John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “Master and Slave” (1796)

Abstract Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) was a White English poet, essayist, and children’s book author. John Aikin (1747–1822) was a White English physician and Barbauld’s younger brother. In the 1790s, Barbauld and Aikin co-authored the six-volume work Evenings at Home, a collection of stories composed by Aikin and Barbauld for children or young adults. This chapter is one of these stories—a short fictional conversation between an enslaved man and his enslaver. In this dialogue, the unnamed enslaved person makes several remarkable points, for instance about gratitude and the injustice of slavery; toward the end of the text, the enslaver frees him. Incidentally, this dialogue had a major impact on Frederick Douglass, the famous Black abolitionist and author. Douglass writes that he discovered this text when he was about thirteen and still enslaved, reading the dialogue “again and again with unflagging satisfaction.”