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L!:! Cy Aikin (1781-1864)

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L!:! Cy Aikin (1781-1864) l!:!_cy Aikin (1781-1864) Niece of Anna Letitia Barbauld and daughter of Martha Jennings and John Aikin, Lucy Aikin was born in Warrington on 6 November 178i. When she was three years old her family moved to Yarmouth, where her father practiced medicine. Brought up on Barbauld's Early Lessons and Hymns in Prose for Chil­ dren, Aikin realized early that words would be her metier. After complaining that her older brother George took half a tart intended for the younger chil­ dren, she was admonished, "You should be willing to give your brother part of your tart." But she objected to the injustice, and her father, "who," she later recalled, "had listened with great attention to my harangue, exclaimed, 'Why Lucy, you are quite eloquent!' O! never-to-be-forgotten praise! Had I been a boy, it might have made me an orator; as it was, it incited me to exert to the utmost, by tongue and by pen, all the power of words I possessed or could ever acquire-I had learned where my strength lay." 1 Aikin studied French, Italian, and Latin. Her father was her chief men­ tor. A close observer of the natural world, he taught his children to know and to love plants, birds, and animals of all kinds. In 1792 the family moved to London, where her father practiced as a physician until his health failed in 1797. Then he took his family to Stoke Newington and devoted the rest of his life, the next quarter-century, to literature. It was during this period that he published, in conjunction with Barbauld, the hugely successful and influential six-volume Evenings at Home. Aikin was seventeen when she first began publishing articles in reviews, magazines, and the Annual Register. Believing that "the magic of rhyme is felt in the very cradle," in 1801 she published an anthology, Poetry for Children, Consisting of Short Pieces to be Committed to Memory, which included some of her own poems as well as several anonymous contributions by her aunt. It I. Lucy Aikin, Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters, ed. Philip Henery Le Breton (London, 1864), xvii. 6 Lucy Aikin 7 went through at least eleven editions and continued to be reprinted as late as 1845. In 1810 Joseph Johnson brought out Aikin's long feminist poem, Epistles on Women, Exemplifying their Character and Condition in various Ages and Nations, documenting not only the history of women's achievements but also their subjugation. It is an ambitious but uneven work, certainly not the equal of Barbauld's tour de force, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, published two years later. However, a comparison of the poems shows the strong intellectual bond that existed between the two women. Aikin's next book was a novel, Lorimer; a Tale (1814); but she made her reputation with the two pioneering social histories that followed: Memoirs ef the Court ef Queen Elizabeth (1818), issued in at least six editions during her lifetime, and Memoirs ef the Court ef King James the First (1822), which the Edinburgh Review praised as "a work very nearly as entertaining as a novel, and far more instructive than most histories." 2 These innovative works highlight the literary, artistic, and social character of the times rather than the more usual parliamentary or military history. Aikin lived quietly at Stoke Newington, principally writing and caring for her invalid father until his death in December 1822, when she and her mother moved to Hampstead. In 1823 she published a life of her father (Memoir ef John Aikin, M.D. ... With a Selection ef his Miscellaneous Pieces), and in 1825 she edited The Works ef Anna La?titia Barbauld, including her valuable biography of her aunt, letters, prose pieces, and many poems not published during Bar­ bauld's lifetime. To this day, many of Barbauld's poems can only be dated by the chronological order in which Lucy Aikin placed them in this edition. A short biography of Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger and two more histories followed: Memoirs of the Court of King Charles the First (1833) and The Life ofJoseph Addison (1843), which Thomas Macaulay, writing in the Edinburgh Review, thought disappointing.3 According to Aikin's own account, she knew "almost every literary woman of celebrity." 4 She was an accomplished conversationalist and letter writer. One of her correspondents was fellow Unitarian William Ellery Channing, to whom she wrote for many years (1826-42).5 Aikin lived the 2. 37 (June 1822): 212-13. 3. Ibid., 78 (July-October 1843). The biography of Benger was published with Benger's Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn (London, 1827). 4. Aikin, Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters, 7. 5. Anna Letitia Le Breton published selections from both. sides of the correspondence in 1874. She quotes a letter from Channing's nephew and biographer, William Henry Channing, in which he observes that "for many years, indeed, Dr. Channing regarded Miss Aikin as one of his most confidential European friends; and he wrote to her in consequence with the undisguised freedom of familiar intercourse. He valued her letters very highly for the liberal information given in them, as to all movements in the world of letters, of politics and of religion around 8 Lucy Aikin last eighteen years of her life with a niece, Anna Letitia Le Breton, first in Wimbledon and then in Hampstead. At age eighty-four, she died from influenza (29 January 1864); her grave in the old churchyard of Hampstead lies next to that of her lifelong friend Joanna Baillie. In 1864 her nephew, Philip Henery Le Breton, published some of her letters to Channing along with other correspondence, miscellaneous prose pieces, and a memoir, quoting extensively from an autobiography. MAJOR WORKS: Epistles on Women, Exemplifying their Character and Condition in Viiri­ ous Ages and Nations. With Miscellaneous Poems (London, 1810); Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, 2 vols. (London, 1818); Memoirs of the Court of King James the First, 2 vols. (London, 1822); Memoir of John Aikin, M.D . ... With a Selection of his Miscel­ laneous Pieces, Biographical, Moral, and Critical, 2 vols. (London, 1823); Memoirs ef the Court ef King Charles the First, 2 vols. (London, 1833); The Life efJoseph Addison, 2 vols. (London, 1843). TEXT USED: The text for Epistles on Women is from the London edition (1810). from Epistles on Women, Exemplifying their Character and Condition in various Ages and Nations from the Introduction Feeling with gratitude of what her [woman's] heart and mind are capable, the scholars, the sages, and the patriots of coming days will treat her as a sister and a friend. The politic father will not then leave as a "legacy" to his daughters* the injunction to conceal their wit, their learning, and even their good sense, in deference to the "natural malignity" t with which most men regard every woman of a sound understanding and cultivated mind; nor will even the reputation of our great Milton himself secure him from the charge of a blasphemous presumption in making his Eve address to Adam the ac­ knowledgement, "God is thy head, thou mine";* and in the assertion that her-as to leading persons, new books and rising authors-and as to the tendencies of the times. And so heartily did he enjoy the originality, brightness, spirit, wit and shrewd sagacity with which Miss Aikin's opinions were declared, that, in the hope of inciting her to full re­ sponse, he seems often to have suggested to her his rising thoughts, as if in half soliloquy" (Correspondence of William Ellery Channing, D.D. , and Lucy Aikin [Boston, 1874], vii-viii). Lucy Aikin 9 the first human pair were formed, "He for God only, she for God in him."§ ... I have simply endeavoured to point out, that between the two partners of human life, not only the strongest family likeness, but the most complete identity of interest subsists: so that it is impossible for man to degrade his companion without degrading himself, or to elevate her without receiving a proportional accession of dignity and happiness. This is the chief "moral of my song"; 11 on this point all my examples are brought to bear. I regard it as the Great Truth to the support of which my pen has devoted itself. •A reference to John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to his Daughters (1774), often published with Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773). t Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, quotes Gregory, also from A Father's Legacy: "But if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding." ~Aikin slightly misquotes Eve speaking to Adam in Milton, Paradise Lost 4.637- 38: "God is thy Law, thou mine: to know no more/ Is Woman's happiest knowledge and her praise." Earlier in the same book, Eve addresses Adam as "my Guide/ And Head" (442-43). §Ibid., 4.299. 11 See Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen, introduction, line 9. from Argument to Epistle I Subject proposed-the fame of man extended over every period of life­ that of woman transient as the beauty on which it is founded-Man renders her a trifler, then despises her, and makes war upon the sex with Juvenal# and Pope. A more impartial view of the subject to be attempted. # Decimus Junius Juvenalis (A.D. 60?-140?), Roman poet whose satires were widely admired by eighteenth-century writers.
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