Anna Laetitia Barbauld, née Aikin, was born into a middle‐class Dissenting family. Her father, a schoolmaster, taught her Latin and Greek from a young age. In 1758 he took up a teaching post at Warrington Academy, Lancashire and the family moved with him. Legal and social discrimination saw Dissenters barred from leading universities, and Warrington Academy became their intellectual hub and sanctuary, allowing Barbauld to make the acquaintance of figures such as Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and William Enfield (1741–97). Though prevented from officially enrolling as a student at the school, she was precocious in her learning and poetic ability, and began writing poetry on diverse topics from the mid‐1760s. In 1774, she married a graduate from Warrington Academy, Reverend Rochemont Barbauld, and settled in Palgrave, Suffolk, where they opened a successful school for boys. In 1777, they adopted her brother John Aikin’s second son, Charles Rochemont Aikin. Barbauld taught prose composition, and her work with children inspired her to write her Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) and the subsequent four‐volume work, Lessons for Children (1787–8). Hymns in Prose for Children was particularly successful, running through many editions. It is among the books that inspired William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789).1 These publications cemented her reputation as synonymous with children’s education.
In 1785 the Barbaulds resigned from teaching at their school and travelled on the continent. On their return, in 1787 they settled in Hampstead, and Barbauld focused on her writing career while her husband continued to teach pupils. She began to compose various works of social and political criticism, particularly essays on the legal discrimination against Dissenters and the moral responsibilities of governments. Such political concerns are clearly visible in her poetry, particularly in ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade’ (1791), where Barbauld’s detached voice offers a balanced though scornful denunciation of British attitudes to slavery. Barbauld also began to write literary criticism; she provided prefaces to editions of Mark Akenside (1794), William Collins (1797), and Addison and Steele (1804). After the couple moved to Stoke Newington in 1802, Barbauld’s domestic life became increasingly troubled owing to her husband’s apparent mental illness. In 1808, they separated because of her fears of physical violence. Barbauld’s husband committed suicide in the same year. After widespread and sometimes brutal condemnation of her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Barbauld ceased publishing poetry. Her poetry and selected prose were published by her niece, Lucy Aikin, in 1825, the year Barbauld died. Despite her success as an author, Barbauld is often considered to be less concerned with female emancipation than some of her peers, as Caroline Franklin argues: ‘Dissenters Anna Barbauld and Helen Maria Williams were politically radical, yet accepted conventional gender distinctions.’2 However, her sex did not prevent her from addressing vital political questions in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven; her jeremiad may have finished her career but it also affirmed her prophetic gift.
William McCarthy, ‘Barbauld, Anna Letitia (1743–1825)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1324, accessed 6 June 2015]; Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/1324; Mary Waters, ‘Anna Barbauld’, The Literary Encyclopedia, first published 23 March 2002; last revised 30 November [http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=249, accessed 16 April 2015].