ANNA LAETITIA BARBAULD’S ETHICS OF SENTIMENT

DONATELLA MONTINI

For few can reason, but all can feel, and many who cannot enter into an argument, may yet listen to a tale.1

There is a significant continuity between Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poetical writing and her editorial commitment to the English novel. Both share an interest in the Romantic issue of moral teaching and in fostering the reader’s understanding and growth. Barbauld, whose father had taught alongside Joseph Priestly at Warrington Academy, never lost her dissenter’s vocation for “freedom of the mind”,2 which characterizes her moral and aesthetic approaches to femininity, politics and domesticity. Her voice kept its non-conformist tone, evident in all her writings, whatever the matter at stake. In the debate over the freedom of women, for instance, she held an absolutely personal stance. When Mary Wollstonecraft, who admired Barbauld as an intellectual and a teacher, argued against her alleged capitulation to a “supposed sexual character”,3 Barbauld answered in favour of good mothers and wives rather than femmes savantes. Maternity (“To a Little Invisible Being who is Expected Soon to

I would like to thank Rosy Colombo for our stimulating conversations about Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poetical writing. Rosy’s committed passion for Barbauld as a poet inspired my interest in her as a literary critic. 1 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “On Romances: An Imitation”, in The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld: With a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, 2 vols, London, 1825, II, 172. 2 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “Corsica”, in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, Oxford, 1990, 302. 3 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Kramnick, Harmondsworth, 1975, 143.

186 Donatella Montini become Visible”, 1795) and domesticity (“Washing Day”, 1797)4 are amongst her favourite topics. From her early poems onwards the language of domestic life, with its dignity and joys, runs alongside poems on human and political rights5 or against war. Among her more political poems, “Corsica” (1773), for example, pleads on behalf of the “Corsican struggle for Liberty”, supporting the campaign of the Corsican refugee Pasquale Paoli. Elsewhere she tells the poor not to “fear the God whom priests and kings have made” (“To the Poor”, 1795).6 Barbauld’s literary career enhanced the dialogic dimension of the public sphere. Her mind was dedicated to the rights of the individual and to the assessment of civil values. Within this framework she set up her modern role as a Romantic literary critic, addressing and creating a new readership that the establishment would not take into consideration. Unlike Coleridge, however, she intended to cultivate her readers by working on their emotions rather than persuading their minds. In the poem dedicated to Coleridge himself (“To Coleridge”, 1799) she suggests that “The hill of science … / A grove extends; / … while things of life, / Obvious to sight and touch, all glowing round, / Fade to the hue of shadows”.7 She claims that the writer of fiction can be a strong agent of enchantment and education, “for few can reason, but all can feel, and many who can not enter into an argument, may yet listen to a tale”. Barbauld maintains that a dynamics of emotions can take over the aridity of logic, because tales “teach us to think by inuring us to feel”.8 One of the most troublesome points of discussion in the conflict- ridden dialogue between Coleridge and Barbauld – a dialogue that outlasted their lives – concerned the form of the novel. Barbauld’s critical treatises on this genre, which attempted a systematic overview of extant works, were her most voluminous, as well as her best: these writings dealt with problems regarding the form and definition of the

4 Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, 307-308 and 308-10 5 Barbauld contributed to the campaigns in 1790 for the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts that excluded Dissenters from public office, and in 1791 for the bill to abolish the slave trade. 6 Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, 307. 7 Ibid., 310 8 Barbauld, “On Romances: An Imitation”, 172 and 175.