XXMRS. BARBAULD
Anne Letitia Barbauldwill probably be more remembered for what she was than for what she did. At a time when women’s education was at a very low ebb, and when for a woman to be an authoress was to single herself out for ungenerous sneers, attacks, and insinuations, Mrs. Barbauld did much to raise the social esteem in which literary women were held, and prove in her own person that a popular authoress could be a devoted wife, daughter, and sister.
Mrs. Barbauld’s father was the Rev. John Aikin, a Doctor of Divinity, much esteemed in Nonconformist circles for his learning and piety. He was for nearly thirty years the head of a well-known Nonconformist college at Warrington, round which a little knot of learned and good men gathered, who, it is said, did much to raise the tone, intellectually and morally, of English society at a time when Oxford and Cambridge were sunk in the deepest lethargy, and had comparatively no influence for good in any direction. Among the men, whose names afterwards became honourably known, who were connected with the social or educational life of the Warrington Academy, may be mentioned Dr. Priestley, Dr. Enfield, the Rev. Gilbert Wakefield, Howard the philanthropist, and Roscoe the historian. In the midst of a society tempered by such good influences as these, Anne Letitia Aikin grew from girlhood to womanhood. She and her brother, John Aikin, four years younger than herself, were the only children of their parents. She was born at Kibworth, in Leicestershire, on 20th June 1743, where her father had a school before he became the head of the Warrington Academy. Her mother is said to have come to the singular conclusion that a girl brought up in a boys’ school must either be a prude or a tomboy, and Mrs. Aikin preferred the former. Judging from a cameo portrait of Mrs. Barbauld, taken at the request of her friend Josiah Wedgwood, she certainly looks as if a good deal of her time had been spent in the enunciation of the words “prunes, prisms, and propriety.” But appearances are notoriously deceptive, and there is a nice little story of Mrs. Barbauld’s girlhood, which shows that her excellent mother did not succeed in entirely eradicating the tomboy element from her daughter’s character. When only fifteen years old, Anne had attracted the affections of a Kibworth farmer, who made a formal application to Dr. Aikin for his daughter’s hand. The Doctor, seeing his daughter in the garden, gave the suitor leave to go and try his fortunes. When she understood the nature of his errand, her embarrassment was very great, for the dilemma presented itself of having to say “No,” and yet to spare the feelings of the swain; finding no other way out of the difficulty, she ran up a tree, thus gaining the top of the garden wall, and then, by one spring, the lane on the other side, leaving her discomfited lover to admire her agility and bewail its results.
Anne was from her birth an extraordinarily precocious child. Her mother wrote of her in after years, comparing her with some less wonderful grandchildren, “I once, indeed, knew a little girl who was as eager to learn as her instructors could be to teach her, and who, at two years old, could read sentences and little stories in herwise book, roundly, without spelling, and in half a year more could read as well as most women; but I never knew such another, and I believe never shall.” Her father shared sufficiently in the prejudices of the period to refuse for a long time to impart to this gifted child any of the classical learning of which he was the master, and in which she ardently desired to share. At length she so far overcame his scruples that she became able to read Latin with facility, and gained some acquaintance with Greek. The fact that her father was a schoolmaster no doubt enabled her to enjoy many opportunities of instruction and education to which the bulk of Englishwomen at that time were complete strangers. At a time when it was thought enough education for most women if they were able to read, “and perhaps to write their names or so,” it is not surprising if schoolmasters’ daughters enjoyed an advantage in being able at least to pick up the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table.
Anne was thirty years of age before she made her first appearance in print with a volume of verse in 1773; but she appears to have been known as a poet in her own circle of friends a few years earlier than this, as there is a letter in existence from Dr. Priestley, dated 1769, in which he asks permission to send a copy of her poem, called “Corsica,” to Boswell, who was destined to future immortality as the biographer of Dr. Johnson. Her first printed volume was highly successful, and passed through four editions almost immediately. Thus encouraged, Anne and her brother shortly afterwards printed a joint-volume, calledMiscellaneous Pieces in Prose, which also attracted much attention and commendation. In Rogers’sTable Talkan anecdote is given about this volume which illustrates the amusing mistakes sometimes arising from joint authorship. The various articles in the book were not signed by their respective authors, and on one occasion Charles James Fox, meeting John Aikin at a dinner party, wished to compliment him on his book. “I particularly admire,” he said, “your essay, ‘Against Inconsistency in our Expectations.’” “That,” replied Aikin, “is my sister’s.” “I much like,” returned Fox, “your essay on Monastic Institutions.” “That” answered Aikin, “is also my sister’s.” Fox thought it best to say no more about the book.
In the same year as that of the publication of this volume of Essays, 1774, Anne Letitia Aikin became the wife of the Rev. Rochemont Barbauld, a descendant of a French Protestant family. Mr. Barbauld’s father had been chaplain to the Electress of Hesse Cassel, a daughter of George II, and the son had been intended for the Church of England. He had, however, conscientious objections to taking orders in that Church, and joined the Presbyterian body. Miss Aikin was warned before her marriage that her future husband had suffered already from an attack of insanity, but with Quixotic devotion this only seemed to her an additional reason why she should unite her life with his. Her married life, notwithstanding many good qualities on her husband’s part, was one of exceptional trial and loneliness. Mr. Barbauld was liable throughout his life to fits of insanity, which took the form of fierce and uncontrollable fury as often as not directed against his wife. They settled at Palgrave in Suffolk, and opened a boys’ school there. Mrs. Barbauld was much urged by her friend Mrs. Montague to open a school for girls, for the purpose of imparting to them, in a regular manner, various branches of science, such as did not then form an ordinary part of women’s education. Mrs. Barbauld declined the task, giving various excuses, such as her own want of proficiency in music and dancing, and other feminine accomplishments. It may, however, be not improbable that her real reason was one that could not be avowed, and was to be found in the mental condition of her husband. It must have been a sufficiently severe trial to the strongest nerves to keep a boys’ school, and to know that the head master and principal teacher was at any time liable to fits of insane fury; but this would have been even worse, it would have been a fatal objection, in a girls’ school. Poor Mrs. Barbauld set herself with pathetic resolution to make the best of the partner and the life she had chosen. She seems immediately to have assumed she would never have any children of her own, for within a year of her marriage she adopted from his birth her nephew Charles, her brother’s son. This was the little Charles from whomThe Early LessonsandHymns in Prosewere written. Very few educational books for young children had then been written, and Mrs. Barbauld set herself to supply the deficiency. She discovered from practical experience the sort of books children learn best from, and the kind of paper and type that suited them best. Many of her friends in the literary world thought she was wasting her talents in such employment. Dr. Johnson is recorded in Boswell’s life to have spoken very scornfully of what she was doing, and set it all down to her having married a “little Presbyterian parson.” It appears, however, in the anecdotes of Johnson, collected by Mrs. Thrale, that though he might have spoken in this way at times, his warm heart did not fail to appreciate the devotion of Mrs. Barbauld’s talents to the humble tasks which her marriage had rendered necessary. “Mrs. Barbauld,” Mrs. Thrale wrote, “had his best praise, and deserved it; no man was more struck than Mr. Johnson with the voluntary descent from possible splendour to painful duty.” She wrote herself in her preface toThe Early Lessons: “The task is humble, but not mean, for to lay the first stone of a noble building and to plant the first idea in a human mind can be no dishonour to any hand.”
The school at Palgrave was successful mainly through Mrs. Barbauld’s efforts; among the scholars were reckoned many men of future distinction, such as the first Lord Denman and William Taylor of Norwich. After eleven years of courageous and exhausting work, the school was given up, and Mr. Barbauld undertook the charge of a Presbyterian church at Hampstead. The husband and wife here enjoyed the friendship of Joanna Baillie and her sister, and here some of Mrs. Barbauld’s best literary work was done. But the terrible malady which had pursued her husband throughout his life continued to darken their existence. In order to be near her brother, and enjoy the protection and solace of his society, Mrs. Barbauld left Hampstead in 1802, and removed to Stoke Newington, where Dr. Aikin then lived. But Mr. Barbauld’s mania continued to increase, and after a sudden attack which he made upon his wife with a dinner knife, it became obvious that he must be put under restraint. The unhappy man put an end to his own life in 1808. After an interval, Mrs. Barbauld resumed her literary work, bringing out an edition of English Novels in 1810. In the following year she brought out a poem, which she called “1811,” very strongly tinged with the despondency which she felt regarding public affairs. She had been bred as a Whig, to hope for great things from the measures of emancipation with which that party had always been identified. Her sympathies were rather with the French Revolution than with the long-continued struggle of England against Napoleon. The poem had a tone of gloom and deep melancholy, which perhaps reflected more of the writer’s personal despondency than the circumstances justified. It is not a little curious that a passage in it is credited with having suggested Lord Macaulay’s famous prophecy that in years to come a New Zealander “will from a broken arch of Blackfriars Bridge contemplate the ruins of St. Paul’s.” The poem provoked a coarse and insulting review in theQuarterly, with which it is to be regretted that Southey’s name is now identified. Murray, the proprietor of theReview, is said to have declared that he was more ashamed of that article than of any that had ever appeared in his magazine. Mrs. Barbauld’s friends, Miss Edgeworth foremost among them, expressed their indignation and sympathy; a more ungentlemanlike, unjust, and insolent review, Miss Edgeworth said she had never read; and she wrote an inspiriting letter to her friend, concluding with the words, “Write on, shine out, and defy them.” But at nearly seventy years of age Mrs. Barbauld was to be excused if she felt that younger and stronger hands must carry on the fight. The poem referred to was not her last literary effort, but it was the last of her writings published during her lifetime. Very little, perhaps, of her work has permanent value; one poem, however, that beginning “Life! I know not what thou art,” which was written in extreme old age, will probably live as long as anything in the language. It indicates possibly what she might have done, had it not been for the tragedy of her married life. Of two lines in this poem—
Life, we’ve been long together,Through pleasant and through cloudy weather—
Life, we’ve been long together,Through pleasant and through cloudy weather—
Life, we’ve been long together,Through pleasant and through cloudy weather—
Life, we’ve been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather—
Wordsworth declared that, though he was not in the habit of grudging people their good things, he wished he had written those lines. Her mental powers remained clear and vigorous to the end of her long life. When she was past eighty, writing to Miss Edgeworth, she summed up, as it were, the worth of what she knew and did not know. “I find that many things I knew, I have forgotten; many things IthoughtI knew, I find I knew nothing about; some things I know, I have found not worth knowing, and some things I would give—oh! what would one not give to know, are beyond the reach of human ken.”
All her life through she laboured with her pen in defence of civil and religious liberty, against the iniquities of the slave trade, and for many other causes which have made life more worth living in England to-day. She died, universally honoured and respected, in 1825, aged eighty-two.