The expressed ambition of Jon Mee's Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762 to 1830 is to explore the tensions within the idea of what David Hume called the “conversable world” of eighteenth-century sociability. Mee sees conversation as a key concern of the period under scrutiny, arguing that discussions about the nature, purpose, and proper forms of conversation were also and simultaneously arenas for working out community and cultural values. His book thus considers conversation in relation not only to the “literature, contention and community” of his title but also to the major philosophical and cultural debates of the period. Late eighteenth-century culture, he argues, conceived of itself as “a form of conversation” (37), even if it had to struggle to accommodate a number of contradictions in order to do so. The book aims to trace a series of metaphorical clusters or tropes that formed around the notion of conversation in the long eighteenth century and to consider what these metaphorical tropes might mean. Mee discusses conversational paradigms based on the metaphors of conflict and harmony, coffeehouse and cloister, femininity and masculinity, freedom and tyranny, commerce, circulation and exchange, and a number of others, and in so doing, he explores the ways in which both conversation itself and ideas about conversation helped to define and shape a sense of British national identity from the 1760s onward.

The book is structured broadly chronologically, in two parts. The first part covers the conversational paradigms of the eighteenth century in the first chapter, with sections on the influence of Addison and Steele's Spectator and Tatler essays, David Hume, Isaac Watts, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This chapter outlines the main debates over conversation encompassed by these writers and locates these in their various contexts. The second chapter explores the relevance of the expansion of the public sphere to conversational ideals in the years before 1790. There is a strong focus on the gendered nature of different habits and practices of conversation in this chapter, as well as an extensive discussion of Dr. Samuel Johnson and his circle. The second part of the book looks in detail at how the conversational models identified in the first half of the book play out in a number of specific examples from the 1790s onward, with chapters on the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle, the Lake Poets, Jane Austen, and the Cockney School. The volume ends with a short epilogue, which briefly, and provocatively, outlines some of the ways in which eighteenth-century ideas about conversation might constructively be applied in the modern university context.

Conversable Worlds is characterized throughout by its attention to precise historical context and traces a number of subtle but important changes, as well as continuities, in conversational ideals and practice over the course of the period it surveys. The book is motivated by an attempt to historicize conversation, but Mee rightly resists the temptation to try to tie particular conversational paradigms to specific historical moments, focusing instead on the range of ideas and practices that are concurrently demonstrated by his material. In the discussion of the preeminence of Johnson's robust and adversarial conversations, for example, Mee takes pains to point out that for all those who regarded Johnson's talk as “a sign of cultural mastery” (95), there were a number of his contemporaries and friends who preferred, and themselves adopted, a more consensual mode of conversation. Similarly, in his discussion of William Hazlitt, Mee identifies the contradictions within Hazlitt's own thinking about conversation's possibilities, as manifested in Liber Amoris (1823).

Mee's attention to historical and textual detail across an extremely wide range of genres and texts is meticulous, although very occasionally generic differences are elided in the service of the wider argument. Given the already expansive scope of the volume, it is perhaps churlish to wish for a discussion of yet another set of sources, but this reader at least felt the lack of a sustained analysis of theatrical dialogue, in which so many of the conventions that are implicit in more domestic forms of conversation are made explicit. But this is a very minor omission in a work that is both extensive and intensive in its treatment of its complex subject matter.

Jon Mee's work takes its place among a number of recent books about eighteenth-century and Romantic sociability, and it self-consciously positions itself as being part of a process of intellectual exchange. Mee's book begins with what he calls a “conversational gambit,” in which he recognizes the “gamble” of conversation—the possibility of unintended consequences—and ends with an acknowledgement of “the hazards of dissemination.” Mee characterizes the long eighteenth-century republic of letters as “a place of [fruitful] collision, misunderstanding, resistance, and silence as much as recognition or communion” (281), and then invites his readers to carry on the conversation begun in his book. It is a timely invitation, and an implicit challenge to scholars and teachers. If we do accept his hypothesis that our own culture was decisively shaped by the conversational paradigms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then we might like to think seriously about how the competing models of “collision” and “ease” that Mee identifies operate within our own political and institutional structures. Thus might the conversation continue.