De Quincey, who was evidently well-disposed towards the “Queen of all the Blue-stockings” (in spite of her misguided preference for Sinbad) says that she “occupied the place from about 1780 to 1805 which from 1805 to 1835 was occupied by Miss Edgeworth.” At any rate she was a pioneer in the art of writing for children, and Miss Edgeworth had a genuine admiration for her work.
But although there was a certain likeness in the aims and ideas of these two, each had her own qualities, which were the outcome of essential differences in character.
Mrs. Barbauld had grown up among the boys of her father’s school, and in her youth was as active and mischievous as a boy. There is a story told of how she escaped an importunate suitor by climbing an apple-tree in the garden and dropping over the wall into a lane. Miss Edgeworth, in the same situation, would have walked out by the gate.
It is true that none of Mrs. Barbauld’s stories show this spirit of mischief: she was playful only in light verse or talk or letters; but she made her personality felt in a romantic attitude to life and Nature, which, although it did not much affect her choice of subjects, made her style unusually free and moving.
She had no children of her own, but adopted a nephew, “little Charles”, for whom she wrote most of her stories; and at Palgrave, where she and her husband had a school, she was the mother, tutor and playfellow of the boys.
The tutor, indeed, comes out in all her stories; the playfellow and the mother are not always there. Yet she was dominated neither by facts nor theories. A deep sense of spiritual truth underlay her teaching, and her feeling for the poetry of Nature was the nearest approach to a Renaissance of Wonder in children’s books.
It may be doubted whether the famous Hymns in Prose[124] ever appealed to children as it did to their parents. Mrs. Barbauld entirely disagreed with Rousseau’s principle that there should be no religious teaching in early life, and that a young child cannot appreciate natural beauties; but she also rejected Paley’s crude idea of the Creator as a sort of Divine Mechanic,[125] which some writers preferred to the neutral deism of Rousseau.
She held that children’s thoughts should be led from the beauty of the flower to the wonder of creation.
“A child”, she says, “to feel the full force of the idea of God, ought never to remember when he had no such idea.” It must come early, with no insistence upon dogma, in association with “all that a child sees, all that he hears, all that affects his mind with wonder or delight.”
“Wonder” was a word unknown to educational theorists, who believed that everything could be discovered or explained. It is her use of those words “wonder” and “delight” which sets Mrs. Barbauld apart from other writers of little books, for it shows something like the spirit of romantic poetry.