Background: Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) was a prolific and influential author whose educational writings shaped nineteenth-century children’s literature. While often analyzed for their didactic content, the specific narrative mechanics through which her stories achieve their pedagogical aims remain underexplored. This article addresses this gap by examining her work in the context of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment's intense philosophical and scientific interest in the faculty of attention.

Purpose: This article argues that Edgeworth’s educational short fiction functions as a series of deliberate literary experiments designed to model, direct, and train the cognitive processes of attention in young readers. Moving beyond readings of her work as simple moral allegory, this study repositions her stories as sophisticated "cognitive designs" that engineer specific psychological experiences.

Methods: The analysis employs a cognitive-historicist framework. It first grounds Edgeworth’s literary practice in the pedagogical theories of Practical Education [18], which she co-authored with her father, and connects her ideas to the psychological theories of Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke [25] and Thomas Reid [29]. It then uses principles from cognitive narratology [2, 19] to conduct close readings of her short fiction, including "The Purple Jar" [14] and tales from The Parent’s Assistant [12] and Moral Tales [13].

Findings: The analysis reveals that Edgeworth utilizes a consistent set of narrative strategies to manage the reader's attention. These include the use of significant objects as attentional anchors, carefully controlled narrative focalization, Socratic dialogues that model focused inquiry, and the manipulation of narrative pace to prevent cognitive overload. These techniques work in concert to cultivate not only moral prudence but also skills of scientific observation and emotional self-regulation.

Conclusion: This reading establishes Maria Edgeworth as a pioneer in a form of cognitive realism, who intuitively understood the power of narrative to shape the mind. Her work demonstrates the potential of the short story form as a controlled environment for psychological experimentation, anticipating modern educational concerns regarding cognitive load [34] and deep attention [21].

Maria Edgeworth, attention, cognitive narratology

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