The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

Anna Barbauld, born Anna Letitia Aikin, received an unusual education from her father, a minister and a teacher, after 1758, at the Warrington Academy in Lancashire, the great educational center for the Nonconformist community, whose religion barred them from admission to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Dissenting academies such as Warrington had developed a modern curriculum in the natural sciences, as well as in modern languages and English literature. This progressive educational program deviated significantly from the classics-based curriculum, scarcely altered since the sixteenth century, that was supplied by the old universities. Barbauld benefited from the curriculum the Dissenters had designed with their sons in mind and mastered French and Italian, and then Latin and Greek, while still a girl.

She made her literary debut with Poems, which went through five editions between 1773 and 1777 and immediately established her as a leading poet. In 1774 she married Rochemont Barbauld, a Dissenting minister, and with him comanaged a school at Palgrave, in Suffolk. Thereafter, becoming increasingly famous and respected in literary circles as (according to the custom of the day) "Mrs. Barbauld," she divided her time between the teaching of younger pupils at Palgrave and a series of writings focused on education, politics, and literature. She published Devotional Pieces (1775), three volumes of Lessons for Children (1778�79), and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), all of which were reprinted many times. William Hazlitt records a common experience in recalling that he read her works "before those of any other author, male or female, when I was learning to spell words of one syllable in her storybooks for children."

She wrote political pamphlets in the 1790s, opposing Britain's declaration of war against France, defending democratic government and popular education, and campaigning for the repeal of the Test Acts that had long excluded Nonconformist Protestants (those who would not subscribe, as a "test" of their loyalty, to the thirty-nine Articles of the Established Church) from the public life of the nation. Her 1791 "Epistle to William Wilberforce" attacked Britain's involvement in the slave trade. She accompanied her poetry and political writing with editing, producing an edition of William Collins's poems (1797), six volumes of the correspondence of the mideighteenth- century novelist Samuel Richardson (1804), fifty volumes of The British Novelists (beginning in 1810), and a popular anthology of poetry and prose for young women called The Female Speaker (1811). The British Novelists was the first attempt to establish a national canon in fiction paralleling the multivolume collections of British poets (such as the one associated with Samuel Johnson's prefaces) that had been appearing since the 1770s. Her introductory essay, "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing," is a pioneering statement concerning the educational value of novels.

Barbauld's last major work in poetry was Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), a bitter diagnosis of contemporary British life and politics, which lamented the war with France (then in its seventeenth year), the poverty of leadership, the fallen economy, colonialism, and the failure of genius (at the conclusion, the Spirit of Genius emigrates to South America). Critics, even the more liberal ones, were antagonized by a woman writer's use of the scourge of Juvenalian satire, and their response was anguished and unanimously negative; and Barbauld seems not to have attempted another long work after this (she was, by this time, in her late sixties). After Barbauld's death, her niece Lucy Aikin brought out her aunt's Works (two volumes), including several previously unpublished pieces.

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T HE M OUSE'S PETITION / 27

The Mouse's Petition1

Found in the trap where he had heen confined all night by Dr. Priestle}', for the sake of making experiments with different kinds of air

"Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos."

�Virgil

Oh hear a pensive prisoner's prayer, For liberty that sighs; And never let thine heart be shut Against the wretch's cries.

5 For here forlorn and sad I sit, Within the wiry gate; And tremble at th' approaching morn, Which brings impending fate.

If e'er thy breast with freedom glow'd,

10 And spurn'd a tyrant's chain, Let not thy strong oppressive force A free-born mouse detain.

Oh do not stain with guiltless blood Thy hospitable hearth; 15 Nor triumph that thy wiles betray'd A prize so little worth.

The scatter'd gleanings of a feast My frugal meals supply; But if thine unrelenting heart

20 That slender boon deny,

The cheerful light, the vital air, Are blessings widely given; Let nature's commoners enjoy The common gifts of heaven.

25 The well-taught philosophic mind To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives.

If mind, as ancient sages taught,2 30 A never dying flame,