In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Unsettled Accounts:Anna Letitia Barbauld's Letters to Lydia Rickards
  • Jessica W. H. Lim (bio)

Introduction

In Anna Letitia Barbauld's poem "A Summer Evening's Meditation" (1773), the speaker longs for transcendence, but her hopes are ultimately frustrated and unfulfilled. She watches as the moon, "Impatient for the night … seems to push / Her brother down the sky," whereupon "I launch into the trackless deeps of space, / Where, burning round, ten thousand suns appear" until she remembers

    embryo systems and unkindled sunsSleep in the womb of chaos; fancy droops,And thought astonish'd stops her bold career.1

The earnest haste with which Barbauld personifies the moon implies not only that the moon has been waiting to assume a position of supremacy in the sky but also more pertinently that the speaker desires for the moon to displace the sun. The speaker's wish appears to be a metaphorical comment on the limitations within which women operated in Georgian Britain. Barbauld's speaker momentarily achieves transcendence through the freedom of her mind, but the realities of everyday life "[stop] her bold career." Barbauld's play on "career" as a verb and noun is startling; she jolts her readers with the disjunctive juxtaposition of stillness and movement. Her subtle comment on the limitations placed on female careers is implicit in her maternal images of "embryo systems" and "suns" (sons) who reside "in the womb." The speaker is aware that social expectations regarding motherhood limit women's abilities to develop other occupations: "fancy droops." Though the speaker affirms that "the hour will come / When all these splendours bursting on my sight / Shall stand unveil'd," the use of future tense conveys the frustration, as much as the hope, of one separated from "splendours" by a still-present veil (lines 120-22).

Like her speaker in "A Summer Evening's Meditation," Barbauld challenged social boundaries and continues to challenge critical categorization. As a philosopher, her radical social politics brought her the label "virago."2 As a writer, she refused to be associated with a single genre; though Poems (1773) received critical acclaim, she spent the remainder of her life [End Page 153] distributing her poems chiefly in manuscript form. Instead, she made her name in the literary market as an educative children's writer, a literary critic and anthologist, and a politically radical pamphleteer and essayist. Born in 1743 to a Rational Dissenting family, Barbauld campaigned for religious freedoms and participated in Dissenting educational academies. Raised in Kibworth and at the Warrington Academy, she later founded a school in Palgrave with her husband. Her alumnae included Sir Thomas Denman, who went on to become the Chief Justice of England during the passage of the 1832 Reform Act. In many ways, one can characterize Barbauld's life as full; as William McCarthy's magisterial biography demonstrates, the scope of Barbauld's interests and passions and her influence over nineteenth-century political and literary thought were immense.3 Yet this vibrancy coexists with Barbauld's awareness of life's limitations, at which she chafed. Barbauld's frustration with restraint is combined with her understanding of the beauty and significance of the immediate present, a paradoxical attitude that animates her letters to her friend and one-time live-in pupil, Lydia Rickards (later Withering).

Barbauld's relationship with Lydia Rickards might have escaped historical notice if not for the efforts of Lydia's descendent, the literary biographer Edith Cordelia (E. C.) Rickards. In 1899, E. C. published an article in Murray's Magazine: A Home and Colonial Periodical for the General Reader celebrating the friendship between Barbauld and her relative.4 E. C. quotes extensively from Barbauld's letters to Lydia, but until recently, the original letters were privately owned. When the last surviving keeper of the Rickards letters passed away, the letters were auctioned off as antique curiosities. Fortuitously, they found their way to McCarthy, who oversaw their settlement in their current home, the Pforzheimer Collection in the New York Public Library.

My introduction to the letters was entirely serendipitous. I had contacted the New York Public Library hoping to examine some rare copies of Barbauld's children's books. I received an email...

pdf