When she had completed her fourth children's book, titled Conversations Introducing Poetry, Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History, in 1804, Charlotte Smith wrote to her friend Sarah Rose that she had ‘laboured it I think more than I ever did any book’. Perhaps it felt laboured to her as she struggled under the spectre of an increasingly serious illness (probably ovarian cancer), but this book also presented Smith with a compositional issue she had yet to encounter. Smith's letters to her long-time publishers Thomas Cadell and William Davies, and later to the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, chart the development of Conversations from a ‘School book of Poetry to exercise the memories of Children’ to something quite different. In a series of business negotiations with Johnson, Smith was forced to re-conceive the book: her initial plan for a compilation of miscellaneous poetry – following such pedagogical best sellers as William Enfield's Speaker (1774) and Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts (1789) – was eventually discarded, and a prose narrative woven through a series of poems took its place.

As such, Conversations would seem a reincarnation of Smith's first children's book, Rural Walks (1795), a work she wrote by selecting ‘such pieces of poetry as seem'd likely to form the taste, & … connecting the whole by domestic scenes’. Rural Walks plots the mental and moral development of the main character as both story and lesson, a narrative technique common to children's fictions such as John Aikin and Anna Barbauld 's Lessons for Children (1778–9), Mary Wollstonecraft 's Original Stories from Real Life (1788), and Maria Edgeworth's Early Lessons (1801). Unlike these novelistic fictions, Conversations began as one type of educational work – a poetic miscellany – and became, as Smith worked on it, a composite form distinct from the generic models available to her. The labour of this little book was not in producing materials for it; Smith did not, as Johnson asked, write forty additional pages of poetry.