Uncollected Periodical Prose by Anna Letitia Barbauld William McCarthy (bio) In 1773 Anna Letitia Barbauld and her brother, John Aikin, published a volume of their essays, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. Six of the ten essays in that volume reappeared, attributed to Barbauld, in the 1825 edition of Barbauld’s Works compiled by her niece, Lucy Aikin, after Barbauld’s death. Aside from those six, Lucy Aikin reprinted seven essays from other sources.1 The thirteen essays thus reprinted by Lucy Aikin appeared to constitute Barbauld’s total output of short prose pieces. In fact Barbauld published more prose than Lucy Aikin reprinted, or, probably, knew of. Works is obviously incomplete: it does not include Barbauld’s signed literary criticism (the prefaces to Akenside, Collins, Richardson’s Correspondence, The Spectator, and The British Novelists) or her books for children. It also silently omits several unsigned pieces acknowledged by her, chiefly the two Civic Sermons from 1792. Furthermore, references in letters by Barbauld and John Aikin imply a larger body of post-Miscellaneous Pieces essay-writing than the seven pieces Lucy Aikin reprinted. Finally, John Kenrick, a stepson of Barbauld’s close friend Elizabeth Belsham Kenrick who had access to Barbauld letters and manuscript poems now lost, attributed to Barbauld essays and reviews not mentioned by Lucy Aikin. A difference between Lucy’s and Kenrick’s attitudes towards Barbauld attribution can be gathered from their ways of noticing Barbauld’s reviews (unsigned) for The Annual Review, edited by her nephew Arthur Aikin and published by [End Page 225] Longmans. Lucy Aikin acknowledged them grudgingly, as if Barbauld had dirtied her hands: she “reluctantly took part of the poetry and polite literature in one or two of the earliest volumes.” Kenrick, citing a letter from Arthur Aikin to a friend, simply declared that Barbauld wrote “the leading articles in poetry and belles letters.”2 Kenrick appears to have spoken from knowledge, and Lucy Aikin to have been ignorant, or disingenuous. In any case Aikin’s editing was hasty: Barbauld died on 9 March 1825, and Works was published on 8 July.3 In Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment, I reported that Barbauld published a number of prose pieces anonymously or pseudonymously in magazines and that the disappearance or destruction of her papers and the archives of her publishers made identifying them problematic, but that I had compiled a list of candidates I was not then ready to declare.4 In attribution work, however, “ready” is often a purely relative term. Absent new information that may still turn up, and in the belief that Barbauld’s writings will in time be genuinely collected, I propose to tell here what is known and what I surmise about her uncollected periodical prose, and to publish my list of additions to and candidates for her canon. Two of the additions have been reprinted already by Elizabeth Kraft and me in our Barbauld anthology from Broadview Press, and several candidates are discussed in Voice of the Enlightenment.5 Here I offer a synoptic account of both kinds, which may stand in the place of arguments for attributions in a future Collected Works. In letters, Barbauld and her brother referred several times to her interest in writing essays or her actual writing of them. Congratulating her on settling near London, John Aikin saw “a glorious opportunity” to collaborate on “a periodical paper.” Aikin recurred to a topic he had probably urged before, knowing Barbauld’s fondness for The Spectator (to which she had alluded in a recent letter to him). It’s as if he is inviting her to pick up the collaboration they had left off with Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. Ten years earlier, Barbauld for her part had humorously proposed to him that they put their “fragments” together in a “Joineriana.”6 [End Page 226] Early in 1791 Aikin returned to the idea of a periodical—this time, a magazine. Neither Barbauld nor her husband felt equal to conducting a magazine, so she declined (28 February 1791). But in mid-1792 she undertook to write, at the risk of prosecution, a political periodical called Civic Sermons to the People. Two numbers appeared anonymously, and...