SOURCE: "Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns in Prose: 'An Air-Blown Particle' of Romanticism?" in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. IX, No. 3, Summer, 1975, pp. 259-68.

In the following excerpt, Pickering examines Barbauld's place in the history of children's literature and suggests that her writings influenced the development of English Romanticism.

Pinpointing the origins of the Romantic Movement is like tracing the evolution of man. New and embarrassing ancestors will forever turn up in isolated rifts in Kenya or in the backwaters of eighteenth-century journals. Wordsworth and Coleridge did not leap full grown from the forehead of Calliope, but were instead the poetic product of a long line of cultural ancestors. In this essay I want to make the case for eighteenth-century children's literature being among the progenitors of English Romanticism. Although many people wrote children's literature after 1780, I intend to focus on Anna Letitia Barbauld, whom Henry Crabb Robinson, the indefatigable diarist...