ABSTRACT
Prefaced to The Grammatical Play-thing, or, Winter Evening’s Recreation, for Young Ladies from Four to Twelve Years Old (1800), is ‘A dialogue, containing directions for playing the grammatical game’. Dominating the dialogue is one Miss Henrietta, who for most of the preface’s nine pages resists both the attractions of grammar and her teacher ‘Mrs Friendly’. Grammar, according to Miss Henrietta, is ‘dull’, ‘hard’, ‘difficult to comprehend’, ‘disagreeable’, and of no ‘use’.2 One of Miss Henrietta’s roles is obviously that of the blocking figure characteristic of pedagogical dialogues,3 and the degree and duration of her resistance must ostensibly serve to highlight the effectiveness of the pedagogical methods published by Mrs Eves, one of the proprietors of Birmingham’s Crescent School, an expensive institution for a select number of girls. However, as Cajka has observed, Mrs Friendly’s methods of persuasion are illogical as well as unkind: she eventually converts Miss Henrietta by humiliating her socially, not by persuading her of a demonstrable connection between studying grammar and speaking well.4
