Hannah More

gigatos | June 3, 2022

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Summary

Hannah More († September 7, 1833 in Bristol) was an English religious writer and philanthropist.

Hannah More was born in 1745 at Fishponds, near Stapleton, north of Bristol. Her father was Jacob More, a schoolmaster, and her mother was Mary More, daughter of John Grace, a farmer. She was the fourth of five daughters of the couple. Her sisters were Mary (1747-1819). Her father had attended Norwich Grammar School, where he studied the classics. Like his father, he belonged to Anglicanism and was destined for a career in the church. This was frustrated after losing a legal battle over an inheritance with a cousin. Initially he worked in Bristol. Through friendship with Norborne Berkeley, later the fourth Baron de Botetourt, he was appointed master of the free school at Fishponds. There he founded his family.

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Training

Hannah More”s intellect was nurtured early, not only by her father, but also her mother and sisters supported the precocious child and recognized genius of the family, who was characterized by quick-witted cleverness and a passion for learning. Her father taught her Latin and mathematics. She learned French from her oldest sister Mary, who attended a French school in Bristol, as did her other sisters. Her parents ran a boarding school for girls, and the sisters were brought up with the idea that they would later support themselves. Fascinated by the stories of the poet and playwright John Dryden, told to her by the nurse who had lived in the poet”s household, More began writing down stories and verses as soon as she learned to write and read, also to entertain her sister Patty.

Together with her sisters Sarah and Martha, she became a pupil at the age of 12 in the girls” boarding school that her father had set up for Mary and Elizabeth More at 6 Trinity Street in Bristol. Her parents also moved to Bristol and opened a school for boys in Stony Hill. In addition to lessons in French, Italian, and Spanish, Hannah More received instruction in Latin from James Newton of Bristol Baptist Academy. Her father stopped her mathematics lessons because he feared that this knowledge would make her a pedant.

She later taught with her sisters at the school, which moved to a new building on Park Street in 1767. She remained there until her sisters retired in 1789. The success of the More Sisters” School ensured that the women became highly respected figures in Bristol society. Her special literary talent, however, also attracted the attention of family friends and other patrons such as James Stonehouse, Ann Lovell Gwatkin, Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, and Elizabeth Somerset, fifth Duchess of Beaufort. Most meaningful to her, however, was the loving support and friendship of her sisters, with whom she felt a strong bond and remained connected through periods of separation by constant correspondence.

Hannah More became engaged in 1767 to William Turner of Belmont House, Wraxall, Somerset. She had met him through his younger cousins, who were pupils at the sisters” school. More was preparing for life as the wife of a wealthy country gentleman and advised him on the design of the gardens at Belmont, now part of the Tyntesfield estate, owned by the National Trust. By contrast, Belmont House is privately owned. Turner, who was twenty years older than More, was, however, a nervous and uncertain fiancé. He postponed the wedding three times, the first time reportedly leaving her at the altar. On the advice of her concerned family and friends, she finally broke off the engagement in 1773, apparently triggering a nervous breakdown. Little is known about More and Turner”s relationship, even less about their feelings, however, this was almost certainly More”s only serious romantic attachment, after which she decided never to marry. She rejected subsequent marriage proposals, including that of the poet John Langhorne. Turner tried to make up for his inconsistency by offering her an annuity. At first More refused, but was persuaded and eventually gained both financial security and independence.

Plant

More composed her first work, The Search after Happiness, a pastoral verse drama for schoolgirls, in her late teens. Published in Bristol in 1762, the work expresses her views on education and the role of women in society. In the work, the speeches of archetypal female characters such as the fashionable Euphelia, the unworldly Cleora, and the lazy Laurinda represent the various misfortunes that result from improper education; in contrast, the wise Urania must counsel the other women to cultivate domestic virtues. First performed at the School of Mores, the play was reprinted in London in 1773. It was in great demand by the public, and by the mid-1780s over 10,000 copies had been sold. A twelfth edition appeared in 1800.

To provide her students with suitable moral material for plays, she wrote five short dramas based on Old Testament stories, published in 1782 as Sacred Dramas. With her pupils, she attended performances at the King Street Theatre in Bath to improve her stage skills. From Italian, she translated Pietro Metastasio”s play Attilio Regolo, a heroic tragedy about the Roman general Marcus Attilius Regulus, in 1774.

Blue stocking and playwright

Together with her sisters Sarah and Martha, Hannah More undertook in the winter of 1773

But she was not merely concerned with fawning over the London literati; More was anxious to make a name for herself. She secured Johnson”s recognition through her ballads “Sir Eldred of the Bower” and “The Bleeding Rock,” published by Cadell in 1776. Garrick, her favorite actor and increasingly close friend and mentor, encouraged her passion for drama. He performed her first play, “The Inflexible Captive,” based on her Metastasio translation, at the Theatre Royal in Bath in April 1775. Although it was well received by the audience, she declined the suggestion of a performance on a London stage. Instead, she wrote Percy, a new play set on the frontiers in the 12th century about two lovers whose fortunes were doomed by the feud between the Douglas and Northumberland families. When it premiered in Covent Garden in December 1777, Percy was enthusiastically received. More reported home on the play”s success after the first two performances and was delighted with the positive reviews. Especially since she possessed the conviction that the theater could have a powerful moral influence, she was especially pleased with the audience”s reactions. She earned nearly £600 on the rights and within a few weeks the first run of nearly 4000 copies had been sold. To her delight, the play became the hit of the season and her authorship became an open secret.

Eminent painters such as Daniel Gardner, Frances Reynolds, and John Opie asked her to sit in portrait, and she was depicted as Melpomene the Tragic Muse in Richard Samuel”s The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain. Reynolds saw her as the embodiment of all the muses and christened her Nine, a nickname picked up by Garrick. In 1782, she was elected a Fellow of the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Rouen in Rouen.

Hannah More solidified her reputation as a “bluestocking” when she tried to promote the writer Anna Yearsley, nicknamed the “Bristol Milkwoman.” She heard that Yearsley, a penniless working-class woman with a young family, was a talented poet and used her literary and aristocratic connections to promote a volume of her verse. Yearsley”s work Yearsley”s Poems, on Several Occasions appeared in 1785 and brought in proceeds of about £600, which More and Elizabeth Montagu put into a trust fund to protect Yearsley”s earnings from her supposedly incompetent husband. These good intentions, however, led to a bitter dispute with Yearsley, who accused More and Montagu of stealing her income. The trust was quickly dissolved, and unlike Montagu, who was enraged by Yearsley”s behavior, More refused to address Yearsley”s increasingly public accusations. This controversy contributed to More”s disillusionment with the literary world, and after Garrick”s death in 1779, she had also lost interest in the London scene. The failure of her third and final play, The Fatal Falsehood, which played only a few evenings, contributed to this. Eventually she was accused by Hannah Cowley of plagiarizing Cowley”s tragedy Albina. This accusation further embarrassed her, and she categorically denied it in the James” Chronicle. A second edition of The Fatal Falsehood appeared in 1780, although her publisher Thomas Cadell advised against it.

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Literature for women

From her experiences as a teacher at the school she shared with her sisters, came her work Essays on Various Subjects, Principally Designed for Young Ladies, published anonymously in 1777. In eight essays, she addressed moralist topics such as debauchery, conversation, sentimental relationships, and education and religion. She addressed other issues that were close to her heart. In the introduction, she advised her sex to succeed as women rather than strive as men. Throughout the work, she referred to gender differences, both in terms of natural abilities and social roles. In stating that women excelled in tasks that did not require a strong intellect, she argued against her own literary aspirations, for she wrote that women:

She held the belief that there was a reciprocal relationship between female education and behavior and called for more attention to be paid to the intellectual, sentimental, and religious education of girls. She described female behavior as “one of the most important hinges on which the great machine of human society turns.”

When her work on the education of women appeared 22 years later, she herself was already very well known as a writer. As a result of this fame, her work Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, which appeared in 1799, became a great success, even in the nascent feminist movement. Seven editions were printed in the first year. In her work, she criticizes contemporary attitudes toward female education, criticizing Jean-Jacques Rousseau”s doctrine of sensibility, which made women creatures of mere feeling, but also Mary Wollstonecraft”s belief in female rights, which encouraged women to be aggressively independent. In her view, women should be raised neither as Circassians nor Amazons, but as Christians. The evangelical belief that girls were afflicted with the original sin of humanity and thence came into the world with a depraved nature and bad dispositions that needed to be corrected was to be the great goal of education. Despite the obvious pessimism of such beliefs, she rejoiced in the situation of her sex in 1790s Britain and called upon her fellow women to take advantage of these blessings as she had done.

As a corollary to her views, it stood that the education of a female monarch, who would be the ultimate moral example of a nation, was the most important concern for a moralist. That is why she addressed her third work on female education, Hints toward Forming the Character of a Young Princess, published in 1805, to Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince of Wales, whose immoral behavior More, like her fellow evangelicals, disapproved of. For them, Princess Charlotte was the hope of the nation. She outlined a curriculum suitable for a future monarch, rich in classical and English history, Christian theology, and the nature of royal duties. This breach of etiquette was followed by other advice for her sex, such as her only novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, published in 1809, which is a work of fiction more than a treatise on female manners and education. In essence, the work is a parable about marriage, morality, and an alternative to the romantic novels that would usually be offered in what she considered “the market of mischief.” Although reviews for this work were poor, it became More”s most successful work to date and was reprinted ten times in its first six months. She commented on this as ample compensation for the negative, critical receptions.

Religious beliefs

More”s religious beliefs were based on the orthodox Trinitarian doctrines and the episcopal structure of the Church of England. She held to this throughout her life. It changed, however, in the 1780s, with the rise of evangelicalism. She viewed the emerging irreligion of the modern world with growing horror. Having been rebuked by one of her oldest Christian mentors, Stonhouse, on an early visit to London when she dined out on Sundays, she consciously tried to avoid social situations that compromised her faith. In addition, she aligned her personal acquaintances with their religious attitudes. Along with her influential supporters in the Anglican hierarchy, such as Robert Lowth, Josiah Tucker, George Horne, and Beilby Porteus, her friends urged her to use her talents and connections to advance two evangelically inspired campaigns: the abolition of slavery and the reformation of mores. In this regard, too, she gained a national reputation.

In 1776 More made the acquaintance of Charles and Margaret Middleton, whose home in Teston, Kent became the headquarters of the parliamentary campaign to abolish the slave trade. More and her fellow campaigners solicited support for the abolition of slavery from members of Parliament in letters and personal meetings. At a dinner party in April 1789, she showed the Society a cross-section of a slave ship created by Thomas Clarkson. After being interrupted by the arrival of John Tarleton, a leading Liverpool slave trader and politician, she discontinued these efforts at the event for fear of an argument. Through Newton”s eyewitness accounts of the inhumanities of the slave trade, she was inspired to write her poem Slavery, which she wrote in great haste in January 1788 to maximize publicity for William Wilberforce”s bill. After she met Wilberforce in the fall of 1787, he became a firm friend and valued correspondent. More became involved in the fight for parliamentary abolition of both commerce and slavery itself. She joined the African Institution and in the late 1820s was appointed to the committee of the Female Anti-Slavery Society at Clifton near Bristol.

Having become disillusioned with the prevailing mores and morals of London society, she sought to reform them. Thanks to the respect and prestige she had earned in elite circles, she was able to secure a sympathetic hearing in the salons of the upper classes. She always strove to be a role model by her behavior, observing the Sabbath, avoiding card parties, and bringing religious topics into general conversation. She took her cue from Bishop Horne”s advice and anonymously published Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society in 1788. This work had a great success; within six days the second edition was sold out, the third in four hours, and in 1790 the eighth edition appeared. Through her criticism of the behavior of the upper classes and her belief in a hierarchical and respectful society, More sought to bring about a reformation of morals through the leaders of society. She renewed this with her work An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, which appeared in 1790 and was distributed in its fifth edition. Despite its success, which was also illustrated by her reception at court, these works were unpalatable reading in some circles. More was considered a killjoy, and her effigy was burned by students at Westminster School, according to Hester Thrale. Taking full advantage of the moral authority granted to her gender, More was criticized for her unfeminine behavior for speaking out so publicly.

All this, and the political situation at home and abroad in the 1790s, depressed and demoralized Hannah More, and her conviction dwindled that she could have any effect through her exhortations to the great. To a friend in 1795 she wrote “I think I am done with the aristocracy” and focused instead on her duties to “her poor barbarians.”

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Philanthropin

By “poor barbarians” More meant the parishioners of several parishes in the Mendips in Somerset, among whom she sought to provide educational and religious assistance. After a visit by Wilberforce in August 1789 to More at Cowslip Green, she visited the nearby village of Cheddar and was appalled to see many poor people immersed in an excess of vice, poverty, and ignorance not thought possible in a civilized and Christian country. Wilberforce encouraged More and her sisters to establish schools to teach the children of the poor to read. Hannah and Martha More rented a house in Cheddar and hired teachers to teach the children to read the Bible and catechism. More insisted, however, that they not be taught to write, fearing it would make them unhappy with their humble situation. She later sharply criticized the National Society for teaching her students the three Rs.

They had great success with the school in Cheddar and quickly 300 students attended. The sisters founded another school in Shipham and within ten years they were operating twelve schools scattered throughout the Mendips. To pursue their goal of “educating the lower classes to habits of industriousness and virtue,” the sisters also started evening classes for adults, weekday classes for girls to learn to sew, knit, and spin, and a series of women”s friendship clubs where the virtues of cleanliness, decency, and Christian behavior were inculcated. They organized annual picnics for the schools and societies beginning in 1791, at which rewards were distributed or incentives in the form of gingerbread. Hannah and Martha More took turns visiting the schools every Sunday from May to December and took care of the necessary administrative tasks during the week. Since this work took up much of their time, the sisters retired from the boarding school at Christmas 1789 and turned the business over to Selina Mills who continued it with her sisters Mary and Fanny. The More sisters divided their time between Coslip Green and Bath. In Bath, they bought a house on Pulteney Street. Into a large house in Barley Wood in Wrington, Somerset all five sisters moved together in 1801. For her energetic philanthropy, Hannah More received much praise from her evangelical friends, and Horace Walpole also gave her much credit for her extraordinary achievements.

However, their schools also initially met with hostility from local farmers and landowners, who feared that schooling would make workers lazy and useless. More had to do a lot of convincing to get them to support it. Even greater opposition, however, came from some local clergy, who feared that More”s work would call into question their pastoral care. But she also received support, as from the local bishop, Charles Moss. The concern of the local clergy was justified; none of the thirteen congregations had a pastor; one rode in on Sundays to preach. There was no weekly service, the sick were not visited, children were often buried without a formal funeral service. Wanting to change this state of affairs, she introduced sermons and Bible readings in the schools and evening classes. Some locals objected to this and expressed their displeasure by breaking windows of the schools. The local clergy, however, vented their displeasure in a full-blown religious controversy of national significance. Thomas Bere, vicar of Blagdon, North Somerset, sharply attacked More”s school in Blagdon in 1800. He accused the school administration of holding Methodist meetings in the evening hours, promoting extemporaneous prayer, and undermining the authority of ordained clergy. Other clergy took the opportunity to denounce More for promoting schism, Methodism, and Jacobinism in their schools. Foul-mouthed attacks against the “bishop” were also written anonymously by local clergymen Edward Spencer of Wells and William Shaw of Chelvey Court. Enraged, Hannah More wrote a letter to the Bishop of Bath in her defense. However, increasingly worn down by the abuse and attacks, she closed the school at Blagdon, primarily to protect the other schools.

The radicalism of the French Revolution combined with atheism appalled Hannah More, and she also became increasingly politically active. She denounced their attack on religion in her 1793 paper Remarks on the speech of M. Dupont, made in the National Convention of France, on the subjects of religion and public education. In vain had she previously hoped that the clergy in England would take a stand. Bishop Proteus insisted that this publication appear in her name to increase its public impact, and three editions of the paper appeared in the first year. He also encouraged her to write more, and so in 1792 Village politics: addressed to all the mechanics, journeymen, and day laborers, in Great Britain by , a country carpenter, was born. She used the pseudonym “Will Chip” for the publication. In a dialogue between a blacksmith and a mason, the political ideals of Thomas Paine were ridiculed. More was concerned about the influence that Paine had, whose book Rights of Man circulated in a cheap edition throughout Great Britain.

Writing such overtly political works was not really her ambition, but the threat of revolution and war drove her to write dozens of similarly loyalist, moralistic, and Christian narratives specifically for the lower classes. These works were published anonymously as Cheap Repository Tracts from 1795 to 1798. There were 114 tracts in all, 49 by Hannah, others were written by her sisters Sarah and Martha, and they appeared monthly. They were financed by subscriptions and distributed by booksellers and peddlers throughout the country. She had a great success with these works. Within four months she sold 700,000 copies, and within a year more than 2 million. The tracts were bought by members of the middle and upper classes, who distributed them to the poor. But a large market was also found in the United States. Bishop Porteus sent large quantities to Sierra Leone and the West Indies. Their impact on the target audience is not measurable, but the Cheap Repository Tracts certainly established themselves “as safe reading” for the poor and paved the way for the work of the Religious Tract Society, founded in 1799.

Hannah More published three more works during the last years of the Napoleonic Wars. In these writings she reflected on her religious writings. Practical Piety, or, The Influence of the Religion of the Heart on the Conduct of the Life appeared in 1811, with the twelfth edition published in 1821, and Christian Morals in 1813, in which she advocates Christian living for the middle and upper classes, a message that runs through her life but still appeals to the public, as this book was also reprinted. On April 18, 1813, her oldest sister Mary dies. Hannah More seeks comfort in the Scriptures and writes the biographical Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of St. Paul which is published in 1815. She thought this would be her last work. She already suspected that she would receive strong criticism for attempting to deal with a biblical subject, once from Calvinists and also from the established church parties. For despite her hostility to Calvinists and Methodists, her reading and acquaintance were not limited to the established church, but her evangelical piety connected her with dissenters as well as with Anglicanism.

As early as 1817, Hannah More again engaged in public controversy with native political and religious radicalism. After the Peace of 1815, the poor continued to suffer economic hardship and interest in radical literature was high. Urged by her evangelical friends in government, More contributed to The Anti-Cobbett, or The Weekly Patriotic Register, in 1817. She was asked to rewrite her old tracts or to produce new tracts as well. One of the new works was The Loyal Subject”s Political Creed, and with this work she earned the nickname old bishop in petticoats from William Cobbett. Her last didactic work was Moral Sketches of Prevailing Opinions and Manners, Foreign and Domestic and it appeared in 1819. It became her most conservative and patriotic work, advocating the politics, religion and mores of Great Britain in contrast to those of France and the rest of Europe.

Late years and death

Hannah More”s late years were marked by the illnesses and deaths of her sisters. She nursed her beloved sisters when they became ill and gave them untiring comfort. After Martha”s death on September 14, 1819, Hannah More was left alone in the house at Barley Wood. In the decade that followed, she too suffered from a series of serious illnesses. When she was well, she often had company, as her friends and fans flocked to visit and entertain her. This in such great numbers that she had to limit their visits to certain days of the week. These friends were the main pleasure of her life. In her later years she could not do much with the politics and literature of the day. She had noticed herself that she had become more reactionary with age. Her friends persuaded her to leave Barley Wood in 1828 and move to Clifton, where they cared for her and she finally died on September 7, 1833, at the age of 88. She was buried next to her sisters in All Saints Cemetery in Wrington on September 13. She left about £30,000, most of which she bequeathed to charities and religious societies.

In his funeral sermon, her curate and later biographer Henry Thompson quoted from Coelebs to describe her guiding principle in life: “If it is absurd to expect perfection, it is not unreasonable to expect consistency” (H. Thompson, The Christian an Example, 1833, 7).

Religious writings and tracts

Historian Linda Colley describes Hannah More in her book Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992) as.

Author of The Great Abolition Sham (2005) Michael Jordan states:

Richard S. Reddie believes that More was strongly influenced by the ideas of William Wilberforce:

Judy Chicago dedicated an inscription to Hannah More on the triangular floor tiles of the Heritage Floor of her 1974 to 1979 installation The Dinner Party. The porcelain tiles inscribed with Hannah More”s name are associated with the place setting for Mary Wollstonecraft.

Sources