Anna Barbauld’s Poetic Career in Script and Print

Chapter 3 takes the long view of Anna Barbauld’s career as a dynamic example of the interactions between media, gender, and genre over nearly seven decades, from the 1760s, when she began composing verse, to the mid-1820s, when she died and a significant quantity of her unpublished writing came to light. Barbauld’s considerable fame as a poet rested on the social verse she published in the 1770s – poems she had written a decade earlier for her domestic circle and which she reluctantly published. For reasons we only imperfectly understand, she never printed another collection of her poems, even after the enormous success of her 1773 volume, reviews of which compared her to both Milton and Shakespeare, and even though she continued to write poetry for the next five decades of her life. She did strategically print some of her poems in magazines, whereas others she circulated in manuscript. This chapter points to the sociable and political nature of many of Barbauld’s poems, as well as to the satiric vein that runs throughout, to understand her reluctance to publish poetry and her willingness to publish in other genres, from political and religious tracts to educational and children’s books.