Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Early life

Anna Laetitia Barbauld entered the world on 20 June 1743 in Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire, the daughter of Jane and John Aikin. She was given her maternal grandmother’s name, though family and friends called her Nancy. Two weeks after her birth, her mother’s brother, John Jennings, baptised her in Huntingdonshire. Her father ran the local Dissenting academy and served as minister at a nearby Presbyterian church.

The family lived in what scholar William McCarthy calls one of Kibworth’s finest houses, right in the village square. Because the building also housed a boys’ school, Barbauld grew up very much in public view. The Aikins enjoyed a comfortable life, likely on par with prosperous freeholders, tradesmen, and manufacturers; when her father died in 1780, his estate was worth over £2,500.

Barbauld later told her husband that in her early years she had little contact with other girls—there were simply none in the village to talk to. Surrounded by boys, she picked up their boisterous ways.

Her mother tried to curb this behaviour, which was considered unseemly for a girl, and according to Lucy Aikin’s memoir, the result was an exaggerated shyness and reserve. Barbauld never felt at ease with her own femininity and thought she fell short of the era’s ideal of womanhood. This outsider’s perspective shaped much of her writing, which often questioned 18th-century assumptions about what women should be.

She pestered her father to teach her the classics, and he eventually gave in. This opened the door to Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and many subjects then thought unnecessary for women. Her mother worried that such intellectualism would leave her a spinster, and the two were never as close as Barbauld was with her father. Still, her mother took pride in her achievements, later recalling a little girl who at age two could read sentences and stories fluently, without spelling—a child she never expected to see again.

Stoke Newington and later life

In 1802, the Barbaulds settled at 113 Church Street in Stoke Newington. Rochemont began serving as minister at the Unitarian Chapel on Newington Green, about a mile off. Anna was glad to be closer to her brother John, because her husband’s mental state was quickly deteriorating. Rochemont grew violently hostile toward her, suffering fits of insane rage.

Once, during dinner, he grabbed a knife and chased her around the table; she escaped only by leaping out a window. These terrifying episodes kept happening, causing Anna deep sorrow and placing her in real peril, yet she would not abandon him. In 1808, Rochemont drowned himself in the New River nearby, and Anna was crushed by grief. When she eventually returned to writing, she produced the radical poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), which portrayed England as a ruin.

The reviews were so brutal that, according to scholar William McCarthy, she never published another separate work. Lucy Aikin even claimed, wrongly, that Barbauld stopped writing entirely. McCarthy notes that Barbauld did not fully leave print or writing, but sank into a profound, lasting depression. She admitted in 1813 that her pen had been idle, but after that year she composed at least three dialogues and an “Ode to Remorse.”

Until the 2010s, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven was thought to have ended her career, but more recent scholarship has restored it to the Romantic canon and revived her standing as a poet of that era; it is now often regarded as her finest poetic work. Barbauld died in 1825, still a celebrated writer, and was buried in the family vault at St Mary’s, Stoke Newington. Afterwards, a marble tablet was placed in the Newington Green Chapel. Its inscription honors her wit, genius, poetic talent, and sharp understanding, and says she used these gifts to advance humanity, peace, justice, civil and religious liberty, and devotion.

Legacy

When Anna Laetitia Barbauld died, the Newcastle Magazine called her the finest of all female poets and one of the most forceful prose writers around, while the Imperial Magazine predicted her name would be respected as long as English was spoken or literature valued anywhere. Critics compared her favorably to Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson. Yet by 1925, she was barely remembered, and then only as a writer of moralizing children’s verse. It took the feminist literary criticism of the 1970s and 1980s to bring her back into literary history.

Younger poets like Amelia Opie of Norwich admired her greatly, sending her poems in 1787 for feedback. But by the early 1800s, Barbauld had oddly vanished from the literary scene. One major reason was the scorn of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. In their radical youth they had looked to her for inspiration, but as they grew conservative they rejected her work.

Once those poets became canonized, their dismissive judgments stuck. The intellectual world Barbauld helped shape—especially within the Dissenting academies—had by the late 1800s become linked with what Matthew Arnold called the “philistine” middle class.

That reform-minded 18th-century middle class was later blamed for the worst excesses of the industrial age. Finally, the Victorians turned Barbauld into a sentimental saint, erasing her political bravery, her sharpness, and her humor and irony. What remained was a figure the modernists could easily despise.

Literary analysis

Most of the attention to Barbauld’s poetry has come from feminist literary critics who want to bring back women writers once well known but later overlooked. One approach is taken by Isobel Armstrong, who reads Barbauld alongside other Romantic women poets as challenging Edmund Burke’s ideas about the sublime and the beautiful, as well as Adam Smith’s economic arguments in The Wealth of Nations. Armstrong points to Barbauld’s poem “Inscription for an Ice-House” as evidence of this challenge.

A second approach comes from Marlon Ross and Anne K. Mellor, who argue that Barbauld and her contemporaries created a distinct feminine voice in literature. Ross notes that being both a woman and a religious dissenter gave Barbauld a unique social perspective, which pushed her to write social commentary. But women faced a double bind: they could address politics in nonpolitical forms, which might weaken their political message, or they could use overtly political forms while trying to keep a feminine tone, which also risked softening their agenda.

As a result, Barbauld and other Romantic women poets often turned to occasional poems. These poems had traditionally offered satirical comments on national events, but by the late 1700s they became more serious and personal. Women wrote sentimental poems about personal milestones, like the birth of a child, arguing that by focusing on small, everyday moments they could build a moral foundation for the whole nation. Ross and Mellor see this adaptation of existing styles and genres as a key way women poets developed a feminine version of Romanticism.

Did You Know?

• Barbauld's first book of poems, simply titled Poems, went through four editions in a single year after its 1773 publication.
• She and her husband spent eleven years teaching at Palgrave Academy in Suffolk, where the school replaced strict discipline with a system of fines and jobations and even juvenile trials.