Evenings at Home  Evenings at Home, or The Juvenile Budget Opened (1792–1796) is a collection of six volumes of stories written by John Aikin and his sister Anna Laetitia Barbauld. It is an early example of children's literature. The late Victorian children's writer Mary Louisa Molesworth named it as one of the handful of books that was owned by every family in her childhood and read enthusiastically. In their introduction, the authors explain the title in these words:   The book was translated into French. Gilbert took the title for one of his plays, "Eyes and No Eyes" (1875), from one of the stories in the collection. Ichchharam Desai translated these stories in Gujarati as "Balkono Anand" (1895).