This book re-places Lamb - as reader, writer and friend - in the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s.It taps into current interest in 'romantic sociability', a close study of the affiliations of writers who used to be grouped as 'the Wordsworth circle' and 'the Keats circle'. This book makes valuable contribution to emerging critical studies of Lamb and his writings. It offers the first book-length study of Lamb's early works and their relationship to other Romantic writers. It discusses Lamb's friendship with key Romantic writers, including Coleridge and Wordsworth and how their relationships informed their works. It gives attention to allusive practices of the time and the development of the essay as a genre.This book makes the case for a re-placing of Lamb as reader, writer and friend in the midst of the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s. Reading his little-known early works alongside others by the likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth, it allows a revealing insight into the creative dynamics of early Romanticism.

A diary entry, begun by a wife and finished by a husband; a map of London, its streets bearing the names of forgotten lives; biographies of siblings, and of spouses; a poem which gives life to long-dead voices from the archives. All these feature in this volume as examples of 'writing lives together': British life writing which has been collaboratively authored and/or joins together the lives of multiple subjects. The contributions to this book range over published and unpublished material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories. The book closes with essays by contemporary, practising biographers, Daisy Hay and Laurel Brake, who explain their decisions to move away from the single subject in writing the lives of figures from the Romantic and Victorian periods. We conclude with the reflections and work of a contemporary poet, Kathleen Bell, writing on James Watt (1736-1819) and his family, in a ghostly collaboration with the archives. Taken as a whole, the collection offers distinctive new readings of collaboration in theory and practice, reflecting on the many ways in which lives might be written together: across gender boundaries, across time, across genre. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

A diary entry, begun by a wife and finished by a husband; a map of London, its streets bearing the names of forgotten lives; biographies of siblings, and of spouses; a poem which gives life to long-dead voices from the archives. All these feature in this volume as examples of 'writing lives together': British life writing which has been collaboratively authored and/or joins together the lives of multiple subjects. The contributions to this book range over published and unpublished material from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, including biography, auto/biographical memoirs, letters, diaries, sermons, maps and directories. The book closes with essays by contemporary, practising biographers, Daisy Hay and Laurel Brake, who explain their decisions to move away from the single subject in writing the lives of figures from the Romantic and Victorian periods. We conclude with the reflections and work of a contemporary poet, Kathleen Bell, writing on James Watt (1736-1819) and his family, in a ghostly collaboration with the archives. Taken as a whole, the collection offers distinctive new readings of collaboration in theory and practice, reflecting on the many ways in which lives might be written together: across gender boundaries, across time, across genre. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the first collection of essays on poet and public intellectual Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825). By international scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature, these new essays survey Barbauld's writing from early to late: her versatility as a stylist, her poetry, her books for children, her political writing, her performance as editor and reviewer. They explore themes of sociability, materiality, and affect in Barbauld's writing, and trace her reception and influence. Rooted in enlightenment philosophy and ethics and dissenting religion, Barbauld's work exerted a huge impact on the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on education and ideas about childhood far into the nineteenth century. William McCarthy's introduction explores the importance of Barbauld's work today, and co-editor Olivia Murphy assesses the commentary on Barbauld that followed her rediscovery in the early 1990s. Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the indispensible introduction to Barbauld's work and current thinking about it.

Recent criticism is now fully appreciating the nuanced and complex contribution made by Dissenters to the culture and ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain. This is the first sustained study of a Dissenting family - the Aikins - from the 1740s to the 1860s. Essays by literary critics, historians of religion and science, and geographers explore and contextualize the achievements of this remarkable family, including John Aikin senior, tutor at the celebrated Warrington Academy, and his children, poet Anna Letitia Barbauld, and John Aikin junior, literary physician and editor. The latter's children in turn were leading professionals and writers in the early Victorian era. This study provides new perspectives on the social and cultural importance of the family and their circle - an untold story of collaboration and exchange, and a narrative which breaks down period boundaries to set Enlightenment and Victorian culture in dialogue.

In December 2015 a novel by Elizabeth Hays (c. 1765-1825) that has eluded scholars of women novelists of the 1790s for more than a century was finally discovered in the British Library. Fatal Errors was written in the late 1790s by the sister of Mary Hays, but not published until 1819 under her married name, Lanfear, and has therefore been completely overlooked until now. There has been considerable interest in the missing novel, since we know that Mary Wollstonecraft read and commented on a version of the manuscript in 1796, but it was presumed never to have been published. Now this missing piece of the conversation of the Hays-Wollstonecraft-Godwin circle has been located this modern critical edition of Fatal Errors contributes both to our knowledge of this network of radical writers and thinkers, and to our understanding of the trajectory of women's fiction and the Jacobin novel.

Recent criticism is now fully appreciating the nuanced and complex contribution made by Dissenters to the culture and ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain. This is the first sustained study of a Dissenting family - the Aikins - from the 1740s to the 1860s. Essays by literary critics, historians of religion and science, and geographers explore and contextualize the achievements of this remarkable family, including John Aikin senior, tutor at the celebrated Warrington Academy, and his children, poet Anna Letitia Barbauld, and John Aikin junior, literary physician and editor. The latter's children in turn were leading professionals and writers in the early Victorian era. This study provides new perspectives on the social and cultural importance of the family and their circle - an untold story of collaboration and exchange, and a narrative which breaks down period boundaries to set Enlightenment and Victorian culture in dialogue.

This book makes the case for a re-placing of Lamb as reader, writer and friend in the midst of the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s. Reading his little-known early works alongside others by the likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth, it allows a revealing insight into the creative dynamics of early Romanticism.