Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743—1825), English poet and miscellaneous writer, was born at Kibworth-Harcourt[?], in Leicestershire, on the 20th of June 1743. Her father, the Reverend John Aikin[?], a Presbyterian minister and schoolmaster, taught his daughter Latin and Greek. In 1758 Mr Aikin removed his family to Warrington, to act as theological tutor in a dissenting academy there. In 1773 Miss Aikin published a volume of Poems, which was very successful, and co-operated with her brother, Dr John Aikin[?], in a volume of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose.

In 1774 she married Rochemont Barbauld[?], a member of a French Protestant family settled in England. He had been educated in the academy at Warrington, and was minister of a Presbyterian church at Palgrave[?], in Suffolk, where, with his wife's help, he established a boarding school. In 1785 she left England for the continent with her husband, whose health was seriously impaired. On their return about two years later, Mr Barbauld was appointed to a church at Hampstead. In 1802 they removed to Stoke Newington.

Mrs Barbauld became well known in London literary circles. She collaborated with Dr Aikin in his Evenings at Home; in 1795 she published an edition of Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination, with a critical essay; two years later she edited Collins's Odes; in 1804 she published a selection of papers from the English Essayists[?], and a selection from Samuel Richardson's correspondence, with a biographical notice; in 1810 a collection of the British Novelists[?] (50 vols.) with biographical and critical notices; and in 1811 her longest poem, Eighteen hundred and Eleven, giving a gloomy view of the existing state and future prospects of Britain. This poem anticipated Macaulay in contemplating the prospect of a visitor from the antipodes regarding at a future day the ruins of St Paul's from a broken arch of Blackfriars Bridge. Mrs Barbauld died on the 9th of March 1825, her husband had died in 1808. There is a memoir by her niece Lucy Aikin.