Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education.

The definitive eighteenth-century work on female education, which called for greater attention to be paid to the intellectual, sentimental, and religious education of women.

The third edition, printed the same year as the first, of this popular treatise by the educationalist and woman-of-letters Hannah More (1745-1833) attacking the prevailing system of education of middle-class women, which she believed had led to a general decay in the moral and intellectual standards of society.

'In her review of her contemporary attitudes towards female education she criticized both Jean-Jacques Rousseau's doctrine of sensibility, which turned women into creatures of mere sentiment, and Mary Wollstonecraft's belief in female rights, which encouraged women to adopt an aggressive independence... At the heart of her educational ideas lay the evangelical conviction that children were tainted with mankind's original sin and so should be considered "as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions, which it should be great end of education to rectify" (vol. 1, p. 57). Notwithstanding the apparent pessimism of such beliefs she rejoiced at the situation of her sex in the Britain of the 1790s and called on her fellow women to take advantage, as she had, of these blessings' (ODNB).

With provenance for the English gunmaker and inventor William Greener (1806-1869), who patented a design for an electric lamp some 33 years before Thomas Edison's patent of 1879.

Third edition; 2 vols; 8vo (19.5 x 12.5 cm); printed on blue tinted paper, ownership inscriptions in pen to half-title of vol. I and titles of vols I & II, bookplate to front pastedown of each vol.; contemporary tree-calf, contrasting red morocco lettering-pieces to spine, joints rubbed and starting to split but holding, spine ends chipped exposing headbands, a little marked; xix, [1], 292, [2]; vii, [1], 327, [1]pp.