The poet Anna Letitia Barbauld and her family (the Aikins) are recognized for their contributions to literature and scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With its multidisciplinary approach to family networks and religious Dissent, this book will appeal to scholars of religion, history of science, biography, geography and literature.

Through one outstanding family, these multidisciplinary essays demonstrate the modernising power of religious Dissent across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.