In the latter part of 1820, Maria Edgeworth, accompanied by her two much younger stepsisters, was on an extended visit to the Continent and staying in Pregny, close to Geneva. From Switzerland, Edgeworth directed a triangular correspondence, the other vertices of which were her ‘dear Triumvirate Council of critics and friends’ at home in the Irish midlands, and the publisher Rowland Hunter in London. Manuscript, transcripts, critical opinions, proofs and views on marketing circulated between the three sets of participants. At issue was the preparation for the press of a work that Hunter would publish in 1821: Rosamond: A Sequel to Early Lessons. At one point in the correspondence, Edgeworth reassured those at home who had expressed doubts as to what was apparently Hunter’s preferred title: ‘Sequel does not exclusively mean end. It means also Continuation or what follows.’ Origins and beginnings are the stuff of myth and glamour; ‘Continuation or what follows’ attracts less notice, but it too can be venturesome. Rosamond occurs in that interstitial period between childhood and young adulthood, taking its young heroine from age eleven to fourteen, an age when girls are considered ‘neither quite as children, nor quite as women’. Frank: A Sequel to Early Lessons (1822) concerns a younger child, nine when the sequel begins and eleven at its close. In spatial terms, both works broach new ground as their young protagonists encounter new social situations and challenges beyond the protected familial spaces in which Edgeworth’s works for younger children, Early Lessons (1801) and Early Lessons Continued (1814), mainly occur. Edgeworth’s sequels represent the receptive and expressive powers of older children as they acquire knowledge of the self and of the world, come to understand themselves as separate from the supportive family matrix and begin to establish themselves as gendered speaking subjects. Through continuation, through the process of imagining ‘what follows’, Edgeworth pushed into new spaces and contributed to an expanded understanding of what fiction might be. The juncture of Edgeworth’s literary career at which these fictions were written was one in which writerly acts of ‘continuation’ held especial resonance. With the death in 1817 of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Maria lost not only a much-loved father but also a literary collaborator, one Edgeworth was inclined to credit as a moving force for her work: ‘it was to please my father I first exerted myself to write, to please him I continued’.

These two extracts frame what might be considered ‘the Bluestocking moment’ which emerged in the 1760s until the conservative response to the French Revolution in the 1790s. The first is a 1741 letter from Jemima Yorke, Marchioness Grey (1723–97) to the essayist and poet Catherine Talbot (1721–70), describing the sociable pleasure and intellectual fulfilment she receives in their mutual reading of Charles Rollin’s Histoire Romaine (1739–50). The second is from Hannah More’s Bas Bleu: or, Conversation, her 1786 manifesto for Bluestocking conversation, blending the languages of commerce, patriotism and intellectual and moral growth. This chapter focuses on the ways in which shared reading was essential in providing the early Bluestocking writers with access to novel ideas, an avenue for sociocultural critique and a vehicle for self-fashioning as an unprecedented generation of public female intellectuals.

The concept of Bluestocking self-education through mutually developmental epistolary friendships has long formed a central concern of Bluestocking scholarship. Sylvia Harcstark Myers famously associated the movement with ‘chosen friendship’ between elite women outside of the family unit. She saw these friendships as a proto-feminist ‘supportive structure’ in which intellectual activity establishes a shared sense of feminine community. Socratic dialogue, Stoic rational community and Aristotelian ‘virtue friendship’.5 Heller defines virtue friendship, originally articulated in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and carried into the eighteenth century via humanist education, as a model of simultaneous self-fashioning and community formation which is affective, rational and grounded in virtue. Heller takes Aristotle’s statement that ‘a friend is another self’ and combines it with Jürgen

Among the phalanx of anti-Jacobin British novels written in the decades after the French Revolution, two late offerings by notable women proffered a social and political attack on what French ideas had wrought, seemingly, on British soil: republicanism, rationalism, sentiment and religious laxity. Written to repudiate French revolutionary notions, both Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809) and Laetitia Matilda Hawkins’ Rosanne: or, A Father’s Labour Lost (1814) focus on female education within the private domestic realm, in particular by highlighting scenes of reading, both cautionary and exemplary, as a guard for British virtues. More was the most important evangelical writer of the post-Revolutionary period; her voluminous literary output, including Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–8), acted as one of ‘the chief agenc[ies] in checking the flood of philosophy, infidelity, and disrespect for inherited privilege that poured fearfully across the Channel from 1790 on’. Coelebs, which employs the Latin for ‘bachelor’ as the name of its hero, was More’s singular attempt to use the form of the novel to carry out her life’s work of reform, employing fiction to argue for conservative politics, evangelical theology and the proper education for women. Hawkins, her contemporary, was equally prolific if less influential, publishing anonymous novels in the 1780s and continuing under her own name in the 1790s and beyond with travel writing, memoirs, conduct books, ‘sermonets’, translations and more novels (her last was Heraline in 1822). Hawkins was the daughter of Sir John Hawkins, author of the first important history of Western music (1776) and the unenviable author of the first biography of Dr Johnson (1787), a work occluded rather spectacularly in the public regard by Boswell’s, published four years later. Hawkins was brought up within the Twickenham sect and was on familiar terms with figures such as David Garrick, Dr Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, the last of whom taught her finger games with paper. Hawkins, like More, used the vantage of her cultural authority and superior education (both women, for instance, knew Latin, Greek, French and Italian; Hawkins also knew Hebrew) to conduct conservative polemical instruction, though both deplored women’s direct intervention into the political sphere.

A literary life is a happy life, as Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840) makes clear in the title of her 1805 novel for children, Visits to the Juvenile Library: Knowledge Proved to be the Source of Happiness. There on the shelves of the actual early nineteenth-century children’s bookshop to which she alludes in the title – Tabart’s Juvenile Library on New Bond Street in London – both the knowledge and the happiness temptingly featured in the story are available for purchase. But it is not quite that easy: to be literate, it is first necessary to become literate. And therein lies the plot.

Fenwick’s novel centres on enticing five recently orphaned reluctant child readers into the rewards of a literary life. As they had been raised in Jamaica, the spoiled (White) children of plantation-owners, they had been accustomed to having an enslaved person attending to every whim. Because their early schooling had been at the hands of a sadistic ‘master’, they had learned to equate education in general and reading in particular with punishments typically inflicted on the enslaved. That is why, when they arrive in London, with their (enslaved) nanny, Nora, to the guardianship of ‘the good Mrs. Clifford’, as she is always called in the story, they want nothing to do with literate life. They are suffering, as the title of the first chapter clearly states, from ‘The Mistakes of Ignorance’, their misery stemming from the fact that they had never learned to be ‘excited to activity of mind or body’ (p. 7). In diagnosing their ills, the good Mrs Clifford notes that it is equally difficult ‘to rouse the curiosity of these children or to engage their affections’ (p. 5). Her challenge is to disabuse them of the idea that education is a form of punishment defined by ‘the terrors of rods, canes, dark closets and stocks’ (to use Nora’s terms), and to coax them into recognising being literate as a good thing (p. 15). In the novel, all ends happily as the children, and their enslaved nanny Nora, discover that becoming literate is physically, intellectually and emotionally rewarding. Teaching people to become literate has of course long been at the heart of the educational project, though the word ‘literacy’ itself did not come into being until 1883 (OED). It would have been alien to Eliza Fenwick and her late-Enlightenment contemporaries.

For scholars of women’s literary education, few names are better known than that of Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810). A prolific author and critic of children’s literature, and a significant pedagogue, Trimmer dedicated her life to advancing education and conservative Anglicanism, with no little success. Commentators report that, in 1800, Elizabeth Newbery’s catalogue of her uncle-in- law’s renowned London bookstore shows that the shop ‘stocked more titles by Mrs. Trimmer than any other author’; and, in its time, Trimmer’s seminal periodical, The Guardian of Education (1802–6), ‘dominated the field of children’s literature reviewing’. Her writing for children was unusually prominent in contemporary circulating libraries,

and her most celebrated children’s book, Fabulous Histories (1786), ‘was a nursery staple for over a century’. Prima facie, it is easy to agree with Frederick Joseph Harvey Darton’s tautological statement that ‘[t]he importance of Sarah Trimmer is that she was important. [… S]he made herself, in respect of her writings for and about children, completely typical of the […] English upper middle-class’.

Given that Trimmer’s name is so well known and that her importance may be taken as read, it is noteworthy that Matthew Grenby – who has lately published most about her life and work – should refer to ‘the vast gap […] between [her] consequence to her contemporaries and her position on the margins of literary history today’. This disparity can largely be attributed to what has become a received wisdom characterisation of her as ‘the enemy of imagination’: a significant description in context because, as James Engell has put it, imagination was the conceptual ‘quintessence of Romanticism’. In imagination, Romanticism determined ‘an idea whose power both to assimilate and to foster other ideas seemed virtually limitless’. Jonathan Wordsworth reports that, for John Keats, ‘that which is imagined will be found to be real’ whilst simultaneously human imagination ‘is in the same relation to its celestial “reflection”, as human existence is to heaven’. William Wordsworth discovered in imagination ‘something mysterious, beyond human experience’, William Blake identified in it the opposite to self-negating rationalism, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought of it as a faculty with layers ranging from tertiary ‘fancy’ to the primary means (at the very least) by which humans perceive everything.

Jane Austen’s remarks about her contemporaries Mary Brunton and Jane West are characteristically double-edged, and in both cases tinged with admiration and professional jealousy. Self Control, not Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, was, as Anthony Mandal reminds us, the runaway success of 1811, while ‘good Mrs. West’s’ Letters to a Young Lady, published in the same year, immediately went through four editions in 1811 alone. In the competitive literary marketplace of the 1810s, Austen’s success was much more modest. Perhaps the more overtly didactic work of West and Brunton had a more immediate and obvious appeal to the readership; perhaps their publishers simply did a better job at marketing their works. In West’s case, of course, she was already a known name by 1811, in the genres of both conduct literature and the novel, and that, in itself, might have been enough to guarantee greater success than could be expected for the debut novel of an anonymous Hampshire lady. But the key point to note is that all three writers were competing for a share of the same market and readership, and that they were benefiting from a particular kind of anti-Jacobin public feeling that, by the 1810s, had come to associate sensibility and emotional freedom with the French Revolution and its terrifying aftermath, and reason, sense and emotional regulation with its opposition.

In Beyond CLIL: Pluriliteracies Teaching for Deeper Learning we demonstrate that learning progressions typically evolve around big ideas in a discipline or a subject. Disciplinary core constructs show how disciplines or subjects use different approaches to collecting, analysing, evaluating and communicating information. This is why, in PTDL, those core constructs are used to inform and guide the development of learning progressions into/for individual subjects. Progress in subject learning is not linear but multi-dimensional and multi-directional. It involves specific ways of thinking and typical forms of representing information and specific text types or genres to share information. Progress in subject learning can be conceptualised as enhancing meaning-making potential. It entails growing conceptual understanding of content knowledge as well as a growing command of subject-specific procedures and strategies. It results from engaging in the specific major activity domains of a subject (doing, organising, explaining and arguing). This idea is captured in Figure 3.1.

Multimedia communication design is a form of complex problem-solving. It requires heuristics which take into account addressees’ cognitive abilities and prior knowledge, the complexity of the subject matter, processing conditions, time limits, and other factors. Multimedia designers have to be aware of the asymmetry between texts and pictures in terms of representational principles and communication functions, including the fact that texts and pictures compensate for their inherent ambiguities by reciprocal disambiguation. Designers have to be further aware that multimedia comprehension starts with initial mental model construction primarily guided by the text, which is then followed by adaptive mental model specification primarily guided by the picture for specific task requirements. Text design should enable smooth continuous coherence formation within the right text modality. Picture design should enable scaffolding for mental model construction and visualize the essential structure of a subject matter with regard to future tasks. Above all, multimedia design needs to adequately synchronize the different comprehension processes.

In future, an increasing number of people will need to learn continuously in order to orient themselves in the quickly changing world around them. Multimedia communication and multimedia comprehension will be key elements of their learning. Accordingly, it is very important to have a sufficiently deep understanding of the psychological processes behind multimedia comprehension. This understanding should be rooted in theory-driven empirical research about the cognitive processing of multiple representations, particularly of texts and pictures. It should also allow practice-oriented basic recommendations to be derived for the design and usage of multimedia. These recommendations should go beyond everyday knowledge, practical experience, intuition, and the use of seemingly professional surface features. Design of multimedia communication has to be based on sufficiently deep knowledge about the psychological processes involved in comprehension and knowledge construction. Practitioners need to receive scientific support for them to better understand the laws of perception and cognitive processing underlying comprehension and knowledge acquisition.

Conceptualising music education not only as ‘music-making’ but as ‘musical meaning-making‘, Valerie Krupp ’s learning episode provides a fascinating example of developing learner musical literacy skills – involving intra- and interpersonal negotiation and reflection and drawing on subject-specific knowledge, skills and processes. She argues that for learners to engage meaningfully in music analysis, recensions, aesthetic arguments and so on, they need to practise and use the language of musical genres and musical inquiry alongside language for critical and aesthetic evaluation. This, she proposes, promotes learner agency, encompassing musical literacies, competences and critical cultural consciousness. Situating the learning episode as praxial, student-relevant and real-world, it concerns the posting of a sea shanty, ‘The Wellerman’, on TikTok. Against all odds, the song ‘went viral‘, leading to ‘in the moment‘ global interest in sea shanties. Learners investigate why such a musical phenomenon took place. This opens up critical inquiry into the socio-cultural context of the shanty genre – classifying, analysing and critiquing musical and social media and analysing user comments. This example could be transferred to exploring other musical genres and interpretations.

Pictures are two-dimensional depictive representations. They include static pictures and animations. The latter are defined as pictorial displays that change their structure or other features over time and trigger perception of a continuous change. Static and animated pictures can display static as well as dynamic content. Both can have an envisioning, explanatory, orientation, organizing, and argumentative function. Picture comprehension entails sub-semantic perceptual processing, semantic perceptual processing, and conceptual processing. Sub-semantic perceptual processing is primarily pre-attentive and data-driven. It results in viewer-cantered and object-cantered visual representations. Semantic perceptual processing is attentive and data- as well as knowledge-driven. It results in object or event recognition. Conceptual processing is attentive and primarily knowledge-driven. It creates complex propositional structures and mental models in working memory. Picture comprehension is based on analog structure mapping under the guidance of perceptual and conceptual representations.

Text comprehension and picture comprehension can be synthesized into a common conceptual framework which differentiates between external and internal descriptive and depictive representations. Combining this framework with the human cognitive architecture including sensory registers, working memory, and long-term memory leads to an integrated model of text and picture comprehension. The model consists of a descriptive branch and a depictive branch of processing. It includes multiple sensory modalities. Due to a flexible combination of sensory modalities and representational formats, the model covers listening comprehension, reading comprehension, visual picture comprehension, and sound comprehension. The model considers text comprehension and picture comprehension to be different routes for constructing mental models and propositional representations with the help of prior knowledge. It allows us to explain the effects of coherence, text modality, split attention, text–picture contiguity, redundancy, sequencing, and the effects of different types of visualization.

Human history has created a large variety of sign systems for communication. These systems were developed at different times for different purposes. While oral language has developed as part of human biological evolution, written texts, realistic pictures, maps, and graphs are cultural inventions. Human oral language might have originated from gestures supplemented by sound patterns. It is a biological anchored feature of the human species, as manifested in somatic, perceptual, and neurological pre-adaptations. Early writing systems used iconic ideograms which were gradually transformed into symbols. This made production and discrimination easier but increased the required amount of learning. Further development led to writing systems using phonograms plus orthographic ideograms. Realistic pictures are older than writing systems. They represent content by similarity but also show allegories of social relationships. Maps are realistic pictures of a geographic area facing the problem of how to present a curved earth surface on a two-dimensional surface. Graphs are visuo-spatial objects representing a subject matter based on analogy due to inherent common structural properties.