatures and on explaining human superiority. The chapter argues that children’s writers make a distinct contribution to a developing literature of animal subjectivity. They make significant innovations in narrative techniques for representing nonhuman viewpoints, not only in their use of animal narrators but in third-person narrative access to non-linguistic animal minds. Writers include Dorothy Kilner, Thomas Day, Sarah Trimmer, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Dorothy Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, and Edward Augustus Kendall.