Echoes of Protest: Barbauld’s Anti-War Afterlife

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines Anna Barbauld’s public protest through her antiwar afterlife and her contemporaneous reception, including accounts of her support for the French Revolution in the Belfast News-Letter. The essay identifies heretofore unknown reprintings of Barbauld’s antiwar rhetoric from Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation in a range of sources, from nineteenth-century British newspapers to nineteenth-century American schoolbooks to an early twentieth-century journal in Newfoundland to a Vermont newspaper in 1918, among others. Included in this “afterlife” is a work heretofore not addressed in scholarship. The piece is called “The Contrast: Or Peace and War,” published in The Athenaeum (1807). Barbauld’s “The Contrast,” the first prose poem in English, betrays an increasing pessimism that would find its profoundest expression in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812). The essay contends that the Biblical cadences and pedagogical style of Barbauld’s landmark Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) represent a formal underpinning for the unsentimental expressions of “The Contrast.” Scholars must pursue with renewed vigor efforts to “uncover” or “unmask” evidence of women’s protest writing that became anonymously excerpted for a public readership. Despite the odds, Barbauld’s protests nevertheless persisted.