Anna Letitia Barbauld's ‘To Mr. Barbauld, with a Map of the Land of Matrimony’ and the History of Sentimental Cartography

Abstract

ABSTRACTAnna Letitia Barbauld's poem ‘To Mr. Barbauld, with a Map of the Land of Matrimony’ (1775; 1825) and its illustrated companion piece, ‘A New Map of the Land of Matrimony, Drawn from the Latest Surveys’, first published anonymously by Joseph Johnson in 1772 but attributable to Barbauld, show their creator playing in original ways with courtly and libertine variants of the map of love and marriage: a genre of allegorical and sentimental map tracing its provenance to ‘La Carte de tendre’ or ‘The Map of the Country of Tenderness’, conceived by Madeleine de Scudéry for inclusion in her multi-volume prose romance Clélie (1654–61) and given illustrated form by François Chauveau. Taken together, map and drawing indirectly serve to illuminate Barbauld's complicated position within Enlightenment feminism and invite new insights into her relationship with the canonical male Romantics, reaffirming her status as a key transitional figure between Neoclassicism and Romanticism in the contribution she makes to the historical debate over the relationship between different arts (and, more specifically, to the historical debate over the relationship between the visual and verbal arts).