She, in her early home, had enjoyed those advantages that have so often helped to strengthen and enlarge learned and literary tastes in women, an almost masculine education, and the society of highly-cultured and liberal-minded men. She was the only daughter of Dr. Aikin, who himself, we are told, was a man of sound scholarship, and the friend of Drs. Priestley, Enfield, and Doddridge, the latter of whom for some time resided in the family.[61]
Back View of Houses, Church Row.
Her first poems were published the year before her marriage, and were followed by her ‘Hymns in Prose,’ for children, hymns that were themselves full of poetry—at least, to the perception of one child’s heart—and were accepted by hundreds of parents with gratitude and admiration. Other works followed, and she assisted her brother, Dr. John Aikin, in the delightful series of stories entitled ‘Evenings at Home.’ But the fruits of her training and associations are best seen in her critical and graver writings, which display ‘a strong, logical, and correctly-thinking mind’[62]—nay, in some of them a breadth and liberality of thought quite beyond the times in which she lived; and it required in that day some courage to publish them. Take, for instance, her ‘Observations on the Devotional Taste,’ on ‘Sects and Establishments,’ a page of which I append.[63]
At the present day some of her suggestions have become opinions, and are openly preached; but her anticipatory expression of them reads rather like inspiration than the simple sequence of logical reasoning. Moreover, she was living in times when for women to have opinions at all—or at least to print them—was regarded as unfeminine, and looked upon with disfavour. Mrs. Barbauld herself, in her ‘Life of Richardson,’ tells us how the accomplished and clever Mrs. Delany found fault with a conversation in ‘Sir Charles Grandison,’ in which the words ‘intellect’ and ‘ethics’ occur, as being too scholastic to be spoken by a woman; and Dr. Johnson ‘did not greatly approve of literature as a career for women,’ though he condoned it in the case of little Fanny Burney and Miss Mulso, afterwards well known as Mrs. Chapone, or, as she used to be styled in my young days, Madame Chapone, without a course of whose letters no young lady was supposed to have finished her education. But Johnson affected, in Mrs. Barbauld’s case, to underrate her talents. When, however, at the very height of her literary reputation, he heard of her devoting herself to the culture of the young minds entrusted to her own and her husband’s care, she had, we are told, ‘his highest praise.’ No one, according to Mrs. Piozzi, ‘was more struck with this voluntary descent from possible splendour to painful duty than the Doctor.’ But why ‘painful duty’? I imagine that to Mrs. Barbauld the divine gift of teaching, as she, and Pestalozzi, and Dr. Arnold, and a few others, have taught, was as spontaneous and irrepressible as her writing poetry. The first-fruits of her genius had been for children. The publication of her ‘Early Lessons’ was an era in their first steps to knowledge, and her contemporaries declared it unrivalled amongst books for children. She had taught when quite a girl in her father’s school, for the simple love of teaching, and thus I do not believe that the step she took was one regarded by her as a descent. She had made a name that was destined to live, and the estimation in which her writings were held lost nothing by her ceasing to write, though the reputation of them enhanced that of the Hampstead School. No doubt she regarded her acceptance of the position from quite another point of view than did the learned Doctor, who had essayed school-keeping as a means to an end, and failed, while the lady entered upon it con amore, and her method was altogether different from the scholastic system then in vogue. She was the friend, companion, and confidant of her pupils; she sympathized with all their small troubles, shared their joys, and catered for their amusement. Howitt, in his ‘Northern Heights of London,’ tells how a lady calling on her found Mrs. Barbauld in the midst of making paper plumes, ruffs, and collars, for the boys who were about to play in private theatricals.
No; I feel sure there was no feeling of descent in her change of occupation, no sense of ‘painful duty’ in the teaching that helped to mould the minds of boys like Thomas Denman, afterwards Lord Denman, Lord Chief Justice of England, and of William Gell, subsequently Sir William Gell, the antiquary and topographer of Greece and Pompeii, neither of whom in after-life forgot their indebtedness to her. She had, as a writer, known the triumph of success. Her poems, published in 1778, had passed through four editions in the year. She had won the praise of Charles James Fox, who particularly admired her songs; had been eulogized by Garrick as ‘She who sang the sweetest lay’; and was regarded by Wordsworth as the ‘first of literary women’; while Crabb Robinson, who did not see her till she had reached old age, was enthusiastic in his admiration of her intellect, and charmed with her appearance even then.
It is amusing, from a woman’s standpoint, to mark the generous praise and admiration of these men, and compare it with the stinted commendation and personality of the ‘sweet Queen’s’ ex-reader, and of Mrs. Chapone. Some time after Miss Burney’s return to her father’s house, Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld called upon her, whereupon she writes in her journal that the latter is altered at this period, ‘but not for the worse to me, since the first flight of her youth has taken with it a great portion of an almost set smile, which had an air of determined complacency and prepared acquiescence that seemed to result from a sweetness that never risked being off guard. I remember,’ she runs on, ‘Mrs. Chapone saying to me, “She is a very good young woman, as well as replete with talent, but why must one always smile so? It makes my jaws ache to look at her;”’ and then Miss Burney sums up her literary merit as ‘the authoress of the most useful works, next to Mrs. Trimmer, that have been written for children, though this with the world is probably her very secondary merit. Her many pretty poems, and particularly songs, being generally esteemed. But many more have written these as well. For children’s books she began the new walk, which has since been so well cultivated, to the great information as well as the utility of parents.’
She tells us that Mrs. Barbauld’s brother, Mr. Aikin, had a very fine countenance, and describes Mr. Barbauld as ‘a very characteristic figure, but well bred and sensible.’ Crabb Robinson is more clear in his delineation of him, and says he had ‘a slim figure, a weazen face, and a shrill voice. He talked a good deal, and was fond of dwelling on controversial points of religion. He was by no means destitute of ability.’ Amongst Mrs. Barbauld’s guests at Church Row in 1798 was Miss Mary Galton, afterwards Mrs. Schemelpennick, one of the shining lights in that brilliant company that met in Mrs. Montague’s drawing-rooms on the occasions of her literary assemblies, which brought together all the wit and talent of the town.