The critical essay emerged in the eighteenth century in writing that described natural and artistic objects, and in the process inspired readers to think about the nature of their experience. This chapter traces the critical essay’s evolution from Joseph Addison’s Pleasures of the Imagination through the work of nineteenth-century essayists like Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt, culminating in the academic literary criticism of New Critics such as I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks and more recent practitioners such as D. A. Miller and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Mary Wollstonecraft came to write about education in much the same way that John Locke and Immanuel Kant did: she wrote after having taught. Running a school with her sisters Everina and Eliza for a time and working as a governess to the daughters of the Kingsborough family in Ireland prompted her to set down her ideas about the work that a teacher should perform and the difficulties that the teacher might face.1 While Locke and Kant recommended that parents choose their children’s tutors carefully and pay them well, Wollstonecraft’s experiences led her to outline her pedagogical ideas in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and to produce instructive fictions in Original Stories from Real Life (1788).2 She took a broad view of education, and imagined that it did not merely concern the teaching of particular subjects such as spelling or math. In her extensive survey, education offered an opportunity to develop moral and political skills for daily living, even in the confines of a household. As Wollstonecraft observed in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, education was essential if women were to be able to be good mothers and wives, and not to tyrannize children and servants out of a sense that they were themselves tyrannized.3

When William Wordsworth published his ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, he disparaged many things that had come to seem the signal attributes of poetry: elevated diction, personifications of abstract ideas and ‘phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets’ (LB 101). His aim in his poems, he said, was to justify his conviction that poetry could do without such elegances, and to describe ‘incidents and situations from common life. … In a selection of the language really used by men’ (97). He wrote in the conviction that poetry needed to tap into the most fundamental sources of pleasure, rather than the most refined, and identified his own writing more with the perceptions of rustic people than with those of professional poets. In particular, he singled out ‘the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude’, which he instanced as ‘the life of our ordinary conversation’ (111). Conversation itself – what one person might actually say to another in the process of exchanging remarks in their different voices – might provide an example and a standard for poetry. Comparing lines from the ‘Babes in the Wood’ with some that Samuel Johnson had written in order to mock poetry using ‘language that closely resembles that of life and nature’ (113), he implicitly drew a distinction. Dr Johnson’s lines do not rise to the level of good poetry, because they do not rise to the level of conversation, something that one person might actually feel impelled to tell another.

The various essays that constitute Wordsworth's prose oeuvre bear a strange relationship to the literary marketplace. They are the work of a writer frequently interested in current issues and events (when he writes about the Convention of Cintra, for example, or the Kendal and Windermere Railway, or copyright). Yet even these, the most topical of Wordsworth's essays, also manifest his consciousness of being at some remove from those events. It was a detachment, in part, simply circumstantial. Think, for instance, of Wordsworth's political analysis of the Convention of Cintra, which concluded Napoleon's efforts to bring Portugal into the 'Continental System', his Europe-wide closure of ports to British trade, and to oust the British. Wordsworth wrote the essay on the Convention of Cintra in the Lake District, relying on British newspapers from the middle of September 1808 for news of the Convention and the complex political manoeuvring that Napoleon engaged in with the Spanish and Portuguese, and was continually adjusting his understanding of his audience. He initially planned to express his views at a County Meeting, but later sought publication for the essay as a series of entries in Daniel Stuart's daily newspaper The Courier, and then commissioned De Quincey to shepherd the pamphlet through publication by Longman's at the end of May 1809. Delays overtook the project. The essay that had begun as a contribution to current political debates lost most of its audience before it ever reached them. Sales were minimal, and Wordsworth's earlier plan to bring out a second edition of Cintra dissolved in the face of scant demand for the first.