Anna Barbauld Research Articles

Skirting around the Sex in Mary Tighe's Psyche

When in 1801 Mary Tighe began composing Psyche; or, The Legend of Love, an epic romance that offers a sensual, often erotic reworking of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, she knew how dangerous articulating sexual passion could be for a woman's literary reputation. 2 As if the history of women's literature lacked sufficient examples, the reception of two recently departed Marys—Wollstonecraft and Robinson—demonstrated how women writers who voice passion do so with peril. Though Wollstonecraft promoted the rational in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) whereas Robinson inscribed the erotic in Sappho and Phaon (1796), both Wollstonecraft and Robinson alike were castigated by conservative critics for unleashing indecorous passions in their writings, whether those passions were political or sexual. Indeed Richard Polwhele's diatribe on The Unsex'd Females (1798) baldly categorized Tighe's contemporaries as good girls or bad girls based on his assessment of their sexual politics. 3 For Polwhele, [End Page 731] Wollstonecraft epitomized the bad seed who enticed other women writers such as Robinson, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, or Ann Yearsley into her "female band despising NATURE's law" by urging them "To blend mental energy with Passion's fire." 4 Good women writers such as Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Hester Chapone, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Anna Seward, Fanny Burney, or Ann Radcliffe resisted Wollstonecraft's infecting "strain" by joining Hannah More's seraphic "train." 5 The stratification of Romantic-era women writers into such camps by Polwhele (and others) made it increasingly difficult for a woman writer to express passion without being consigned to the bad girl camp, "unsex'd" by her critics and therefore unavailable to a larger female constituency who only had access to culturally sanctioned publications. If women writers wanted to be read by the largest possible constituency but wanted to express the passions, was there an acceptable way to make passion manifest? Would they simply adopt the traditional male positioning of the female as the object of desire, or could they dare to show the female as the subject of her own erotic experience, without dire consequences to the female or the writer? Was it conceivable to present a female character in an erotic relationship who is not preparing to take the leap of Leucata (Sappho in Robinson's Sappho and Phaon), finding herself "bastilled" in a madhouse (Maria in Wollstonecraft's Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman [1798]), or discovering herself in league and in love with the devil (Victoria in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya [1806])?

British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830 , and: Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s , and: Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (review)

REVIEWS229 edition ofMansfield Park, is based on a concept of "textual primitivism," presumably the opposite of textual urbanity as well as what Sutherland calls "familial correction" (p. xxxiii). The result in Keymer-Wakeley is a critical edition with attitude, amply supported by scholarship but wearing its professional obligations fully alert to the fact that the editing process nowadays cannot be a dull duty (and certainly not a silent activity) but should be the literary version of a Wagnerian opera, an opus which contains aspects of all other genres and requires all the creative literary skills. Not only that: modern editing drags along with it some of the most fascinating mediations between printing technology and authorial intention, the muse and the marketplace, logic and intuition, artistic purpose and commercial practicality , the writerly and the readerly. No less than one should expect, of course, from a master printer who manufactured something that turned out to be a founding text in the history of the modern novel and whose industrial and social aspirations were directly linked to his scribal power. Clive Probyn Monash University Miranda Burgess. British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii + 307pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-521-77329-6. Angela Keane. Women Writers and theEnglish Nation in the 1 790s. Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ix + 200pp. US$54.95. ISBN 0-521-77342-3. Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke, eds. Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xiii + 395pp. US$20.95. ISBN 0-7914-4970-X. The Romantic period is not what it used to be. An easy confidence in the centrality ofpoetry and of the particular people who wrote it, in the boundaries between the words Enlightenment and Romanticism and all that they implied, and in the definition ofliterature itself, has given way to an increasingly sophisticated historical sense of the period's cultural heterogeneity. This revisionary momentum has focused our attention on the important links between the effects of the ubiquitous use of a gendered vocabulary as a means of comprehending broad social change, the actual conditions of particular men and women, concerns about property and the instabilities of commerce, and the multiple forms of literary production in the age. 230EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION14:2 The French Revolution remains central to these debates, but it no longer constitutes the historical bedrock that it once did. The result is a new critical landscape that often asks different questions about a different—but increasingly familiar—group of writers, and which has weakened the temporal boundaries that traditionally defined the Romantic period. In doing so, it has begun to make the period's most familiar writers and literary themes interesting in important new ways. Miranda Burgess's British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 17401830 tackles many of these challenges by foregrounding the issue of genre, exploring the changing ways that romance was bound up with debates about political economy. Taking up Anna Barbauld's dictum, "Let me make the novels of a country, and let who will make the systems," Burgess argues that as a genre integrating public and private levels ofexperience, romance offered an important means of commenting on emerging models of social order that were grounded in psychology rather than theology. In doing so, she suggests, romance filled a crucial ideological vacuum. Arguments stressing the divine right of kings may have gone the way of the Stuarts, butJohn Locke's liberal alternative was itself grounded in a Genesis-based account of the divine right of husbands and fathers that was destabilized by the interventions of Tory women writers such as Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood. If, as Burgess argues, these older narratives of social order were experiencing something ofa legitimation crisis thatwas compounded by theJacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, the problem could be solved by embracing a new narrative articulated by thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, which celebrated a morally progressive British society in which the sovereignty of virtuous sentiment was ensured through the circulating effects of sympathy. Such a vision, with its emphasis on human nature...

Dystopian Futures: Time-Travel and Millenarian Visions in the Poetry of Anna Barbauld and Charlotte Smith

Science-fiction and fantasy writing have always been, and continue to be, literary genres to which women writers are particularly attracted. In her study of women's science fiction, Sara Lefanu argues that among other things providing an appeal for women writers, is fact that 'SF offers a language….for interrogation of cultural order', an order in which they usually inhabit a maginalised position. [1] Within various categories usually grouped together under heading of science fiction, are two sub-genres which she identifies as being of particular interest: Utopias and Dystopias. In her discussion of feminist re-workings of these genres however, Lefanu concentrates on contemporary texts. In this essay, I want to examine way in which these genres have previously been appropriated by women writers, by revisiting futuristic texts by two female poets of Romantic period. The two poems that I am going to focus on, Charlotte Smith's 'Beachy Head' and Anna Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, both use fantastic device of time-travel to provide a vision of ruins of British and European civilisation, and in my analysis of these texts I will be drawing on theories of fantasy writing put forward by Rosemary Jackson in her critical study, Fantasy: A Literature of Subversion. Jackson points out that 'a literary fantasy is produced within, and determined by, its social context' and consequently, 'though it might struggle against limits of this context, often being articulated upon that very struggle, it cannot be understood in isolation from it'. [2] The dystopian visions of Smith and Barbauld are linked by a number of key features, which suggest that they are products of shared historical moment. In particular, both women tap into what might be termed millenarian anxiety at beginning of nineteenth century. This kind of anxiety is not in itself wholly confined to this particular fin-de-siecle, as Malcolm Bradbury observes: the turning of a century has a strongly chiliastic effect; it helps distil men's millenarian disposition to think about crisis, to reflect on history as revolution or cycle, to consider, as so many fin-de-siecle and aube-de-siecle, minds did consider, question of endings and beginnings, going and coming of world. [3] [1] Sarah Lefanu, In Chinks of World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (London: The Women's Press, 1988) p.23. [2] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Routledge, 1981) p.3. [3] Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) p.51.

In sermon and story: contrasting anti-war rhetoric in the work of Anna Barbauld and Amelia Opie

An outspoken anti-militarist thematics unites several significant texts written by women in the Romantic period. This article will examine the work of two of those writers, Anna Barbauld and Amelia Opie. They both come out of the radical Dissenting tradition and both use their writing to challenge the necessity of the wars with France. However, they adopt very different rhetorical approaches: Barbauld, in her two politically-informed Fast-Day sermons, appropriates a traditionally male genre and selects a predominantly male audience; Opie takes the short story form and in sentimental and expressive style focuses on the pernicious role played by women in a militarist society, apparently aiming primarily at a female audience. None of the texts has been given significant critical attention, nor have they been juxtaposed before. Such a contrast reveals the variety of rhetorical strategies employed in women's anti-war writing of the Romantic period.

"Things by Their Right Name": Peace Education in Evenings at Home

"Things by Their Right Name":Peace Education in Evenings at Home Penny Mahon (bio) Learning to understand war and peace should be a necessary facet of children's education. . . . They need an education that affirms life and encourages new thinking about conflict, progress, and peacemaking. . . . Peace education has become a legitimate concern. —Ruth Meyers Peace education has a long history; commitment to "an education that affirms life and encourages new thinking about conflict, progress, and peacemaking" can be traced back as far as the end of the eighteenth century. In the Romantic period, peace education was shared by both men and women, although in Victorian and Edwardian society it tended to become gender-specific. The roots of peace education can be found in the collaborative text Evenings at Home, the work of two late eighteenth-century dissenters, siblings Anna Barbauld and John Aikin. A concern for peace is one of several social and moral themes evident in children's literature in the late 1700s and early 1800s. One of the most sensitive was slavery, which Anna Barbauld, Amelia Opie, and the Taylor sisters all treated in their children's poetry.1 Others, according to Margaret Cutt, included the relation between landlord and tenant, the treatment of animals, and the social divide between rich and poor.2 The moral issue of war, however, does not appear to have received modern critical attention. This is a surprising gap in current scholarship. Although recent critical texts have addressed the complex effects of competing ideologies on the literature of the Romantic period, no one has yet explored to any significant extent the way in which the dominant militarist ideology was challenged.3 I would argue that if militarism is the "process whereby military values, ideology and patterns of behaviour achieve a dominating influence over the political, social, economic and foreign affairs of the [End Page 164] state,"4 then it was a subject of recurrent concern for several writers of the Romantic period, and their work was a radical critique of militarist systems in general and of Pitt's Tory government in particular. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh argue that "writers now neglected were at one time thought close to the 'center,' and that their engagement with questions of empire made no small part of their contemporary claim to cultural centrality" (8). Issues of war and peace were embedded in the rhetoric of several Romantic writers whose work elicited positive critical response in their day. One such work was Anna Barbauld's antimilitarist and remarkably subversive essay Sins of Government, Sins of the People (1793). Her later poem "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" (1812), on the other hand, provoked an abusively critical reaction.5 The breadth of response from such prestigious journals as the Analytical, the Monthly, the Quarterly, and Critical Reviews highlights the extent of her reputation over a period of nearly twenty years and the duration of her engagement with the war-and-peace debate. The prevalence and vigor of such a debate was hardly surprising. Although the eighteenth century had been by no means pacific, "the wars of the French Revolution and of Napoleon were qualitatively and quantitatively different from their immediate predecessors."6 The differences involved the unique ideological basis of England's war with France, which continued with brief intervals from 1793 to 1815, the broad geographical scale of the conflict and the aggressive nationalism with which England pursued that conflict, the use of people's armies rather than mercenaries, and the suffering of huge numbers of French civilians. These factors placed enormous strains on Britain's economy, manpower, finances, and government (Emsley 4). The details of the war-and-peace debate during the years of war with France have been ably documented by J. E. Cookson, who maintains that antiwar activity from 1793 to 1815 was directed almost exclusively by the rational dissenters, specifically the Unitarians. Their rational Christianity involved a firm belief in human perfectibility and their conviction that war was "an eradicable evil" (a belief not shared by the evangelicals).7 These Friends of Peace, among whom were the Aikin siblings, were not an organization as such but a linked fellowship of people with similarly liberal religious...

Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception

One of the most exciting developments in Romantic studies in the past decade has been the rediscovery and repositioning of women poets as vital and influential members of the Romantic literary community. This is the first volume to focus on women poets of this era and to consider how their historical reception challenges current conceptions of Romanticism. With a broad, revisionist view, the essays examine the poetry these women produced, what the poets thought about themselves and their place in the contemporary literary scene, and what the recovery of their works says about current and past theoretical frameworks.The contributors focus their attention on such poets as Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, Mary Lamb, and Fanny Kemble and argue for a significant rethinking of Romanticism as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon. Grounding their consideration of the poets in cultural, social, intellectual, and aesthetic concerns, the authors contest the received wisdom about Romantic poetry, its authors, its themes, and its audiences. Some of the essays examine the ways in which many of the poets sought to establish stable positions and identities for themselves, while others address the changing nature over time of the reputations of these women poets.

The "Joineriana": Anna Barbauld, the Aikin Family Circle, and the Dissenting Public Sphere

The "Joineriana": Anna Barbauld, the Aikin Family Circle, and the Dissenting Public Sphere

Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism

period be included in Oxford series, Women Writers in English, 1350-1850, was assured from beginning. Yet, in subtle ways in which an inherent rationale may become clear long after it is acted on, only now do I understand why I assumed her priority. There are, after all, a number of very worthy candidates for this honor, major cultural presences like Anna Barbauld and Mary Robinson, who well deserve reassume their prominence and be made once again available awide audience. There are even those-Catherine Macaulay and Hannah More are obvious examples--for whom modern republication in multivolume editions could have considerable impact on reframining our cultural attitudes period in which they enacted formative roles. Then again, there are likewise a number of virtually unknown but distinguished women writers in period who could have been drawn upon remind us how often in past women have been consigned through institutional sanction, in Gray's bleak marmorial terms, to dumb Forgetfullness a prey. Yet Charlotte Smith stands in a kind of exemplary isolation. She succeeded against all odds; in contemporary parlance, she made it hard way. Anna Barbauld, for instance, was product of a major Dissenting family-the Aikins--who were intimately connected with literary establishment. Her father, headmaster of prestigious Warrington Academy, educated her; her brother, a medical doctor by profession, collaborated with her in a variety of publications; her nephew Arthur at turn of century was editor of Annual Review; and her niece Lucy Aikin became in turn a noted poet and historian. Beyond family network and Dissenting intellectual community, she relied on circle of cultured Bluestockings whom her Poems of 1773 introduced her and who immediately embraced her as an articulate representative of their values. For five decades Mrs. Barbauld was a privileged, centrally placed, authoritative cultural voice, a woman whose like had existed in no previous generation in Britain. Her opposite in fortune if not in fame, perhaps, is Mary Robinson, denoted the English Sappho in her time, whose experiences may remind us that late eighteenth century was not universally supportive of such cushioned bourgeois successes as Anna Barbauld. With nothing depend on but her striking beauty, Robinson went into theater as an adolescent star. Compromised before she was an adult, she left stage

A Regency Prophecy and the End of Anna Barbauld's Career

A Regency Prophecy and the End of Anna Barbauld's Career

Anna Barbauld's Criticism of Fiction —Johnsonian Mode, Female Vision

Anna Barbauld's Criticism of Fiction —Johnsonian Mode, Female Vision

Nineteenth-Century Children's Satire and the Ambivalent Reader

Nineteenth-Century Children's Satire and the Ambivalent Reader Alan Richardson (bio) Satire is initially hard to place in the history of children's literature because little or no place has been made for it. Most accounts of the development of British children's literature from its emergence in the middle of the eighteenth century to its "golden age" in the Victorian period describe a happy shift from primarily didactic works to primarily imaginative ones: from reason to fantasy, from instruction to delight, from the moral tale to the fairy tale. According to this frankly progressive model (most recently articulated by Geoffrey Summerfield in his study Fantasy and Reason), children's literature had to be liberated from its early dominance by rationalists and Christian moralists, in order for the wiser age of Victorian fantasy, with its "more open imagination" (Pickering 4), to blossom from the fairy tale revival of the earlier nineteenth century. I have argued elsewhere that this model does not adequately reflect the extent to which fairy tales were (to borrow Jack Zipes's term) "bourgeoisified" (29) in order to become accepted as reading fit for children, a process through which the distinction between didactic and fantastic often breaks down, as in the moral or moralized fairy tale characteristic of the period (Richardson). But this model also obscures—or keeps from becoming articulated—certain latent assumptions underlying both didactic and much fantastic children's literature as well, assumptions rooted in the fundamentally new conception of childhood which emerged along with (and helped make possible) the children's publishing industry. It is in analyzing the resistance not to children's fairy tales but to children's satire, a resistance left out of histories of children's literature, that our own cultural assumptions regarding children and their books—which we inherit from eighteenth-century moralists and nineteenth-century fantasists alike—can be called into question. Both the moral tale and the children's fairy tale, for example, share an underlying assumption that the child reader is not to make independent moral evaluations. In the moral tale, a child protagonist may be required to make a moral judgment, but it is always made clear to the child reader (usually through a [End Page 122] controlling parental figure) which course of action is the correct one. And even when the child is not explicitly instructed in the morality of its age and class, the fiction can be seen as taking place in a fundamentally amoral fictional world. That is, in the cases in which literary fairy tales for children do not simply (like more frankly didactic literature) reflect the social morality of the day—as Wilhelm Grimm assured readers of the revised Kinder- und Hausmärchen they would (Tatar 217)—they can be seen as essentially irrelevant to discussions of social morality altogether. This is the brunt of Coleridge's famous response to the complaint of Anna Barbauld (a relatively enlightened didactic writer for children herself) that the Rime of the Ancient Mariner "had no moral": "It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Night's tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of the dates had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son" (405). Whether, like Nicholas Tucker, we view the world of fairy tales as a "morally-charged universe" (76) or, like Coleridge, as a morally empty space where questions of value become meaningless, the fairy tale exacts no more complicated an ethical response from the child reader than does the moral tale. Satire, on the other hand, as the "literary genre most implicated in historical and social particulars" (Howes 217), deals almost by definition with the revaluation of social values, and children's satire, unlike children's fantasy, found no early defenders among the Romantics or elsewhere. In fact, advocates of imaginative literature for children could make common ground with didactic writers in attacking satirical works intended for or made available to children. The tacit notion that children should remain morally naive...

His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature by Ann Messenger

#4046, for 4538 read 4530; *4171 and nineteen other entries, for 4183 read 4176. In Gissing’s The Emancipated, the enthusiastic Reuben Elgar praises the “nineteenth century . . . its special opportunities and demands and character­ istics,” and wishes he could convey them to the “intelligence” of his puri­ tanical sister. Good bibliographies can often open up a period or the works of an author as well as a critical or biographical study. Elgar would have been pleased with, and would have found much food for thought in, these three volumes. r ic h a r d m o r t o n / McMaster University Ann Messenger, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986). ix, 271. $26.00 (u.s.) For about a decade, feminist critics have been remapping the terrain of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. Janet Todd, Katharine Rog­ ers, and others have published wide-ranging surveys of women writers of the period, demonstrating the astonishing variety and vigour of their work. Jane Spencer and Dale Spender have written books on the early women novelists; monographs on novelists such as Eliza Haywood, Frances Brooke, Ann Radcliffe , Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney are appearing in rapid suc­ cession; and Pandora, Virago, and Oxford presses are reissuing early women novelists at the rate of a dozen a year. Dramatists such as Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Polwhele, Susanna Centlivre, Delariviere Manley, and Frances Brooke are being rediscovered, and the old chestnut of women having been excluded from the male-dominated world of the theatre is being laid to rest. Even women poets are beginning to receive some attention, as scholars retrieve their manuscripts from oblivion: Isobel Grundy and Ruth Perry, for example, have made the poetic works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Astell available for the first time. The purpose of Ann Messenger’s stimulating book is to study some women writers in relation to their better-known male contemporaries. The “His” of her title are, together with Crashaw and Milton, an august group of Augustans — Dryden, Southeme, Addison and Steele, Pope, Gay, Ambrose Philips, and Johnson; the “Hers” are Anne Killigrew, Aphra Behn, the Countess of Winchilsea, Lady Montagu, Eliza Haywood, Frances Brooke, Anna Barbauld, and Ellis Cornelia Knight. Spanning over a hundred years of women’s writing, from Killigrew’s collected poems (1686) to Barbauld’s 100 poems of the 1790s and early 1800s, IIis and Hers excludes women drama­ tists but includes poets, novelists, and essayists. Seven of the eight women authors seem to me of considerable interest. Barbauld might more fruitfully have been represented as a literary critic (her 200-page study of Richardson remains one of the best ever written on the novelist), and one might question the choice of Knight’s Dinarbas (1790) in a decade that saw the publication of all of Radcliffe’s novels, Burney’s Camilla, and Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent . By placing men and women writers side by side, Messenger hopes “ to shed some light in both directions” (5) ; this, however, is the least successful part of her enterprise. In chapter I, for example, comparing Dryden’s encomiastic Ode to Anne Killigrew with Killigrew’s own poetic achievement, Messenger adds little to the protracted critical debate over Dryden’s poem; instead, she rightly concentrates her energies on the grotesquely neglected subject of his tribute. In other chapters, male poets are included for comparative purposes: a study of Lady Winchilsea’s original and complex “To the Nightingale,” for example, glances briefly at nightingale poems by Grashaw and Ambrose Philips, but is primarily a deft close reading of Winchilsea’s poem. A brisk survey of Barbauld’s poetry, similarly, considers some intriguing allusions to Milton and Pope, without attempting to offer fresh insights into these target figures. While Messenger’s refusal to isolate women writers from the literary “mainstream” is certainly justifiable, her analyses of male writers are gen­ erally superficial. Chapter II, comparing Southerne’s dramatic version of Oroonoko with Behn’s novella, devotes equal space to the two authors, but Messenger’s sympathies are clearly with Behn, the moving power of whose fiction is contrasted with the frivolity of Southerne’s “entertainment...

Rousseau's Émile and Early Children's Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Rousseau's Émile and Early Children's Literature Robert J. Bator (bio) Sylvia W. Patterson . Rousseau's Émile and Early Children's Literature (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1971). Histories of children's literature usually hop through the eighteenth century in a single chapter. Newbery, Day, Edgeworth and a few others are leapfrogged in an impatient effort to get on to that "golden" nineteenth century. To see Patterson pause to search out some of the rarer stuff from the 1700's is pleasurable. That Patterson, limiting herself to the influence of one philosopher on ten English writers in the last twenty years of the century, can come up with a 177-page book demonstrates how rich the period can be. After lengthy summary of Émile, the author painstakingly scrutinizes for Rousseau's influence twenty-one works from: Anna Barbauld and John Aikin, Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, Eleanor Fenn, Dorothy and Mary Jane Kilner, Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Influence is too strong a word. Patterson acknowledges that her intent is to show what Rousseau's ideas were, that major authors knew them, and that some of the ideas crop up in the juvenile works covered. Where direct influence cannot be posited, Patterson wisely suggests that Rousseau's ideas coincide with a given author. Mostly, Patterson demonstrates such parallelism abundantly and credibly. [End Page 238] Thus, when she points out that Rousseau felt the same way that Mary Wollstonecraft did about breast feeding, the reader cannot carp. A few pages later (p. 109) Patterson converts this to "Mary Wollstonecraft follows Rousseau in the idea of the mother nursing her own child." Such overreaching does not clarify but clouds the extent of Rousseau's influence. On Wollstonecraft there is also some omission. Only internal evidence is cited by Patterson to show that Original Stories (1788) exhibits Wollstonecraft's use of Rousseau, yet at least one biographer of Wollstonecraft gives the year and month when she read Émile—and her favorable reaction to it (G. R. Stirling Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Study in Economics and Romance, London: Martin Secker, 1911, p. 74). In summarizing Émile and in illustrating the central irony of Rousseau's disciples writing any books for children, Patterson is admirable. I would fault only the selective vision. What about some apostles of Rousseau who, though French, had a wide English audience? Maria Edgeworth saw Arnaud Berquin's The Children's Friend (England, 1783) as universally popular. She also translated a work of Madame de Genlis to whom one critic attributes more influence in England than Émile. Even accepting the restriction to English authors, one finds the works chosen with a restricted field of vision. Granted that three works by Lady Eleanor Fenn can epitomize the fourteen or so she wrote, why not include Fables in Monosyllables (c. 1783), which Patterson mentions but does not cite even though it contains the first direct quotation from Rousseau in an English children's book? Why omit that and then hunt for parallels to Émile in her other works? One suspects that Fenn's Fables were not accessible to the author. Only eight of the major works traced by Patterson are used in eighteenth-century versions; of the eight only four are first editions. Such versions are admittedly hard to come by, but later editions are likely to be brutally revised the way even Goody Two-Shoes was butchered by nineteenth-century editors. To focus on major authors is a sound way of explicating Rousseau. It might be difficult to grant even nodding attention to what Percy Muir calls the "monstrous regiment" of anonymous and lesser known female writers of the period. One can dispense with Harriet English or Lucy Peacock, but Lucy Pinchard in The Two Cousins (1794) and H. S.'s Anecdotes of Mary (1795) both contain direct quotations from Rousseau. There may be more among the hack writers. Under minor lapses in biography, the reader should know that the Kilners, Mary Jane and Dorothy, were not sisters, as Patterson has them, but sisters-in-law. The notion of Rousseau's influence on juvenile literature which has often been skeletally treated elsewhere has been fleshed out by Patterson...

Samuel taylor coleridge and Anna Barbauld

Journal Article Samuel taylor coleridge and Anna Barbauld Get access St. Swithin St. Swithin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s11-V, Issue 121, 20 April 1912, Page 315, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s11-V.121.315b Published: 20 April 1912