Physician and brother to Anna Letitia Barbauld, John Aikin was a broad-ranging and prolific literary man whose connections in the burgeoning late eighteenth-century print marketplace make him exemplary of emerging literary professionalism. His writings range through the subjects of science, medicine, reform, history, biography, geography, nature, conduct, children's and educational literature, politics, poetry, and literary criticism. In addition, he was an active and productive editor, including of several of the period's outstanding periodicals, such as the Monthly Magazine, the Athenaeum, and the Annual Register. He and his sister collaborated on Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773) and Evenings at Home; or, the Juvenile Budget Opened (1792-1796).