Chapter 7 - The Art of Teaching to Invent

Summary

In Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia several concerns of the eighteenth-century mock artists – their didactic technologies, their investigations in the physically extended and tacit dimensions of human cognition (‘intuitive analogy’, in Darwin’s terms) – received the attention of scientific inquiry. Darwin’s friends Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth fed his ideas back into educational discourse in Practical Education and then forward again into Maria’s novel Belinda. She had written one of the last eighteenth-century mock arts, her ‘Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification’. Belinda represents a final convergence of Industrial Enlightenment didactic experiment with an older tradition of mock-didactic social satire. Readers have complained that Edgeworth’s writing is hampered by its didactic impulses and by their uncertain instructive ends. This concluding chapter argues that the intentions of her fiction are coherent when read as part of the Enlightenment mock-technical tradition.