My title is taken from the following passage in William Blake's epic poem Milton:

This essay is not concerned with Blake directly, but aims to unpick some of the hidden relations behind the hegemonic eighteenth-century idea of the conversation of culture. ‘Conversation’ is a ubiquitous term in eighteenth-century historiography, but there seems to have been little work done on what constituted conversation as what we might term a literary and verbal technology, or how it stood in relation to ideas of controversy and freedom of speech. In Habermas's account, for instance, conversation is the means by which private opinions come to be transformed into the public sphere, but neither he nor his many followers have looked in much detail at what constituted conversation (as opposed to other kinds of discourse) in and for the period. What were the contentious others, I want to ask, against which conversation was defined? Is conversation defined as part of a continuum with contention, dispute, and controversy, or is it seen as part of a binary opposition with such terms?