Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade’; ‘The Rights of Woman’; Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem

Indicating the scope of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s achievement, Emma Major refers to her as ‘poet, essayist, political pamphleteer, and educationalist’.¹ A committed Rational Dissenting writer, Barbauld was a highly educated poet devoted to the Enlightenment principles of the innate goodness of humanity, reason, and the importance of education.² Praised by Wordsworth and Coleridge, she occupies a position on the cusp of Romanticism while speaking with the even and mannered tones of eighteenth‐century poetry. Brad Sullivan notes that ‘Barbauld’s rhetorical strategies as a poet often aim to create a “Dissenting frame of mind” in her readers’,³ and her poetry seeks to stimulate a thoughtful response that moves and educates the reader. Her ‘persona is formed in no small part by Barbauld’s careful and intelligent response to the work of her predecessors, notably Milton and James Thomson (the poet most closely associated with Milton’s legacy in the eighteenth century)’,⁴ but her poetry remains studiedly individual.

Despite a range of critical responses to her achievement, her contemporaries and much current criticism have primarily tended to evaluate her status as a female poet.⁵ Though Barbauld has been maligned for her apparent antagonism to feminism, recent critics have shown her stance to be far more nuanced than her difference from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman would suggest.⁶ Barbauld’s learned and often prophetic poetry draws on various models from Milton to Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and it is her ‘confident assumption of the mantle of the female prophet during this period [1790s]’ that impels her poetry.⁷ ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade,’ ‘The Rights of Woman’, and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven reveal the breadth of Barbauld’s political and cultural concerns and her poetic versatility.

In ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce’, Barbauld coolly traces the deceit that allows slavery to continue. Written in carefully formed heroic couplets, the insistent regularity of the lines suggests that Barbauld is recalling Pope’s decorous tone as she corrects the erring ethical character of the age. Despite the arguments urged by ‘Preacher, Poet, Senator’ (3),⁸ ‘Still Afric bleeds / Uncheck’d, the human traffic still proceeds’ (15–16). Prophesying African rage turning on Britain owing to ‘minds deprav’d by bondage known’ (47), Barbauld’s poetry presents horrified images of coming turbulence, where the polished form clashes with the brutal content. The unearned luxury and ease created by slavery’s fruits destroy British virtue, as Barbauld curtly states: ‘By foreign wealth are British morals chang’d, / And Afric’s sons, and India’s, smile aveng’d’ (104–5). Such bleakness goes unmitigated by the close of the poem, as Barbauld urges Wilberforce to ‘seek no more to break a Nation’s fall’ (116). Comfortless, the speaker reassures Wilberforce that his efforts have earned his salvation, but asserts that, for Britain, he ‘strove in vain’ (123). Barbauld anatomizes Britain’s venal tyranny, offering no salving note to mitigate her vision.

‘The Rights of Woman’, despite its description in the seminal edition of Barbauld’s work as an ‘outburst of anger at Wollstonecraft’,⁹ has been compellingly re‐evaluated by Penny Bradshaw, who argues that ‘it functions only ironically in its relegation of women to the non‐public realm of blushes and tears, a realm which was certainly not occupied by Barbauld in her own life’.¹⁰ There is no firm evidence that Barbauld’s poem attempted to respond to Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, and Barbauld’s poem seems, on the surface, to advocate that women should behave as feeling rather than rational creatures, against Wollstonecraft’s essay. If read without recourse to irony, the poem seems to contradict much of Barbauld’s other work, particularly where Barbauld implies that feeling rather than reason wins the day. Advocating ‘Soft melting tones’ (11) and ‘Blushes and fears’ (12) in place of war, Barbauld’s witty detachment becomes easy to overlook. The poem is written in cross‐rhymed quatrains, and the speaker aligns herself with neither women nor men, even if the highly structured style seems more appropriate for ‘male’ reason rather than ‘female’ sentiment. Applauding women as the ‘courted idol of mankind’, Barbauld is apparently content with women as other than men. Yet, as Adeline Johns‐Putra points out with reference to Washing‐Day, ‘Barbauld’s mock‐heroic mode always possesses the potential to mock – not heroicise – the domestic’,¹¹ and in ‘Rights of Woman’, Barbauld seems more tongue in cheek than didactic in her advice to her own gender in a short but complicated poem. The appeal to Nature’s ‘soft maxims’ (31) serves not to promote rights but endanger them, and the silenced and softened female, imprisoned by the restrictive patriarchal view in the poem, is prevented from speaking. Surrendering her own gender in the poem, Barbauld’s silent refusal to write from the first‐person perspective witnesses her need to resign her femininity in order to speak; this subtle poem suggests restrictions placed on the female voice that it does not name.

Despite her high reputation, Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven marked the end of her career as a poet as ‘reviewers were quick to chastise her for abandoning her proper feminine realm’.¹² Published in 1812 to sneers from John Wilson Croker, who would also famously demolish Keats’s Endymion, Barbauld’s heroic couplets offer an unsparing critique of the state of Britain. Composed and printed during political crises, including the Napoleonic Wars (which had been raging since 1793), and a miserable economic situation, the opening of the poem succinctly captures the desolation suffered by the country,¹³ before Barbauld moves into her favoured prophetic mode. Eighteen Hundred and Eleven is often referred to as a jeremiad as its verse prophecy imagines a future in which Britain’s dominance has sunk. Sternly informing Britain that ‘thy Midas dream is o’er’ (61), the poem gives no sense that the British Empire is either undeserving of its ruin or that prosperity was its natural state. Refusing to be numbered with its ‘flatterers’, Barbauld writes: ‘but, Britain, know, / Thou who hast shared the guilt must share the woe’ (45–6), the couplet typically twinning knowledge and sorrow.¹⁴ Offering no solutions, the poem is thorough in its condemnation of what it reveals to be an empire on the cusp of decline, telling Britain, ‘Yes, thou must droop’ (61), despite the speaker’s avowed patriotism. In Barbauld’s vision, America inherits culture and freedom, with American visitors going to tourist sites with ‘duteous zeal’ (129) just as British tourists visited the ruins of Rome and Greece.

Yet, despite the gloom of the poem, ‘Barbauld’s cosmopolitan jeremiad implies the possibility of recovering a reformed Enlightenment faith in historical progress and undermines narrowly nationalist and partisan views’.¹⁵ Though sorrowful for London’s and Britain’s ‘faded glories’ (158), Barbauld places her faith in continued progress facilitated by Western domination, as Francesco Crocco notes: ‘[u]nderstood by her contemporaries as unpatriotic for her anti‐war beliefs, Barbauld in fact reifies colonial ideology in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’.¹⁶ Rooted in her Dissenting beliefs, Barbauld’s poetry is poised and self‐contained, moving between ironized domestic notes to searing political comment, while remaining united by ‘her confident assumption of an authoritative feminine voice’.¹⁷ A product and proponent of the Enlightenment, Barbauld retains the detached balance of Pope’s poetry alongside her Miltonic condemnation of ‘Enfeebling Luxury and ghastly Want’ (Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 64).¹⁸

Notes

1 Emma Major, ‘Nature, Nation, and Denomination: Barbauld’s Taste for the Public’, ELH 74.4 (2007): 909–30 (at 909).

2 See Orianne Smith, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 159.

3 Brad Sullivan, ‘Cultivating a “Dissenting Frame of Mind”: Radical Education, the Rhetoric of Inquiry, and Anna Barbauld’s Poetry’, Romanticism on the Net 45 (2007): http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2007/v/n45/015817ar.htm.

4 Robert W. Jones, ‘Barbauld, Milton, and the Idea of Resistance’, Romanticism 9.2 (2003): 119–40 (at 119–20).

5 ‘What this range of responses to Barbauld’s work has in common is that for all of them it is the gendered character of her writing that is at issue: it is her willingness or failure to appear properly feminine that is the central focus of their criticism.’ Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 226.

6 See, in particular, Penny Bradshaw, ‘The Limits of Barbauld’s Feminism: Re‐reading “The Rights of Woman”’, European Romantic Review 16.1 (2005): 23–37, which casts serious doubt on readings of ‘The Rights of Woman’ as a reaction to Wollstonecraft by showing that such readings are conjectural and do not fit with the rest of Barbauld’s rhetorical strategies adopted elsewhere in her work.

7 Smith, Romantic Women Writers, p. 169 and p. 158.

8 ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade’, in The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 114.

9 ‘The Rights of Women’, in The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, p. 289.

10 Penny Bradshaw, ‘Gendering the Enlightenment: Conflicting Images of Progress in the Poetry of Anna Lætitia Barbauld’, Women’s Writing 5.3 (1998): 353–71 (at 368, n.2).

11 Adeline Johns‐Putra, ‘Satire and Domesticity in Late Eighteenth‐Century Women’s Poetry: Minding the Gap’, Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies 33.1 (2010): 67–87 (at 75).

12 Evan Gottlieb, ‘Fighting Words: Representing the Napoleonic Wars in the Poetry of Hemans and Barbauld’, European Romantic Review 20.3 (2009): 327–43 (at 336).

13 See William Keach, ‘A Regency Prophecy and the End of Anna Barbauld’s Career’, Studies in Romanticism 33.4 (1994): 569–77 (at 573).

14 Barbauld admitted the ‘gloomy’ quality of her poem. See the letter to Judith Beecroft, 19 March 1812, quoted in Anna Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2001), p. 160.

15 William Levine, ‘The Eighteenth‐Century Jeremiad and Progress‐Piece: Traditions in Anna Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”’, Women’s Writing 12.2 (2005): 177–86 (at 178).

16 Francesco Crocco, ‘The Colonial Subtext of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, Wordsworth Circle 41.2 (2010): 91–4 (at 91).

17 Angela Keane, ‘The Market, the Public and the Female Author: Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Gift Economy’, Romanticism 8.2 (2002): 161–78 (at 164).

18 As Jacqueline Labbe shows, ‘she brings to much of her writing an Enlightenment perspective of detachment and impartiality, but occasionally sparks into a more personalized style’. Jacqueline Labbe, ‘Communities: Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Romanticism’, Literature Compass 1 (2004): 1–12 (at 3).