Lucy Aikin

-
Standard Name: Aikin, Lucy
Birth Name: Lucy Aikin
Pseudonym: L. A.
Pseudonym: Mary Godolphin
Pseudonym: L. A.
LA 's famous relations made her modest about her creative writing. Publishing during the early nineteenth century, she has to her credit a major poem expressing revisionist historical and feminist ideas, and an interesting novel, as well as much biographical and historical scholarship and some writing for children. She was a pioneer in the writing of cultural history concerned with social environment as well as events. A number of her letters were published after her death.
Title page of Lucy Aikin's "Epistles on Women, exemplifying their character and condition in various ages and nations. With miscellaneous poems", 1810, with the author's name and the colophon of the publisher, Joseph Johnson.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Joanna Baillie
Over the course of her long life JB made dozens of well-loved friends, many of them either professional writers like herself or else writing amateurs. They included Lucy Aikin , Mary Berry , Eliza Fletcher
Literary responses Joanna Baillie
The Chief Justice of Ceylon, Sir Alexander Johnstone , asked that two of JB 's last plays be translated into Singalese.One—The Bride, A Tragedy (published in summer 1828), had a Singalese subject.
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
38 (1828): 602
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB 's niece wrote of her (with an echo of Pope on himself) that while yet a child, she was surprised to find herself a poet.
McCarthy, William et al. “Introduction”. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, University of Georgia Press, p. xxi - xlvi.
xxviii
She herself, however, said it was Joseph Priestley
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
In summer 1789 she wrote a poem of complex feeling, An Epistle to Dr Enfield, which she said he was to throw into the Mersey on a farewell visit to Warrington. It too...
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
J. W. Croker 's notice in the Quarterly Review (in June 1812, wrongly attributed by some to Southey ) was most offensive of all. He reached for the gendered weapons so often drawn against Mary Wollstonecraft
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
Reviews were mixed, some praising her for accuracy and good judgement as a biographer, some doubting the value of the letters, and some employing a vocabulary of delicacy and related terms which was becoming de...
Textual Features Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB draws on Hannah More , her niece Lucy Aikin , and (anonymously) Joanna Baillie . She is even-handed in that she includes six excerpts from James Fordyce 's Sermons to Young Women, a...
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB 's niece Lucy Aikin posthumously published her aunt's Works, with a memoir.
McCarthy, William et al. “Introduction”. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, University of Georgia Press, p. xxi - xlvi.
xlvi
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
Lucy Aikin edited and posthumously issued a volume of ALB 's poems and mostly unpublished prose pieces (some epistolary) as A Legacy for Young Ladies. The whole has been called a conduct book.
McCarthy, William et al. “Introduction”. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, University of Georgia Press, p. xxi - xlvi.
xlvi
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
675
Family and Intimate relationships Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB 's niece Lucy Aikin , youngest daughter of her brother John, became a writer, and later edited and published ALB 's works.
Family and Intimate relationships Anna Letitia Barbauld
Rochemont Barbauld came from a French Huguenot family and had a strong foreign accent as a result of spending his childhood abroad. He was ALB 's junior by six years, small in stature, emotionally unstable...
Occupation Anna Letitia Barbauld
At some time before November 1773, while the engaged pair were casting around for a means of earning money, Countess Spencer (perhaps, but only perhaps, with the support of Elizabeth Montagu , and quite possibly...
Friends, Associates Anna Letitia Barbauld
The literary society of ALB 's time was, as biographer Betsy Rodgers notes, small and intimate.
Rodgers, Betsy. Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and her Family. Methuen.
80
Writers all knew each other and kept in touch; those who did not live in London visited frequently...
Birth Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB was born at West Camel in Somerset.
Lucy Aikin gave her birthplace as Wells (a larger place, not far away).
The Monthly Repository. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme.
1 n.s., 1827.126
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Aikin, Lucy, and Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger. “Memoir of Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger”. Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, 3rdrd ed, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green.
Residence Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB had persuaded her mother to settle the pair of them in London.
This is the date given by Lucy Aikin in her obituary of Benger, though elsewhere she places the move a year...

Timeline

9 September 1803: The first number appeared of the Annual Review,...

Writing climate item

9 September 1803

The first number appeared of the Annual Review, a Dissenting periodical run by Lucy Aikin 's brother Arthur Aikin , which had been planned in 1802.

By Christmas 1869: Francis Galton, mathematician, scientist,...

Writing climate item

By Christmas 1869

Francis Galton , mathematician, scientist, and eugenicist, published Hereditary Genius: An Enquiry into its Laws and Consequences,

Texts

Barbauld, Anna Letitia. A Legacy for Young Ladies. Editor Aikin, Lucy, Longman, 1826.
Aikin, Lucy. Correspondence of William Ellery Channing, D. D., and Lucy Aikin, from 1826 to 1842. Editor Le Breton, Anna Letitia, Roberts, 1874.
Aikin, Lucy. Epistles on Women, Exemplifying their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations. J. Johnson, 1810.
Aikin, Lucy. Lorimer, A Tale. Henry Colburn, 1814.
Barbauld, Anna Letitia. “Memoir”. The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, edited by Lucy Aikin, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825, p. 1: v - lxix.
Le Breton, Philip Hemery, and Lucy Aikin. “Memoir”. Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters, Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864.
Aikin, Lucy, and Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger. “Memoir of Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger”. Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, 3rdrd ed, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1827.
Aikin, Lucy. Memoir of John Aikin, M. D. Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1823.
Aikin, Lucy. Memoirs of the Court of King Charles the First. Longman, 1833.
Aikin, Lucy. Memoirs of the Court of King James the First. Longman, 1822.
Aikin, Lucy. Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818.
Aikin, Lucy. Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth. Cambridge University Press, 2010, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.
Aikin, Lucy. Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters. Editor Le Breton, Philip Hemery, Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864.
Aikin, Lucy, editor. Poetry for Children. Consisting of Short Pieces, to be Committed to Memory. R. Phillips, 1801.
Aikin, Lucy. The Life of Joseph Addison. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1843.
Barbauld, Anna Letitia. The Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Editor Aikin, Lucy, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825.