That great writer in the English language Rod McGillis This issue of the Quarterly is largely devoted to essays on historical children's literature, and this gives me the opportunity to speak of a writer whom Samuel Pickering calls "one of the glories of eighteenth-century English children's books" (168). I speak of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Mrs. Barbauld's biographer, Betsy Rogers, refers to her as "one of the most effective pamphleteers of the eighteenth century," and "the first serious writer for children" (108, 71). Wordsworth informed Henry Crabb Robinson that Mrs. Barbauld was "the first of our literary women" (Rogers 148). Maria Edgeworth called her "the most respectable and elegant female writer that England can boast" (143). Isaac Kramnick refers to her as "perhaps the most important woman radical in the 1790s," after Mary Wollstonecraft (33). Dr. Johnson paid Mrs. Barbauld a compliment when he noted that although no imitators of his style had "hit it," in her essay "On Romance," "Miss Aiken (Mrs. Barbauld) has done it the best, for she has imitated the sentiment as well as the diction." In short, Mrs. Barbauld has received high praise from her contemporaries and ours. William Hazlitt, Mrs. Trimmer, Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft all praised her, and she was undoubtedly influential in her day. Mrs. Barbauld was the eldest child of John Aiken who in 1758, when Anna Laetitia was fifteen, became a tutor at the dissenting Academy at Warrington. She lived there for fifteen years and, as her niece Lucy Aiken informs us, she "in some degree overcame her father's scruples" regarding the education of women and gained, along with the male pupils at the Academy, a classical education (Works I vii). She was apparently courted by the French revolutionary Jean Paul Marat, but she accepted another Frenchman, Rochemont Barbauld, a year after her first volume of poems appeared in 1773. She became a well known writer for children after the publication of her Lessons for Children (1778) and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781). Her other published work includes an edition in six volumes of Samuel Richardson's letters (1804) and a fifty volume work, The British Novelists (1810). She must have been a formidable woman. A member of a hypnotist's society once attempted to hypnotise her, "but after a long and unpleasant operation of rubbing the temples and forehead, he was obliged to desist without success" (Rogers 94). This is an indication, I think, of her strength of mind. Clearly, she had a strong character; she coped with her husband's recurring bouts of insanity (he died insane in London in 1808), for eleven years she ran a boy's school at Palgrave in Suffolk, and throughout her life she wrote many books and pamphlets. She died in 1825 while living at Stoke Newington and her epitaph says she was "endowed by the Giver of all good with wit, genius, poetic talent, and a vigorous understanding." This glory of eighteenth century children's books, we might think, ought to command our attention. What we mostly remember of Mrs. Barbauld, however, are anecdotes such as the one in which Elton Hammond, brother of a friend of Mrs. Barbauld's, left among his papers one entitled, "The Best Way of Killing Mrs. Barbauld"—by shooting, stabbing, or by poison (Rogers 145). But she is most famous as the object of Charles Lamb's ire. In a well known letter to Coleridge, Lamb remarks: "Goody Two Shoes is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery . . . Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? . . . Damn them! I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child." Much of this ill will has a personal source. Lamb may have held a grudge against Mrs. Barbauld for an unfavourable review of John Woodvil (1802) in the Annual Review that he thought Mrs. Barbauld wrote. Coleridge, who also had unkind things to say of Mrs. Barbauld, might well express pique for Mrs. Barbauld's astute comments...
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May 1, 1992
Lorraine Helms 
Open Access