"An Address to the Deity" was an immensely popular poem, reprinted in a number of places including Mary Wollstonecraft's The Female Reader (1789) and Barbauld's own Female Speaker (1811). Joseph Priestley wrote that the poem was composed at Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1767, after Aikin had heard a discourse by Priestley to a group of ministers (See McCarthy and Kraft 221n).