The Politics of Vision: Anna Barbauld’s ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’

Abstract

In her brilliant long poem ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, Mrs Anna Aikin Barbauld commandingly stakes out her political position concerning gender and the aetiology of destruction. In doing so she claims for herself an authoritative vantage point of ’disinterestedness’, and in skilfully phrased heroic couplets looks out over time and the disparate elements of society to describe the dismal state of affairs in 1811, to identify what went wrong, and finally to explore what will happen after Britain loses its status as the seat of civilization. By 1811 her neo-classical style was regarded as old-fashioned, but in a successful career of nearly 40 years no-one had publicly questioned her extraordinary ability to use powerful yet accessible allusions to present and argue complex ideas. Yet the reception of this poem was hostile. John Croker wrote in the Quarterly Review,

We think that she has wandered from the course in which she was respectable and useful, and miserably mistaken both her powers and her duty, in exchanging the birchen for the satiric rod, and abandoning the superintendance of the ‘ovilia’ of the nursery, to wage war on the ’reluctantes dracones’, statesmen, and warriors, whose misdoings have aroused her indignant muse.¹