Heard George (aged 6) … read in Sandford and Merton [although?] the scenery of which was at Venice and in Turkey. This raised his geographical enquiries. He placed the map of Europe, found the places named and had much general conversation concerning the map of [C?] which fitted up all our time, perhaps more usefully than by our routine of learning.

For Anna Larpent, George's mother, the realization that time was more usefully spent learning geography in conversation than by memorization deserved a comment in her journal. Indeed, a few weeks later she noted ‘taught both Boys much geography by Maps and Conversation’. She was not alone. Based on her experience of teaching her numerous siblings, Maria Edgeworth also relied on conversation as a teaching method because she had established that ‘whatever can be taught in conversation, is clear gain in instruction’. My purpose in this chapter is to explore conversations as a polysemic practice of the leisured classes which provided an informal mode of education. In the first part, I discuss social and familial conversations as a mode of conduct and mental training for children. In the second part, I trace the emergence and the demise of a new textual pedagogy based on conversation, the ‘familiar format’ – didactic texts constructed as conversations.

Conversation as oral culture

From the early eighteenth century, conversation in social spaces was defined and experienced as the ‘archetype of an art of living and thinking, linked to morality’. That morality required that conversation be instructive as well as entertaining. Conversation was not just talk, it was a mix of entertainment and ‘improvement’. ‘The two chief ends of conversation are to entertain and improve’, Swift had declared early in the century, and towards its end, bluestocking Hester Chapone declared it is ‘almost impossible that an evening should pass in mutual endeavours to entertain each other [in conversation], without something being struck out, that would, in some degree enlighten and improve the mind’.