The Inspiration of the Outdoors in the Lake District

Dove Cottage
Source: http://www.bridgehousegrasmere.co.uk/
grasmere.htm

Taking a tour of Dove Cottage, it's not hard to imagine how crowded the house would have been as people came to visit for extended periods of time, Wordsworth got married, and he and his wife started having children. With many children, friends, and family demanding attention, Wordsworth would have had a hard time finding a solitary place to think and write. The rooms that he could have sat in by himself when he and Dorothy first moved to the cottage would have quickly filled, leaving Wordsworth without his indoor thinking space. For that reason, he moved outdoors.

In our walks around two of Wordsworth's houses, Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, we saw that Wordsworth had wooden lean-tos built in both of the gardens and would spend large amounts of time there composing his poetry and reading it aloud, to the extent that neighbors thought he was mad. Letters and extracts from Dorothy's diary attested to the fact that Wordsworth would compose entire poems during four and five hours walks through the walking paths of the Lake District. Walking on some of those paths myself, I was firstly impressed by the physical condition Wordsworth would have needed to be in to climb up rocky paths without becoming so exhausted that he could actually focus and compose a poem. But once I could breathe normally again, I was struck by how beautiful the landscape was. After being dwarfed by buildings for so long in London, it was an incredible experience to be dwarfed by mountains and trees. Surrounded by giant trees, looking out onto lakes framed by mountains, I had never felt so small before. After feeling suffocated in a small flat every since returning from Scotland, it felt wonderful to breathe freely again, to actually hear my thoughts amid the wind rustling through the trees and the calls of birds. I suddenly recognized how Wordsworth could have found so much inspiration in these hills.

Source: http://www.lakesfarmholidays.co.uk/photos.htm

Walking around these difficult paths, I also began to understand Dorothy's attachment to her brother that seems so strange when read in her journal. This women, who would have spent all of her time with her brother, would have had to rely on Wordsworth for help as she moved along the paths. Her heavy wool skirts, possibly weighed down even more by rain water, would have made walking up the rocky paths exceedingly difficult. Unlike other women we've learned about this semester who would have had to move throughout difficult terrain without assistance, like Mary Anning or Elizabeth Philpot, Dorothy could use her brother's help to move about the Lake District. Her presence on Wordsworth's walks would have provided him with a sounding post. She also noticed things about nature that Wordsworth might not have noticed, such as the patches of daffodils that she wrote about in her Grasmere Journals. These aspects of nature that she noticed found their way into her writings and her brother's poems. Thus, while Wordsworth needed the solitude of working in nature for some of his works, the communion he could have with Dorothy in nature also greatly influenced his works, allowing him to write some of the greatest poems of his career while he lived in the Lake District. 

Exhibition Project Draft: Overview and Introduction

Overview:

Walking through the streets of London, it is difficult not to pass a statue of a man on horseback. In art galleries throughout the city, men look out of their portraits from the backs of muscular stallions, the picture of power, regality, and grace. But where are the female riders? Women have long been an integral part of the horse industry in all of its forms, but they are rarely pictured on horses. This exhibition digs deep into the storage units of galleries throughout the city, bringing women and their horses into the spotlight dominated by men. Using a mixture of mediums in both art and literature, “Strong Horses, Strong Women” seeks to show just how powerful and empowering the bond between women and horses can be.

Introduction:  

Many little girls ask Santa Claus for a pony at some point in their childhoods. Running around with a stick horse between their skinny legs, they dream of riding a horse through open fields, jumping over fallen trees and streams. These gentle giants are sources of fascination, as they wistfully gaze out car windows at horses in backyard pastures. 

Horseback riding is now considered a generally feminine pastime, with the number of girls signing up for lessons and summer horse camps greatly dwarfing the minuscule number of boys who swing up into the saddle. But the most common images of horses and their riders are greatly masculinized. Past rulers and military commanders sit on regal stallions with thick, muscular necks and shoulders that betray their virile power, cast in bronze for the world to look upon them for eternity. Simple word association immediately ties horses with cowboys, the hyper masculine men dressed in dirty blue jeans, a Stetson hat, and jangling spurs who can break even the most stubborn horse. Even in the more classically effeminate disciplines, like dressage, the top riders and trainers are men. Women are often demoted into the roles of assistant trainer, if they are able to actually break into the profession, or amateur rider, if they have the money to pay a trainer. The recent creation of lady amateur divisions in many disciplines separate women even further from the male amateurs who might join the sport. Pushed into these categories, the women who do enter into the horse industry in whatever form are plagued with the reduction of their sport into what Tami Spry calls the "facile anthropomorphized Disneyesque romance" between a girl and her horse. 

The relationships between women and horses have often been viewed in a negative light, implying some sort of misplaced psychosexual relationship in the cruder mythologies about women’s relationships with horses. Medieval depictions of women with horses were often those of Amazons or female warriors, those women who existed outside of the typical gender boundaries (Almond). These women are depicted riding astride in the same manner as men to show their sexual otherness. As the study of psychology developed, the vestiges of Freud influenced the view of women and horses. Linda Burke and Keri Brandt explain that “women’s relationships with horses are often submerged within the language of ‘misplacement,’ centered on unfulfilled human desires, such as a desire for a man, or for a child.” But this skewed cultural view ignores and negates the benefits of the woman-horse relationship. This exhibit seeks to showcase and celebrate those benefits.

For the women who ride horses, their experiences generally begin in childhood. As some people joke in the horse industry, little girls are bitten by the ‘horse bug’ and they never turn back. When the girl who ardently asked Santa for a pony finally receives that long awaited gift, or at least riding lessons, they are sent down a road that challenges them and scares their parents. Spry describes those early rides as “the nuanced negotiation of power between an 80-pound girl and 1000-pound horse.” The fact that the horse could run off at any moment, a fear felt by the adults in R.G. Gregory’s poem, “girl (three) and the black horse,” makes the initial rides, or even the initial years of riding, frightening for bystanders. But negotiating such a skewed power dynamic gives the young rider a sense of power and independence that she can control this horse, even if the horse is just kindly tolerating this “fly” on its back. “Miss Elizabeth Williamson” sits confidently on her pony with a self-assured smirk on her face and her hand on her hip in Annie Louisa Swynerton’s painting. The carefree attitude of “little madam” on her pony in the painting points to the cheeky independence she has gained riding through the hills.

The independence given to a young girl on a pony transforms into the power held by women riders captured in the rest of the exhibit. Horses represent power and the way women ride them affords them that same power. For that reason, writers like May Swenson and Virginia Woolf imagine women with the strength of horses, clearing obstacles and “lengthening out for the test” with “aloofness in their limbs.” Women exert their power from horseback, resisting suitors, leading foxhunts, and riding the powerful stallions normally reserved for men. The final image of Queen Victoria on a rearing horse is shown with a saddle purportedly owned by Queen Elizabeth I, showing that horseback riding was used to display the power of female rulers in the same manner as male rulers.

Riding often is placed into the category of a hobby, a phase, something to be grown out of. This exhibit is meant to show that riding is so much than that; it is a means to fly without leaving to ground, to create an unbreakable bond with an animal, and to find power on the back of a horse.

Pessimistic Biblical Allusions in the Literature of Wordsworth and Hardy

As we've moved forward this semester in our study of the long nineteenth century, we have noted how advances in scientific knowledge challenged Christian beliefs. Darwin's theory on the origin of species shook the belief that God had created the world in its ideal form that had not changed since the moment of creation. The continued discovery of fossils also brought to light the idea that God could allow something that He created to die out. These challenges to belief led to a sense of pessimism that pervaded the literature of the time. Writers like William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy instilled this pessimism in their writings by distorting and corrupting religious allusions in their poems and novels, including Wordsworth's "Michael" and Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles. Both of these works contain allusions to the Old Testament story of the binding of Isaac, which both authors use to show that the appearance of the angel at the end of the story doesn't fit into the reality of the world the authors live in.

The allusion to the binding of Isaac is much more obvious in Wordsworth's "Michael." Michael and Isabel are the couple who are granted a child, Luke, in their old age. Michael is asked to sacrifice his son not to God, but to money, sending him into the city to earn money to pay back a debt so the family won't have to sell part of their land. As Michael lets his son go, despite Isabel's objections, an angel doesn't intervene with a replacement sacrifice. Luke never returns from the city and Michael is left to die on his land without his son. The promise of prosperity that God gives to Abraham in the biblical covenant is foregone in Wordsworth's poem, suggesting that such covenants cannot exist in the reality Wordsworth writes about.

Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'urbervilles depicts a similarly bleak portrait of reality as Tess struggles through her life as a fallen woman. While the novel's story doesn't include such an explicit retelling of the binding of Isaac, Hardy's language when Tess and her brother Abraham are traveling to town at the beginning of the novel recalls the covenant God makes with the biblical Abraham. As they travel through the night, Abraham "[leans] back against the hives, and with upturned face [makes] observations on the stars," recalling the image of Abraham looking up at the stars as he speaks to God in the Old Testament. But unlike the stars in the Bible, which provide Abraham hope for prosperity, the stars in Hardy's novel are bodies "whose cold pulses [are] beating amid the black hollows above, in serene dissociation from these two wisps of human." The humans of Hardy's novel are greatly distanced from the natural world and, by extension, from God. Abraham in Hardy's novel must pose his questions to Tess, while Abraham in the Bible can pose his questions directly to God. The rest of the conversation between Tess and Abraham allude to the fact that the novel's characters and the world itself are now distanced from God and his promises. While describing the stars as other worlds, Tess claims that "most of them [are] splendid and sound--a few blighted." Abraham follows up this statement asking if they live on a splendid star or a blighted star. Tess answers without hesitation that they live on "a blighted one," which suggests the disparity between the world full of promises the biblical Abraham lives in and the world of pessimism that Hardy's Abraham lives in. Hardy's Abraham looks up at the stars and doesn't see a promise for prosperity, but a remembrance of their ill luck that "[they] didn't pitch on a sound [star]." This contrast between the biblical Abraham and Hardy's Abraham suggests that the world has changed and God no longer makes promises, placing the pessimism of Hardy's writing against the original biblical story to show that the biblical story and its promise can no longer fit into the pessimistic world that Hardy writes about.

To Make a House a Home

Down House
Source: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/
daysout/properties/home-of-charles-darwin-down-house/

After two months of living in London, I have discovered how hard it is to find a quiet place to think in this city. Sounds of traffic, sirens, and hundreds of voices create the cacophony of the streets; four (or more) people in a small flat, listening to the radio, playing video games, and running the washer that shakes so much it could wake the dead makes the indoors almost as loud and stiflingly crowded. For that reason, I find any escape into a quieter neighborhood a blessed relief. I suspect I feel the same way as Charles Darwin did when he moved to Down House.

The first thing I noticed getting off the bus in Downe was how quiet it was. In about an hour's time, we had escaped the bustle of the city and entered a small village with a few pubs, a church, and not much else, at least not where the bus dropped us off. The ten minute walk along a meandering road past fields, hedges, and trees brought us to Down House. The beautifully manicured lawn and the quiet interrupted by few cars immediately indicated to me what visitors to Darwin's home would have seen walking up the path to the front of the house. The ivy sprawling up the house gave the building the feel of the quintessential old English home and walking into the preserved first floor was an impactful moment. Chills ran down my spine when I placed my hand on the bannister that Darwin would have touched every day.

As I walked through the exhibition on the top floor of the house and learned more about Darwin's interactions with his family, I recognized how much the location of the house would have impacted the family dynamics. The large amount of land would have allowed the children to play side by side with their father observing earthworms or fungi, while Emma could maintain her garden exactly as she wanted to, with a little bit of disorder. All rooms of the home showed evidence both of Darwin's work, but also of the children's presence, suggesting that Darwin didn't try to draw distinct lines between his work life and his family life. The relations between the Darwins and their servants also seemed more familial than I would have expected from the time period; I nearly laughed out loud when I heard that Darwin would play billiards with his butler. Overall, it seemed like a harmonious house that gave Darwin room for his work, but didn't let his work take over his life.

Anne Darwin
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Anne_Darwin

Learning about how attentive Darwin was to his daughter, Anne, during her battle with scarlet fever, I also noticed how the house's position away from the city would allow Darwin to focus on his family when he needed to. Having the financial freedom to not work, unlike so many of his fellow scientists, Darwin could focus on his children when he needed to. Away from the city and the societal expectations that men didn't attend to their children, Darwin could be the father he wanted to be, without conforming to the typical view of the father as being largely absent from their children's lives. For those reasons, he could nurse Anne himself, but for those reasons, he also ardently felt her loss, remarking, "We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age.... Oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still and shall ever love her dear joyous face." It is very obvious that family meant a great deal to Darwin and I believe that living at Down House, away from the city, helped foster the loving relationship he had with his children.

Charles Darwin with his eldest son, William
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Charles_Darwin

The gardens around Down House also show how much Darwin's children loved and respected him. The audio tour informed visitors of all of the things his children did for him when his health was failing to allow him to continue his work. Learning that the children built the laboratory attached to the greenhouse so Darwin would have a place to sit while he worked, I understood how much they loved him and respected his need to do work even as his health failed. Leaving the laboratory, I could imagine Darwin walking to his 'thinking path' supported by one of his daughters or his sons. I saw then that while Down House was vitally important for giving Darwin the quiet place away from the city where he had room to grow his plants, observe his orchids, study his barnacles, and breed his pigeons, it had the lasting importance of growing and building the Darwin family, whose presence still hangs warmly over the house. The half-finished game of backgammon in the sitting room, the open book in Darwin's study, and the specimen on his billiard table all made it feel like a home that Charles Darwin could walk back into at any moment, ready to make a new discovery.

Mirrors and Clocks at the Geffrye Museum

I have an aversion to crowds. I'm the type of person who likes to hear myself think, and I often feel like I can't do so surrounded by a lot of people. So when I saw the narrow hallway leading through the Geffrye Museum and all of my classmates crowding in, I immediately walked to the other end of the hallway. While this move began as a purely self-centered decision, it completely changed how I viewed the rooms in the museum as I moved backwards through time. 

A drawing room from 1890 with many small mirrors
Source: http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/
period-rooms-and-gardens/explore
-rooms/drawing-room-1890/

My choice to start from the end, in the 1890 room, and move towards the 1630 room helped me see trends that I may not have noticed moving in the opposite direction. Moving backwards also forced me to go back to rooms and check if something that appeared in a room from an earlier time appeared in the later rooms. I immediately noticed how important small, segmented mirrors were in the room from 1890. Mirrors appeared above the fireplace, as well as on the walls in other areas of the room. This arrangement of mirrors in both places in the room combined the placement of mirrors in previous rooms. Mirrors appeared above the fireplace in both the room from 1870 and the room from 1745, while mirrors appeared on the walls in the rooms from 1695, 1745, 1790, and 1830. But a mirror does not appear in the room from 1630. Recognizing this change, I moved back to the text for the 1695 room, in which the first mirror appeared, to see if I could find an explanation. The manufacture of glass improved in England around 1695, including the manufacture of mirrors, which reduced the price of mirrors so more people could buy what had once been considered a luxury good. For that reason, families in 1695 could buy a mirror and families from every period after. Changes in taste influenced how mirrors were placed in the rooms, so that by 1890, the aesthetic movement brought about the use of smaller, segmented mirrors that were used more for decoration than for vanity. The placement of the mirrors also emphasized the changes in the quality of the mirrors that were being manufactured. The mirrors that were more warped were smaller and hung high up on the wall, so they couldn't be used for checking one's reflection. Clearer, larger mirrors were hung in prominent positions over the fireplace in the center of the room so that people could easily check their reflection. Thus, the design of the room reflected not only the changes in taste and design, but also the changes in manufacturing that occurred as technology improved. 

A parlour from 1745 with a clock on the upper wall
Source: http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/
period-rooms-and-gardens/explore-
rooms/parlour-1745/

Another object that caught my eye in the museum was a large clock that hung high on the wall in the parlour from 1745. In our world, where clocks appear in almost every room and we're constantly checking the time on our phones and computers, the thought of not having a clock seems strange. But I noticed the clock in the 1745 room simply because I hadn't seen a clock anywhere else. I backtracked once again and found that the only other room that had a clock was the room from 1890, but that clock appeared in the corner as part of a larger wall hanging and didn't occupy a prominent space in the room. That made me question why such a large clock appeared in the room from 1745 and no where else. Unfortunately, the text for the room didn't provide an explanation for the clock's presence. But the absence of clocks in most of the rooms alluded to the type of life the room's owners lived. Since most of the rooms appearing in the museum were considered the domains of women, the lack of clocks spoke to the life of leisure many middle and upper class women were able to lead. While their husbands worked and their servants did the work in the house, the women of the house didn't need to keep track of the time. It also suggested the continuation of the reliance on the natural landscape for telling time. The passage of time had been tracked by the movement of the sun for so long and the large number of windows in the rooms shown in the museum would have allowed for residents to track the sun even from inside a cozy drawing room. Thus, the absence of clocks in many of the rooms showed both the relative unimportance of tracking time compared to our modern need for the constant tracking of time and the continued use of nature to check the movement of time. 

Tracking individual objects in the rooms of the Geffrye Museum, like mirrors or clocks, gave insight into changes in design, taste, manufacturing capabilities, economics, and lifestyle. Starting from 1890 and moving backward through time allowed me to see those objects after their evolution throughout time in English households and track how those objects had changed to reach that final point in the last room. 

Too Much Jewelry, Not Enough Vikings

Source: http://www.britishmuseumshop
online.org/exhibition-tickets/
vikings-life-and-legend/invt/mexviking

Vikings are supposed to be exciting. That's how popular culture has displayed them for years, as the hulking men wearing horned helmets, worshipping Thor on the deck on an exquisitely carved war ship. In American history classes, we learn that the Vikings were probably the first people to "discover" North America, and they immediately capture school children's attention more than Christopher Columbus ever can. The Vikings were a vibrant people, but all sense of vibrancy is lost in the British Museum's new exhibition, "Vikings: Life and Legend."

One of many brooches on display
Source: http://omega.reader.travel/
tour.php?c=32&s=98&t=2564

The promotional material for the exhibit certainly makes it seem like the curators take advantage of the interest in Vikings that already exists in our culture. The exhibition's poster features an image of a Viking sword, a replica Viking ship sits in the yard of the Museum, and the promotional video for the exhibit features men decked in armour wielding swords and axes and women with painted faces waving wands in the air (viewable at http://
www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/ vikings.aspx). But all of the excitement the promotional materials develop falls flat when you enter the exhibit. Queuing in lines of hundreds of people trying to cram into small, dark aisle ways between display cases, you pass brooches and jewelry, not swords and armour. Instead of opening with an image that will capture attention, like the sounds of a raid played over head, visitors listen to a male and female voice tell Old Norse legends in Old Norse. While the sound is initially interesting, the fact that visitors can understand what is being said means that the recording quickly becomes background noise, something to fill the air as you're squeezed and jostled by the other visitors. And recording legends in Old Norse seems like a lost opportunity to me. Viking legends feature the tales of intrigue, valour, and the supernatural that color the modern view of these people, so why not read the legends in English and actually let visitors enjoy them? That could have captured attention very easily and made the fact that you have to stand in line for twenty minutes to see a brooch a lot more bearable.

The jaw bone and helmet of a Viking warrior
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/
artanddesign/2014/mar/04/vikings-british-
museum-ship-story

The heart of the exhibit is the reconstructed war ship, Roskilde 6. Taking up the majority of the huge room at the end of the Sainsbury wing, the wood and metal skeleton of a ship offers a breath of fresh air after the stuffy earlier displays. Of course, that could be simply because you can finally emerge into a large room where you're not pressed on all sides by people. But this final, gaping room certainly offers the most interesting artifacts in the exhibit. Beyond the ship, which is interesting to view on all sides as you move through the room, displays include armour, swords, a giant painted replica of a rune stone, and Viking skeletons. A Viking warrior stands in one case, his grin showing the filed down snarl that terrified monks would have seen as he and his fellow warriors rushed into the monastery. Decapitated skeletons from a mass grave also show that the Vikings weren't always successful. And it is in this room that we finally see the first artifacts of the Norse religion. While quotes about Thor and Odin are painted on the walls throughout the exhibit, we don't see actual evidences of them until nearly the end of the exhibit. In the same area, we finally see evidence of the female sorceresses with painted faces, who appeared in the promotional video but didn't appear in the exhibit until you had almost reached the exit. The Norse religion is quickly passed over in the exhibit to reach evidence of the influence of Christianity. Thor's hammer is quickly replaced by a gilded cross and once again, opportunity seems to have been missed. Norse mythology has never been in the public eye like it is right now with the popularity of the Thor movies. This exhibit provided the perfect space to teach about the actual Norse mythology, free from the influence of Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston, but I guess they just wanted to push you out to the gift shop faster and not tell you anything substantive about the beliefs that dominated Viking life for years before conversion to Christianity.

Overall, it seems that the exhibit's curators didn't want to work with the popular image of the Vikings, instead displaying more brooches than one can count and talking about the intercontinental influences shown in their metal work. The exhibit begins with an explanation that Viking comes from an Old Norse word that means pirate and then proceeds for much of the exhibit to show the Vikings as anything but pirates. I watched numerous kids, and parents, walk through the first rooms with glazed eyes, asking over and over when they would get to the ship. And, to be honest, I felt the same way. If the curators advertised ships, swords, and warriors, the things that actually make Vikings interesting, why bury those objects behind rooms of jewelry? The exhibit was full of missed opportunity, but not enough Vikings.

The Poem in the Museum

Anna Barbauld's "The Mouse's Petition" and Animal Experimentation - Final Research Paper Proposal

One point that has been restated over and over in the reading that we have done this semester is that women were not accepted in scientific circles during the long 19th century. Tracy Chevalier's book Remarkable Creatures fictionalized the events of Mary Anning's life, including her lack of recognition by the male scientists who relied on her expertise when they were among their male peers in various societies. Steven Johnson wrote in Species Seekers about how the wives of naturalists who provided the extremely detailed, sophisticated illustrations of their husband's specimens would not be credited in publications. And the wall text detailing Charles and Emma Darwin's marriage in the Down House exhibit even included the statement that Darwin "did not look for a wife who shared his scientific passions or had aspirations of her own." Unable to speak or write about science in any official capacity, women had to find alternate means to express their interest and knowledge, often in the form of stories meant to teach children about science. Some women sought to challenge male scientists from the "sensible" feminine domain of poetry, including Anna Barbauld in her poem, "The Mouse's Petition,"

A modern illustration to Barbauld's poem
Source: http://www.animalliberationfront.com/
Saints/Authors/Poetry/A_Mouses_Plea.htm

Joseph Priestly, a Dissenting clergyman and natural philosopher, began conducting experiments with different kinds of air in 1771, eventually leading to his discovery of oxygen. Priestly often conducted his experiments on mice, placing them in glass vacuum jars and slowly depriving them of air, or exposing them to air laced with toxic gases. Anna Barbauld, then Anna Aiken, was visiting Priestly at his home when he was conducting these experiments. According to Barbauld's memoirist, William Turner, a mouse was brought into the house by a servant after the Priestly family and their guest had finished supper, which was too late in the evening for any experiment to be conducted on the mouse. The servant was instructed to cage the mouse until morning when an experiment could be conducted. During the night, Barbauld wrote a poem in the mouse's voice, arguing for its release. Addressing the poem to Priestly, she twisted it among the wires of the cage, where it was found the next morning when the mouse was brought in after breakfast. If Turner is to be believed, Barbauld's poem persuaded Priestly to let the mouse go. Barbauld had challenged Priestly's killing of these mice with poetry, and she seemed to have been successful.

The first page of "The Mouse's Petition," 1773
Source: http://en.wikisource.org/
wiki/The_Mouse's_Petition

Barbauld's poem to Priestly had been meant as a private exchange, though, that wasn't supposed to receive the critique and interpretation of the viewing public. Barbauld's brother pressured her into published her work, though, and the poem appeared in her first edition of poetry. Critics immediately latched on to "The Mouse's Petition" as a vehement rejection of animal experimentation. Barbauld, not wanting such critics to damage Priestly's reputation, tried to quickly backpedal, stating that the poem was intended "as the petition of mercy against justice," not as "the pleas of humanity against cruelty." She claimed that the poem was meant to be a larger statement about poverty and the rights of the poor, but the reading of the poem as a challenge to animal cruelty remained, influencing animal rights activists for years after the poem's publication. In my research paper, I want to explore the different ways that Barbauld's poem was read and how different activist groups, especially those composed mainly of women, used her poem in their movements. The poem was also generally included in children's literature, in spite of its rather weighty metaphysical ideas such as the transmigration of souls, because of its anthropomorphizing of the mouse, so I would like to explore the contrast between the poem being used as an anthem for a cause and as children's reading and how initial critical reception of the poem allowed for both usages of the poem.