Maria Edgeworth’s Moral Tales and the Problem of Youth Rebellion in a Revolutionary Age

[From Introduction]: "In the wake of the French Revolution, the threat to social order intensified anxieties over children and popular influence. O’Malley addresses the fiction for young readers by one of the key figures of late eighteenth-century children’s literature, Maria Edgeworth (Moral Tales for Young People (1804)), alongside More’s Cheap Repository Tract literature, and considers how Edgeworth helped shape the dominant paradigm of didactic, purposeful writing for children. Edgeworth, O’Malley argues, uses didactic forms to both reinscribe the differences between children and adults, while at the same guaranteeing the successful reproduction of adult standards, behaviours, and ways of thinking in the young. Edgeworth was also the author of successful conduct works, including Essays on Professional Education (1809), which she wrote with her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth."