Frances Ferguson is the Mary Elizabeth Garrett Chair in Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. She has written three books (Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 1977; Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation, 1992; and Pornography, The Theory, 2005) and essays on a variety of eighteenth and nineteenth century topics and literary theory. She is currently working on a project that aims to identify the difference that Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Bentham’s work on children and education made to their accounts of modern democratic political liberalism.