Abstract: “The Affectivity of the Natural World and the Romantic Child: Christian-Romantic Values in Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children”
In her Hymns in Prose for Children, which were first published in 1781, Anna Laetitia Barbauld comprises fifteen hymns with a didactic approach to children’s literature common in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. As Bobbie Wells writes in his entry about Barbauld, “[h]er children’s writing [was] informed by her mistrust of imaginative flights of fancy and her belief that children should see the hand of God in all things” (62). This intention she sought to bring close to children by “challeng[ing] young readers with these lyrical prose poems which equated religious feeling with freedom in nature long before the Romantic poets” (Styles 354). Thus, in her Hymns in Prose for Children, the author (more or less) subtly imparts Christian-Romantic values that place the innocence of the child, its naturalness, individuality, and sense for equality at the center of the text.
Moreover, the mode in which her hymns ought to be read and studied clearly emerges from the preface of the book: “They are intended to be committed to memory, and recited” (Barbauld v). The Christian-Romantic values conveyed through the hymns are to be incorporated into the child’s mind – they ought to become one with the child. In order to achieve this embodiment of the values in the ideal child reader, Barbauld draws on “connecting religion with a variety of sensible objects, with all that he sees, all he hears, all that affects his young mind with wonder and delight” (vi; emphasis mine). This affectation, I argue, is imparted on the child reader in a twofold manner: firstly, on the textural level, including the materiality of the book, the illustrations accompanying the hymns, as well as the sensory richness of her language, and secondly, on the level of content, comprising the anthropomorphizing descriptions of nature which place the child and nature on the same ontological plane an focus on human-nature relationships that are inherently affective (Bailey 608), while simultaneously highlighting the individuality of each reader and their active engagement in the structure of the text via scaffolds for individual thinking(-feeling).
Hence, in my talk I intend to highlight the way Barbauld’s Christian-Romantic values assigned to and associated with human beings – in my case, children –, animals, plants, and ‘Nature’ as “religious sublimity” (Johnson 645) affectively charge the texture and content of Hymns in Prose for Children. Furthermore, I contend that knowing about Romantic children’s literature – in particular, the Hymns in Prose for Children – is crucial for an understanding of how Romantic poetry developed in the aftermath of Barbauld’s successful influence on an entire generation of children.
Works Cited
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. 1866. Hymns in Prose for Children. Hurd and Houghton.
Bailey, Peggy Dunn. 2010. “‘Hymns in Prose for Children’: Christian Romanticism and Instruction as Worship.” Christianity and Literature 59 (4): 603–17.
Johnson, Denise. 2024. The Joy of Children’s Literature. Routledge.
Styles, Morag. 2001. “Hymns in Prose for Children.” In The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, edited by Elizabeth L. Keyser, Juliet Partridge, and Morag Styles. Cambridge University Press.
Wells, Bobbie. 2001. “Anna Laetitia Barbauld.” In The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, edited by Elizabeth L. Keyser, Juliet Partridge, and Morag Styles. Cambridge University Press.
Bio: University of Augsburg, Germany
Isabel Fernandez Mayor is a Master’s student of English and American Studies and Secondary School Teaching at the University of Augsburg. Her Bachelor’s thesis was titled “Ecological Matters: The Materiality of Nature in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden” and sparked her research interest in anglophone children’s literature. She was recently accepted for an MPhil in Children’s Literature at Trinity College Dublin and will most likely start studying there in September 2025.