Anna Letitia Aikin Barbauld (1743-1825) Poet, Social and Literary Critic, Teacher

      Anna Letitia Aikin Barbauld was the daughter of Jane Jennings and Dr. John Aikin, a tutor at Warrington Academy, a dissenting public school. Often described as modest and unassuming, she first published a volume of her poetry in 1773 at the urging of her brother John.

      Anna Aikin married the Rev. Rochemont Barbauld, who was educated at the Warrington Academy, in 1774. The couple established a successful school in Palgrove but was forced to close it down in 1785 when Rochemont first started showing signs of mental illness. The Barbaulds then moved to Hampstead where she became intimate friends with Joanna Baillie. Rochemont drowned himself in 1808 after brutally assaulting Barbauld.

      A leading literary figure and social critic, Barbauld was also a staunch public opponent of slavery; in 1793 she published a program for national reform entitled Sins of Government, Sins of Nation. After Rochemont's death, Barbauld edited The British Novel, which opened with her essay "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing."

      Barbauld's aesthetic theory "that the primary goal of literature was to educate the young in rational thought…[and] teach a new concept of gender-equality" (Mellor and Matlak 166) was in contrast to that of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Although she is often represented by "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven," Barbauld believed that the novel was the best genre for achieving what she considered literature's goal. For Barbauld, "it is finally the novelist, and the female novelist in particular, who becomes the unacknowledged legislator of the social world" (Mellor and Matlak 166).

      "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" uses apocalyptic images to describe the horrors of war:

Man calls to Famine, nor invokes in vain,
Disease and Rapine follow in her train;
The tramp of marching hosts disturbs the plough,
The sword, not sickle, reaps the harvest now,
And where the Soldier gleans the scant supply,
The helpless Peasant but retires to die; (15-20)

Widely condemned, the poem "prophesies that on some future day a traveller from the antipodes will, from a broken arch, of Blackfriars Bridge, contemplate the ruins of St. Paul’s" (DNB 1065). Although she continued to write until her death in 1825, "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" ended Barbauld’s literary career; it was the last of her published works.