SOURCE: "Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns in Prose: 'An Air-Blown Particle' of Romanticism?" in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. IX, No. 3, Summer, 1975, pp. 259-68.

[In the following excerpt, Pickering examines Barbauld's place in the history of children's literature and suggests that her writings influenced the development of English Romanticism.]

Pinpointing the origins of the Romantic Movement is like tracing the evolution of man. New and embarrassing ancestors will forever turn up in isolated rifts in Kenya or in the backwaters of eighteenth-century journals. Wordsworth and Coleridge did not leap full grown from the forehead of Calliope, but were instead the poetic product of a long line of cultural ancestors. In this essay I want to make the case for eighteenth-century children's literature being among the progenitors of English Romanticism. Although many people wrote children's literature after 1780, I intend to focus on Anna Letitia Barbauld, whom Henry Crabb Robinson, the indefatigable diarist, compared to the angel Gabriel.

In 1802 Wordsworth wrote that the child was the father of the man. If this poetic description of human nature is accurate, then Mrs. Barbauld's influence upon nineteenth-century thought was incalculable. In 1781, Mrs. Barbauld published her Hymns in Prose for Children. Written for children aged 3 to 5, the Hymns were designed

to impress devetional feelings as early as possible on the infant mind . . . to impress them by connecting religion with a variety of sensible objects, with all that he [a child] sees, all that he hears, all that affects his young mind with wonder or delight; and thus by deep, strong, and permanent associations, to lay the best foundation for practical devotion in future life.

The Hymns were a phenomenal success. In 1877 Mrs. Barbauld's biographer [Jerome March] wrote enthusiastically,

where in the long catalogue of children's books, shall we find any to be compared with them? Many who heard them the first time at their mother's knee can trace to them their deepest, most precious convictions. A century has now passed since they were written; they have been largely used by all classes from the palace to the cottage, and still what a freshness and beauty in every page!

Even after allowance has been made for biographical afflatus, this was a remarkable tribute. Moreover it was repeated throughout the century. Not only were the Hymns translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian, but they were construed into Latin hexameters. At Mrs. Barbauld's death in 1825, the Christian Reformer wrote that the Hymns were "beyond all praise" and accused the parent who did "not familiarize his children to these exquisite effusions of pious taste" of being "deficient in the first of duties."

During Mrs. Barbauld's lifetime, individuals were hardly less restrained than eulogists at her death. In "On the Living Poets," William Hazlitt reminisced that the "first poetess" he could recollect was Mrs. Barbauld. Recalling that she strewed "the flowers of poetry most agreeably round the borders of religious controversy," Hazlitt wrote nostalgically "I wish I could repay my childish debt of gratitude in terms of appropriate praise." In 1797 Coleridge called her "that great and excellent woman." On publication of the Lyrical Ballads, he instructed Thomas Longman to send complimentary copies to five people, one of whom was Mrs. Barbauld. According to Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth, who disapproved of Mrs. Barbauld's later political poetry, still thought her "the first of our literary women."

Not all judgments of Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns were favorable, but even those that were adverse underlined her influence. In describing his unhappy childhood, Ernest Pontifex remembered angrily that he had to learn Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns by heart. Charles Lamb objected to the Hymns' didacticism. He believed that fancy was the raw material from which literature was made and that children would be better off imaginatively if they read "old wives tales." In 1802 he wrote Coleridge in exasperation, saying "Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics out of the nursery, and the shopman at Newbery's hardly deigned to reach them off an unexplored corner of a shelf, when Mary [his sister] asked for them . . . Damn them!—I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Beasts of what is human in man and child."

Thinking Mrs. Barbauld's works represented eighteenth-century rationalism, Lamb made an ill-founded criticism. With justice it could have been applied to some of Mrs. Barbauld's imitators, in particular Mrs. Trimmer, but not to Mrs. Barbauld herself, whose works freed rather than confined the imagination. For our purposes though, Lamb's statement that Mrs. Barbauld's works had filled the bookstore and had banished the "old classics out of the nursery" is important. In 1802 the Guardian of Education recounted the history of children's books in England. Before the reign of Queen Anne, the Guardian wrote, mere were few children's books. During and after Queen Anne's reign, "the first period of Infantine and Juvenile Literature" began. During this time, Mother Goose's Fairy Tales, Esop's and Gay's Fables, and The Little Female Academy by Mrs. Fielding ("the learned translator of Xenophon") were prominent. "In general of a very harmless nature," these books "were most calculated to entertain the imagination, rather than improve the heart or cultivate the imagination." With Mrs. Barbauld's "introducing a species of writing, in the style of familiar conversation, which is certainly much better adapted to the capacities of young children than any that preceded it," the modern period of religious literature for children began. "The useful hints given by Mrs. Barbauld," the journal continued, were "generally adopted by her contemporaries, and many books have been supplied to the nursery by means of which children at an early age have acquired the rudiments of useful science, and even the first principles of Christianity with delight to themselves, and ease to their instructors." In banishing the fairy tales and establishing the general pattern of most English children's literature for at least forty years, Mrs. Barbauld was a moral Johnny-on-the-spot. Fortuitously her Hymns embodied the growing moral didacticism that later inspired widely-read writers like Legh Richmond and Hannah More.

In the preface to the Hymns, Mrs. Barbauld said that there were few books calculated to assist children in the devotional part of religion except Dr. Watts's verses. Although these were "in pretty general use," it was doubtful, Mrs. Barbauld argued, "whether poetry ought to be lowered to the capacities of children, or whether they should not rather be kept from reading verse, till they are able to relish good verse" (iii-iv). Behind Mrs. Barbauld's preface were the realizations that Watts's verses were pretty poor stuff and that poetic expression was beyond young children's understanding. However in evoking Watts, Mrs. Barbauld meant not only to be critical but also to establish herself as Watts's successor. First published in 1715, Watts's Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children had been extremely popular in religious families. At the conclusion of the Songs, Watts included "a slight specimen of moral songs, such as I wish some happy and condescending Genius would undertake for the use of Children." "The Sense and Subjects," Watts urged, "might be borrowed plentifully from the Proverbs of Solomon, from all the common appearances of Nature, from all the occurrences in Civil Life, both in the City and Country, (which would also afford matter for other divine Songs). Here the Language and Measures should be easy and flowing, and without the Solemnities of Religion, or the sacred Names of God and Holy Things; that children might find Delight and Profit together."

After the publication of the Hymns, Mrs. Barbauld was recognized as Watts's "condescending genius." Written in "measured prose" instead of verse, her Hymns borrowed their subjects and sense from the common appearances of nature and were "nearly as agreeable to the ear as a more regular rhythmus." Moreover they conveyed Watts's delightful and profitable faith without confusing children with thorny doctrine or terrifying accounts of the wages of sin.

The Hymns were popular not only because of their literary merits but also because they embodied the moral concerns of the age. With the sermons of John Scott, Isaac Barrow, and John Tillotson serving as texts, the Church of England drifted towards latitudinarianism throughout the late seventeenth and early and mid eighteenth centuries. Charity replaced Christ, and good works rather than correct doctrine became the hallmark of the true Christian. For Scott personal benevolism was the Christian ideal. Christianity taught us, he wrote,

to be benign and bountiful to the necessitous and distressed, and to endeavour according to our ability to allay their sorrows, remove their oppressions, support them under the calamities, and counsel them in their doubts, to be ready to every good work, and like the Fields of Spices to be scattering our Perfumes through all the Neighborhood."

As latitudinarianism dominated the theology of the Established Church, so it pervaded literary criticism. Toward the end of the century, ethical criticism often led to a willing suspension of literary judgment. Journals such as the Critical Review wrote typically, "The author wishes to inculcate filial piety; and she has executed her design in a number of well-chosen pathetic tales.—In such a cause, Criticism smooths his brow and takes off his spectacles, willing to see no fault. She who would support the cause of piety and virtue cannot err." Supporting the cause of piety and virtue, Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns taught broad-church morality. Recognizing this, the two leading journals of the period, the Monthly and Critical reviews received the Hymns favorably, stating that Mrs. Barbauld gave young people "a proper idea of the Creator and his works."

A Unitarian at a time when Unitarians were respected rather than condemned, Mrs. Barbauld did not stress particular doctrines such as the atonement or the Trinity. This so broadened her appeal that even Calvinists conscientiously taught the Hymns to their children. When Hannah More and the Anglican evangelicals at Clapham began publishing their Cheap Repository Tracts for readers in "the lower and middling classes," the Calvinistic Evangelical Magazine advised them to imitate Mrs. Barbauld and avoid controversial political and theological doctrine.

The appearance of the Hymns in 1781 coincided with what J. R. Green in his History of the English People called "the beginnings of popular education." Although there had been previous fumblings forward, the Sunday School Movement made little headway until Robert Raikes began his school in Gloucester in 1780. In 1785 the Sunday School Society was founded; by 1792, it was estimated that there were five hundred thousand "Sunday Scholars." The phenomenal spread of Sunday Schools resulted, for the most part, from three factors: evangelical stress on man's responsibility for man, latitudinarian emphasis on personal benevolism, and the belief that a religious education would make society more stable. In the 1790's, Sunday Schools provided the only national system of education. After the Bell-Lancaster dispute in the first decade of the nineteenth century, other plans were adopted. But even so late as 1818 a parliamentary survey showed that 452,817 English children were being educated in Sunday Schools. This figure becomes significant for our purposes when we realize that Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns was one of the first works adopted as reading matter by Sunday Schools of all theological hues. Later, Lancaster used her books in his schools. Furthermore, with her Easy Lessons for Children, the Hymns established, in Fanny Burney's words, the "new walk" for children's literature, along which countless writers followed. For example, the Easy Lessons led Mrs. Trimmer to write Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, [1792] designed "to open the minds of children to a variety of information, to induce them to make observations on the works of nature, and to lead them up to the Universal Parent, the Creator of this world and all things in it."

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Englishmen believed that youthful reading made the man. Perhaps Dr. Johnson's friend, Anna Seward, known in poetry circles as the Swan of Lichfield, put it best, "it cannot be doubted that the understanding, and virtue, the safety, and happiness of those branches of Society which are raised above the necessity of mechanic toil depend much upon the early impressions they receive from books which captivate the imagination and interest of the heart." Today we are not so sure how influential childhood reading is in shaping adults, and, consequently, the influence of Mrs. Barbauld's works upon later writers must always remain in the hazy world of the history of ideas. Nevertheless, Mrs. Barbauld's poetics were Romantic. According to Henry James, the artistic sensibility is "a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-blown particle in its tissue." In turn these particles were often converted into art. Certainly the Hymns' popularioty testified to the wind they stirred, and particles were blown into the nineteenth century. To say, however, that Mrs. Barbauld directly influenced Romantic poetry would be going too far. If, though, the artist does convert "the very pulses of the air into revelations," she may have had an indirect influence upon the Romantics. With the realization that I can reach no final conclusions, but can only furnish speculative matter for future thought, I want to examine some of the similarities between Mrs. Barbauld's poetry and that of Wordsworth, who read and admired her writings.

According to Pater, "the sense of a life in natural objects," which was rhetorical artifice in most poetry, was almost a "literal fact" for Wordsworth. "To him," Pater wrote [in Appreciations, 1911], "every natural object seemed to possess . . . a moral or spiritual life, to be capable of a companionship with man, full of expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse." Wordsworth believed a spirit rolled through all thinking things and all objects of all thought. This spirit acted upon "certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind," liberating it from the "degraded thirst after outrageous stimulation." Nature, as Emerson put it, conspired with the spirit to emancipate man from the long littleness of life. Lucy achieved immoratality when she became one with rocks and stones and tress, and her lover achieved a transcendent spiritual union when he took nature for the guardian of his heart and half-created the world about him. Wordsworth was not, of course, merely a sentimental naturalist. It was through nature, Pater wrote, that he approached the spectacle of human life and came to understand the burthen of the mystery. Mrs. Barbauld also resembles Wordsworth in her belief that natural objects possessed a moral or spiritual life which enabled them to emancipate man. For her, "every field" was "like an open book." "Every painted flower" had "a lesson written on its leaves," and "every murmuring brook" had "a tongue" (75). The universe was the living visible garment of God as nature taught man "to see the Creator in the visible appearance of all around him." Although Wordsworth's "Intelligence which governs all," was more complex than Mrs. Barbauld's God, the moral presences of both poets were cut from the same latitudinarian cloth and rarely descended to the doctrinaire.

Wordsworth and Mrs. Barbauld were poets of democracy and celebrated the degnity of the common man. Wordsworth's famous preface of 1800 championed democracy in poetry. The true poet was not a poetaster, appealing to an educated elite; neither was he an inspired prophet with his eye in a fine frenzy rolling. Instead, he was "a man speaking to men" in the "language really used by men." Poetry itself was "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," not a frozen pastiche of "gaudiness and inane phraseology," which only the few could understand. In revolt, like Wordsworth, against poetic diction and eighteenth-century rationalism, Mrs. Barbauld used the language of a man speaking simply. Indeed, her simplicity fitted Wordsworth's definition of poetry better than his own verse. In "Hymn II," Mrs. Barbauld wrote disarmingly,

Come let us go forth into the fields, let us see how the flowers spring, let us listen to the warbling of the birds, and sport ourselves upon the new grass. The winter is over and gone, the buds come out upon the trees, the crimson blossoms of the peach and the nectarine are seen, and the green leaves sprout. The hedges are bordered with tufts of primroses, and yellow cowslips that hang down their heads; and the blue violet lies hid beneath the shade . . . The butterflies flutter from bush to bush, and open their wings to the warm sun. The young animals of every kind are sporting about, they feel themselves happy, they are glad to be alive,—they thank him that has made them alive. They may thank him in their hearts, but we can thank him with our tongues; we are better than they, and can praise him better.

The simplicity of Mrs. Barbauld's poetic prose made the Hymns available to all children learning to read.

Her democracy, however, was not limited to language. Her poetic world was organic rather than atomistic, for, like Wordsworth, she believed that a spirit was "deeply interfused" through all things. As a result, the brotherhood of man was not a New Testament ideal but philosophic reality. Nature taught that all men from the "Negro woman . . . pining in captivity" to the "monarch ruling an hundred states" (60-61) were members of "God's family" (59). Trying to awaken children's sensibilities through lush descriptions, she attempted to enlarge their capacities for sympathy and love. Once children loved "all things because they are the creatures of God" (51), then "incidents and situations from common life" (Cumberland beggars, old leech gatherers, and idiot boys) could become worthy of serious thought.

Growth was the most prevalent theme in Wordsworth's and Mrs. Barbauld's poetry. For both, the child was the father of the man. As the subtitle of The Prelude was "Growth of a Poet's Mind" so the Hymns in Prose could have easily been subtitled "Growth of a Child's Mind." Wordsworth and Mrs. Barbauld believed that the mind developed through sense experience and reflection, Locke's sources of empirical knowledge. As she stated in the preface to the Hymns, by connecting religion with "sensible objects," Mrs. Barbauld hoped to control the "fair seed-time" of a child's soul. Accepting Locke's associationist view of behavior, she wanted "to lay the best foundation for practical devotion in future life." As important as empirical knowledge was, however, Wordsworth and Mrs. Barbauld also believed that intuition could play a major part in the learning process. For Wordsworth, one impulse could, but not necessarily would, invigorate "the discriminating powers of the mind." The ways of the worldly world, he wrote in the "Preface" of 1800, reduced men's minds to "almost savage torpor." The epiphanic moment could contribute to mental growth by moving vision beyond the actual object perceived to an object half-created by the imagination. Although Mrs. Barbauld wanted the epiphanic moment to lead to religious rather than imaginative perception, her emphasis upon the importance of impulse was similar to that of Wordsworth.

In so stressing impulse, she implicitly criticized eighteenth-century rationalism. Although their approaches were different, both poets thought imagination crucial to a child's growth. Book V of The Prelude, for example, celebrated the importance in childhood of "the open ground of Fancy." More pietistic and more openly critical of reason, the sixth "Hymn" was Mrs. Barbauld's Book V. In a catechistic section, she taught the importance of impulse and urged child readers to half-create the world about them. What Wordsworth later criticized as the "model child" was Mrs. Barbauld's "child of reason." She began the catechism by asking the child of reason where he had been and what he had seen. Lacking a creative imagination, the child replied that he had been in the meadow, looking at cattle and wheat. "Didst thou see nothing more?" she retorted.

Didst thou observe nothing beside? Return again, child of reason, for there are greater things than these.—God was among the fields; and didst thou not perceive him? His beauty was upon the meadows; his smile enlivened the sun-shine. I have walked through the thick forest; the wind whispered among the trees; the brook fell from the rocks with a pleasant murmur; the squirrel leapt from bough to bough; and the birds sung to each other amongst the branches. Didst thou hear nothing, but the murmur of the brook? no whispers, but the whispers of the wind? Return again, child of reason, for there are greater things than these.—God was amongst the trees; his voice sounded in the murmur of the water; his music warbled in the shade; and didst thou not attend?

Mrs. Barbauld was not, as Arnold labelled Wordsworth, "one of the very chief glories of English Poetry." Preciously sentimental and didactically heavy-handed, her poetic prose has been neglected by contemporary criticism. Put into historical perspective, however, it becomes more interesting. "In the great poets," James Russell Lowell wrote, "there is an exquisite sensibility both of soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer sea-moss with every movement of the element in which it floats." Mrs. Barbauld helped create the element in which the Romantic poets eventually floated. In 1803, a writer in the Guardian of Education said he had frequently heard the Hymns "recited by young children with such intelligence of countenance, and emphasis of delivery, as evidently proved that the sentiments of the writer were transfused into the minds of the little speakers." We can never know to what extent this "transfusion" contributed to the life-blood of Romantic poetry. There were similarities, as I have tried to point out, between Wordsworth's and Mrs. Barbauld's poetics. Indeed Wordsworth, as did probably most of the leading Romantic poets, read the Hymns. Beyond this, though, we cannot go; and the most we can conclude is that eighteenth-century children's literature, in particular Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns in Prose, was one of the progenitors of the English Romantic Movement.