17 Facts About Lucy Aikin

Lucy Aikin was an English historical writer, biographer and correspondent.

Lucy Aikin was the fourth child of a physician, John Aikin, and his wife, Martha Jennings.

Lucy's aunt was Anna Laetitia Barbauld, a prominent children's writer, while her brother Arthur Aikin was a chemist, mineralogist and scientific writer, and their brother Charles Rochemont was adopted by Barbauld and became a doctor and chemist.

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.

Lucy Aikin briefly attended a day school in Yarmouth, but was largely educated privately by her father and her aunt, an early critic of the education system.

Lucy Aikin "read widely in English, French, Italian, and Latin literature and history," began publishing for magazines at the age of 17, and was assisting her father as an editor of his writings.

Lucy Aikin's works delve into the artistic, social, and literary sides of her period, rather than its religious, military or parliamentary history.

Under the pseudonym Mary Godolphin, Lucy Aikin contributed as an editor to versions of Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Aesop's Fables, Evenings at Home, and Sandford and Merton written "in Words of One Syllable".

Lucy Aikin's conversational powers were remarkable, and she was a graceful and graphic letter writer.

Lucy Aikin maintained for almost 16 years a graver correspondence with the Rev Dr William Ellery Channing, an American Unitarian theologian in Boston, on religion, philosophy, politics, and literature.

Lucy Aikin's letters were known for criticizing leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, and for criticisms of various authors, male and female.

Lucy Aikin's letters showed an appreciation for classic and contemporary literature.

Lucy Aikin translated French texts: Louis Francois Jauffret's The Travels of Rolando, and Jean Gaspard Hess's The Life of Ulrich Zwingli, on a leader of the Reformation in Switzerland.

Lucy Aikin lived her whole life with family, notably her parents and her niece, although she did briefly live with her nephew in London.

Politically Lucy Aikin was a staunch feminist, and religiously she was a Unitarian.

Lucy Aikin died of influenza in 1864 in Hampstead, then just north of London, where she had lived for 40 years.

Lucy 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.