Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute: Literary Dialogue in an Age of Revolution by Adrian J. Wallbank (review)

In his postscript, Adrian J. Wallbank explains that his project was meant to "open up multiple avenues for further research . . . into this seriously neglected literary genre" of the written dialogue, gesturing toward the beginnings of a history of "dialogic didacticism" in the Romantic era (217). The book meets these expectations well by revealing in elaborate detail this overlooked genre, and suggesting ways that Wallbank's readings can help complement our approach to already canonical markers of the period.

Historically speaking, Wallbank anchors his study to major and minor events at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The French Revolution's impact on British thought, the provoking works of Thomas Paine, and the Jacobin/Anti-Jacobin debates are prominent touchstones. Also of importance is the Blagdon controversy, which figures in a chapter discussing the move from catechetical dialogue to more of a mentoring framework. Here it must be noted that Wallbank could usefully provide a more comprehensive explanation of the nature and timing of this controversy, although the readings of the texts which he provides are impeccable.

Number twenty-five of the Pickering and Chatto series of books on the Enlightenment, Wallbank's contribution offers a gift to those unfamiliar with this genre—which is, frankly, most of us—in the subtlety of his definitional framework, especially in its dealing with the didactic. Using primary sources (Steele, Johnson, and Shaftesbury being the most noteworthy) as well as modern theorists of the making of the public sphere (particularly Habermas and Bakhtin), Wallbank distinguishes between conversation and dialogue as he posits the latter as being more "often [a] site of contestation and dispute," and more of a location for "instruction and pedagogy—particularly in cases where it resembles catechetical questioning" and for shaping "the exchange of information in terms of intellectual and social disparities" (4). Wallbank's marked sensitivity to class leads him onto the grounds of evangelical dialogue and some responses from the Anglican Church that are especially enlightening and little studied.

In his explorations of evangelical dialogue, Wallbank offers an insightful consideration of Hannah More and the Sunday School Movement, seeing them as a key source for loyalist propaganda in the 1790s as well as for religious conversion. His care in reading More's Turn the Carpet; or, the Two Weavers (1796) leads him to expose the ambiguities and dilemmas produced by the genre in general and More's praxis in particular. Paralleling More's tract with the idea of contraries in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Wallbank speculates that these "ambiguities" (40) could be resolved through a change in the dialogue genre itself.

In tracing how the genre responds to these problems as it moves into the nineteenth century, Wallbank highlights several formal variations within its didactic practice. These astute observations train us to be more capable readers of moments of didacticism in canonical literature of the period. Wallbank describes how working- and middle-class readers "are figured" in these dialogues, observing that they do not have the political or philosophical background of classic but elite works such as those of Plato and François Fènèlon. Instead, these readers were familiar with forms of "mentoring" dialogue such as the church catechisms (12-13). He concludes that therefore, "alongside the classical and philosophical examples of mentoring" of elite texts, "all sectors of society were permeated by an acute awareness of catechetical/dialogic mentoring and pedagogy" (13). Further into the nineteenth century, however, these forms of overt and often heavy-handed dialogic mentoring give way to the "development of 'interrogative,' inconclusive and less heavily directed dialogues" as typified by Robert Southey's Colloquies (1829) and other lesser-known exemplars (189).

Wallbank's reading of Southey's Colloquies adds to the recent revival of interest in Southey and his works and what we might label the conservative turn of the 1820s and '30s, carried...