Wednesday 29th October, 2025

6:00pm–6:00pm

public

free

not required

Dr Williams's Library Conference

Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Anna Laetita Barbauld and Dissenting Hymns

Anna Laetita Barbauld (1743-1825) was a poet, educator and polemicist, celebrated after her death as ‘unquestionably the first of our female poets, and one of the most eloquent and powerful of our prose writers’.[1] This lecture will investigate Barbauld’s use of the hymn form to debate and celebrate Dissenting devotional practices. Barbauld was born into an Arian Dissenting family and educated by her father John Aikin at Warrington Dissenting Academy. She was made famous by her first publication Poems (1773), which includes a number of hymns. These hymns have often been read as lyric poems for private consumption but I show how they were used in Dissenting congregational worship, and argue that Barbauld encouraged their use and circulation in Dissenting hymnals. Barbauld exploited the flexible generic qualities of hymns, using them as forms of celebration, protest, and community building throughout her career.

Mary Fairclough

Mary Fairclough is Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her work investigates the intersection of literature, science, politics and religion in the eighteenth century and Romantic period. She is the author of The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy, and Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Literature, Electricity and Politics: ‘Electrick Communication Every Where’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and a book in progress on Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Hays, reading, and devotion, supported by the Leverhulme Trust.