ABSTRACT
Published the same year as the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, Maria Edgeworth's Practical Education has several striking similarities with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's collection of poems. Edgeworth emphasizes the intellectual agency of children in regard to language when she discusses the importance of clear, perspicuous language in her chapter on grammar. Edgeworth alludes to John Horne Tooke's Epea Pteroenta, recommending it to parents, and expressing a wish that Tooke would write 'an elementary work in a simple style, unfolding his grammatical discoveries to the rising generation'. Edgeworth thus echoes and evokes Tooke's own arguments linking abstract language and political corruption, in which he had shown how language had been annexed to serve the interest of the ruling order, inducing the masses by association to reverence such terms as 'majesty' and 'law'. In his home county of Longford, R.L. Edgeworth's politics made him unpopular with both landed gentry and ultra-Protestant middlemen.
