Page "Anna Laetitia Barbauld" Paragraph 55

Barbauld's remarkable disappearance from the literary landscape took place for a number of reasons.

One of the most important was the disdain heaped upon her by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, poets who in their youthful, radical days had looked to her poetry for inspiration, but in their later, conservative years dismissed her work.

Once these poets had become canonized, their opinions held sway.

Moreover, the intellectual ferment that Barbauld was an important part of — particularly at the Dissenting academies — had, by the end of the 19th century, come to be associated with the " philistine " middle class, as Matthew Arnold put it.

The reformist 18th-century middle class was later held responsible for the excesses and abuses of the industrial age.

Finally, the Victorians viewed Barbauld as " an icon of sentimental saintliness " and " erased her political courage, her tough mindedness, her talent for humor and irony ", a literary figure that modernists despised.