Civic Sermons to the People
Contributions
- Anonymous (Anna Letitia Barbauld)
- author
- Joseph Johnson
- publisher
Related resources
- has translation
- Sermons civiques adressés au peuple: par Thomas Paine, auteur des droits de l'homme translation
Summary (extracted citations)
Epigraph: "Nay, why even of yourselves, judge ye not what is right" (No.1)
Notes
Two issues produced; only the second was advertised in the press by Johnson. 20pp. Sold for 6d.
Barbauld’s 'Civic Sermons to the People' was written in response to the 'Royal Proclamation Against Seditious Writings and Publications' of 21 May 1792. It was intended as a cheap, didactic, serial broadsheet bringing political literacy to an uneducated audience. For example, number 2 addressed the question of what government was for. In this respect, Barbauld was ahead of her time, pre-dating Hannah More's conservative 'Village Politics' and Cheap Repository Tracts by six months.
Originally anonymous, Barbauld only admitted authorship in 1811. It was probably abandoned by Barbauld for two reasons. Her confessed inability to keep to deadlines (it was supposed to appear biweekly) and her difficulty in finding the right tone for her intended working-class readership.
It was inspired by Armand Berquin's 'Ami des enfants' and Joachim Cerutti's La Feuille Villageoise, aimed at the French peasantry. The title was a direct translation of the French '"serment civique" or civic oath. Another edition printed in Dundee by Edward Leslie suggests that Barbauld's old pupil, Lord Daer, may have been involved in its distribution in Scotland.
For more on this, see William McCarthy, 'Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment' (2009, John Hopkins University Press), pp.320–323.