INTRODUCTION: THEORY AND PRACTICE

The Romantic age was arguably one of the most exciting and diverse periods of cultural, political and intellectual upheaval in British history. The period witnessed the transition from the relative stability of Church and State agrarian patriarchy to the frenetic pace of urbanization, industrialization, expansion and imperialism of Victorian culture developments which took place against the backdrop of international warfare, revolution and the rapidly expanding self-consciousness of the working classes through increased literacy and education. Indeed, John Stuart Mill accurately characterized the period as an age of change and proclaimed that the nineteenth-century will be known to posterity as the era of one of the greatest revolutions of which history has preserved the remembrance.1 But such developments resulted in the emergence of a rich array of competing political, religious and philosophical values, ideas and discourses which became hotly contested in the public arena through sporadic controversies and propaganda wars. Mill argued that such debates were symptomatic of the transitions being witnessed, and that fundamentally, disagreements stemmed from the fact that mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines but have not yet acquired new ones. The spirit of the age, Mill thus proclaimed, was marked by its divisions, the division of men into those who are still what they were, and those who have changed: into men of the present age, and the men of the past. To the former, the spirit of the age is a subject of exultation; to the latter, of terror; to both of eager and anxious interest.2 Unlike post-Enlightenment optimists and radicals such as Wollstonecraft, Paine and Godwin, who variously perceived truth and the march of intellect as expanding human understanding and negating sophistry, Mill proclaimed that the grand achievement of the present age is the diffusion of superficial knowledge (a pun on the Society for the Diffusion for Useful Knowledge founded by Henry Brougham in 1826). It is self-evident that no fixed opinions have yet generally established themselves in the place of those which we have abandoned, Mill argued. No new doctrines, philosophical or social, as yet command an assent at all comparable in unanimity to that which the ancient doctrines could boast of while they continued in vogue. Mill advocated the ameliorative powers

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Dialogue, Didactism and the Genres of Dispute

of discussion as means of effecting further wisdom and progress, but proposed that in reality, the discussions witnessed during the period all too frequently gave rise to the clashing of opinions rather than the debating of truth. The tendency to seek refuge in the relative safety and familiarity of opinions instead of embracing challenging, rigorous debate and examination, is better suited to the inclination of most disputants, Mill concluded, and
whether men adhere to old opinions or adopt new ones, they have in general an invincible propensity to split the truth, and take half, or less than half of it; and a habit of erecting their quills and bristling up like a porcupine against anyone who brings them the other half, as if he were attempting to deprive them of the portion which they have.3

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This age of transition witnessed a plethora of debates and propaganda campaigns which sought to persuade the reading public of the truth of their particular ideas, opinions or ideologies. Controversies continually erupted concerning Catholicism, Dissent, evangelicalism, politics, revolution, education, culture, aesthetics and philosophy to name but a few. The Revolution Controversy was foremost in these debates, and epitomized Mills contention that the period witnessed the continual clash of opinions as opposed to the potential for progress proffered by discussion. The revolution in France and the optimism it gave British radicals and liberal sympathizers gave rise to a sense that society was witnessing the dawn of a unique convulsive political earthquake.4 Old things seemed passing away, Southey retrospectively enthused, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.5 But many conservatives were horrified with the extent to which the intellectual and political possibilities associated with such developments were opening up for the working classes. The disparate ways in which these developments were interpreted meant that the nation became effectively polarized, Catherine Macaulay noted, into two distinct camps: those inspired by sentiments of exultation and rapture, and those who felt only indignation and scorn.6 The propaganda war that ensued became increasingly fraught, and the urgency with which loyalists in particular tried to press home their case became progressively more reliant upon blatant didacticism rather than reasoned argument. For the radicals, the witty, lively, common-sensical, venomous and sometimes vulgar blows Paines Rights of Man (17912) dealt the Burkean line of defence, and the sense of urgency which he gave to his grand themes of rights, equality and the constitution, were akin to a literary breath of fresh air, and made converts of a great many persons, Sir Samuel Romilly observed.7 The unassuming directness of Paines work saw him labelled as the honestest of all politicians,8 and as a consequence, the text penetrated the lower layers of society far more effectively than anything seen before. Indeed, as Claeys notes, large numbers of the tract were probably given away

Introduction: Theory and Practice

for free, even being read gratis, it was claimed, to street porters at their pitching places.9 On the other side of the political spectrum, loyalists had no option but to embrace this new stylistic urgency and directness for themselves not to have done so would have allowed the radicals to monopolize the increasingly literate and disaffected members of the working class.10 Both sides of the debate were effectively in a race to capture the understandings and political acquiescence of this rapidly expanding, lower-class reading audience and thus polite and gentlemanly debate gave way, by late 1792, to an increasingly desperate contest for the nations political conscience. The battle of wits became a battle of wills as reasoned debate was forced roughly aside by exhortation intimidation, and as Mark Philp has characterized it, vulgarity.11 Given that the main protagonists of the Revolution Controversy had cast aside reasoned debate, is it not a little surprising, even contradictory to find dialogue as one of the most important and pervasive mediums in use during this and indeed subsequent controversies?12 If we put aside for one moment the obvious and inherent artificiality of the text, the question that needs to be asked is why the two sides of such intensely polarized and deeply prejudiced debates would want to talk to and engage with one another? After all, as Herzog has noted in respect of the Revolution Controversy, in July 1793 the London Corresponding Society (LCS) and Reevess Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers (APLP) met at the Crown and Anchor Tavern at the same time (the Reevites meeting downstairs and the LCS upstairs). Not surprisingly, theres no evidence that they all sat down together and politely tried to thrash out their differences.13 In any attempt to explain the popularity of dialogue as a site for the interaction and negotiation of intensely disparate political, religious and philosophical sentiments and opinions, we first need to define exactly what we mean by the term dialogue and how it is differentiated from conversation. The terms dialogue and conversation and often used interchangeably, but in both their real and textual manifestations, I would argue, they are of a decidedly different character. Notwithstanding the parameters dictated by eighteenth-century notions of politeness (and its associated debates), conversation, as Jon Mee has recently demonstrated, is characterized by informality. Conversation is often and perhaps inevitably the site of disputation, but writers on politeness set out to moderate such tendencies, Mee claims. Indeed, the ethos of polite conversation in the eighteenth-century was widely understood to exclude disagreeable and divisive subjects most obviously religious and political differences, and thus what Addison and Swift saw as the Itch of Dispute and Contradiction was deemed to be decidedly antithetical to proper conversability.14 Johnsons definition of conversation in his Dictionary of the English Language (17556) also reaffirms the Addisonian conception of conversation as familiar discourse; chat;

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easy talk; opposed to formal conference, and crucially, Steele noted that Equality is the Life of Conversation.15 Dialogue, on the other hand, Johnson defines as a conference, in so much as it is still an exchange between individuals in a conversational format, but is more formal, less characterized by chat or easy talk.16 Unlike conversation, dialogue is often the site of contestation and dispute, and, as we shall see, is often associated with instruction and pedagogy particularly in cases it where it resembles catechetical questioning and instead of representing equality, configures the exchange of information in terms of intellectual or social disparities. But in attempting to understand the tendency for dialogue to be utilized so pervasively in cultural and philosophical controversies, we also need expunge from our minds the commonly held notion that the dialogue genre is somehow synonymous with classical republican values and egalitarian Athenian-like debate. It has been widely claimed that Athenian culture, with its emphasis upon egalitarian discussion and political interaction in the Assembly, Law Court and other public places, naturally fostered dialogue as a literary and philosophical form.17 As Shaftesbury claimed, such republican public practices and the dialogue genre are inseparable, and as Lawrence Klein has noted, they form a key ingredient of Greek political achievement since it was the arena in which the common good was determined and where critical understanding and practice became embodied into their literature and arts.18 But I would like to dispute the claim that the literary dialogue can be faithfully and mimetically egalitarian in the same way that real debates supposedly were in ancient Greece. Indeed, I would claim that it is highly debatable whether real dialogue itself can ever be free from the operations of power and coercion, and in this respect dialogue is decidedly different from its more informal counterpart conversation. In what follows, I would like to contend that dialogue (in both its real and textual manifestations), is predominantly didactic and pedagogical. Efforts to negate such tendencies were attempted by radicals, liberal philosophers and even conservatives during the Romantic period in an attempt to conceal the transparency of their didacticism, but such efforts frequently led to a host of other problems, as we shall see later. In terms of real dialogue, it seems highly unlikely that the ideal of ancient Athenian egalitarian debate and public practices (upon which the dialogue genre is supposedly based) even existed. William Young in his The Spirit of Athens (1777) argued that civic participation and disquisition was both democratic and widespread,19 but Socrates condemnation of the prevalence of eristic in Euthydemus suggests that the egalitarian Athenian ideal was not perhaps as ideal as we are led to believe. Indeed, as Martha Nussbaum has rightly suggested, ancient Athens was prone to hasty and sloppy reasoning, and to the substitution of invective for real deliberation (much in the same way as our society is today).20 It is my contention that although real dialogue is less influenced by

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political and ideological agendas than textual dialogue, (simply because the debate is made up of relatively autonomous individuals rather than a single author, and the participants can, if they so wish, remain neutral or independent entities), real debates are nonetheless exercises in either the assertion or acquisition of power. Indeed, evidence which attests to the validity of this contention frequently comes from those advocates who claim that dialogue is egalitarian or guided by the mediation proffered by reason. Jrgen Habermas, for example, claims that the ultimate aim and characteristic of dialogue is the achievement of consensus, but argues that the guiding principle of dialogic debates is reason; a principle that Habermas insists must not only be strictly adhered to in the process of debate itself, but which ought to be attained as a result of consensus. Thus, for Habermas,
the concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld.21

By insisting upon the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, Habermas prescribes that all emotion should be abandoned at the shrine of reason and consensus-bringing dialogue. Indeed, Habermass ideal speech situation excludes all force whether it arises from within the process of reaching understanding itself or outside influences except for the force of the better argument.22 There are shades of Shaftesbury and Priestley here. Shaftesbury proposed that the dazzling bright[ness] of the chief character or hero should be the only deciding factor in dialogic debates, whilst Priestley proposed that reason should be the umpire in all disputes.23 However, in practice Habermass emphasis upon abandoning emotion and embracing reason is hopelessly unrealistic. As Herzog rightly observes, the idea that debate should exclude all force except for the force of the better argument is pointedly unhelpful, perhaps downright incoherent.24 Indeed, the very maintenance of Habermass ideal speech situation requires force from both external and internal influences. As Herzog notes, any imaginable practice of free speech is governed by norms. And norms are enabling constraints Every such constraint is a sign of an antinomy: free speech demands abolishing such constraints and free speech demands maintaining them.25 It is for precisely this reason that the LCS, Literary and Philosophical Societies and other such groups devised strict rules of conduct; drunkenness was prohibited, interruptions forbidden, nobody was allowed to speak more than twice, and in the case of the Philomathian Society, discussions were regulated by an hourglass (although only Godwin and Holcroft had to be curtailed by its

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enforcement).26 Even with such rules in place, however, it was nigh impossible to control the heat of intense argument. George Canning MP testified that even in the relatively polite political enclaves of Parliament, debates could become excessively emotional. Following a debate in 1794, Canning recorded that I was nearly overcome, and as he later found out, he had inadvertently waved his arms around to emphasize his point, accidentally striking Lord Bayham in the process.27 In Macclesfield during 1827, a group of disaffected weavers organized a meeting to discuss the possibility of strike action. The weavers advertised that during the proceedings every man should be heard quietly and be at liberty to declare his sentiments freely, and without interruption. However, as Herzog narrates, despite these rules, when one weaver suggested the merits of meeting ones contractual obligations these champions of free speech pulled him away and rolled him in the mud.28 Passion, emotion and conflict in debates, then, are inevitable. Indeed, Hume describes emotion as universally imprinted in the nature of the human mind as an inescapable psychological reality,29 and for the likes of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and John Thelwall, the very communication of ideas presupposed a willingness to be attacked, [and] exposed to argument and ridicule.30 Indeed, for Thelwall, it is precisely the sentiments which provoke the most hostility and revolt which form the basis of the meditations which eventually terminate in settled conviction.31 Habermas is clearly right in his suggestion that dialogue often ends in consensus but fails to consider the price paid for such consensus. If we assume for one moment consensus is achievable, consensus is inevitably brought about through submission, since at least one participant will have to relinquish their particular argument or opinion (or at least modify it) in order to acquiesce with what the others agree upon (to do otherwise would be to resemble Mills Porcupine bristl[ing] up against his or her opponents). Furthermore, by setting up the force of the better argument as the sole criterion for achieving consensus, those individuals who are not blessed with rhetorical skills are not only inadvertently excluded, but are likely to be sidelined in future debates because the power (or as Gramsci would put it, prestige and subsequent confidence) that the victors acquire (as a result of the consensus their arguments initiate), would undoubtedly set the terms of subsequent debates.32 Indeed, it is nigh impossible to eliminate the operations of prejudice, ideology and power in dialogue, I would suggest, since language itself (the very medium of dialogue) can never be pure or uninfluenced by the intentions of others, as Bakhtin has proposed in relation to language and heteroglossia.33 The philosophically sterile and emotionally devoid suggestion of rationality or consensus in dialogic exchange, then, is an impossibly utopian state, and requires power and force itself, as Herzog has noted, for its very maintenance.

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In Putnams schema for dialogue, meanwhile, the futility of consensusdriven debate is at least contemplated. Indeed, as Myerson has pointed out, for Putnam (echoing Hume), it is psychologically implausible for deep-seated disagreements to be resolved through dialogue, because of their emotional sources.34 However, as Myerson suggests, because Putnam sees emotion as inevitable, he regards careful reasoning, attempted impartiality and critical judgement as all the more important in argument35 an approach very much favoured by Hobbes as a way of controlling conflict.36 In other words, faced with the impossibility of eliminating emotion, Putnam simply prescribes an even more sustained effort to control it, even though the endeavour may merely be an attempted impartiality. For Putnam, advancements in understanding are possible, providing careful adherence to the guiding principle of reason is observed, and as such, consensus is not the overriding aim of dialogue. For Putnam, as Myerson relates, rationality is not necessarily an orientation towards agreement as Habermas would have it, it is the ultimate goal. Thus, providing dialogic debates keep rationality as their goal, real advances occur in understanding, real progress is made in knowledge, despite the search for rationality being endless and devoid of consensus.37 I am not convinced that Putnams schema for dialogue is practical, however, since unless power is brought to bear in dialogue, surely the debate in question would last forever and be rendered perpetually irresolvable? As Protagoras the Greek sophist noted, on every issue on which opinions are put forward, a counter-opinion can be formulated with equal rhetorical force as the original view.38 Putnam postulates that such a scenario is conducive to the discovery of knowledge, but unless the interlocutors seek agreement on what emerges from the debate, surely that knowledge is constantly transitory and of little practical use as a means of making sense of the world around us. Indeed, as Shaftesbury noted, in a free conference men had rather reason upon trifles, so they may reason freely and without the imposition of authority. But in so doing they inevitably refrain from debating the usefullest and best subjects in the world.39 Nothing could ever be certain in Putnams prescription of dialogue, then, precisely because nothing could necessarily be decided upon. Although such a methodology could be useful for interrogating existing knowledge, it is of little practical use for deciding what is, or is not truth. In summary, then, if disputants come to a debate with preconceived but contrary opinions as to the truth of the subject discussed, some opinions have to be defeated or modified if consensus is to be achieved or one particular truth is to prevail. From this, we may surmise that all dialogue that ends, and ends in consensus (of whatever kind, whether defeat, withdrawal, assent or submission), concludes precisely because of an unequal distribution of linguistic, philosophical or rhetorical power. In reality, to make reason and truth the guiding light and ultimate court of appeal is an unachievable aspiration, since reason and truth are themselves

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sites of manipulation or negotiation. As Alexander Pope once realized, to reason right is to submit40 a realization (I shall not say truth) which Habermas, Putnam, and other dialogic theorists such as Giddens and Rawls would have done well to consider. 41 Claims that literary dialogues are egalitarian, meanwhile, seem to fundamentally ignore the inescapable artificiality of the text. In textual dialogues the participants are merely creatures of the authors imagination, and speak through the author rather than through the impetus of their own faculties.42 The author is essentially an unseen God a fact that is inescapable, no matter how much the writer may claim (as Shaftesbury recommends) to have given each character his or her full reason ingenuity, sense and art.43 The only way in which a textual dialogue could possibly replicate the supposedly egalitarian parameters and characteristics of public debate would be for multiple authors (or interlocutors) to contribute to the texts construction independently. During the eighteenth century, several monthly miscellanies and journals tried to produce such a scenario, most notably the Bee (1790), which comprised of assorted correspondents letters, thus creating a sort of discursive, dialogic, heteroglot textual community a society of the text or portable coffeehouse as Klancher describes it.44 As Klanchers phraseology implies, such a text could constitute and represent genuine egalitarian interaction, but even here, surely an editor could exercise a certain amount of authority in the selection, presentation and editing of the correspondents letters and arguments? Such interventions would be entirely expedient in order to prevent the text from losing focus, coherence or becoming unwieldy. Indeed, as Klancher seems to imply in the case of the Bee, it is entirely possible that the letters were not even written by correspondents, but by the editor himself.45 Such activities inevitably skew the ideological direction taken by the society of the text, and as such, it is difficult to see how the text can ever be a purely egalitarian arena. Textual dialogues that have pretences to being accurate, unprejudiced records of real discussions also have to be treated with a great deal of scepticism. Notation brings with it a plethora of problems in terms of accuracy and the presentation of mistaken or distorted meanings and interpretations. In the 1790s, MPs were frequently complaining that the reporting of parliamentary speeches and debates were either erroneous or distorted. As Herzog reports, some complained that the reports actually inverted the meanings of their speeches, either because different reporters used different styles of expression, or, as was often suspected at the time, because of political bias.46 Whatever the reasons for these distortions, notation cannot be trusted as an unbiased presentation of an original dispute because such representations almost inevitably involve some degree of authorial influence, ideology and power (even if it is subtly exercised). Explicit pretences to accurate notation also need to be treated with caution, lest they are a ruse to

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encourage the reader to believe that particular debates are taking place in the public realm when in reality they are not. In The Plot Found Out; A Dialogue between Three Members of the Jacobin Club in France (1793), for instance, the Jacobins are overheard boasting about their intention to plunder all the English gold in our country under the guise of eternally talking about liberty, equality, and the majority of the people a plot which although entirely fictional, was clearly designed to encourage a belief that such plots were actually circulating.47 Textual dialogues, then, are also predominantly arenas for the expression and negotiation of power (although as we shall see in my final chapter, dialogic satire frequently attempts to problematize such tendencies). Even Platos dialogues are not egalitarian exchanges concerning the discovery or communication of truth. Rather, they are about power, authority and education traits that Cicero exploited (albeit more openly) in his expository dialogues. The fact that Socrates frequently teaches us very little, or that his discussions frequently end up back at their starting point (as in Euthyphro, Lysis, and Protagoras for example), is integral to his educational agenda. In the concluding remarks of Lysis, for example, Socrates summarizes that nothing has been agreed upon, or discovered, and that the concept of friendship remains a philosophically indefinable enigma. Such an ending cannot be dismissed as a failure, just as it cannot be dismissed as deliberately open ended in order to promote philosophical speculation and debate. Rather, power and ideology has been exerted, particularly in respect of undermining the eristic methods of the Sophists (for whom rhetoric and the winning of an argument at all costs, rather than the pursuit of truth, was the main aim of oral discussions and arguments). Although we are still no nearer truth (or a definition of friendship) at the conclusion of Lysis, an agenda has been executed, and hence, necessarily, power and influence also, as is so poignantly demonstrated in the frequency with which an interlocutors only function is assent (true, very true, that is certain and the like). Indeed, as Richard Robinson has pointed out, such instances suggest that Socrates teaching often comes dangerously close to the eristical method he was attempting to confute, and can actually be interpreted as symptomatic of the degeneration of Platos own method.48 Dialogue, then, is a uniquely manipulative arena in which ideas can be rendered convincing under the pretence of doing so in a demotic and egalitarian fashion. Adverse ideological or philosophical ideas can be attacked, debated and ultimately defeated in dialogue, hence why the genre is so important in political, religious and philosophical controversies and propaganda wars. Indeed, as Bartholow Crawford has charted, between 15501745 surges in the publication of dialogues correspond exactly with periods of public excitement, and thus the genre has considerable significance as a true expression of the spirit of the times.49 One of the principal benefits of dialogue over essays or other forms

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of monologic exhortation, I would argue, is its ability to present the truth or falsehood of a particular idea through a demonstrable process of interaction. Although inherently artificial, dialogue enacts a process of persuasion and conversion which in itself lends credibility to the ideas being promulgated. As Richard Hurd argued in 1771,
for though Truth be not formally delivered in Dialogue, it may be insinuated; and a capable writer will find means to do this so effectually as, in discussing both sides of a question, to engage the reader insensibly on that side, where the Truth lies.50

Such persuasion is achieved precisely because arguments are not simply formally delivered and left for the reader to concur with its views (or so it would be hoped), but the truth is actively demonstrated, carefully expanded and systematically ratified before our very eyes. This is particularly advantageous, Jesse Foot claimed in 1795, because
the ignorant will find their advantage, by having the question placed fairly before them, and without its being frittered away as to elude their capacity; and the designing will not have it in their power so easily to escape from that of which they cannot bear to be convicted, because by their theory it has been contradicted.51

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The truth of the debate which has been undertaken, then, is not proven to us by virtue of a discourse simply outlining a series of facts to best advantage in the hope that they will be sufficiently compelling to be persuasive, but by demonstration a tactic that is not only provides clarity, but leaves the designing with little room for manoeuvre or escape and effectively ostracizes those still unconvinced. One of the most useful ways of conceiving of this process, I would suggest, is to view dialogue as a form of literary mentoring. The use of the terms mentor and mentoring as a means of defining the role and approach of a tutor or guide was originally conceived by Homer in The Odyssey. In Homers epic, Telemachus (Odysseuss son), is informally guided and taught by a wise tutor named Mentor, and the term has been applied to such roles ever since. Mentoring is undoubtedly a supremely effective mode of education, and as Shaftesbury rightly pointed out, in a matter of reason, more is done in a minute or two by way of question and reply than by a continued discourse of whole hours. Anna Barbauld and William Godwin suggested similar advantages.52 Yet within a literary text, mentoring becomes more problematic, since the process is either fictional or reported, and is thus inextricable from the materiality of the text and the ideological intentions of its author. Indeed, the mentoring is largely an indirect process owing to the inescapable spatial, material, interpretive and psychological gap that exists between the author, the text and the reader. The latent materiality of the text renders it incapable of acting directly as a mentor, and as such the

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process of dialogic mentoring and guidance is represented to us via the interplay of words and ideas between the interlocutors on the page as a substitute for real face-to-face mentoring. The mentoring contained within the literary dialogue, however, can only become an effective process for the reader (rather than merely a representation of such a process), when he or she identifies with the authors fictional, but representative protg a situation which is made possible, to borrow Habermass terminology, through the authors use of audience-orientated subjectivity.53 In other words, the words and opinions of the protg (and sometimes the mentor, depending upon the intended audience) are crudely and deliberately stereotyped to encourage the reader to identify John Simple, Manufacturer, Farmer, or Parishioner, to cite but a few examples, as their surrogate or representative within the text. Simultaneously, the mentors language is also often geared towards an inclusivity which is intended to transcend the text. A perfect example of this process is demonstrated in the frequent use of the words you and your. In Thomas Vivians Three Dialogues between a Minister and One of his Parishioners (1762, rep. 1790), to cite just one example, the Minister (or mentor) appears to speak to both the parishioner and the reader (the protg) simultaneously now consider what you have heard from me, the Minister bellows, read your Bible, examine yourself, and pray unto God to give you a sense of your real state and a right judgement in all things.54 Similarly, in A Bird in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush (1792), John Frankly reprimands George Careful for attending a debating club: you must be a fool, George, to run the risk you do; pray, what is that but Treason? if you have any Regard for your Character, youll scratch your name out.55 One cannot help getting the overwhelming feeling that the mentor in these dialogues is talking directly to us as readers. Indeed, as Harvey Sacks has commented, the openness of you means that you can in fact be a way of talking about everyone and indeed, incidentally of me. You, as it expands and eventually meets everyone, excludes no one a process which, as Althusser has put it, ultimately hails and interpellates us to within the ideological parameters of the utterance.56 In other words, such hailing and inclusive openness not only facilitates our identification with the protg within the text, but affirms that we have identified with him, precisely because we feel and recognize that we are both being addressed simultaneously. This relationship is never explicitly described or demonstrated within the text, and indeed, is distinctly divorced from the text, occurring psychologically in the mind of the reader. The process of dialogic, literary mentoring is thus hidden from immediate view, and occurs almost by accident rather than design. Indeed, the fact that the reader is not directly a recipient of the authors mentoring is almost a condition of the process working, and although modern critics easily recognize and often deride the opaqueness of such strategies, 57 for eighteenth-century writers its comparative subtlety was conceived as an immensely important and persuasive

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alternative to direct exhortation. As Edward Wynne commented whilst explaining the instructive, didactic nature of dialogue, men must be taught as if you taught them not, and by such methods, the process of teaching something by feigned characters, and in an imaginary conversation thus softens the rigour of professed instruction.58 The notion of dialogic mentoring was not new to the Romantic period of course. Writers of expository dialogues had used the tactic of mentoring for centuries, and as we have seen, even Socrates was a mentor. Religious dialogues and catechisms were particularly common sites of dialogic mentoring, and provided an important model, I would suggest, for the political mentoring that occurred during the Revolution Controversy. What makes dialogic mentoring so interesting during the 1790s and beyond, however, is the fact that it was used for the first time for the political edification, education and acquiescence of the workingclass reader. It should be noted that although dialogue was a popular medium for political propaganda in previous centuries, especially during the Civil War and the Restoration, the Revolution Controversy was the first period in British history in which political dialogues were written specifically for working-class readers. Prior to 1792, politically contentious subjects discussed in pamphlet dialogues included issues such as the divorce of Henry VIII, the Siege of Ostend in 1602, the prerogative of Parliament, the state of Ireland, and the contentious interrelationship between the Tories and Jacobinism all subjects which would have been debated in the higher echelons of society and did not require the engagement of the working classes.59 Nevertheless, mentoring was a familiar literary tactic for both working and middle-class reading audiences during this period, and was thus readily transferable to political issues and contemporaneous controversies. Despite the fact that working and middle-class readers may never have even heard of existing models of political mentoring (Fnlons highly influential The Adventures of Telemachus [1699],60 for example, or classical texts such as those written by Plato or Cicero), dialogic mentoring was very much integral to working and middle-class culture and reading practices. Vast numbers of individuals living through this period would have read the widely distributed religious pamphlets that had deployed dialogic mentoring throughout the course of the eighteenth-century, whilst mentoring would also have been frequently encountered through the process of learning to read and being catechized. For most working-class readers in the late eighteenth-century, literacy was gained as a result of the combined study of both the alphabet and the catechism in the local Sunday or Charity School. As Ian Green has suggested,
whatever the school, the first texts they [the pupils] would have encountered were twofold: The ABC with the Catechisme and The Primer and Catechisme, two works which served the double function of helping children to learn to read English and to

Introduction: Theory and Practice learn the catechism The idea of pairing an ABC with a dialogue or catechism seems in England to date from the mid-1540s there were six sets of alphabets, syllables, numbers from one to three hundred, the Prayer Book catechism, and at the end a series of graces to be said before and after meals.61

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Once the alphabet had been mastered, then, most people would have encountered The Prayer Book Catechism, the slightly less demanding Westminster Shorter Catechism, or one of a raft of alternatives such as those by Nowell or Calvin during their acquisition of literacy. Indeed, catechisms were an integral part of educational and moral training for the middling and upper classes, and many university students found themselves having to learn and be examined on increasingly complex catechisms as benchmarks of their academic progress, many of which were in Latin, Greek and Hebrew.62 The statistics are both various and sketchy, but both contemporaneous and modern day accounts of reading audiences estimate literacy as running at about two-thirds of the population in this period63 of these, most would have encountered the catechism soon after mastering their ABCs. The proliferation in the number of Sunday Schools in this period made a significant contribution to this expansion of literacy and its associated assimilation of literary mentoring. Indeed, as Sarah Trimmer pointed out in 1799, never was greater attention paid to the religious instruction of the children of the poor than at present a phenomenon which relied heavily on the use of catechisms in Sunday and Charity Schools, as Lord Beilby, Sarah Trimmer, and literary critics and historians such as Green, Laqueur and Rickard have attested.64 But crucially, as Ian Green has insightfully suggested in relation to the English Civil War, the penetration of catechisms within society was sufficiently prevalent for propagandists to judge that the use of the question-and-answer technique would be familiar to and might attract the attention of potential readers65 a conclusion that seems even more applicable to the print culture of the Romantic period given the rapid expansion of reading audiences and the active promotion of Sunday School catechizing. In short, then, alongside the classical and philosophical examples of mentoring available during the eighteenth-century (which were probably only read by upper and middle-class readers), all sectors of society were permeated by an acute awareness of catechetical/dialogic mentoring and pedagogy. Indeed, the formalistic distinctions between catechisms and the dialogue genre are extremely fluid, and as Sarah Trimmer, Isaac Watts and Edward Wynne all noted, the catechism bears many similarities with dialogue. Indeed, for Wynne, the catechism might be considered as the first rude form of dialogue.66 Given the importance of dialogic/catechetical mentoring in the acquisition of literacy, then, the dialogue was clearly a major literary form in this period which cut across social and class boundaries, and was a principal vehicle for the formation of social, political and religious identities and opinions. Indeed, in this respect it could be argued that the dialogue was

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Dialogue, Didactism and the Genres of Dispute

more significant than any of the canonical Romantic-period genres such as the novel, poetry, drama, and the essay. As a prominent cultural model for dialogic mentoring, the sufficiently prevalent and familiar use of the catechism clearly laid the foundations for the ready assimilation of catechetical style dialogues and mentoring throughout the Romantic period, particularly as a form of propaganda and pedagogy, and is thus of immense importance to our understanding of the dialogue genre during this period and its significance, to borrow Crawfords phrase, as a true expression of the spirit of the times.

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