Elizabeth Hamilton was a Scottish essayist, poet, satirist and novelist, who in both her prose and fiction entered into the French-revolutionary era controversy in Britain over the education and rights of women.

David Manson (1726-1792) was an Irish schoolmaster who in teaching children basic literacy sought to exclude "drudgery and fear" by pioneering the use of play and peer tutoring. His methods were in varying degrees adapted by freely-instructed hedge-school masters across the north of Ireland, and were advertised to a larger British audience by Elizabeth Hamilton in her popular novel The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808).