Barbauld, Anna Letitia, Mrs (McKechnie Section 2)

Recorded by Mills. Mrs Peggy Hickman has since published some more information about this ‘poetess and bluestocking', as she calls her, in an article, ‘Shadow Portraits' (Antique Collector, February 1963), and in her book Two Centuries of Silhouette (London, 1971).

Mrs Barbauld, it seems, was one of the many amateur silhouette artists in her day. She won contemporary fame by her best-selling primers and books written especially for children. She and her husband ran a boarding school at Palgrave in Suffolk, and her

Early Lessons and Lessons at Home were written for an adopted son and for the younger pupils at the school.

Mrs Barbauld's father, John Aitken, DD, was headmaster of the Warrington Academy of Dissenters: hence the inclusion of a profile of her in Warrington Worthies, produced by James Kendrick (see Section Two) in 1854. Mrs Peggy Hickman illustrates this profile in Two Centuries of Silhouette. The original appears to have been taken in c. 1820, when Mrs Barbauld was well over seventy years old. Her age is evident from the profile: her figure is bent; and one can see that the profile was taken before single porcelain false teeth became easily available to the public (1845). An engraving from an earlier water-colour drawing, on the same page, is much more attractive; it shows Mrs Barbauld when she was about twenty years younger.

Mrs Barbauld lived in a circle which included many eminent people of the day. She was a life-long friend of Dr Joseph Priestley (1773-1804), the pioneer chemist and discoverer of oxygen. She wrote one of her poems, 'The Mouse's Petition', while staying with the Priestleys in their house near Leeds. The poem is concerned with the imagined feelings of a mouse caught in an old fashioned bell-trap. (No one was more pleased than Mrs Barbauld that Priestly did not use mice in his experiments.) Wordsworth, after hearing a reading of another poem, 'Life', which Mrs Barbauld wrote when she was quite old, remarked, 'I am not in the habit of grudging people their good things, but I wish I had written those lines.' And Mrs Barbauld's prose style was said to resemble that of Dr Johnson himself.

During a visit to France in 1785, Mrs Barbauld met Thomas Jefferson, then Minister to France under Washington's government, in Paris. (It was at about this time that Jefferson persuaded the French sculptor Houdon to visit the United States to execute his statue of Washington, now in Richmond, Virginia; see under Hubard, William James, Section One.) Soon after this meeting she wrote, 'How uniformly great is Congress, and what a spotless character Washington.'

More information about Mrs Barbauld and her circle can be found in Georgian Chronicle, by Betsy Rodgers (London, 1958).

My main reason for including an entry on Mrs Barbauld in this Section is her connection with Robert Kinder (1775-1854), to whom she was aunt by marriage. A friend of Mrs Hickman has a small red leather pocket book which belonged to Kinder, who was an ancestor of hers. On the first page are painted the family crest, the date June 1794, and Robert Kinder's initials. Each of the remaining pages of the book bears a painted silhouette of a member of the family, to which a later descendant has added the date of birth in every case. From a family tree, Mrs Hickman was able to discover the dates of death of all these people. She has illustrated these silhouettes in the article cited above. They appear to date from the late 1790s and the early 1800s, and it is thought that they were probably painted by Robert Kinder himself when he was a young man. I have described this interesting little book in this entry since it is typical of many similar books owned by Georgian families at the time. The quality of the painting, which shows many details of costume, is good. Over the years, profiles such as these may have been removed by dealers from such books, framed, and sold; this makes the differentiation between amateur and professional work, in painted profiles of this period, especially difficult.

Mrs Barbauld, poetess, writer and silhouette artist (she may also have given some lessons in the art to her nephew, if he did indeed paint the examples referred to above), died in 1825.

Although profiles of Mrs Barbauld were taken by other artists, and although we know in what style the Kinder profiles were painted, no profile by Mrs Barbauld herself is extant, although Mills lists a profile by her once owned by Wellesley. It is not even certain that she painted her profiles, and did not cut them. Mrs Barbauld is not known to have used trade labels; no doubt the example once owned by Wellesley was signed.