Written by Molly Beverstein

Born in 1743, Anna Letitia Aikin, later Barbauld, was one of the most visible and respected literary figures of the late eighteenth century. She was an accomplished poet, opinionated essayist, literary critic, and author of endearing stories and verse for children. Although her work was praised and admired by contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Montague, William Wordsworth, and Sir Walter Scott, her writing also met with harsh opposition. Most notable was a scathing criticism of her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven published in the Quarterly Review, written by John Wilson Croker, a politically conservative critic infamous to us for his virulent assault on John Keats as well. Croker is thus the antagonist accused by Shelley in Adonais of having caused Keats's death. He seems at the least to have been a poor judge of poetry. Although Barbauld continued to write until her death in 1825, people often attribute a decline in her published output to her distress over Croker's attack. As in the case of Keats, however, Croker's effects on Barbauld may be more mythic than real. In general, her writing has been eclipsed by the works of other Romantic authors, and the varied pleasures of Barbauld's work have been critically neglected. However, the engaging, confident, and logically assertive nature of her work makes it worthy of resurrection.

Born at Kibworth, Leicestershire, Barbauld was the eldest child of Rev. John and Jane Jennings Aikin. Her childhood was spent in the stimulating academic setting of her father's school for boys, which nurtured her acute imagination and intellect. By the age of three she could read, and as a young woman had mastered French, Italian, German, and Latin. When she was 15, her father accepted the position of classical tutor at Warrington Academy in Lancashire, augmenting Barbauld's opportunity for academic growth. At her younger brother John's persuasion, she published her first volume of poetry in December 1772, Poems, which was an immediate success and went through four editions in its first year. The following year she published with equal success Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773) which she coauthored with her brother. In 1774, she married Rev. Rochement Barbauld, and the couple moved to Palgrave in Suffolk where Barbauld spent a good deal of her energy starting and managing a boys' school with her husband. The Barbaulds were unable to have children of their own, so in 1777 they adopted their two-year-old nephew Charles Aikin, who was the inspiration for her Lessons for Children, a series of stories for young readers published in 1778-1779. Her next and most remembered work was Hymns in Prose for Children which was designed, as Barbauld says in the preface, to impress the "idea of God" on the infant mind. It was published in 1781, went through 30 editions by 1849, and was translated into five languages.

In 1787, the Barbaulds moved to Hampstead to be closer to John Aikin, and here Anna wrote and published several politically charged essays, including An Appeal to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (March 1790), and Sins of the Government, Sins of the Nation (1793) . Also in 1793, she again collaborated with John to publish a collection of children's fables entitled Evenings at Home. Rochement Barbauld's escalating mental illness climaxed in his suicide in 1808, causing Anna Barbauld much pain and grief. However, his death allowed the opportunity for her to concentrate more energy on writing. The following year she began contributing to the Monthly Review, and later, she supplied biographical prefaces and edited 50 volumes of the British Novelists series (first ed., 1810). She also compiled a collection of the best English works for women readers entitled The Female Speaker in 1811. Eighteen twelve marks the publication of her satiric poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, which gravely forecasted the fading of the power of the British Empire. She continued to write letters and articles until her death in 1825, a few months shy of her 82nd birthday.

In his memoirs, Joseph Priestley called Barbauld "one of the best poets [that England] can boast of." Half a century later, Jerome Murch wrote in his biography of Barbauld, "I have chosen this subject because I fear it is not generally known or not sufficiently remembered how much English literature owes this woman." Barbauld's work reveals that her talent was as unusual as it was real, that her fame in her own lifetime was well deserved, and that the pleasure and insight to be gained from her work was as valued during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century as it is today.

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