Table Of ContentRELIGIOUS DISSENT AND THE
– 1740–1860
AIKIN BARBAULD CIRCLE,
Recent criticism is now fully appreciating the nuanced and complex
contribution made by Dissenters to the culture and ideas of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain. This is the first sus-
tainedstudyofaDissentingfamily–theAikins–fromthe1740sto
the1860s.Essaysbyliterarycritics,historiansofreligionandscience,
and geographers explore and contextualize the achievements of this
remarkablefamily,includingJohnAikinsenior,tutoratthecelebrated
WarringtonAcademy,andhischildren:poetAnnaLetitiaBarbauld,
and John Aikin junior, literary physician and editor. The latter’s
children in turn were leading professionals and writers in the early
Victorianera.Thisstudyprovidesnewperspectivesonthesocialand
cultural importance of the family and its circle – an untold story of
collaborationandexchange,andanarrativewhichbreaksdownperiod
boundariestosetEnlightenmentandVictoriancultureindialogue.
felicity james isLecturerinEighteenth-andNineteenth-century
LiteratureattheUniversityofLeicester.
ian inkster is Research Professor of International History in the
Faculty of Humanities, at Nottingham Trent University, UK, and
Professor of Global History in the Department of International
StudiesatWenzaoUrsulineCollege,Kaohsiung,TaiwanROC.
RELIGIOUS DISSENT AND
–
THE AIKIN BARBAULD
1740–1860
CIRCLE,
edited by
FELICITY JAMES
AND
IAN INKSTER
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Contents
Notesontheeditorsandcontributors page vii
Foreword
isabel rivers and david l. wykes xi
Acknowledgements xiii
1 ReligiousDissentandtheAikin–Barbauldcircle,1740–1860:
anintroduction
felicity james 1
2 TheRevdJohnAikinsenior:KibworthSchool
andWarringtonAcademy
david l. wykes 28
3 HowDissentmadeAnnaLetitiaBarbauld,andwhatshe
madeofDissent
william mccarthy 52
4 ‘AndmakethineownApollodoublythine’:JohnAikin
asliteraryphysicianandtheintersectionofmedicine,
moralityandpolitics
kathryn ready 70
5 ‘Outlinemapsofknowledge’:JohnAikin’sgeographical
imagination
stephen daniels and paul elliott 94
6 ‘Undertheeyeofthepublic’:ArthurAikin(1773–1854),
theDissentingmindandthecharacterofEnglish
industrialization
ian inkster 126
v
vi Contents
7 ‘Thedifferentgeniusofwoman’:LucyAikin’shistoriography
michelle levy 156
8 LucyAikinandthelegaciesofDissent
felicity james 183
9 TheAikinfamily,retrospectively
anne f. janowitz 205
Bibliography 230
Index 249
Notes on the editors and contributors
EDITORS
felicity james is Lecturer in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century
Literature at the University of Leicester. Her first book, Charles Lamb,
ColeridgeandWordsworth:ReadingFriendshipinthe1790s(2008)rereads
Lamb’s position as an urban, Dissenting Romantic. She has recently
published articles on Coleridge, Mary Hays and Harriet Martineau,
and is currently working on a study of life writing and Dissent across
the Romantic and Victorian periods, which stems from research
undertakenduringaBritishAcademyPostdoctoralFellowshipatChrist
Church,Oxford(2005–8).
ian inkster was born in Warrington and is Research Professor of
International History at Nottingham Trent University (UK) and
Professor of Global History at Wenzao Ursuline College, Kaohsiung,
Taiwan. Work on British culture and the process of industrialization is
illustrated in his collected essays Scientific Culture and Urbanisation in
Industrialising Britain (1997) and his recent paper, ‘Potentially Global:
A Story of Useful and Reliable Knowledge and Material Progress in
Europe circa 1474–1914’, InternationalHistory Review, 28 (2006),237–86.
Editor of History of Technology (UK) since 2001, Inkster is the author
of The Japanese Industrial Economy: Late Development and Cultural
Causation (2001) and Science and Technology in History: An Approach to
Industrialisation(1991).
CONTRIBUTORS
stephen daniels holdstheChairofHumanGeographyasProfessorof
CulturalGeographyattheUniversityofNottinghamwherehehasworked
since1980.Since2005hehasbeenDirectoroftheArtsandHumanities
Research Council’s programme in landscape and environment, and was
elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009. His works on long
vii
viii Notes on the editors and contributors
eighteenth-century subjects include Humphry Repton: Landscape
Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (1999) and Joseph
Wright (1999), the exhibition catalogue Paul Sandby 1731–1809:
Picturing Britain (2009) co-edited with John Bonehill, and book
contributions on the art and aesthetics of Loutherbourg, Turner and
UvedalePrice.
paul elliott is Lecturer in History at the University of Derby and a
special lecturer at the University of Nottingham. His research interests
includeeighteenth-andnineteenth-centuryurbanhistory,scientificand
intellectual history and the history of education, and he has published
TheDerbyPhilosophers:ScienceandCultureinBritishUrbanSociety,1750–
1850 (2009); Enlightenment, Modernity and Science (Tauris, 2010); and
(co-authored with Charles Watkins and Stephen Daniels) The British
Arboretum(2011).
anne f. janowitz is Professor of Romantic Poetry at Queen Mary,
UniversityofLondon.SheistheauthorofEngland’sRuins:PoeticPurpose
and the National Landscape (1990), Lyric and Labour in the Romantic
Tradition (1998) and Women Romantic Poets: Anna Barbauld and Mary
Robinson (2005). She is at present writing about the night sky in
eighteenth-centurypoetry.
michellelevyisAssociateProfessorofEnglishatSimonFraserUniversity,
inBritishColumbia.SheistheauthorofFamilyAuthorshipandRomantic
PrintCulture(2008),astudyoftheconjunctionofauthorshipandfamily
life as a distinctive cultural formation of the Romantic period that
examines the literary practices and texts of the Aikins, Wordsworths,
Coleridges, Godwins and Shelleys. She has recently completed, with
Anne K. Mellor, an edition of Lucy Aikin’s Epistles on Women and
OtherWorks(2011).
william mccarthy istheauthorofAnnaLetitiaBarbauld,Voiceofthe
Enlightenment(2008),winneroftheASECSAnnibelJenkinsBiography
Prize2011.Heisco-editor,withElizabethKraft,ofBarbauld’scollected
poems (1994) and the anthology Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry
andProse(2002).
kathryn ready is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Winnipeg.Hergeneralfieldiseighteenth-andearlynineteenth-century
Britishliteratureandculture,withparticularinterestsinwomenwriters,
religious Dissent, and science and literature. Dr Ready has published
Notesontheeditorsandcontributors ix
articlesonvariousmembersoftheAikinfamilyinEighteenth-centuryLife,
Eighteenth-century Women, History of European Ideas, Symbiosis and
Women’s Writing. She has received a Social Sciences and Humanities
ResearchCouncilofCanadaStandardResearchGrantforamonograph
project,‘“TheFreedomoftheMind”:TheAikinFamilyandtheLegacy
ofRationalDissentingSociability’,andisplanningasecondmonograph
projectontheeighteenth-centuryliteraryphysician.
davidl.wykesisDirectorofDrWilliams’sTrustandLibrary,and,with
Professor Isabel Rivers, Co-Director of the Dr Williams’s Centre for
Dissenting Studies. He is also an honorary reader at Queen Mary,
University of London. He edited Parliament and Dissent, with Stephen
Taylor (2005), and with Isabel Rivers Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher,
andTheologian(2008)andDissentingPraise:ReligiousDissentandtheHymn
inEnglandandWales(2011).Hehaspublishedmanyessaysandarticleson
DissentingandUnitarianhistory.TogetherwithIsabelRiversheiscurrently
workingonamajornewstudy,AHistoryoftheDissentingAcademiesinthe
British Isles, 1660–1860, in association with Richard Whatmore of Sussex
University.
