In Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia several concerns of the eighteenth-century mock artists – their didactic technologies, their investigations in the physically extended and tacit dimensions of human cognition (‘intuitive analogy’, in Darwin’s terms) – received the attention of scientific inquiry. Darwin’s friends Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth fed his ideas back into educational discourse in Practical Education and then forward again into Maria’s novel Belinda. She had written one of the last eighteenth-century mock arts, her ‘Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification’. Belinda represents a final convergence of Industrial Enlightenment didactic experiment with an older tradition of mock-didactic social satire. Readers have complained that Edgeworth’s writing is hampered by its didactic impulses and by their uncertain instructive ends. This concluding chapter argues that the intentions of her fiction are coherent when read as part of the Enlightenment mock-technical tradition.

This chapter explores how political economy was understood in Joseph Johnson’s periodical, the Analytical Review, by investigating which publications were listed under the heading of ‘political economy’, and how they were reviewed. It thereby illuminates how political economy was understood in Wollstonecraft’s intellectual milieu. Political economy emerges as a heterogeneous discourse where political and moral ideas mixed with the economic, and where discussions of human nature, and human motivation, as well as of civil society, were often prominent. Writings reviewed as ‘political economy’ in the Analytical Review reveal how the term was used by radical and progressive thinkers as a means for collecting a range of critical perspectives on contemporary society, as well as setting out possible means of improvement. In the eyes of the Analytical Review, political economy offered the prospect of enacting reforms which might increase the happiness of ordinary people, and a means of critiquing existing injustices.

In the third interlude, ‘The Storm’, I examine the performance of a single song by one singer, the crippled black sailor Joseph Johnson. Taking an approach somewhat indebted to Timothy Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat, I pursue the elements bound up in Johnson’s performance right across the globe, from the Antipodes to Jamaica, from Versailles to the West End stage, placing this East End performance within an imperial narrative of cultural appropriation, assimilation, and identity formation. Johnson emerges as in many ways the epitome of the ballad-singer: a marginal figure disadvantaged by both race and injury, whose self-fashioning (based on Jamaican Jonkonnu practice) was designed to reposition himself at the heart of both metropolitan and national notions of patriotism.

This essay explores the multiple literacies of Indigenous writers from the earliest moments of American settlement, with a particular focus on early New England. The chapter sketches out the contours of early New England Native writing: its principal figures; its plural etiologies and intent; and its contested emergence at the fractious join of Native and settler spaces, institutions, and worldviews. Moving from John Eliot and his earliest missionary attempts to produce a new kind of alphabetic literacy for Indigenous converts, the essay documents the tensions between missionary-driven literacy projects and Indigenous uses of such literacy for specific political and cultural reasons. From 18th century figures like Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson to the 19th century writer and activist William Apess, Native writers produced rhetorically sophisticated texts that expressed a deep commitment to the continuity of Native peoples.