The Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century was so named for an intellectual movement that shook the foundations of Western civilization. In championing radical ideas such as individual liberty and an empirical appraisal of the universe through rational inquiry and natural experience, Enlightenment philosophers in Europe and America planted the seeds for modern liberalism, cultural humanism, science and technology, and laissez-faire Capitalism This volume brings together works from this era, with more than 100 selections from a range of sources.

NOTE: None of these titles are the Penguin edition listed on your syllabus.

NOTE: None of these titles is the Penguin edition listed on your syllabus.

Published in 1749, the story of Mrs. Teachum and the nine pupils who make up her "little female academy" is widely recognized as the first full-length novel for children, and the first to be aimed specifically at girls. The daily experiences of Mrs. Teachum's charges are interwoven with fables and fairy tales illustrating the book's underlying principles, which draw on contemporary theories of education and virtue.

Among the earliest novels written about children, for children, The History of Sandford and Merton was enormously popular for a century and a half after its first publication in 1783-9. The novel is Enlightenment for beginners, offering a course of education in class, race, and gender to its six year-old protagonists, the robust farm-boy Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton, the spoiled boy from the big house. Sandford and Merton offers entertaining and practical lessons in manners, masculinity, and class politics. This Broadview Edition includes the original illustrations, along with contemporary reviews and other material on childhood by John Locke, Thomas Day, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others.

Desmond is a political novel about the French Revolution. Charlotte Smith's only epistolary work, it is her most politically radical piece. Written in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Smith's Desmond fuses political discussion with romance, social satire and a suspenseful plot revolving around a liberal hero desperately in love with a woman who is married to a drunken anti-revolutionary. Whereas Burke represented the French Revolution as a sentimental drama, Smith draws out the parallel between political and domestic tyranny to show how the disenfranchisement of British women under eighteenth-century common law resembled the political tyranny of the French absolutist monarchy.

First published in 1791, Elizabeth Inchbald's story of the courtship and marriage between a ward and her guardian, a Catholic priest, prefigures Jane Austen in its sureness of touch and subtlety of characterization.

He appears to be persecutor and I the persecuted: is not this difference the mere creature of the imagination?'Young Caleb is a guileless servant who enters the employment of the charismatic Ferdinando Falkland. Falkland, an apparently cosmopolitan and benevolent country squire, is subject to unexplained melancholy, and Caleb becomes convinced that he harbours a dark secret. His discovery of the truth leads to false accusations against him, and an unremitting and vengeful persecution as suspenseful as any thriller.The novel is also a powerful political allegory, inspired by Godwin's passionately held beliefs concerning social justice in the decade following the French Revolution.