Lucy's father was also a historian, and her grandfather, likewise called John Aikin (1713–1780), was a Unitarian scholar and theological tutor, closely associated with Warrington Academy.
[1] Lucy Aikin lived with her parents in Great Yarmouth and Stoke Newington until the death of her father in 1822, when she moved to Hampstead.
She "read widely in English, French, Italian, and Latin literature and history,"[1] began publishing for magazines at the age of 17, and was soon assisting her father as an editor of his writings.
The last of these, containing many letters of Addison never before published, was the subject of an essay by Macaulay, who while praising Aikin's other works, and especially her Memoirs of the Court of James I, observed that she was "far more at home among the ruffs and peaked beards of Theobalds than among the steenkirks and flowing periwigs which surrounded Queen Anne's tea table at Hampton.
Her letters to her relatives and intimate friends showed her relish for society, and were full of wit and lively anecdotes of distinguished literary persons.
[1] Aikin also translated French texts: Louis Francois Jauffret's The Travels of Rolando (publication around 1804), and Jean Gaspard Hess's The Life of Ulrich Zwingli (1812), on a leader of the Reformation in Switzerland.
Aikin's Memoirs, Miscellanies, and Letters were published in 1864, as was an edited version of her correspondence with Channing ten years later, in 1874 (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate).