© 2002 by Oxford University Press
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‘The Mouse's Petition’: Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Scientific Revolution
1 Wolfson College Oxford
This article charts a literary response to the revolution in chemistry in the poetry and prose of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, challenging the tendency in recent history to obscure the involvement of women in scientific culture. Counter to conventional images of the ‘lady writer’, Barbauld appropriated scientific language, filtered it through a ‘feminine’ sensibility, and took it into the political arena to join the writings of Joseph Priestley and Edmund Burke. She not only used scientific rhetoric to energize her political writings; she also criticized the conduct of the radical scientists with whom she was associated. Her work can productively be read as a commentary on the scientists of her era, akin to that of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein on the succeeding generation of chemists. Her criticism, carried out with a light, affectionate touch, takes part in the cultivation of an open, ethical scientific culture pioneered in the eighteenth century.