To Stoke Newington, where I have been invited to speak in a few weeks’ time about Anna Barbauld as a radical thinker (this year marks the 200th anniversary of her death). It’s too nice an autumn afternoon to sit indoors preparing my talk so I’m off on a wander, reflecting that there is no shortage of literary radicals associated with this pocket of north London – Daniel Defoe, Richard Price, Mary Wollstonecraft. Under my arm is a biography: Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment by William McCarthy, not a new book (it was published in 2008) but a good one. Rereading it is like catching up with an old friend.

Anna Barbauld’s early fame rested on the success of her Poems in 1773 (as ‘Miss Aikin’). She would go on to become a renowned woman of letters, an outspoken intellectual, a pamphleteer and a fervent campaigner for progressive causes: in favour of democratic government and popular education; fiercely opposed to the slave trade. When William Wilberforce’s attempt to outlaw the slave trade was defeated in Parliament in 1791, Mrs Barbauld took up her pen. What angered her was not only that profits were put before people, but that the depravity, suffering and injustice that had been clearly laid out were not denied: the evil was seen and defended. Her ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce’ begins:

Cease, Wilberforce, to urge thy generous aim!

Thy Country knows the sin, and stands the shame! 

There was more sin and shame to come two years later when France declared war on England and King George III called for a public day of fasting to urge the Almighty to look favourably