Reception and legacy

Reception and legacy

Lessons for Children and Barbauld's other popular children's book, Hymns in Prose for Children, had an unprecedented impact; not only did they influence the poetry of William Wordsworth and William Blake, particularly Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789–94),they were also used to teach several generations of schoolchildren both in Britain and the United States. Barbauld's texts were used to perpetuate the ideal of Republican motherhood in 19th-century America, particularly the notion of the mother as the educator of the nation.British children's author and critic Charlotte Yonge wrote in 1869 that the books had taught "three-quarters of the gentry of the last three generations" to read.Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning could still recite the beginning of Lessons at age thirty-nine.
 the authoress of the most useful books, next to Mrs. Trimmer's, that have been yet written for dear little children; though this for the world is probably her very secondary merit, her many pretty poems, and particularly songs, being generally esteemed. But many more have written those as well, and not a few better; for children's books she began the new walk, which has since been so well cultivated, to the great information as well as utility of parents.


Barbauld herself believed that her writing was noble and she encouraged others to follow in her footsteps. As Betsy Rodgers, her biographer, explains: "she gave prestige to the writing of juvenile literature, and by not lowering her standard of writing for children, she inspired others to write on a similar high standard".in fact, because of Barbauld, Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More were galvanised to write for poor children and to organise a large-scale Sunday School movement. Ann and Jane Taylor began writing children's poetry, the most famous of which is "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". Ellenor Fenn wrote and designed a series of readers and games for middle-class children, including the best-selling Cobwebs to Catch Flies (1784). Richard Lovell Edgeworth began one of the first systematic studies of childhood development which would culminate not only in an educational treatise co-authored with Maria Edgeworth entitled Practical Education (1798), but also in a large body of children's stories by Maria, beginning with The Parent's Assistant (1798). Thomas Day originally began his important The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–89) for Edgeworth's collection, but it grew too long and was published separately.

In the second half of the 1790s, Barbauld and her brother, the physician John Aikin, wrote a second series of books, Evenings at Home, aimed at more advanced readers, ages eight to twelve. While not as influential, these were also popular and remained in print for decades. Lessons was reprinted, translated, pirated, and imitated until the 20th century; according to Myers, it helped found a female tradition of educational writing.

While Day, for example, has been hailed as an educational innovator, Barbauld has most often been described through the unsympathetic words of her detractors. The politician Charles James Fox and the writer and critic Samuel Johnson ridiculed Barbauld's children's books and believed that she was wasting her poetic talents. In his Life of Johnson (1791), James Boswell recorded Johnson's thoughts

Endeavouring to make children prematurely wise is useless labour ... Too much is expected from precocity, and too little performed. [Barbauld] was an instance of early cultivation, but in what did it terminate? In marrying a little Presbyterian parson, who keeps an infant boarding-school, so that all her employment now is, 'To suckle fools, and chronicle small beer.' She tells the children 'This is a cat, and that is a dog, with four legs and a tail; see there! you are much better than a cat or a dog, for you can speak.'

Barbauld had published a successful book of poetry in 1773 which Johnson greatly admired; he viewed her switch to children's literature as a descent. The most damning and lasting criticism, however, came from the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb in a letter to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Mrs. Barbauld stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery Mrs. B's and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant & vapid as Mrs. B's books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge, & his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers, when he has learnt, that a Horse is an animal, & billy is better than a Horse, & such like: instead of that beautiful Interest which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to Poetry no less in the little walks of Children than with Men.―: Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography & Natural History? Damn them. I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights & Blasts of all that is Human in man & child.

This quote was used by writers and scholars to condemn Barbauld and other educational writers for a century. As Myers argues:

 expresses in embryonic form ways of thinking about children, teaching, and literature that have long since been institutionalized in historical account and classroom practice: the privileging of an imaginative canon and its separation from all the cultural knowledge that had previously been thought of as literature; the binary opposition of scientific, empiricist ways of knowing and intuitive, imaginative insights; even the two-tiered structure of most modern English departments, with male-dominated imaginative literature on the upper-deck and practical reading and writing instruction, taught most often by women and the untenured, relegated to the lower levels.

It is only in the 1990s and 2000s that Barbauld and other female educational writers are beginning to be acknowledged in the history of children's literature and, indeed, in the history of literature itself.As Myers points out, "the writing woman as teacher has not captured the imagination of feminist scholars",and Barbauld's children's works are usually consigned to "the backwaters of children's literature surveys, usually deplored for their pernicious effect on the emergent cultural construction of Romantic childhood, or in the margins of commentary on male high Romanticism, a minor inspiration for Blake or Wordsworth perhaps".The male Romantics did not explore didactic genres that illustrated educational progress; rather, as Myers explains, their works embodied a "nostalgia for lost youth and pervasive valorization of instinctive juvenile wisdom" not shared by many female writers at this time.

Serious scholarship is just beginning to investigate the complexities of Barbauld's Lessons; McCarthy, for example, has noted the resonances between Lessons and T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland that have yet to be explored