John Aikin senior was the first member of an extraordinary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century provincial family of Dissenters to gain distinction, and is today largely remembered because he taught at the celebrated Warrington Academy, serving first as tutor in belles-lettres and then as theological tutor or principal. Aikin had earlier conducted an important school at Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire, the subject of much recent interest among scholars because it was at Kibworth that his children, John Aikin junior and Anna Letitia Barbauld, were born and began their schooling. Among his contemporaries Aikin also gained some celebrity as a scholar in languages and literature both classical and modern, but his failure to publish more than a couple of essays in the Monthly Review and a preface to his son’s essays on Pliny means his scholarship has been little considered. Although Aikin’s reputation is largely derived from his work as a tutor at Warrington Academy, it is clear his school was of regional significance, and that his contribution as a schoolmaster was at least as important as his role as a tutor at Warrington.

Aikin’s education and early career

John Aikin was born in London on 28 December 1713. His father, also John, a London linen draper, was originally from Kirkcudbright in south-east Scotland. Aikin was at first intended for his father’s business, and after some time in his father’s shop he was placed as a clerk in an overseas merchant house where he learned French, and indeed acquired a remarkable proficiency in the language as a result of living with a family where only French was spoken. Ill-health caused him to be sent to school in St Albans. The school was kept in the old manor house of Newland Squillers, on the edge of the town, on the road leading to Hatfield and Hertford. The house ‘had been let as a Boy’s Boarding-School; and . . . it was a very reputable school among the Dissenters, where the celebrated Dr. Doddridge, Dr. Aikin, and others, ministers, and other persons of that profession, received the rudiments of their education’. It seems likely that this was the Dissenter’s charity school at St Albans which was a cause célèbre at the end of Queen Anne’s reign. In May 1714 Dissenters were accused of also taking in church children and forcing them to attend the local Dissenting meeting – a hugely damaging charge just at the time when the Schism Bill was introduced into parliament. The master was said to have ‘once been upon the stage’, and was fond of exercising his boys in dramatics. William Turner speculated that this gave Aikin ‘an early taste for poetry, and also that force and clearness of enunciation, by which he was eminently distinguished’. Almost certainly through the influence of the local Dissenting minister in St Albans, Samuel Clarke, who was Philip Doddridge’s friend and patron, Aikin was sent to Doddridge’s Academy in Northampton in midsummer 1732 at the age of 19. At Northampton, according to his granddaughter Lucy, ‘the bent of his mind towards learning so strongly manifested itself, that he obtained his father’s permission to change his views and devote himself to the Christian ministry’.