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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
I. Introduction
ALTHOUGH SHE WAS A WELL-KNOWN AND HIGHLY RESPECTED WRITER OF poetry, children's literature, civil sermons, and critical prose, Anna Laetitia Barbauld (born Aikin, 1743-1825) was reluctant to view herself as a professional author. Most crucially, Barbauld did not depend on her writing for a livelihood, and emphasized the social and moral concerns shaping her forays into print. Her notion of poetic labor was forged not only in the culture of sensibility, but in the culture of religious dissent. The Aikins were active members of the non-conformist community located in Lancashire county; Barbauld's father, John Aikin, served as a tutor in divinity at Warrington Academy, and Barbauld was informally educated in this environment. In 1774 Anna Laetitia Aikin married Rochemont Barbauld, a graduate of Warrington and a dissenting minister. One of the most famous academies of its kind, Warrington served as an important center of dissenting thought in the late eighteenth century. (1) Joseph Priestley taught at Warrington from 1761 until 1767, and became close friends with the Aikins.
Barbauld's acquaintance with Priestley and his works purportedly inspired her to write her first poems. (2) Her initial readership was the dissenting community in which she lived; Barbauld circulated her poetry in manuscript to friends and to the students and tutors at Warrington. Through these channels, her fame spread, but Barbauld shunned publicity. In "A Legacy for Young Ladies," she emphasized that women's role is "to be a wife, a mother, a mistress of a family. The knowledge belonging to these duties is your professional knowledge, the want of which nothing will excuse." Literary knowledge could be a "duty" for men, but for women it was to be used for "the purposes of adorning and improving the mind, of refining the sentiments, and supplying proper stores for conversation." (3) Accounts of Barbauld's literary career suggest that she had to be persuaded to publish her works at all. She published her first poems anonymously in 1772, in a volume of songs edited by her brother John, and in a volume of hymns edited by a tutor at Warrington, William Enfield. In response to "many demands" Barbauld prepared her first solo volume, Poems, which was published by Joseph Johnson in 1773 and printed by the Eyres press in Warrington. Poems went through three editions that year, reaching a fifth edition by 1776 and a sixth by 1792; an American edition was printed in 1820. Following Poems, Barbauld published Epistle to William Wilberforce (1791) and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) with Joseph Johnson, and placed some additional poetry in magazines and anthologies. (4)
While Barbauld produced works in many genres, her total production as a poet was slight; the bulk of her poetry remained unpublished until after her death. (5) Even following the success of Poems, printed under her name, she continued to circulate work by manuscript, often preferring to send poems to friends rather than publish them. Similarly, anonymity was not simply a cloak Barbauld wore prior to securing a measure of literary fame, as was the norm with many women writers (6); throughout the course of her career, Barbauld chose to publish some of her poetry anonymously, to sign some poems "A Lady," or to use the initials A.L.B. or A.B. The poetic persona she cultivated was one of privacy, modesty, and restraint.
Such claims to privacy by eighteenth-century women writers were highly conventional, serving to display compliance with gendered codes of public decorum. Barbauld was certainly influenced by these codes, and scholars have tended to view her as conservative in her acceptance of imposed gendered roles and the doctrine of separate spheres. For instance, Carol Shiner Wilson notes the lack of conflict in Barbauld's poetry "between the needle of domesticity and the pen of artistic desire found in many women writers." (7) But recent work is beginning to suggest that representing her poetic labor as an extension of her private, domestic role did not simply signal Barbauld's acquiescence with gendered limits, but formed a complicated, albeit complicitous, critique of the political and economic systems that shaped her experience as a woman writer and religious dissenter. (8) Crucial to this revision, I will argue, is an understanding of how Barbauld's poetry was produced and circulated, knowledge that the scrupulous edition of Barbauld's poetry by McCarthy and Kraft has recently supplied.
This essay argues that Barbauld develops a lyric aesthetic based on the miniature object so as to textually and materially define a circulation distinct from the dominant, commercially controlled circuits of exchange. The miniaturist poem offers itself to a small, local audience through the conceit of the gift rather than the commodity. A key thread in the fabric of the literature of sentiment, miniaturist literature advertises itself as the product of feminine, domestic handicraft; in doing so, it appears to accept its "minor" status, its role as adornment, the themes of domestic life and moral virtues. While it is a literature defined by the limits of its thematic and formal reach, these limits also serve as the source of its power and critique: Barbauld inscribes her miniaturist poetry as the privileged unit of a representational and political economy opposed to capitalist expansion in its imperialist variety, and to its poetic counterpart, the expansive romantic self. At stake in her use of a miniaturist aesthetic is a model of poetic sincerity based not on autobiographical confession, but on anonymity and the concealment of the personal. Although she wrote and published alongside the first generation romantics, Barbauld--due to her use of Augustan diction and emphasis on the object world rather than on expressions of private feeling--has been seen as an anachronistic throwback to eighteenth-century neoclassical writers. An exploration of Barbauld's miniaturist aesthetic not only reveals that she was actively immersed in the cultural world of romanticism, but that her poetry charts an influential if little-recognized response to the marketing of poetic sincerity and the culture of literary celebrity. (9)
2. Anonymity and Literary Property
Barbauld reflects on the limits and possibilities of the miniature as a model for female authorship in an early unpublished poem, "An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley's Study." (10) This poem considers the scene of poetic production from an unnamed or anonymous narrator's perspective, placing perspective itself in question. What renders Barbauld's poem a miniaturist study is its concern with spatial perspective versus temporal narration: titled an "inventory," it advertises itself as the work of fancy versus imagination, as nothing more than the accumulation of visual, minute detail. (11) In overt theme and purpose the poem is domestic, its work comparable to the mental survey someone such as Priestley's wife or maid might perform as she glances in the study to check that everything is in its proper place.
Although an inventory would appear to have little political import, the narrator's description of Priestley's furniture belies this expectation. Priestley was one of the most well-known republican dissenters of the late eighteenth century. By describing the objects in his study, the narrator draws an implicit portrait of the man and his intellectual and political engagements, investing neutral objects with political meaning. Indeed, at stake in this poem about furniture is the relationship between possessions and their owners, property and authorship. The poem begins with a contrast between landed property and intellectual capital:
A map of every country known, With not a foot of land his own. A list of folks that kicked a dust On this poor globe, from Ptol. the First; He hopes,--indeed it is but fair,-- Some day to get a corner there. (1-6, Poems 38-39)
The narrator alludes to works that Priestley has authored--The New Chart of History (1769) and The Chart of Biography (1765)--and implies that these books are the only form of property available to him. Priestley's lack of material property and the unlikelihood that his name will pass into posterity, connotes the history of unequal treatment, specifically the deprivation of civil and political liberties, experienced by dissenters under British law. (12) This situation resonates doubly for Barbauld, who suffered exclusions not only as a dissenter but as a woman (Ross, "Configurations" 93).
Yet language, the narrator shows, is a medium able to subvert the exigencies of material circumstance:
A group of all the British kings, Fair emblem! on a packthread swings The fathers, ranged in goodly row, A decent, venerable show, Writ a great while ago, they tell us, And many an inch o'ertop their fellows. The meek-robed lawyers, all in white; Pure as the lamb,--at least, to sight. (7-16)
While the classics of religion and law lining Priestley's shelves indicate that he is a faithful English citizen, the narrator implies that appearances deceive, through her description of the spatial arrangement of these works. The fact that the British kings are "swinging on a packthread" connotes an image of the kings hanging by their necks, an "emblem" not of justice and order but of the glorious revolution and Priestley's republican politics (Poems 247). Similarly, by stating that the works of the church fathers make a "venerable show," and that the lawyers appear "pure as the lamb,--at least to sight," the narrator reveals the limits of the visible. In this manner she suggests that her project of visual description belies its manifest appearance, that the meaning of the inventory can be discerned not simply in the objects she catalogues, but in what she implies. More specifically, meaning accrues in her use and arrangement of Priestley's objects in the poem. The portrait of Priestley emerges through what remains invisible without the paintbrush of language: the history and use of his objects. Language itself, then, in its doubleness, its ability to refer to both what is visible and invisible, can evade the exigencies of the material, visible world, defying attempts to declare written texts as material forms of property.
The narrator develops an apt metaphor for language as a propertyless medium--electricity--as she inventories the tools of science that Priestley employs in his study:
A shelf of bottles, jar and phial By which the rogues he can defy all,-- All filled with lightning keen and genuine, And many a little imp he'll pen you in; Which, like le Sage's sprite, let out, Among the neighbours makes a rout; Brings down the lightning on their houses, And kills their geese, and frights their spouses. A rare thermometer, by which He settles, to the nicest pitch, The just degrees of heat, to raise Sermons, or politics, or plays. (17-28)
Priestley wrote a History of Electricity in 1767; the "phial" or Leyden jar was used to store electricity, which when discharged "made a spark like lightning" (Poems 247). The narrator draws a parallel between writing and lightning through the use of a pun, that classic figure of doubleness: punning on the word "pen," she refers both to the electrical "imps" Priestley pens or cages in the jars or phials, and to the verbal "imps" he creates in his treatises. Like electricity, language is invisible until it is released from its "pen" and circulated; only at this point can it achieve contact, creating tangible sparks. Additionally, the allusion to "Le Sage's sprite" would resonate with a contemporary audience; it refers to Le Diable Boiteux by Rene Le Sage, in which "a student releases from a phial in a laboratory a spirit named Asmodeus, who creates a furor among the neighbors by lifting the roofs from their houses and revealing their private lives" (Poems 248). The narrator implies that Priestley's muse, like le Sage's sprite, aims to strike discord. On the other hand, Priestley was responding to a violent social conflict, a conflict which would eventually result in personal domestic havoc, the burning of his study and laboratory in the Birmingham riots of 1791. (13)
Through her alliance with the doubleness of language, the narrator distinguishes herself from Priestley, criticizing his incendiary form of writing. Although dissenters are "unfairly" barred from property, power, and civil liberties, the narrator presents Priestley's response to this, his agitation for reform, as no different in kind from the oppression he seeks to counter. His desire for a "corner" of the map renders his political "commerce" as corrupt as that of his enemies':
Papers and books, a strange mixed olio, From shilling touch to pompous folio, Answer, remark, reply, rejoinder, Fresh from the mint, all stamped and coined here; Like new-made glass, set by to cool, Before it bears the workman's tool A blotted proof-sheet, wet from Bowling. --"How can a man his anger hold in?"-- Forgotten rimes, and college themes, Worm-eaten plans, and embryo schemes;-- A mass of heterogeneous matter, A chaos dark, nor land nor water;-- (29-40)
Comparing the varieties of polemical treatises in Priestley's study ("answer, remark, reply, rejoinder") to freshly minted coins, the narrator points out the connections between financial and political commerce. In using such treatises, Priestley subjects his politics to the logic of the marketplace, to the competition, one-upmanship,...
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