Writers and philosophers of the eighteenth century embraced nurture, or cultural betterment, as a way to counterbalance or transcend the negative threat of nature. In the work of Locke, Swift, Defoe, Rousseau, and other giants of the British Enlightenment, Jenny Davidson recovers these writers' passionate interest in the transformative effects of education and experience. The husbandry of human nature at once embodied and threatened the enlightened ideal of reason, and in following the trajectory of this intellectual history, Davidson not only recasts the fundamental concerns of the Enlightenment but reveals the prehistory of our contemporary struggles with human perfectibility.