Anna Barbauld

English writer

• Born: June 20, 1743
• Birthplace: Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire, England
• Died: March 9, 1825
• Place of death: Stoke Newington, England

Barbauld, a Unitarian dissenter, was one of the most respected and well-known literary figures of eighteenth century England. Although she is renowned for her poetry, which addresses topics ranging from domestic issues to political propaganda, she also was an influential writer of educational and children’s literature and was a literary critic and an editor.

Early Life

Anna Barbauld (BAHR-boh) was the eldest child and only daughter of Jane Jennings Aikin and John Aikin, a Presbyterian dissenter and distinguished minister and schoolteacher. Anna received a conventional domestic education from her mother, customary for girls at that time, and later convinced her father to teach her Latin and Greek. At an early age (she was able to read by the age of three) she began to read extensively in her father’s library and learned French, German, and Italian.

When she was fifteen years old, her father became a tutor at Warrington, the leading dissenting academy established to provide an education for nonconformist clergymen who were excluded from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Although as a girl she was not allowed to study at Warrington academy, she nevertheless was able to profit from the congenial intellectual environment. She remained aware, however, of the differences between her limited educational opportunities and those of her younger brother John, with whom she maintained a close relationship until his death in 1822. She published her first volume of poetry in 1773, which proved to be a great success and paved the way for her prolific writing and career. She encountered the same success with her Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (coauthored with her brother) in 1773.

In 1775, she married Rochemont Barbauld, a clergyman of French descent and a former pupil at Warrington, and moved with him to Palgrave in Suffolk, where the couple set up a boarding school for boys. The years in which Barbauld spent educating children also established her career as a writer of educational literature. Her marriage seems to have been a happy one, and many of Barbauld’s poems, including “To Mr. Barbauld, with a Map of the Land of Matrimony,” celebrate her relationship with her husband.

Life’s Work

Anna Barbauld’s writing life was long and varied, but she is best known for her poetry. While some of her poems focus on topics traditionally considered to be feminine—such as love, domestic life, nature, and religion—she was also the author of satires and political poems. Her first collection, Poems (1773), already introduced her different voices. The collection includes personal poems for friends and family, such as “On Mrs. P[riestley]’s Leaving Warrington”; Romantic poems, such as “A Summer Evening’s Meditation”; and political poems, such as “Corsica.”

Barbauld acquired her reputation as an educational writer for children mainly because of Lessons for Children (1778, 1779, 1787, 1788), devised for her adopted son, her nephew Charles Aikin—the Barbaulds had no children of their own—and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781). After the Barbaulds’ resignation from the school, they toured France and Switzerland. When they returned to England, they settled in Hampstead and Anna Barbauld continued teaching small numbers of both girls and boys.

She resumed her friendship with bluestockings Hannah More and Elizabeth Montagu, and she wrote several political pamphlets. As a Unitarian dissenter, she was a spokeswoman for liberal causes and for peace, but the times were difficult for dissenters. The Barbaulds were publicly criticized and threatened because of her husband Rochemont’s refusal to sign loyalty oaths to the government. Consequently, Barbauld advocated equal rights for all citizens with her pamphlet Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790). In another pamphlet, entitled Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation (1793), she denounced England’s declaration of war against France. In addition to her pamphlets, her poems testify to her politics and courage. She announced that she was strongly in favor of abolition with the poem Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade (1791). However, she was more conservative in other works. For instance, with “The Rights of Woman” (wr. 1793, pb. 1825), she entered into a debate with Mary Wollstonecraft on the role of women in society. Women’s sphere, Barbauld argued, was the domestic one, even though her position here stood opposed to her own public voice.

In 1802, the Barbaulds moved to Stoke Newington to care for Anna’s brother, John Aikin, whose health had declined. Here she began her editorial work with The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (1804). In the following years, Barbauld’s private life deteriorated, as Rochemont was increasingly affected by a mental illness that led him to attack Anna with a knife in 1808; the attack led to the couple’s separation. Later that same year, Rochemont committed suicide. Anna’s grief led her to seek comfort in religion and to concentrate even more of her energy on writing; in 1809, she began contributing to the Monthly Review and later edited fifty volumes of the series The British Novelists (1810), each prefaced by a biographical and critical sketch and introduced by her essay “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing,” which made her one of the leading literary critics of the day.

In 1812, her most famous poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, was published, in which she criticized the long-lasting war between England and France and prophesied that England as a nation would be surpassed like other powers in world history. The poem is a culmination of her lifelong political views—consequently, she attacks England severely for sacrificing its democratic principles. This provoked aggressive criticism and the accusation of treason, so that Barbauld, although she continued writing, did not publish further texts independently. Ultimately, it was John Wilson Croker’s harsh critique in the Quarterly Review that seemed to have effectively silenced her at the height of her powers as a poet—an incident that underscored the reality that social criticism and political criticism were not only dangerous but often also forbidden discourses, especially for women.

After Barbauld’s death in 1825, her niece Lucy Aikin published The Works of Anna Lætitia Barbauld, with a Memoir by Lucy Aikin (1825) and A Legacy for Young Ladies (1826). Her still unpublished manuscripts and papers were destroyed in the bombing of London in September, 1940, the early days of World War II.

Significance

Anna Barbauld was acclaimed for her genius and talent. Contemporaries such as Oliver Goldsmith, William Wordsworth, and the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge praised and admired her poetry in particular. However, resentment against dissent and the general, negative reactions to Enlightenment radicalism in the early nineteenth century contributed to Barbauld’s professional demise. Her poetry was revalued, but not until the 1980’s, and she has yet to receive adequate credit for her work as an educator and critic.

Barbauld’s work has received less attention than it deserves, likely because it defies simple categorization. Although she held strong views on liberty and equality, she cannot be classified exclusively as a feminist writer. While much of her work is influenced by political discussion, her poetry also uses homely and playful subjects and has a tone that has been regarded as “feminine.” Furthermore, although she is received as a political author today, her religious works are often ignored as well. Her independence of thought and her intellectual versatility have made it a challenge to classify and define her work and her political positions.

Bibliography

Bradshaw, Penny. “Gendering the Enlightenment: Conflicting Images of Progress in the Poetry of Anna Lætitia Barbauld.” Women’s Writing 5, no. 3 (1998): 353-372. Analyzes the conflict between a feminine set of ideal Enlightenment values in Barbauld’s poetry and an opposing set of masculine concepts, including exploitation and repression, particularly visible in slavery, colonialism, and the exploitation of nature.

Keach, William. “Barbauld, Romanticism, and the Survival of Dissent.” Essays and Studies (Romanticism and Gender) 1998: 44-61. Disproves Barbauld’s image as “pretty poetess” by retracing the dissenting culture in Romanticism, which is central to much of her poetry up to the 1790’s and beyond.

McCarthy, William. “’We Hoped the Woman Was Going to Appear’: Repression, Desire, and Gender in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Early Poems.” In Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley. Hanover, Md.: University Press of New England, 1995. Argues for a biographical reading of Barbauld’s poems, which uncovers her concern with gender, female desire, the construction of “woman,” and her own subjectivity.

McCarthy, William, and Elizabeth Kraft, eds. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Accompanied by an accessible introduction to Barbauld’s poetry, a chronology, and extensive notes on each poem.

Ross, Marlon B. “The Birth of a Tradition: Making Cultural Space for Feminine Poetry.” In The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry, edited by Marlon B. Ross. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Situates Barbauld in a transitional phase in which sociohistorical conditions transformed the “bluestocking” into the “feminine poetess.” Analyzes Barbauld’s place among her contemporaries by interpreting her political, polemical, and more “feminine” poems.