CHAPTER FIVE
“One generation passeth away, and another cometh”
Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Late Literary Work
The part of monitress I dare not play,
Nor scarce accept the def’rence thou wouldst pay,
But know a kind illusion gives it rise,
And blush thy simpleness should count me wise.
—Lady Louisa Stuart, “Upon Growing Old” (1757–1851)
Poet, critic, and essayist Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) remained on the fringes of literary history during the Victorian era, when many eighteenth and early nineteenth-century women writers vanished. That may mean little for the woman whose fame was once described as “second to none among the female writers of her country.”1 One critic predicted that after her death Barbauld would be remembered for her well-circulated works for children, but before her late twentieth-century rehabilitation, Barbauld was remembered primarily as the attractive old woman who wrote a harmless poem about old age.2 This poem, titled “Life,” was supposedly learned by heart by William Wordsworth (1770–1850), who is said to have wished he had written it himself, and recited at bedtime by Frances Burney (1752–1840), as we have seen.3 For a time after her death, Barbauld was known best—what little was known of her—as a model elderly woman writer.
Barbauld’s “Life,” first published in her posthumous works (1825), is a 30-line poem, written circa 1812. Only its last stanza was cited at the centenary of her death, as William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft note (318):
Life! we have been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
’Tis hard to part when friends are dear;
Perhaps ’twill cost a sigh, a tear;—
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not Good-night, but in some brighter clime
Bid me Good-morning!
As clever as it may be, this verse is unrepresentative of the variety and depth of Barbauld’s poetic, not to say literary, contributions. The stanza is not even representative of the poem “Life,” which displays greater complexity and questions the relationship of life, identity, and the afterlife. The poem takes as its epigraph the beginning of Roman emperor Hadrian’s alleged deathbed verse, “Animula, vagula, blandula” (sweet little soul, fickle, yet cuddlesome)—itself no simple comment on the end of earthly existence. Barbauld’s poem begins, “Life! I know not what thou art, / But I know that thou and I must part,” and goes on to mention the “valueless clod” that will hold the speaker’s corpse, once she is dead, and to wonder “in this strange divorce” (from life), “where I must seek, this compound I?” (166). The second stanza imagines what might make up Life’s essence, wondering if Life’s existence ever changes, asking “Yet canst thou without thought or feeling be? / O say what art thou, when no more thou’rt thee?” The poem’s last stanza is far more optimistic and unquestioning than its first two.
It has been said that the last stanza of “Life” should have been inscribed on [Barbauld’s] tomb ‘by way of Epitaph’” (qtd. in McCarthy and Kraft 318). “Figuratively, it has been,” as McCarthy and Kraft conclude, offering evidence of the ways in which “the eight lines seem to have entered popular culture” as “a set piece for mortuary consolation.”4 Barbauld was remembered as an ideal elderly woman, successfully performing happy old age, a type of memorializing unusual among women writers of the period. For Barbauld’s best-known contemporaries, it was more customary to endure tributes to their early works and criticism or ignorance of their later ones. Barbauld came to be appreciated as a young person’s old person. American Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) declared that he had never seen a person of Barbauld’s age “who had preserved so much of youth; on whom time had laid so gentle a hand. Her countenance had nothing of the rigidity and hard lines of advanced life, but responded to the mind like a young woman’s.”5 Those who wrote about celebrated women writers’ looks in old age seem either to remark on their premature haggardness or to celebrate loudly their uncanny youthfulness. The latter, too, has its costs; although Barbauld was able to sustain posthumous renown for having inhabited a “grandmotherly” role in late life, that persona necessitated that she be viewed as harmless and noncontroversial—a condition dependent upon the neglect of the most noteworthy long poem published in her late life.
The extent to which Barbauld experienced the happy old age that “Life” presents is difficult to conclude.6 In posthumously published letters, Barbauld makes several disparaging comments about the prospect of old age, but her December 1813 letter to Susanna Estlin is perhaps the most profoundly negative: “If you ask what I am doing,—nothing. Pope, I think, somewhere says, ‘The last years of life, like tickets left in the wheel, rise in value.’ The thought is beautiful, but false; they are of very little value,—they are generally past either in struggling with pains and infirmities, or in a dreamy kind of existence: no new veins of thought are opened; no young affections springing up; the ship has taken in its lading, whatever it may be, whether precious stones or lumber, and lies idly flapping its sails, and waiting for the wind that must drive it upon the wide ocean” (Works 1: 308). This statement alone is enough to suggest that “Life” serves us ill as a summary of Barbauld’s late literary career, but her letter to Estlin may be no more representative of her experiences than the poem. Contrary to what she states in this letter, Barbauld’s late work as an author shows that she had opened—and would continue to open—new veins of thought in her old age.
Today, Barbauld is studied for her work in a range of genres, not simply for brief, allegedly cheerful verses. Critical commentary on Barbauld has never been more robust. A good deal of this work has centered on her poetry, especially her shorter poems, perhaps because they are easily anthologized and pleasurable to teach.7 When critics have looked to Barbauld’s writings in other genres, it has been primarily to her works for the young. It is only recently that much interest has been taken in Barbauld’s other literary contributions. For instance, Claudia Johnson, Catherine Moore, and Katharine Rogers have written about Barbauld’s groundbreaking editorial work for the fifty-volume series British Novelists (1810).8 As Johnson has noted, Barbauld’s “work as an editor of fiction receives relatively little attention” (166). We might add that editorial, biographical, and literary critical work constitutes a significant portion of Barbauld’s authorial contributions, particularly in late life and that it has been little attended to.
In the first half of this chapter, I address this lack by examining Barbauld’s editorial and literary critical projects from the 1790s to the 1810s, in order to argue for that labor as an important feature of her later years, showing its consequence as an authorial choice. Rather than seeing it as work she undertook because she could not pursue more challenging writing (as her nineteenth-century biographers surmised), we ought to consider her critical work as an attempt to make a different kind of contribution to literary history. Barbauld’s own comments show that she thought it important to bring before the public authors of the previous generation whose works deserved another hearing, positioning her work as a kind of literary public service. Barbauld may have been doing for the rising generation what she hoped would be done for her in the next—reviving under-read or almost forgotten texts for a public that needed reminding of their quality.
A look at Barbauld as editor and critic sets up the latter part of the chapter, in which I consider her last published work and its effect on her reputation in old age, as well as her posthumous reputation. Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) imagines a future with London in ruins and in which global power has shifted to the Americas. The poem was excoriated by prominent British reviewers and received one particularly damning review. A great deal of commentary on the poem has appeared in the past decade, much of it seeking the reasons why Eighteen Hundred and Eleven proved a critical failure.9 There is at least one angle that few critics have investigated—the possibility that negative stereotypes about old women played a role. My chapter deepens the work of previous scholars by returning the fact of—and the factor of— Barbauld’s old age to our speculations about the reception of this important poem. Reconstructing Barbauld’s authorial activities in her old age serves to refocus our conversations on the extent of the literary contributions she made. It demonstrates the ways in which the poem “Life” has long skewed our sense not only of Barbauld’s career as a whole but of the variety and vicissitudes of her written work in old age.
“A Work of the First Excellence Cannot Perish”: Barbauld as Editor
When “the effervescence caused by the French revolution had subsided,” Barbauld “could seldom excite herself to the labor of composition, except on the spur of occasion,” according to her niece, biographer, and editor Lucy Aikin (1781–1864) (Barbauld, Works xxxvii). Aikin belittles Barbauld’s efforts, explaining that in the 1790s Barbauld “gave nothing more to the public for a considerable number of years, with the exception of two critical essays,” on Akenside and Collins. It was not long afterward that Barbauld’s selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder and her biography and correspondence of novelist Samuel Richardson appeared—both in 1804. Neither of these works ought to be characterized as slight, and they could not have been produced on the “spur of occasion.” The former arose, according to Aikin, from “a warm attachment to the authors of what has been called the Augustan age of English literature,” resulting in Barbauld’s “most successful” effort in literary criticism (xxxix, xl). Despite this praise, Aikin repeatedly downplays Barbauld’s motivations for and agency in undertaking editorial and critical work.
Barbauld’s reasons for pursuing this work are presented by Aikin as a reaction to negative circumstances. As we saw above, she first asserts that Barbauld had no political impetus to write. When describing her aunt’s editing and critical efforts in the early 1800s, however, Aikin alleges that that work was undertaken “chiefly as a solace under the pressure and anxieties” of her husband’s unnamed (but by then well-known) ailment: mental illness (Barbauld, Works xliii). After his death in 1808, Barbauld is said to have sought “relief from dejection” in editing and literary criticism because she was “incapable as yet of any stronger effort” (xlix). In other words, Aikin would have it that Barbauld chose this kind of work first because she was living in a politically unexciting time, then because she was looking for something to relieve anxiety, and finally, because it was effortless work in which she might drown her grief. It seems peculiar to explain away many years of dedicated labor as either accidental or easy. At other points, Aikin presents Barbauld as having been drawn into editorial and critical work not by circumstances but through pressure from others. According to Aikin, Barbauld “was prevailed upon to undertake the task” of editing Richardson’s letters (xliii; emphasis added). Barbauld “consented to employ herself in these humbler offices of literature.” In each case, Aikin’s message is clear: Barbauld incidentally—or perhaps even as a result of coercion—set aside her literary talents. To serve as an editor and a critic, Aikin implies, is an act of little consequence for a successful author.
This version of events has seemed to stick in subsequent accounts of Barbauld’s career. The anthology Women Critics 1660–1820 (1995) mistakenly claims that “Barbauld’s career as a critic began when she edited the letters of Samuel Richardson.”10 But it was almost a decade earlier that Barbauld had written a substantial introductory essay for Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination (1795) and the works of William Collins (1797). She followed up these projects with the Richardson correspondence and her selections from the Spectator and Tatler (1804), then with the fifty-volume British Novelists (1810), as well as with a further collection titled The Female Speaker (1811). For several decades, the lion’s share of Barbauld’s publications consisted of editorial projects or substantive literary critical introductions on eighteenth-century writers. It was arguably the most significant published work of her early old age. In no sense, in terms of labor or length, was this minor work. As one critic points out, Barbauld’s life of Richardson is “the longest work she ever did,” at approximately two hundred pages.11 Kraft and McCarthy conclude, “The critical neglect of Barbauld’s poetry is baffling” (xxi). We might add that the critical neglect of Barbauld as an editor and literary critic is baffling as well.
Perhaps the best place to examine Barbauld’s critical and editorial work is through a study of “the longest work she ever did,” her prefatory essay to Richardson’s correspondence and the editorial work that followed it. Barbauld undertook this ambitious six-volume project when few of the eighteenth-century novelist’s letters had been previously published. She also wrote the first full-length biography of Richardson. Still, there has been little twentieth-century appreciation of Barbauld’s contributions. References to her in Richardson criticism have followed A. D. McKillop, who chastises Barbauld’s “ruthless hand” as editor and refers to “the slashing strokes of her editorial pen.”12 Editor John Carroll also characterizes Barbauld’s editing with such words as “unaccountable,” “erroneous,” and “altered.”13 Where she has been mentioned, it is generally in a footnote of little substance or complaint. It is also true that Barbauld may get short shrift in scholarship on Richardson because there is so little attention to his correspondence per se, as Peter Sabor points out.14
If there is little mention of Barbauld in studies about Richardson, however, there is even less of Richardson in studies of Barbauld.15 This seems surprising, because editing and introducing the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (1804) was an important event in her publishing career, particularly if the reception of the work is any indication. Discussing Barbauld as editor, critic, and biographer affords us the opportunity to examine the ways in which she framed her work and to consider the import of the glowing critical responses the project met with. In this section, I examine Barbauld’s contemporaries’ views of her critical and editorial work on Richardson, seeing them alongside more recent concerns about her editorial choices and practice. In the process, I draw conclusions about what the work may have meant for Barbauld’s later life and reputation, as well as her career in full.
Barbauld’s editorial practices vis-à-vis Richardson’s letters have already been expertly evaluated by William McCarthy. In an essay published in Studies in Bibliography (2001), McCarthy compares surviving Richardson letters with texts printed in Barbauld’s edition, arguing that her edited letters “may not be first-class citizens of the Richardson canon” “but they are not aliens to it.”16 He offers four conclusions: (1) Barbauld abridged letters by an average of 30 percent; (2) all of the letters “depart from their originals in occasional details of wording” (SiB 207); (3) very few (just 5%–6%) bear directions to conflate; and (4) based on his findings, approximately 90 percent of the 280 letters known only from the Barbauld Correspondence “can be trusted to represent with accuracy the originals” (208). McCarthy stresses that Barbauld should not be held solely responsible for departures from the manuscripts. Richardson, too, left editorial markings. As McCarthy reminds us, “Richardson’s editing, like Barbauld’s later, was not based on the ethic modern editors work by” (205). McCarthy’s work overturns previous conclusions about Barbauld’s hand in Richardson’s correspondence. Twentieth-century criticisms of Barbauld as a shoddy editor ought as a result to strike us as anachronistic.
Further information deepens these claims—first, by contextualizing how important editorial and critical work was to Barbauld’s late career and, second, by examining the responses to her edition of Richardson. Barbauld was not a green editor, by any means, when she tackled the Richardson project. She was a seasoned, experienced, and well-respected critic—and an author who valued editing. In the preface to the Richardson edition, Barbauld writes, “It was the favourite employment of [Richardson’s] declining years to select and arrange [his letters], and he always looked forward to their publication at some distant period.”17 What critics have overlooked is the way in which Barbauld’s description of Richardson’s employment mirrors her labor on his behalf. She appears to have found selecting, arranging, introducing, and remarking on the works of other authors a favorite employment of her own declining years.
Barbauld’s “Life of Samuel Richardson With Remarks on His Writings” begins not with his life or writings but with a twenty-page discourse on novels and romances. (She would later draw from this piece in her introductory essay to the British Novelists collection.) Barbauld’s biography of Richardson follows, with twenty-five pages summarizing his life. She then provides approximately thirty pages of summary and commentary each on Pamela and Clarissa. Sir Charles Grandison is given nearly twenty pages of coverage, and Familiar Letters receives two pages’ worth. From there, Barbauld considers literary matters such as Richardson’s style, his relationships with female correspondents, and the effects of the piracy of Dublin booksellers. Next, Barbauld spends thirty-five pages describing Richardson’s moral character, covering his love life, his beliefs about and relationships to women, his religion, his faults (according to Barbauld, Richardson was vain), his physical description, and his daughters. She proceeds to a ten-page account of Richardson that she has received from a woman acquainted with him in her youth. Finally, Barbauld presents in twenty pages short sketches of Richardson’s main correspondents, from Aaron Hill to Lady Bradshaigh.
In her introduction, Barbauld argues that the value of an author’s correspondence is that it functions as a kind of time travel or as a way to commune with spirits beyond the grave. She writes, “Nothing tends so strongly to place us in the midst of the generations that are past, as a perusal of their correspondence. To have their very letters, their very handwriting before our eyes, gives a more intimate feeling of their existence, than any other memorial of them” (Correspondence ccx). As Barbauld describes it, reading correspondence is a retrospective activity, particularly suited to the aged or to those inclined to look backward. As I discussed in the introduction, such manifestations of having done-this-ness are common in aged women’s writings. For Barbauld, the sensation is linked to reading the words—especially the very handwriting—of others. Her sense of the Correspondence’s function and audience paved the way for its reception. The Critical Review thought that the volumes would be attractive to two kinds of readers—first, “modern ladies” who want to see the objects that entertained their mothers and grandmothers, and second, the old themselves: “those who lived nearer the period” who “will feel their former pleasures revived, by the renewal of the impressions with which they were once so much delighted.”18
Barbauld’s Richardson edition was reviewed widely, and, as Peter Sabor notes, reviews were “mixed”—a mix worthy of scrutiny.19 Of the six major reviews that appeared, only one (the Anti-Jacobin) approached its task as starting and stopping with a volume-by-volume description of the contents of the Correspondence, and one provided extracts from the letters themselves (Imperial Review). The others concentrated almost exclusively on Barbauld’s essay. In these reviews, nearly as much attention was paid to the achievements of Barbauld as to those of Richardson. Some reviewers questioned whether Richardson was too out of fashion to be brought back into the public eye, as the Monthly Review wonders that, “after so long a repose, we should now conjure up [Richardson’s] ghost.”20 The Critical Review claims, “of the rising generation few have heard of Pamela” (162). In the strangest proof that Richardson was seen as old literary news, one well-meaning critic calls him “the greatest literary luminary of the seventeenth century” (Monthly Review 31). Each reviewer argued that one or more of Richardson’s literary achievements would endure, making his biography and correspondence of abiding interest.
Notable in these reviews is not just the estimation of Richardson’s importance but the lavish encomiums on Barbauld. The Imperial Review praises publisher Phillips for his “judgment in submitting these valuable documents to the critical inspection of Mrs. Barbauld. The good sense and the delicacy of feeling by which the writings of that lady are distinguished, afforded an ample pledge that she would discharge the office of editor with taste and fidelity.” The reviewer is not disappointed with the results: “Upon inspection of the contents of these volumes, we confidently declare our conviction that this pledge she has not forfeited.”21 The Eclectic Review describes “the judicious selection, and the elegant composition of Mrs. Barbauld, which will naturally be cherished… She has at once done justice to his fame and to her own; she praises with discrimination, censures with candour.”22 The Literary Magazine, too, thinks Barbauld’s choice of subject and her work itself could not have been better executed: “a more congenial subject could not possibly have been afforded to [Barbauld’s] pen. Richardson has experienced a good fortune, which rarely falls to the lot of deceased merit. His will appears to have been literally executed at the time he himself prescribed, and by a hand more worthy of his genius than any other which England could at present furnish.”23 The reviewer believes that Richardson himself, were he living, would have chosen Barbauld for the editorial and critical task: “the only pen in England which Richardson’s sublime and disembodied intelligence would have selected, is, most probably, that of Letitia Barbauld” (533). Making Barbauld Richardson’s editor was seen as a perfect pairing because she was considered as talented a writer as he.
If reviewers were enthusiastic about Barbauld as editor and critic, they were less pleased with the letters themselves, which were most often described as trifling. The Critical Review finds them “seldom containing any particular subject of inquiry or discussion,” with “little that is particularly interesting” on literary information of the era (284, 285). After its warm praise, the Eclectic Review, too, turns sour: “But after every exertion of candour, we must avow, that in reading these letters, we have betrayed symptoms of weariness, and even of disgust” (123). Because of the repetition of subject and the frequent idolizing of Richardson in the letters, the reviewer proclaims, “we cannot wholly suppress emotions of mingled pity and contempt.” Many of the reviews spent little space on volumes 2 through 6—the letters themselves. As the Eclectic Review puts it, “Having dwelt thus long on two-thirds of the first volume, our readers will not wish us to enlarge on the correspondence which occupies the rest of this publication.” The chief complaint was that the letters did not contain instruction and advice, whether moral or literary. Instead, they were found wearisome in “ringing incessant changes on Pamela, Clarissa, Grandison” (Eclectic Review 123). For Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review, the novels of Richardson “will always be read with admiration,” but “certainly can never appear to greater advantage than when contrasted with the melancholy farrago which is here entitled his Correspondence.”24
Still, the reviewers generally praised rather than blamed Barbauld when addressing this “problem.” They were grateful for, as she put it, her “necessary office of selection” from the “very numerous” letters in the papers purchased by publisher Phillips (1: vi). But six volumes were more than the reviewers thought appropriate. As one critic jokes, “Mrs. B. has formerly written [a poem] ‘The Groans of the Tankard,’ and if correspondence of this kind be often published, we recommend it to her to write the Groans of the Press” (Monthly Review 38). Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review assessment was less jocose; after remarking that Barbauld “has suppressed about twice as many letters as are now presented to our consideration,” Jeffrey concludes: “Favourably as we are disposed to think of all for which she is directly responsible, the perusal of the whole six volumes has fully convinced us that we are even more indebted to her forbearance than to her bounty” (23). The Eclectic Review wishes the correspondence “had been comprised in two or three volumes” but considers itself “obliged to Mrs. Barbauld, that we are let off with the perusal of six” (123). Some blamed Barbauld for the length of the project: The Monthly Review wishes that “the fair editor” had “discreetly suppressed with a bolder hand” (31). Barbauld showed, as she says, “mercy on the public” by not printing the complete letters, but, the Monthly adds, “this mercy should have been farther extended.” Only the Anti-Jacobin Review finds “the whole correspondence is interesting”; it determines that “the selection of [the letters] confers high honour on the judgment of the editor.”25
Whether the letters seemed too many or just right in number, Barbauld was credited with editorial and critical excellence. She was thanked by almost all of her reviewers for keeping back some of Richardson’s letters. Since the early twentieth century, critics have complained about Barbauld’s liberties in (to invoke McKillop’s aforementioned phrase) “slashing” Richardson’s correspondence. But for her earliest critics, Barbauld did not cut out enough. Not one contemporary source complained that Barbauld brought out too little material. This suggests that, rather than the radical editor most twentieth-century criticism would make her out to be, Barbauld was, for her time, quite conservative, putting into print much more of Richardson’s correspondence than her contemporaries wanted to see. It is unclear what directions she had as to length from her publisher, but it is possible that we owe a debt to Barbauld herself for preserving for posterity so much of Richardson’s correspondence.26
As a biographer of Richardson, Barbauld received almost universal high praise. The Critical Review’s assessment is typical: “We have scarcely even seen a biographic sketch more elegant, better discriminated, and more appropriate” (156). As a critic, Barbauld also received compliments from reviewers, though with some minor complaints about her interpretations.27 What the reviewers do not agree on is Barbauld’s style. Some criticize its “freedom and boldness” (Eclectic Review 123), while others found the writing too old fashioned. The Monthly Review concludes that “Mrs. Barbauld’s Memoir is, in general, written with purity and elegance: but occasionally we meet with expressions which modern correctness and taste do not tolerate” (48). Examples of her outdated diction follow. Whether or not the six volumes of Richardson correspondence were being read cover to cover, contemporary readers’ comments suggest that Barbauld’s introductory essay was being read closely in the years after its publication. Although it is difficult to establish both critical and popular acclaim, it would seem Barbauld’s Richardson edition enjoyed both.
The elaborate praise that Barbauld received from reviewers may seem excessive. Traditional scholarly wisdom would have it that Richardson is more worthy of our interest than Barbauld, but it is clear from the critical response to the Correspondence that at the turn of the nineteenth century, Richardson and Barbauld were held in equally high esteem. According to one reviewer, “The world is indebted to … the discernment which selected an editor so peculiarly fitted for doing justice to the writings and character of Richardson. Mrs. Barbauld has genius, taste, and sentiment more congenial to those which have been displayed in Pamela, Grandison, and Clarissa, than probably any other writer of the times, even including those of a similar direction, if perhaps we should except the author of Evelina and Cecilia” (Anti-Jacobin Review 177). The reviewer prefers Burney, presumably because she knows more about novel writing, although Barbauld arguably knew more about editing and literary criticism, and what she produced was almost universally applauded. Her reviewers did not consider editorial, critical, and biographical work beneath Barbauld’s notice, as she was perceived as at the height of her powers in all three areas—a fortuitous combination for literary history.
What did Barbauld think of her editorial, critical, and biographical work? Was turning editor and critic of Richardson, as Aikin suggested, Barbauld’s reaction to political boredom, a search for solace, or a response to dejection? Reviewer Jeffrey senses that Barbauld does not approve of Richardson’s letters because, according to him, she “does not venture to say much in favour of the collection” (34). That may be so. But it appears more likely that she found the letters absorbing. In a private letter to a former pupil, Barbauld refers to her work on Richardson, suggesting that the job is proving fascinating, if challenging: “I am very busy; being … deeply engaged in the job I have perhaps rashly undertaken. Indeed I have at present a splendid opportunity, which I think I might as well use, of getting clear with my correspondents, at little expence of my own invention. For cannot I send them some brilliant paragraphs from Richardson, from Sheridan, from Mrs. Carter, from Dr. Young all whose letters lie before me at my mercy?”28 Here Barbauld imagines herself channeling the voices of literary predecessors, as she envisions using their words—indeed, their paragraphs—as her own. Barbauld seems entranced by the power of editing and criticism. In a letter from January 1805, she writes to Maria Edgeworth asking her and her father for specific criticisms on the Richardson essay: “I shall be much obliged to Mr. Edgeworth or you for any criticisms of the life, because Phillips talks of publishing it separately.”29 Phillips appears never to have done so, but it seems unlikely that Barbauld would have sought criticism on a piece of published work that she did not much value.
Why did Barbauld invest so much of her energy in late life to editorial and literary critical work? Though the Richardson edition offers some indication of what was at stake for Barbauld, her other editorial efforts provide further information. In the prefatory essay to Selections from the “Spectator,” “Tatler,” “Guardian,” and “Freeholder,” Barbauld again begins—as she did with Richardson—by invoking a retrospective trope: “It is equally true of books as of their authors,” she writes, “that one generation passeth away and another cometh.”30 She asserts that “new authors are continually taking possession of the public mind, and old ones falling into disuse” (1: v). The task of the editor, she implies, is to forestall this “falling into disuse” by bringing old authors before the public. When she notes that “the fame of writers is exposed to continual fluctuation,” not just for ephemeral productions but also for “books that have been the favorites of the public,” she could just as easily be speaking of the work of Richardson, of many of the volumes she later selected for inclusion in The British Novelists, or indeed, of her own work. Her hopeful belief is that classics have a special status and cannot die, though they must age.31 As she puts it, a classic is withdrawn from everyday public view to be laid on an honorable shelf: “It is true, indeed, that a work of the first excellence cannot perish. It will continue to be respected as a classic: but it will no longer be the book which every one who reads is expected to be acquainted with, to which allusions are often made, and readily understood in conversation; it loses the precious privilege of occupying the minds of youth; in short, it is withdrawn from the parlour-window, and laid upon the shelf in honourable respose. It ceases to be current coin, but is preserved like a medal in the cabinets of the curious” (vi).
This statement may stand in support of all of Barbauld’s editorial and critical work. To preserve like a medal the work of previous years is a gift that an old critic-author can give to “the minds of youth.” Imagining herself intergenerationally from both sides—among those who came before and after her—seems to have led to a desire to turn editor. For Barbauld, this appears as a selfless response to retrospective thinking. Editing or reintroducing important literary works plays a role in making them classics, available to young and old readers alike. Barbauld is ostensibly discussing the early eighteenth-century periodical essay, and especially the work of Joseph Addison, which she holds in high regard.32 It is also possible to read her statement as the philosophical reflection—at one remove, no doubt—of an aging author herself.
Barbauld in the 1800s and 1810s must have understood firsthand the vagaries of literary fame, as well as the potential power of books. Not one to despair for the future of great books (at this point in her old age, at least), she demonstrates confidence in the ability of future generations to recognize a classic. She discusses situations that might lead to an early forgetting of a work, but she reaches the conclusion that “in reality, nearly all [books] are preserved to us that are most worth preservation … what has perished is chiefly made up of the residuum of science, and the caput mortuum of literature” (Selections x). In particular, she notes, literary works that describe manners “rise in value as their contents become more obsolete.” She writes, “To an antiquary the Spectators are already a great source of information, and five hundred years hence will be invaluable; though it must be observed, some discernment is necessary to separate the playful exaggerations of humour from the real facts on which they are grounded.” Did Barbauld consider her own literary efforts as ones that would “rise in value”? Was she doing unto authors of the past what she hoped, or even trusted, would be done unto her, whether later in life or posthumously?
Her own writings may not have been foremost in her mind when she made such statements, but it is difficult not to see them lurking in the background of her discussions of the fate of past literary compositions. In her preface to The Female Speaker (1811), Barbauld refers to the importance of reading in youth and in age. As she puts it, “a familiarity with the most striking passages of our best authors” has an “advantage” “in future life” that is “not small.”33 These striking passages from the best authors are “equally relished in age as in youth. Whoever has been conversant with them in early youth, has laid up in her mind treasures, which, in sickness and in sorrow, in the sleepless night and the solitary day, will sooth the mind with ideas dear to it’s [sic] recollection; will come upon it like the remembrance of an early friend, revive the vivid feelings of youth, feed the mind with hope, compose it to resignation, and perhaps dismiss the parting breath with those hallelujahs on the tongue, which awoke the first feelings of love and admiration in the childish bosom” (vi). Good literature may guide us successfully from cradle to grave, she argues. Reading such works is especially important as a youthful investment in creating the conditions for a contented late life.
Although Aikin would have it that her aunt’s labors in editing and literary criticism arose almost by default, whether in response to world or life circumstances, it is possible that Barbauld’s critical work was chosen as an aging woman’s literary gift to posterity. She presented to the public the old letters of, original critical essays on, and new editions of the authors of her youth— the ones that presumably served as her solace in old age—so that their words would not be lost. In the years following her death, Aikin and others would attempt to do the same for Barbauld. That Aikin (herself a long-lived author of no small reputation) undertook this labor at all, given her apparent low regard for editorial and critical work, is something for which we ought to be grateful.34 Today, it seems a shame that she and her successors did not bring more of Barbauld’s manuscripts into print or did not say more about them. It is especially unfortunate because a large number of papers were destroyed in an attack on London during the Second World War (McCarthy and Kraft xxxv).35 Barbauld’s faith in posterity’s ability to recognize the “best authors,” if she herself may be admitted among those ranks, was not misplaced, but she could not have anticipated that such recognition would come half a century too late to do as much for her as she had done for others.
Barbauld Sallies Forth
When she was engaged in her most influential works of criticism, Barbauld was just over 60 years old—in her green old age. After nearly ten more years of publishing principally editorial and literary critical work, she published new poetry. Her long, prophetic Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), and the negative press it generated, is alleged to have ended her career. Such stories appear all too frequently in our literary histories. The publishing careers of Hester Lynch Piozzi, Frances Burney, and Barbauld were all said to have been halted by negative press.36 In Barbauld’s case, the stories are literally untrue, as she continued to publish and to contemplate publication after 1812. In the cases of Burney and Barbauld, it was the same anonymous reviewer who eventually stood accused: the acerbic conservative writer and politician John Wilson Croker (1780–1857) of the Quarterly Review. In this section, I look afresh at Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and its reception, with an eye to gender and old age, in order to further our sense of what effects this poem’s initial critical failure may have had on Barbauld’s late career and, ultimately, on her posthumous reputation.
A prophetic poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven envisioned Great Britain’s fall as a world power. Recent critics have been almost of one voice in praising it as a poetic achievement, though assessments of what caused its failure have been enormously varied, with gender, religion, and political climate foremost among the reasons explored. For critic Lucy Newlyn, it was the “generic unclassifiability” of the poem—its “juxtaposition of the familiar and the unfamiliar through prospect and retrospect, its conflation of the elegiac and the satirical, the political and the sentimental” that prevented it from being fully appreciated. Barbauld’s “sheer ambitiousness” and “the authority to which she lays claim” are what “offended her contemporary readers.”37 Nicholas Birns argues that it was the impending War of 1812, considered alongside Barbauld’s prophetic poem about the costs of globalization, that made her critics so uncomfortable.38 William Keach finds in the poem a “decisive break” from Barbauld’s “meliorist historical perspective,” which he suspects was off-putting to her readers, even those who shared her progressive Dissenting ideology (577). It seems likely in this case, as in so many others, that a number of factors contributed to Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’s poor reception. One factor among the many that has not yet been given a hearing is old age and ageism.
In Barbauld’s own day, most reviewers cited political reasons for their condemnations of the poem. Conservative periodical writers were incensed at Barbauld’s message of national doom and her trenchant antiwar criticism, but the poem also made some liberal commentators uncomfortable. They responded “nervously at best” to her becoming a Cassandra of the state (McCarthy and Kraft 310). Although it predicts the future, the poem begins solidly in the present, describing Napoleon’s conquests, other nations’ capitulations, starving British peasants, dead soldiers, and bereaved mothers, widows, and friends anxiously seeking locations of battles that ended their loved ones’ lives. Barbauld’s poem moves into the realm of prophecy with the declaration that Britain’s “Midas dream is o’er” (154). She makes clear that her country is by her “beloved, revered, / By every tie that binds the soul endeared.” It seems obvious that she did not enjoy the poetic vision that she drew—one of London in ruins. That scene was one in which she imagined that foreign travelers would look on the city with “mingled feelings” as its “faded glories rise to view” (157). Great Britain would be honored for its literature and philosophy, but as a national power it would have been decimated, in Barbauld’s poetic vision.
Though there is no date named at which the ruin Barbauld imagined would be accomplished, she implies that it has already begun:
But fairest flowers expand but to decay;
Thy worm is in thy core, thy glories pass away;
Arts, arms and wealth destroy the fruits they bring;
Commerce, like beauty, knows no second spring.
(McCarthy and Kraft 160–61)
These lines, near the poem’s end, describe the reasons for her prognostications. She sees a national fall as inevitable once the country has taken a destructive course. These lines also depict the aging process, linking seasonal and bodily aging to national aging. Barbauld describes it as inevitable that as seasons pass (and flowers decay), as humans age (and beauty fades), so the glories of countries—especially those without a love for liberty—pass away. She predicts that “Genius” will fly from “Europe’s desolated shores” to the place where she sees freedom blossoming—the Americas (161).
One need not be an aged writer to use the trope of a body’s (or a season’s) decline in order to imagine a nation’s decline and fall. In Barbauld’s hands, though, such a comparison had special resonance. It was universally known that Eighteen Hundred and Eleven was the work of a venerable female author. Barbauld’s first publication, a critically acclaimed collection of poems, had appeared some forty years earlier. Reviewers emphasized her advanced age in their assessment of the late poem’s effectiveness. Many used the fact of her long career in framing their remarks. Most placed their reactions to Barbauld’s work in the context of a long line of prior responses they had had to her productions, comparing the present poem unfavorably to her previous works, finding in it the peevishness and joylessness supposedly typical of female old age. The implication seems to have been that reading Eighteen Hundred and Eleven was like being disappointed by an old friend, an old teacher—or simply by an old woman writer. At least one reviewer expressed this sentiment directly.
Most reviews merely hinted at Barbauld’s old age. The Monthly Review’s Christopher Moody focused on a wish that Barbauld had given the poem a later date for its title and expressed the desire that the writings of Barbauld and others would act to “defer the period” of the end of Britain’s greatness. Moody also noted that the poem disappoints “as a picture of the present era,” implying that Barbauld was not at her best perceiving or writing about the current age, even if it accepted her as a prophet for future ones.39 The AntiJacobin Review, which reviewed not only the poem but also the Monthly Review’s positive review (no surprise, given Barbauld’s association with it), focuses on Barbauld’s having been “bred and educated a Dissenter” and argues that she would not have received the Monthly’s approbation otherwise.40 The two reviews did share some elements, however, as the Anti-Jacobin, too, marks Barbauld out as old-fashioned.41 The reviewer writes, “Poets may predict, but the age of prophecy has long passed” (204). Barbauld’s poem, it would seem, was evidence of her being out of touch with the age in which she lived. The Eclectic Review acknowledges the poem’s style to be vigorous and “not very common in the productions of a female pen.”42 The reviewer focuses on the poem’s departure from Barbauld’s previous productions, remarking, “Disposed as we are to receive every performance of Mrs. Barbauld with peculiar cordiality, yet her choice of a subject in this instance … is so unfortunate, that we scarcely ever read a poem of equal merit with so little pleasure” (475). That was then, the reviewer implies, but this is now.
In private letters, too, readers wondered about how their responses to Eighteen Hundred and Eleven ought to be squared with Barbauld’s advanced age. Sir Walter Scott is “sorry the Quarterly Revw. has been savage on Mrs. Barbauld for whose talents I have had long and sincere respect,” even though he could not condemn the principle of their criticism.43 The poet Elizabeth Cobbold (apparently personally unacquainted with Barbauld) writes to her friend Sir James Edward Smith on 26 March 1812 that she has read the just published poem and cannot approve of it: “It is in a high strain of poetry, and possesses a fire of genius and force of language which I should not have expected from her advanced age and what I had seen of her earlier productions; but if I were offered the powers of genius, together with the feelings manifested in that poem, I would reject the combination as a dangerous and deadly gift.”44 Smith disagreed heartily in his reply of 30 March 1812, telling Cobbold that “I did not doubt your admiring Mrs. Barbauld’s poetry; indeed, I think this poem (without any allowance for her age) may take its stand amongst the most lofty productions of any poet, male or female” (2: 178). He then quotes from one of her hymns, first published in the 1770s, and says that it is the most sublime and poetical of its kind ever written, without making any allowance for her youth or her sex. In each case, Barbauld’s age becomes important to the reader’s evaluation of her poetry.
Several reviews also linked Barbauld’s aging to the poem’s political message in terms similar to those she herself had used. The Eclectic Review understands the poem as “almost … unfilial” (475). In a reversal of the way we might expect a long admired female author to be discussed, the review imagines the poet as a faithless daughter and Great Britain as her aged mother:
Such is her [Barbauld’s] eagerness to read a lecture on morbid anatomy, and display her knowledge of the appearances post mortem, that she actually begins to demonstrate on the body of her venerable parent [Great Britain], while she is yet in very tolerable health; and in doing this preserves all the while such perfect composure, as to us is absolutely astonishing. The old lady herself will not relish this treatment, we are sure. She will undoubtedly observe, that she considers herself a very good life at present, and has so little doubt of surviving all her existing progeny, that instead of punishing her graceless daughter [Barbauld] by cutting her off with a shilling, she will frown on her through life, and finally take ample vengeance by inscribing an epitaph on her tomb. (474–75)
On a first reading, it is unclear which “old lady” the reviewer might be referring to. Is it Barbauld or her country? But it becomes evident that “old lady” Great Britain will have the last laugh over “old lady” Barbauld—herself made to seem youthful in comparison—by writing her epitaph.
The notorious review—the one that led Maria Edgeworth to write to Barbauld about her “indignation” and “disgust” and that nearly provoked her to snatch up a pen and respond—was the Quarterly’s, now attributed to Croker.45 He begins his diatribe on the author and the poem by invoking the age of the former: “Our old acquaintance Mrs. Barbauld turned satirist! The last thing we should have expected, and, now that we have seen her satire, the last thing that we could have desired” (309). Croker then emphasizes his own comparative lack of age—at the risk of impugning his own wisdom—to highlight Barbauld’s advance in life: “May we (without derogating too much from that reputation of age and gravity of which critics should be so chary) confess that we are yet young enough to have had early obligations to Mrs. Barbauld; and that it really is with no disposition to retaliate on the fair pedagogue of our former life, that on the present occasion, we have called her up to correct her exercise?” (309). Croker imagines Barbauld, the aged teacher of his far-away youth, changing places with him and playing ignorant pupil to face his supposedly reluctant corrections. This infantilizing rhetoric is continued when Croker implies that Barbauld may be losing her literary faculties, describing her as having “wandered from the course in which she was respectable and useful” (309). He writes of her composing from a misguided sense of “irresistible impulse of public duty” that compelled her to “dash down her shagreen spectacles and her knitting needles” and to “sally forth” as the author of the poem under review.46
In his description of Barbauld sallying forth—giving up the usual garb of an old woman or spinster for the costume of political pamphleteer—Croker paints a picture of an aged female Quixote, foolishly leaving hearth and home to save the world.47 Though he doesn’t know where Barbauld lives, Croker says it is not on Parnassus and must be in some “equally unfrequented” region (310). Unbeknownst to her, Barbauld has become humorously isolated, beyond her prime, and working outside of her own abilities, Croker implies. He ends his review with a serious message—that Barbauld’s “former works have been of some utility” and, though not displaying much taste or talent, “are yet something better than harmless” (313). He warns her that she should “desist from satire,” it being “satire on herself alone” (313). He couches this reproach in generational terms, claiming to speak to age for all youth, earnestly begging “she will not, for the sake of this ungrateful generation, put herself to the trouble of writing any more party pamphlets in verse” (313).
The tradition has been to report that Barbauld was “deeply wounded by the insults and personal remarks which this poem … received from the prejudice and malignancy of a critic” (Ellis 278–79). There seems no reason to doubt that she was upset, but the myth that Croker’s review ended Barbauld’s publishing career seems to have originated with her first biographer. Aikin writes in her 1825 memoir, “This was the last of Mrs. Barbauld’s separate publications. Who indeed, that knew and loved her, could have wished her to expose again that honoured head to the scorns of the unmanly, the malignant, and the base?” (Barbauld, Works lii). Aikin especially laments this “unmanly” review because Barbauld would have welcomed, been cheered by, and had her energy revived by the respectful greetings “which it was once the generous and graceful practice of contemporary criticism to welcome the re-appearance of a well-deserving veteran in the field of letters.”48 Barbauld was treated in a manner neither befitting her sex nor her age, Aikin claims. The result was said to have been devastating to Barbauld in her remaining years, though she put her faith in posterity: “She even laid aside the intention which she had entertained of preparing a new edition of her Poems, long out of print and often inquired for in vain;—well knowing that a day must come when the sting of Envy would be blunted, and her memory would have its fame” (liii). The Quarterly’s review, Aikin alleges, prompted Barbauld to leave her writings in the hands of future editors, rather than to arrange them herself, for fear of inciting further criticism. If Aikin is correct, Croker’s review was highly persuasive. It convinced Barbauld to avoid putting her work before the ungrateful generation that Croker claimed to represent until after her death.
There is good reason to question Aikin’s version of events about the effect of the review on Barbauld’s publishing career. Eighteen Hundred and Eleven was not the last time she published new work. Her poem, “A Thought on Death,” first mysteriously published in the United States, appeared in the Monthly Repository in 1822, advertised as Barbauld’s and “written in her Eightieth Year”; this publication was followed a month later by a signed note from her, offering a corrected version of the poem, both of which the Monthly Repository printed.49 She wrote a memoir attached to a publication by her friend Dr. J. P. Estlin and continued to publish short poems (signed, unsigned, and pseudonymous) in the Annual Register, Monthly Magazine, Monthly Repository, and Ladies Monthly Museum.50 She continued her extensive anonymous reviewing in the Monthly Review.51 The accuracy of Aikin’s statement may rest with how we understand “separate publication.” If it means a single-authored book, Aikin is accurate, but her words have circulated as something more wide ranging. It is customary to claim that the negative review led Barbauld never again to seek print.52 This is simply not the case. She continued to write and sought publication for poems and prose.
Aikin also claims that the Quarterly’s review stopped Barbauld’s plans to edit a volume of her poems, but it is unclear whether or when Barbauld gave up her plan to prepare a new edition. In a letter to Joanna Baillie from 2 February 1822, Barbauld expresses reluctance to provide her with verses requested for a proposed collection to be published for charity: “With regard to your request I cannot say it is particularly agreeable to me to part with one of my poems for a collection, because I have not entirely relinquished the intention of publishing them myself, & I have so very few that I hardly know how to spare one” (Rodgers 242). She accedes to the request because she cannot refuse Baillie or the good cause, offering a poem that has been previously published, one apparently suggested by Baillie. A 20 March 1822 letter asks Baillie please to publish both the “trifle” and the “other” poem which she had thought of before.53 Then Barbauld changes her tone, suggesting that the publication of her verses by Baillie “would not hinder me, I presume, from printing either of them should I think of collecting my scatter’d pieces, as I sometimes do, but many are the things I think of & never accomplish. If at the close of life some may be tolerably acquitted of having done the things they ought to have done, very few of us indeed are not sensible of having left undone those things we ought to have done.” Barbauld’s intention to prepare an edition of her poems for publication seems more equivocal in these letters than the decided refusal that Aikin’s posthumous memoir pronounces. It is possible that Barbauld’s letter itself deserves our skepticism, as her note to Baillie may have been written as a kind of press release to a fellow author. The March 1822 letter, in particular, seems to seek encouragement for completing the task, and it is conceivable that Barbauld hoped Baillie would take a role in seeking an editor. In the end, Barbauld (unlike Baillie) apparently had no hand in preparing for publication her own “complete works.”54
Barbauld’s not editing her own writings in late life cleared the way for Aikin’s account of the effect that Eighteen Hundred and Eleven had on Barbauld’s career. It was the principal one that circulated after Barbauld’s death, though it also competed with less sympathetic interpretations—following Croker—about the soundness of Barbauld’s mind. Jerom Murch, in his study of Barbauld, suggests that the widely held belief at the time her last long poem was published was that Barbauld was losing her faculties, as a result of the death of her husband in 1808. Murch writes, “It has been stated with reference to her last important poem that her mind had not regained its usual healthy tone. There is no doubt that she long suffered severely, but the poem should be judged on its own merits, and few persons would admit that it deserved the bitter criticism with which it was assailed.”55 After thus giving some credence to the likes of Croker, Murch returns to the line of reasoning offered by Aikin: “Mrs. Barbauld lived fourteen years after the publication of this poem. Her powers were still vigorous; her fancy retained all its brightness, but the harp was hung upon the willows. She felt so deeply the misconstruction of angry critics that she wrote nothing more of much importance, though her kindness and gentleness were more conspicuous than ever” (86). As if these myths were not damaging enough to Barbauld’s reputation as an author in old age, an American biographer of women, Sarah Hale, further perverted the distortions of Aikin and Croker. Hale claimed that Barbauld’s “husband died in 1808, and Mrs. Barbauld has recorded her feelings on this melancholy event in a poetical dirge to his memory, and also in her poem ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.’”56 Barbauld’s controversial and moving political poem is misrepresented as an elegy on her late husband.
Traditional versions of her late life—Barbauld the happy-go-lucky old lady, Barbauld the silenced prophetic poet, or Barbauld the accidental editor/critic—do not hold much water. Ageist responses of the literary public during her lifetime and well-meaning misconstructions by her own niece and others thereafter continue to warp our perceptions of Barbauld’s important, sustained late work. Barbauld’s namesake and great-niece Anna Letitia Le Breton left an account of Barbauld’s final years that may provide a helpful springboard for revisionary work. The elderly writer’s steadfast independence during her last years is illustrated by her response to a robbery in her home:
[The burglars] entered a small parlour on the ground floor, and completely sacked it, as well as the dining room adjoining it, actually taking up and carrying off a large carpet among other things. My aunt [Barbauld] slept in a room above adjoining the drawing-room; not only alone, but two stories below the [two female] servants, whose room was reached by a separate staircase. We were dreadfully alarmed for her when the news came to us in town; … she was perfectly cool and calm, however; only remarking how lucky it was they had not come up stairs, as she had a good deal of money in her desk; and she would not be persuaded to alter her arrangements, or have a maid near her. (Le Breton, Memories 42)
Barbauld appears to have been equally unflappable in her late travels and correspondence. Her last journey was to Bristol, where she paid a visit to her “old friends,” Dr. and Mrs. Estlin (49). From there, she went to see her “very old friend” and fellow writer Hannah More (1745–1833), with whom she stayed for several days. In a letter to her brother John Aikin, Barbauld describes her visit to More and her sisters, who were “all good old maids.”57 Barbauld reports that she and More “exchanged riddles, like the wise men of old,” an amusing redeployment of the common linkage of old age and masculine wisdom (50).
At least one nineteenth-century literary critic seems to have more accurately captured the outlines of Barbauld’s late life. In Looking toward Sunset (1865), an extremely popular collection of writings on old age designed as “words of consolation and cheer” to the old, American writer Lydia Maria Child predictably included the last stanza of Barbauld’s poem “Life.” Child introduces the poem, noting that Barbauld “lived to be nearly eighty-two years old. She employed the latter part of her life in editing a series of the best English novels and essays, accompanied with biographical sketches of the authors; and compositions in prose and verse continued to be her favorite occupation to the last.”58 This short paragraph on Barbauld’s old age encapsulates its professional contours, albeit in sentimental, romanticized terms. Nonetheless, it is an important example of an older woman author grasping the varied writing life of another. As studies of Barbauld deepen and evolve, the full impact of her long life and late career—both on their own terms and in terms of literary history—deserve more nuanced retellings. This chapter provides a springboard for future work, by returning Barbauld’s late life critical and editorial contributions to the record, speculating on what motivated this work in her old age and demonstrating the ways in which the harsh reviews she faced were centrally buttressed by ageism, even if driven by political, sex-based, and religious prejudice.
Previous Chapter
Buy This Book in Print