Lessons for Children

Lessons for Children is a series of four age-adapted reading primers written by the prominent 18th-century British poet and essayist Anna Laetitia Barbauld.

In perhaps the first demonstration of experiential pedagogy in Anglo-American children's literature, Barbauld's books use a conversational style, which depicts a mother and her son discussing the natural world.

[2][a] In her history of children's literature in The Guardian of Education (1802–1806), Sarah Trimmer noted these innovations, as well as the use of good-quality paper and large spaces between words.

"[6] The second part increases in difficulty: "February is very cold too, but the days are longer, and there is a yellow crocus coming up, and the mezereon tree is in blossom, and there are some white snow-drops peeking up their little heads.

[9] Barbauld's Lessons emphasises the value of all kinds of language and literacy; not only do readers learn how to read but they also acquire the ability to understand metaphors and analogies.

At this still hours the self-collected soul Turns inward, and beholds a stranger there Of high descent, and more than mortal rank; An embryo GOD; a spark of fire divine, Which must burn on for ages, when the sun, (Fair transitory creature of a day!)

Charles learns the principles of "botany, zoology, numbers, change of state in chemistry ... the money system, the calendar, geography, meteorology, agriculture, political economy, geology, [and] astronomy".

[19][20] Building on Locke's theory of the Association of Ideas, which he had outlined in Some Thoughts, philosopher David Hartley had developed an associationist psychology that greatly influenced writers such as Barbauld (who had read Joseph Priestley's redaction of it).

[20][17] For the first time, educational theorists and practitioners were thinking in terms of developmental psychology, and as a result, Barbauld and the women writers she influenced produced the first graded texts and the first body of literature designed for an age-specific readership.

[21] According to scholar William McCarthy, Lessons not only teaches literacy, "it also initiates the child [reader] into the elements of society's symbol-systems and conceptual structures, inculcates an ethics, and encourages him to develop a certain kind of sensibility".

[31] Barbauld's contemporary William Blake was influenced by Hymns and poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning could still recite the beginning of Lessons at the age of 39.

[32] British children's author and critic Charlotte Mary Yonge wrote in 1869 that the books had taught "three-quarters of the gentry of the last three generations" to read.

[19] According to Myers, Barbauld's work inspired other educational ventures of the time, including the reforms of John Dewey, Friedrich Fröbel, and Johann Pestalozzi.

[3] Lessons also influenced Trimmer and Hannah Moore's work with the charity and Sunday schools that taught working-class children how to read during much of the 18th century.

Ellenor Fenn wrote and designed a series of readers and games for middle-class children, including the best-selling Cobwebs to Catch Flies (1784).

[16][e] In the second half of the 1790s, Barbauld and her brother, the physician John Aikin, wrote a second series of books, Evenings at Home, aimed at more advanced readers, ages eight to twelve.

The politician Charles James Fox and the writer and critic Samuel Johnson ridiculed Barbauld's children's books and believed that she was wasting her poetic talents.

[41] Myers, however, calls Lamb's ways of thinking about children were "embryonic" and mired in the long-standing and long-institutionalized "privileging of an imaginative canon and its separation from all the cultural knowledge that had previously been thought of as literature".

[44] The male Romantics did not explore didactic genres that illustrated educational progress; rather, as Myers explains, their works embodied a "nostalgia for lost youth and [a] pervasive valorization of instinctive juvenile wisdom" not shared by many female writers at this time.