Lucy Aikin and Her Radical Milieu, By Simon Strickland-Scott

Although Newington Green is known for its dissenting academies, it is the Warrington Academy, first opened in 1757, which stands as the foremost of these institutions of higher education.  The Academy was open to all non-conformists, who, by definition were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, but was particularly orientated towards Unitarians.  Among the tutors from its inception was John Aikin.  Aikin had been joined at the Academy in 1761 by the Unitarian Minister and chemist Joseph Priestley.  Another famous tutor at Warrington was the future French Revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. 

Among the students, one notable name among the Academy’s alumni was Thomas Malthus who pioneered the now controversial and largely discredited theory of population growth.

Because of the reputation it developed, Warrington was dubbed ‘The Athens of the North’ and ‘the cradle of Unitarianism’.

John Aikin and his wife, Jane, had two children, a son, also named John, and a daughter, Anna.  The younger John Aikin attended the Academy as a student before becoming a medical doctor and father of four children including a daughter, Lucy, born in November 1781.

Another student at the Academy was one Rochemont Barbauld, who like Marat, hailed from a French Huguenot family. In 1774 he married Anna Aikin who thus became the Anna Barbauld that many readers may already be familiar with.  The Barbaulds would later move to Stoke Newington where Rochemont became minister at the Unitarian Church.  Anna Barbauld was thus Lucy Aikin’s aunt and later adopted her brother Charles Rochemont Aikin who would go on to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Among the financial supporters of the Academy was the wealthy Unitarian merchant William Russell whose house, along with that of Joseph Priestley, fell victim through arson to the Birmingham rioters in 1791 (Priestley would receive temporary sanctuary at Stoke Newington courtesy of the then minister Richard Price).

Another supporter was Thomas Bentley who served as a trustee of the Academy.  A prolific joiner, Bentley, a friend of Lucy Aikin, was also a member of the Lunar Society, the Roscoe Circle and an Octagonian!

The Octagonians were a nickname for members of an independent non-conformist sect in Liverpool named after the eight sided chapel they worshipped in.  This short-lived experiment in dissent began in 1763. The congregation was a merger of two pre-existing congregations, one of which was Unitarian.  The Octagonians adopted their own ‘creedless’ theology and developed what became known as the ‘Liverpool Liturgy’ for their services which also had many Unitarian characteristics.  Several prominent Octagonians supported the Warrington Academy and the young Anna Aikin was influenced by their teachings.

Though largely unknown today, Thomas Bentley was actually a long-time friend and business partner of the much more famous pottery entrepreneur (and sometime Unitarian), Josiah Wedgwood.  The two men also shared membership in the Lunar Society of which Joseph Priestly was also a member, as was another occasional attendee at the Newington Green Chapel; Benjamin Franklin.

The Lunar Society took their name from the full moon on which their monthly meetings were held.  There was a very practical reason for this.  Like most English cities of the time, the streets of Birmingham in the 1760’s (the society was founded in that city in 1765)  were dangerous places after dark and with no artificial street lighting the full moon would provide a little bit of security to members returning home after a long evening.  The Lunaticks, as they nicknamed themselves in a self-effacing way, were, for the most part, scientists, and the Society was perhaps the leading science club of its day where members would demonstrate their latest experiments and hypothesise and debate issues across a wide range of sciences from geology to botany, chemistry to engineering.

Meetings were usually hosted by the engineer Matthew Boulton at Soho House.  Boulton’s collaborator James Watt was also a member and together they were responsible for inventing the single most important machine of the industrial revolution, the steam engine.

Other famous members included the geologist Erasmus Darwin.  Wedgwood and Darwin became good friends and Wedgwood’s daughter Susannah would marry Darwin’s son, Robert; among their six children was Charles Darwin the natural historian and promoter of the theory of evolution.

Bentley and Wedgwood’s main business collaboration was the production of ornamental items including the famous anti-slavery medallions which promoted the abolitionist cause.  The two men also formed the partnership that lay behind the building of the Trent - Mersey Canal.  The diversification from pottery to canals was more natural than it first seems.  At the time the road network was poor and badly maintained; transporting finished goods, whether plates, cups or ornaments from Staffordshire to the rest of the country was fraught with logistical problems because of the high percentage of breakages caused by cart wheels bouncing along uneven roads.  By contrast, the smooth glide of a canal barge on water was an ideal form of transportation.

Thomas Bentley was also a member of the Roscoe Circle.  Founded in the 1760’s, this is now a rather obscure group but it was part of the same nexus of radical institutions and societies; educational, literary and scientific, which had significant Unitarian input and, at best, had world changing influence.  The Circle was named after William Roscoe, a banker, lawyer and Member of Parliament.  Roscoe was an early abolitionist and, despite his own privileged position, supported the French Revolution.

The young Lucy Aikin also joined the Roscoe Circle, which was based sixteen miles from Warrington, in Liverpool, and many of its other members were either Unitarians or Quakers.  Although it was promoted as a non-political literary society, virtually all the members shared Roscoe’s political views on the abolition of slavery and support for the French Revolution and when Britain declared war on revolutionary France in 1793 they duly opposed that war.  The Circle’s support for abolition was acutely controversial because of their location.  Liverpool was (along with Bristol and Glasgow) one of Britain’s main slave trading hubs and the vested interests in the trade among the city’s merchant class was immense.  The Circle was even nicknamed the ‘Liverpool Jacobins’ by observers after the French radicals, members of the Jacobin Club, many of whose views they shared. 

Other members of the circle included William Rathbone IV, a Quaker and founding member of the Liverpool Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which was founded in 1788.

Lucy Aikin moved from Warrington, spending some time living in Great Yarmouth, where her father had a medical practice.  Later father and daughter moved to Stoke Newington.  Lucy became a writer, writing under both her own name and the pseudonym Mary Godolphin.  Probably influenced by her Aunt Anna, Lucy wrote children’s books but these were only one of a variety of genres in which she published.  It was though her historical works which she became most noted for.  In 1810 she had published Epistles on Women; Exemplifying their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations, with Miscellaneous Poems, a work covering the history of womanhood from a feminist perspective.  Beginning as a response to Alexander Pope’s Epistle to a Lady, Aikin declared that ‘Man cannot degrade woman without degrading himself’.

Later, beginning while she was living in Stoke Newington Church Street, Aikin wrote a notable trilogy of historical works: Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (1818); Memoirs of the Court of James I (1822) and Memoirs of the Court of Charles I. (1833).  These books proved popular at the time but when asked about a possible fourth book in the series, focusing on Charles II, Aikin revealed what she thought of the Restoration: ‘I am resolved against proceeding farther with English sovereigns. Charles II is no theme for me: it would make me condemn my species’

Aikin also wrote a biographical work about her father: Memoir of John Aikin, MD (1823) and edited the works of her aunt; The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1825) which included a memoir of Anna by her niece and also many of Anna’s poems, published for the first time.

Aikin moved away from Stoke Newington in 1822 after the death of her father and spent the rest of her long life in Hampstead where she died in January 1864, aged 82.  Although largely unknown today Lucy Aikin certainly deserves to be revisited because of her contribution to and association with radical thought in the early nineteenth century.

This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and Simon Strickland-Scott. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.