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Aikin in A Legacy for Young Ladies, reviews of educational books from the Monthly Review; and a trove of previously unpublished letters on the subject of education to Lydia Rickards.