The Lim Transcriptions of Anna Letitia Barbauld's Letters to Lydia Rickards: A Critique

The Lim Transcriptions of Anna Letitia Barbauld's Letters to Lydia Rickards:A Critique William McCarthy (bio) Anna Letitia Barbauld, letters, transcription, archives, women's writing, women's and gender studies In 2019, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature published transcripts by Jessica W. H. Lim of thirty-one letters written by Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825) to Lydia Rickards (1784-1867).1 The letters to Lydia constitute the only surviving long series of Barbauld letters known today. Barbauld wrote them between 1798, when Lydia came from Birmingham to be her pupil, and 1815, the year when Lydia, then Mrs. William Withering, suffered an illness that caused permanent dementia. Lydia died childless. The letters Barbauld wrote to her remained in the Rickards family. In November 1891, a collateral descendant, Edith Cordelia Rickards (d. 1929), published extracts from them in Murray's Magazine; those were the texts on which I had to depend in my biography, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (2008).2 In 2011, Lydia's last collateral descendant died childless in a nursing home. By sheer good luck (so the story goes), the packet of letters was rescued from what threatened to be disposal and put to auction. They were purchased by a Canadian independent scholar, Joanna Kafarowski, who, five years later, sold them to me. After transcribing and photographing the letters, in August 2016 I delivered them to the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library, their current owner. The collection consists of thirty-nine holograph letters from Barbauld to Lydia; three from Barbauld to Lydia's mother; a letter by Barbauld's nephew and adopted son, Charles Rochemont Aikin, to Lydia; and several other documents.3 Five of Barbauld's letters to Lydia, dating to 1800 or soon after, offer instruction on language, Homer, and history. The letters on history were published by Lucy Aikin in a collection of Barbauld's writings for young people, A Legacy for Young Ladies (1826).4 These instructional letters, but not the social ones, will appear in an edition of Barbauld's collected works in progress from Oxford University Press. In part, no doubt, because learning to read Barbauld's hand takes practice, Lim's transcripts of the letters to Lydia are often erroneous. Collation of the thirty-one letters she transcribed with my own transcripts and, in doubtful cases, with my images of the originals has disclosed 249 errors: on eighteen occasions Lim adds a word not in the original, on thirty occasions she omits a word, and on 201 occasions she misconstrues a word. Aside from suffering from the difficulties presented by Barbauld's rapid [End Page 151] handwriting, the Lim transcripts suggest unfamiliarity with Barbauld's turns of phrase, the people she knew, and authors she read and quoted—unfamiliarity, also, with the conventions of letter-writing and letter-posting in Barbauld's day. My collations did not include matters of punctuation or paragraphing. Lim interprets Barbauld's frequent dashes in the letters as, in effect, paragraph breaks. They may sometimes be, but the effect, in Lim's transcriptions, is often to break up a topic and make a new paragraph out of what seems to have been, for Barbauld, a further thought about an ongoing subject. It would have been less intrusive to leave the dashes in place and observe only Barbauld's own explicit paragraphing. The errors in Lim's transcriptions are important to note because they affect perceptions of the letters. Most obviously, readers not previously acquainted with Barbauld's social milieu will be sent looking for names unknown to Barbauld or sometimes for real individuals who did not belong to her circle. In two transcripts, Barbauld is made to speak of men when in the originals she speaks of women: "Mrs Opie," "Mrs Beecroft," "Mrs Rickards," and "Mrs Milligan," not "Mr." any of these (pp. 168, 191). On the other hand, the poet Samuel Rogers, whom Barbauld knew, becomes "Mrs Susan Rogers" (p. 174). Barbauld's relations by marriage, the Kinders, in Lim's transcriptions are the "Flinders" on one occasion (p. 178) and the "Sheridans" on others (pp. 172...

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