Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825)

Educationist, poet, and writer for children. With her brother, the physician and writer, John Aikin (1747–1822), Barbauld was a member of an intellectual Dissenter circle including the Edgeworths, Erasmus Darwin, and others, whose influence as educationists remained widespread during Ruskinʼs youth, and whose poems, stories, and lessons in dialogue form are reflected in his early reading and writing. These influences were admissible to the Ruskin household despite the politics of this circle. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, Barbauld espoused progressive causes that would have alarmed the Ruskins. However, in the memoir and selection of works by Barbauld, published in 1825 by her niece, Lucy Aikin, a Victorian sanitizing was begun that distanced Barbauldʼs feminism from Wollstonecraft radicalism and associated her writing most strongly with her works for children—a process of reception that, in the view of William McCarthy, gradually hollowed out her significance over the course of the nineteenth century, diminishing the reception of her poetry and prose writing for adults (McCarthy, “‘A High‐Minded Christian Lady’”, 175–77; Aikin, Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld).

Of Aikin and Barbauldʼs writing for children, Barbauldʼs Hymns in Prose (1781) is documented as present in the Ruskin family library; and Evenings at Home (1792–96) was likely owned by the Ruskins, although the provenance of a surviving copy is less definite. F. J. Sharp (1880–1957) acquired from Brantwood what he believed to be Ruskinʼs boyhood copy of Evenings at Home as well as as well as a copy of Barbauldʼs Hymns in Prose (1781), (Viljoen, Sharp Collection, 8), which the Ruskins definitely owned in its 22nd (1821) edition (see Dearden, The Library of John Ruskin, 23 [no. 151]; and for an examination of the volumes, now held by the Beinecke Library, see Lightman, “John Ruskinʼs Debt to Anna Barbauldʼs Books for Children”, 260–61, 264). The influence of Evenings at Home is discernible in what is probably Ruskinʼs earliest extant poem, “The Needless Alarm”, and in “The Adventures of an Ant”.

According to Lucy Aikin, the selections in Evenings at Home attributable to Barbauld are “The Young Mouse”, “The Wasp and the Bee”, “Alfred: A Drama”, “Animals and Countries”, “Canuteʼs Reproof”, “The Masque of Nature”, “Things by Their Right Names”, “The Goose and the Horse”, “On Manufacture”, “The Flying‐fish”, “A Lesson in the Art of Distinguishing”, “The Phoenix and the Dove”, “The Manufacture of Paper”, “The Four Sisters”, and “Live Dolls”. All other pieces were composed by John Aikin or possibly collaboratively (Barbauld, Works, ed. Aikin, 1:xxxvi–xxxvii).

Of Barbauldʼs poems, “A Summer Eveningʼs Meditation” can possibly be detected structuring the conclusion of Ruskinʼs draft version of “Saltzburg”. During Ruskinʼs youth, the poem was available in Aikinʼs 1825 Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1:122–28), and McCarthy has found Barbauldʼs poems in anthologies from 1827 onward (McCarthy, “‘A High‐Minded Christian Lady’”, 190 n. 37).

For the presence of Barbauld and Aikinʼs ideas in Ruskinʼs home education, as well as their continuing contribution to Ruskinʼs mature pedagogical emphasis on attentive vision, unaided by modern lenses, see Naomi Lightmanʼs discussion of the significance of the dialogue, “Eyes, and No Eyes; or, the Art of Seeing”, from Evenings at Home (“John Ruskinʼs Debt to Anna Barbauldʼs Books for Children”).