historian Patricia Crown on the prints produced by Edward Francis Burney forchildren as puzzles and book illustrations. Equally interesting is a chapter by theliterary scholar Sonja Fielitz on the use of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as means ofeducating young British schoolboys. The third article that extends our notion ofchildren’s literature to include works produced by children and youth themselves isPeter Sabor’s discussion of Jane Austen’s juvenilia. But overall the book does notinclude discussion of any of the many eighteenth-century writers for children inBritain and Europe. Instead, the principal focus is on the representation of children inadult culture, including literature: in popular, sensational material such as theNewgate Calendar (Uwe Böker’s essay) or by well-known novelists such as Defoe,Fielding and Sterne (in chapters by Klaus Peter Jochum, Jan Hollm and DirkVanderbeke respectively). To omit children’s literature from a book with the broad andtimely theme of ‘fashioning childhood’ seems an odd decision.

Jacqueline Reid-WalshThe Pennsylvania State University

Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770-1840. Edited by Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress. 2006. xii + 279. 4 b. and w. illus. £27.99. pb. 978-0-521-02609-3.

This project is in part a response to Mark Philp’s claim that in the 1790s ‘the idealsnurturing sociability collapsed [...] leaving the stage free for the isolationism of theRomantics’, a statement that posits the Romantics as anti-social and Romanticism asa whole as representing the rejection of Enlightenment sociability. The essays in thisvolume attempt to challenge these assumptions and to displace the solitary self ofRomanticism by investigating its sociable other. Russell and Tuite argue in theintroduction that the predominance of the coffee-house and club as models ofsociability within eighteenth-century representations (Jürgen Habermas’s model ofthe ‘public sphere’) has functioned to produce a paradigmatic model of sociability thatis implicitly ‘male and homosocial’. One of the aims of the volume, therefore, is tore-examine this model in order to account for a more diverse range of sites ofsociability, sites that are more inclusive of female modes of sociability, and to accountfor forms of female participation in the public sphere more generally as part of a largerinvestigation of Romantic sociability. The essays examine modes of sociability asdiverse as circles of sedition, international republicanism, Dissenting culture,Romantic lecturing, the theatre and shopping. The social networks of figures such asAnna Barbauld, Frances Burney, Coleridge, William Godwin, Hazlitt, Ann Lister,Joseph Priestley, Robert Merry and John Thelwall are widely explored in essays by anumber of distinguished scholars, including John Mee and Margaret Jacob.

The poet and educator Anna Barbauld is the subject of two of the essays in thecollection. Anne Janowitz uses Barbauld as an exemplary case to consider two modelsof sociability. The first model is that epitomised by the ‘free familiar conversation’advocated by her father, the Dissenting educationalist John Aikin, and practised in theWarrington Academy. The second is a more urban notion of sociability linked to thatpolitical activism which, according to Janowitz, structured an interventionist poeticin the early 1790s. Deirdre Coleman’s essay on Barbauld goes beyond domestic andfamilial collaboration to focus on her close but argumentative relationship withJoseph Priestley. Much as she admired and was influenced by Priestley, Barbauld held

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strongly to a belief in the virtues ascribed to her sex, such as ‘sympathy and affection,sociability and conversation, and innate delicacy of taste’. Coleman claims that in the1770s, under the influence of an emerging culture of sentiment, Barbauld attemptedto ‘soften and temper Priestley’s masculine rigour by subjecting it to an aestheticdiscourse of beauty and sentimental standards of morality’. Crucially, Colemanargues that Barbauld’s critique of Priestleyan rationalism anticipated that of EdmundBurke, in Reflections upon the Revolution in France, fifteen years later.

One of the most illuminating aspects of this essay is the account of Barbauld’sfriendship with Mary Priestley, who, Coleman speculates, is likely to have been thesubject of ‘To a Lady, With Some Painted Flowers’, the poem that was famouslyattacked by Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft cites the poem in full in her A Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman (1792), emphasising and underscoring what she finds mostoffensive in its sentimental comparisons between women and flowers. Interestingly,given Coleman’s observations, Wollstonecraft accuses Barbauld of conforming to asupposed sexual character, which the sentimental language of men such as Burkeperpetuated. Coleman argues that Mary Priestley was central to definitions offemininity and sociability for Barbauld, whereas her husband’s rationality sometimesseemed at odds with the habits of social existence.

Clara Tuite’s engaging essay on Anne Lister’s style provides an alternative textualmodel of sociability and sexuality. Elsewhere, Gillian Russell emphasises theimportance of the founding of the Royal Institution in 1799, which led to anexpansion in sociable Romantic lecturing across Britain in the early nineteenthcentury. Julia Carlson explores Hazlitt and the sociability of the theatre, James Epsteinfocuses on John Frost to explore sociability and sedition, and Deirdre Shauna Lynchinvokes the concept of a ‘counter public’ in an exploration of women and shopping.The sociable contract of writing is the subject of Judith Barbour’s essay on Godwin,whereas John Mee discusses the limits of sociability through Robert Merry’s DellaCruscanism, and Margaret Jacob locates a new kind of sociability in internationalrepublican conversation. This compelling book is commendable for the way in whichit seeks to engage the topic of Romantic sociability in a spirit of open dialogue anddiscussion, conversation being a predominant trope of the volume.

Sam GeorgeUniversity of Hertfordshire

Commerce and Government Considered in their Mutual Relationship. EtienneBonnot, Abbé de Condillac. Translated by Shelagh Eltis, with introductions byShelagh Eltis and Walter Eltis. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 2008. viii + 347. $24/£16.95. hb. 978-0-86597-702-0. $12/£8.95. pb. 978-0-86597-703-7.

Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac (1714-1780), is an important figure in the FrenchEnlightenment, known best for his sensationist psychology. His contribution toeconomics, mainly found in the work translated here, Le Commerce et le gouvernementconsiderés relativement l’un à l’autre, has been relatively neglected, perhaps because itwas originally published in 1776, the same year as Adam Smith’s magisterial Wealthof Nations, and thus does not fit into either of the obvious categories, ‘before’ or ‘after’Adam Smith. This excellent translation may start to right the balance.

Condillac turned to economics late in life. The Cours d’études, which arose out of hisspell as tutor to the Prince of Parma, argues that it is impossible for any individual to

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