The Collected Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld: Volume 2: Writings for Children and Young People

The Collected Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld presents, for the first time, all the known surviving works of this major English writer, who lived from 1743 to 1825. Poet, essayist, editor, innovative writer for children, polemicist for religious and political reform, Barbauld helped set the agenda for Anglo-American culture for over a century. Her poems influenced Coleridge and Wordsworth; her writings on education, church-state relations, identity politics, and the ethics of citizenship are freshly relevant today; her commentary on books and writers went far to establish today’s canon of English novelists. Beyond their importance, her writings are distinguished by great charm and profound intelligence.

Volume 2 publishes Barbauld’s ground-breaking Lessons for Children (4 vols., 1778-9) for the first time from the earliest surviving copies and reproduces these texts in a manner that honours, as far as possible, the special format the author desired. It also includes the first scholarly edition of Hymns in Prose for Children (1781); pieces in prose and verse associated with the Barbauld school at Palgrave (1774-85); her contributions to Evenings at Home (1793-6); the essays, jeux d’esprit, and poems she wrote for children or young women, many gathered by Lucy Aikin in A Legacy for Young Ladies, reviews of educational books from the Monthly Review; and a trove of previously unpublished letters on the subject of education to Lydia Rickards.

Paula R. Feldman, C. Wallace Martin Professor of English and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts, University of South Carolina, Lisa Vargo, Distinguished Professor, Department of English, University of Saskatchewan

Paula R. Feldman holds the C. Wallace Martin Chair in English and the Louise Fry Scudder Chair in Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. She specializes in literature of the British Romantic era and is the author or editor of ten books and many articles on the subject. She is best known
as editor of British Women Poets of the Romantic Era and co-editor of The Journals of Mary Shelley; The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe; A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, 1750-1850; and scholarly editions of the work of Helen Maria Williams and Felicia Hemans.

Lisa Vargo is Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada, and teaches and researches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, with a focus on Mary Shelley and Anna Barbauld. She has published on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Robinson, Anna Barbauld, Mary Shelley,
Anna Jameson, hypertext editing, gothic fiction, eighteenth-century representations of the moose, Charlotte Smith, and Mathilde Blind. She is the editor of Mary Shelley’s Lodore and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey. Her edition of Mary Shelley’s Spanish and Portuguese Lives appears in Mary
Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings.