Hannah More

Born in 1745 at Fishponds in the parish of Stapleton, near Bristol, Hannah More was the fourth of five daughters of Jacob More (1700–1783),[1] a schoolmaster originally from Harleston, Norfolk. He was from a strong Presbyterian family in Norfolk, but had become a member of the Church of England, and originally intended to pursue a career in the Church, but after the disappointment of losing a lawsuit over an estate he had hoped to inherit, he moved to Bristol, where he became an excise officer and was later appointed to teach at the Fishponds free school.

They were a close family and the sisters were first educated by their father, learning Latin and mathematics: Hannah was also taught by her elder sisters, through whom she learned French. Her conversational French was improved by spending time with French prisoners of war in Frenchay during the Seven Years' War.[1] She was an assiduous student with a sharp intellect, and according to family tradition began writing at an early age.[2]

In 1758 Jacob established a girls' boarding school at Trinity Street in Bristol for the elder sisters, Mary and Elizabeth to run, while he and his wife moved to Stony Hill in the city to open a school for boys. Hannah More became a pupil when she was twelve years old, and taught at the school in her early adulthood.[2]

In 1767 More gave up her share in the school after becoming engaged to William Turner of the Belmont Estate, Wraxall, Somerset, whom she had met when he began teaching her cousins.[1] After six years the wedding had not taken place. Turner seemed reluctant to name a date and in 1773 the engagement was broken off. It seems that as a result, More suffered a nervous breakdown and spent some time recuperating in Uphill, near Weston-super-Mare. Hannah More was induced to accept a £200 annuity from Turner as compensation. This freed her for literary pursuits, and in the winter of 1773–1774 she went to London with her sisters, Sarah and Martha—the first of many such trips at yearly intervals. Some verses that she had written on David Garrick's version of King Lear led to an acquaintance with him.[2]

More's first literary efforts were pastoral plays, written while she was still teaching and suitable for young ladies to act. The first was The Search after Happiness, written in 1762. By the mid-1780s over 10,000 copies of this had been sold.[3] Among her literary models was Metastasio whose opera 'Attilio Regulo she used as a basis for a drama, The Inflexible Captive.

More (standing, left, as a personification of Melpomene, muse of tragedy), in the company of other "bluestockings" (1778).

In London, More sought to associate herself with the literary elite, including Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke. Johnson is quoted as saying to her, "Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth having." He would later be quoted as calling her "the finest versifatrix in the English language".[1] Meanwhile she became a prominent member of the Bluestocking group of women engaged in polite conversation and literary and intellectual pursuits. She attended the salon of Elizabeth Montagu, where she became acquainted with Frances Boscawen, Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Vesey and Hester Chapone, some of whom would become lifelong friends. In 1782 she wrote a witty verse celebration of her friends and the circle to which they belonged, The Bas Bleu, or, Conversation, published in 1784.[2]

Garrick wrote a prologue and epilogue for Hannah More's tragedy Percy, which was shown successfully at Covent Garden in December 1777, and revived in 1785 with Sarah Siddons at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. A copy of Percy was found amongst Mozart's possessions in 1791.[1] Another drama, The Fatal Falsehood, produced in 1779 after Garrick's death, was less successful, and she never wrote for the stage again. However, a tragedy entitled "The Inflexible Captive" was published in 1818.[4] In 1781 she first met Horace Walpole and corresponded with him from that time onwards. At Bristol she discovered the poet Ann Yearsley, and when Yearsley became destitute, she raised a considerable sum of money for her benefit. Lactilia, as Yearsley was known, published Poems, on Several Occasions in 1785, earning about £600. More and Montagu held the profits in trust to protect them from Yearsley's husband. However, Ann Yearsley wished to receive the capital and made insinuations of stealing against More, forcing her to release the money. These literary and social failures lay behind More's withdrawal from London intellectual circles.[2]

Biscuit porcelain figure by Mintons, 1830s

In the 1780s Hannah More became a friend of James Oglethorpe, who had long been concerned with slavery as a moral issue and who was working with Granville Sharp as an early abolitionist.[5] More published Sacred Dramas in 1782, which rapidly ran through 19 editions. These and the poems Bas-Bleu and Florio (1786) mark her gradual transition to more serious views, fully expressed in prose in her Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788) and An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1790). By this time she was close to William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay, sympathising with their evangelical views. She published a poem, Slavery in 1788. For many years she was a friend of Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London and a leading abolitionist, who drew her into a group of prominent campaigners against the slave trade that included Wilberforce, Charles Middleton and James Ramsay, based at Teston in Kent.[6]

In 1785 More bought a house at Cowslip Green, near Wrington in northern Somerset, where she settled into country life with her sister Martha, and wrote several ethical books and tracts: Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805), Coelebs in Search of a Wife (only nominally a story, 1809), Practical Piety (1811), Christian Morals (1813), Character of St Paul (1815), Moral Sketches (1819). She was a rapid writer and her work consequently discursive and animated, but lacking in form. Her huge popularity may be explained by the originality and force of her writings.[6]

The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 did not worry More initially, but by 1790 she was writing, "I have conceived an utter aversion to liberty according to the present idea of it in France. What a cruel people they are!"[7] She praised Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France for combining "the rhetoric of ancient Gaul" and the "patriot spirit of ancient Rome" with "the deepest political sagacity".[8] Part II of the Rights of Man, Thomas Paine's reply to Burke, appeared in 1792. The government was alarmed by its concern for the poor and its call for world revolution, plus its enormous sales. Porteus visited More and asked her to write something for the lower orders, to counteract Paine.[9] This prompted the pamphlet Village Politics (1792). More called it "as a vulgar as [the] heart can wish; but it is only designed for the most vulgar class of readers."[10] The pamphlet (published pseudonymously by "Will Chip") consists of a dialogue in plain English between Jack Anvil, the village blacksmith, and Tom Hood, the village mason. After reading Paine, Tom Hood expresses admiration for the French Revolution to Jack Anvil, and speaks in favour of a new constitution based on liberty and the "rights of man". Jack Anvil responds by praising the British constitution and saying that Britain already has "the best laws in the world". He attacks French liberty as murder, French democracy as tyranny of the majority, French equality as a levelling down of social classes, French philosophy as atheism, and the "rights of man" as "battle, murder and sudden death". Tom Hood finally accepts Jack Anvil's conclusion: "While old England is safe I'll glory in her, and pray for her; and when she is in danger I'll fight for her and die for her."[11]

More's biographer summed up the pamphlet against Paine as "Burke for Beginners".[10] It was well received: Porteus praised it as "a masterpiece of its kind, supremely excellent, greatly admired at Windsor". Frances Boscawen considered it better than William Paley's The British Public's Reasons for Contentment and Richard Owen Cambridge claimed "Swift could not have done it better."[12] More's next anti-Jacobin tract, Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont, condemned atheism in France. Its profits were assigned to French Catholic priests exiled in England.[13]

In 1794, when Paine published The Age of Reason, a deist attack on Christianity, Porteus again requested More's help in combating Paine's ideas, but she refused, being preoccupied with her charity-school work.[13] However, by the end of the year, More, encouraged by Porteus, decided to embark on her Cheap Repository Tracts, which from 1795 to 1798 appeared at a rate of three a month. In January 1795, More explained to Zachary Macaulay: "Vulgar and indecent penny books were always common, but speculative infidelity brought down to the pockets and capacity of the poor forms a new era in our history. This requires strong counteraction."[14] More's Tracts were a phenomenal success, selling 300,000 copies between March and April 1795, 700,000 by July 1795, and over two million by March 1796.[15] They urged the poor in rhetoric of most ingenious homeliness to rely upon the virtues of content, sobriety, humility, industry, reverence for the British Constitution, hatred of the French, and trust in God and the kindness of the gentry.[6] Perhaps the most famous of these is The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, describing a family of phenomenal frugality and contentment. This was translated into several languages.

Blue Plaque on the wall of Keepers Cottage, Brislington.

She was shocked by the strides made for female education in France, saying "they run to study philosophy, and neglect their families to be present at lectures in anatomy."[1]

In 1785 Hannah More moved to a cottage in rural Somerset, "to escape from the world gradually".[1] The school at Wedmore received strong opposition from the locals, who petitioned the Dean of Wells to remove her.[1]

John Scandrett Harford of Blaise Castle was a prodigious benefactor to More's schools in the 1790s, and More modelled the idealised hero and heroine in Coelebs in Search of Wife (1809) on Mr and Mrs Harford.[1] She refused to read Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Women, saying, "So many women are fond of government... because they are not fit for it. To be unstable and capricious is but too characteristic of our sex."[1]

In 1816, More is quoted as saying that "peace with France [is]... a worse evil than war" following the Battle of Waterloo, and refused to allow a French translation of Coelebs.[1] She turned down an honorary membership of the Royal Society of Literature because she considered her "sex alone a disqualification".[1]

In the late 1780s, Hannah and Martha More did philanthropic work in the Mendip area, following encouragement by Wilberforce, who saw the poor conditions of the local people when he visited Cheddar in 1789.[16] She was instrumental in setting up twelve schools by 1800, where reading, the Bible and the catechism were taught to local children. More also donated money to Bishop Philander Chase for the founding of Kenyon College, where a portrait of her hangs there in Peirce Hall.[17]

The More sisters met with a good deal of opposition in their works: farmers thought that education, even to the limited extent of learning to read, would be fatal to agriculture, and clergy, whose neglect she was making good, accused her of Methodist tendencies. However, in her old age, philanthropists from all parts made pilgrimages to see such a bright and amiable old lady, and she retained all her faculties until within two years of her death. She spent the last five years of her life in Clifton, and died on 7 September 1833. She is buried at Church of All Saints, Wrington; busts of her and John Locke remain in the south porch.[6]

Several local schools and St. Michael's Church (Reisterstown, Maryland) are named in her honour. Hannah More Primary School was built in Old Market, Bristol in the 1840s.[1] An image of More was used in 2012 on the Bristol Pound local currency.[18] Hannah More Close in Wrington, where Hannah More is buried, has been named after her as well.

More's reputation was not always positive – Augustine Birrell in his 1906 work Hannah More Once More admits to burying all 19 volumes of her work in his garden in disgust.[1]

Letters to, from and about Hannah More are held by Bristol Archives, including one from William Wilberforce (Ref. 28048/C/1/2) (online catalogue).

Larger collections of records relating to Hannah More can be found at the British Library, Manuscript Collections,[19] Longleat,[20] Newport Central Library,[21] Bodleian Library,[22] Cambridge University: St John's College Library,[23] the Victoria and Albert Museum,[24] Bristol Reference Library,[25] Cambridge University Library,[26] The Women's Library,[27] Gloucestershire Archives,[28] and National Museums Liverpool: Maritime Archives and Library.[29]

• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "More, Hannah" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Stephen, Leslie (1894). "More, Hannah" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. 38. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 414–420.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

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• Hannah More at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA)
• Works by Hannah More at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Hannah More at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by Hannah More at Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books (Toronto Public Library)
• Works by or about Hannah More at Internet Archive
• Works by Hannah More at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Hannah More from Brycchan Carey's listing of British abolitionists
• The full text of Slavery, A Poem available online
• The full text of The Sorrows of Yamba available online
• Original 1797 edition of a printed pamphlet of The Sorrows of Yamba
• "Archival material relating to Hannah More". UK National Archives.