This thesis explores how Anna Letitia Barbauld's book Lessons for Children Aged Two to Three Years (1778) facilitated the development of the conversational primer. This genre, which has not yet been theorised, may be identified by the way the texts present themselves as verisimilar and replicable sets of conversations, and depict parent-teachers and child-pupils as companions. This genre challenges the idea that there is a dichotomy between 'adult' and 'child' readers, a concept that inflects many contemporary approaches to children's literature studies. Through a close reading of Lessons for Children and subsequent conversational primers, this thesis suggests that Barbauld's Rational Dissenting value of discursive diversity influenced British middle-class children's culture, enabling the voices of verisimilar children to proliferate children's books on a previously unknown scale. The Introduction establishes ways in which concepts of child-parent relationships were used as paradigms for understanding modes of government in eighteenth-century Britain. Chapter One examines how children's books prior to Lessons for Children addressed different types of implied child readers with the aim of producing members of an ideal society. Chapter Two explores how Barbauld created a space in which parents could participate in the children's literature market through her introduction of the parent-author as a literary trope, her portrayals of verisimilar mother-child interactions in accessible, domestic spaces. Chapter Three charts how Lessons for Children became the prototype from which subsequent conversational primers drew their literary identity. The fourth chapter contextualises Lessons for Children as an expression of Barbauld's Rational Dissent, and posits that the rise of the conversational primer is indicative of the influence of Rational Dissenting values upon British middle-class children's culture. Chapter Five contrasts the afterlife of the conversational primer with children's books that generated readers' imaginative identification with characters. This comparison suggests that conversational primers encapsulated middle-class Georgian ideals regarding familial learning; an historical specificity that is, in part, responsible for the genre's popular demise. This thesis studies the lifecycle of the conversational primer in the British children's literature market. It examines the porousness between paratextual materials and texts, and shows how an individual author stimulated generic development by popularising specific literary tropes. By theorising the genre of the conversational primer, this study provides a new and productive discourse concerning adult-child interactions in children's literature.

Historian David Bell recently suggested that scholars reconsider the impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) upon modern culture, naming them the first "total war" in modern history. My thesis explores the significance of the wars specifically in the British mourning culture of the period by studying the war literature of four women writers: Anna Letitia Barbauld, Amelia Opie, Jane Austen, and Felicia Hemans. This paper further asks how these authors contributed to the development of a national consciousness studied by Georg Lukács, Benedict Anderson, and others. I argue that women had a representative experience of non-combatants' struggle to mourn war deaths occurring in relatively foreign lands and circumstances. Women writers recorded and contributed to this representative experience that aided the development of a national consciousness in its strong sense of shared anxieties and grief for soldiers. Excluded physically and experientially, women would have had an especially difficult time attempting to mourn combatant deaths while struggling to imagine the places and manners in which those deaths occurred, especially when no physical bodies came home to "testify" of their loved ones' experiences. Women writers' literary portraits of imagined women mourning those whose bodies never came home provide interesting insights into the strategies employed during the grieving process and ultimately demonstrate their contribution to a collective British consciousness based on mourning. The questions I explore in the first section of this thesis circle around the idea of women as writers and mourners: What were writers saying about war, death, and mourning? What common themes begin to appear in the women's Romantic war literature? And, perhaps most importantly, how did such mourning literature affect the growing sense of nationality coming out of this period? In the second section, I consider more precisely how these literary contributions affected mourning culture when no bodies were present for burial and advanced the development of a national consciousness that recognized the wars' "nobodies." How did women's experiences of being left behind and marginalized in the war efforts prepare them to conceptualize destructive mass deaths abroad, and, conceptualizing them, to mourn them?