Pests, Parasites, And Positionality: Anna Letitia Barbauld and "the Caterpillar" (Critical Essay‪)‬

READERS WHO WERE FIRST INTRODUCED TO ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD (1743-1825) as the prudish school matron who wrote prose hymns for children and complained that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" lacks a "moral" (1) may be surprised to find this same woman supporting the thieves who prey immorally upon the rich: Responding to A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis by Patrick Colquhoun (1796), Barbauld refuses to condemn the prowling poor who are "forever nibbling at our property," suggesting that such thieves should be seen, albeit in macrocosmic terms, as necessary to a balanced economy rather than as agents of injury or damage. "I would rather wish to consider them," she writes in her "Thoughts on the Inequality of Conditions" (1807), "as usefully employed in lessening the enormous inequality between the miserable beings who engage in them, and the great commercial speculators, in their way equally rapacious, against whom their frauds are exercised" (S 352-353). Barbauld recognizes, in other words, that the rich merchants in their colonizing and slave trading practices have no more right to their property than do the prowlers, and she ponders why the legal system protects the rich while perpetuating hegemony over the poor (S 347). Although she focuses in other texts on chastising the exploitative tyrants ("Corsica," "Epistle to Wilberforce," "Sins of Government," etc.), she strives in her "Thoughts" essay to sympathize with those who plunder out of need rather than greed. And although she cautions, in her role as middle class educator, that "fraud and robbery are not right" and that individuals with "higher notions of virtue" are forbidden to steal, she nevertheless returns to the immense satisfaction she receives from contemplating this "providential" system of "imposition and peculation" whereby "property is drawn off and dispersed, which would otherwise stagnate" (S 354).