SOURCE: "Heroics and Mock Heroics: John Milton, Alexander Pope, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld," in His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, The University Press of Kentucky, 1986, pp. 172-96.

In the following excerpt, Messenger analyzes Barbauld's use of the mock-heroic mode in her satirical writings, particularly "The Groans of the Tankard" and "Washing-Day. "

Satire, that mode for which the earlier decades of the eighteenth century are so justly famous, fell into increasing disrepute [during the eighteenth century]. There had always been a few who protested against the ugliness of satire, suspicious that the satirist was ill-natured, grinding a personal axe, even unchristian. Addison and Steele's Spectator was uncomfortable with ridicule and irony as early as 1711, and they were far from the first. Practicing satirists routinely defended themselves against hostile opinion, attempting, like Pope in "An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," to establish their credentials as disinterested moral exemplars...