Hannah Whitall Smith

• Hannah Smith
• Born: February 7, 1832
• Died: May 1, 1911

Religious author, evangelist, temperance reformer, and suffragist, was born in Philadelphia to John Mickle Whitall and Mary (Tatum) Whitall, who had grown up in the vicinity of Woodbury, New Jersey. Hannah was the oldest child in a family of five that included two other sisters and two brothers. (One sister, Mary, became the wife of James Carey Thomas and mother of the noted educator Martha Carey Thomas.) John Whitall was the head of Whitall-Tatum, the largest white-glass manufacturing company in the world. Quakers by birth, the Whitalls raised their children with a spiritual world view. Hannah, who attended the Friends’ School of Philadelphia, modeled herself after her father, who was religious, but lively. During adolescence she developed a burning desire to preach and to gain public recognition.

On June 25, 1851, at the age of nineteen, she married Robert Pearsall Smith, a salesman in her father’s business. They had seven children, but only three, Mary Logan (born in 1864), Logan Pearsall (born in 1865), and Alys Pearsall (born in 1867), survived to adulthood. Her husband in 1865 became the manager of the family glassworks in Millville, New Jersey. Under the influence of a band of Methodist employees, both converted to Wesleyan doctrines of sanc-tification by faith. Her husband quit business to preach and in 1869 started a religious periodical in Philadelphia, The Christian Pathway to Power. Hannah Smith, who also did some preaching, contributed articles.

In 1874 Smith with her three surviving children went to England, where her husband had been conducting religious meetings for a year. They became involved with the interdenominational Higher Life movement, which promoted evangelistic revivals among the upper classes. At huge “holiness conferences” at Oxford and Brighton, Smith attracted much attention with her eloquent Bible readings and became known as the “angel of the churches.” According to Logan Pearsall Smith, his father’s too free proffering of St. Paul’s “holy kiss” to his female disciples created a scandal and brought their mission to an end. Hannah Smith stood by her husband, but thereafter felt personally estranged.

In 1875 the Smiths returned to the United States, and Hannah Smith now began an independent career as a religious author. Her first and most popular book, The Christian’s Secret to a Happy Life (1875), was translated into several languages and ultimately sold more than two million copies. In this and in more than a dozen other devotional books and tracts she stressed that a complete surrender to the life-giving spirit of Christ created the emotional climate necessary to embrace spiritual certitude. The philosopher William James became one of her many admirers.

The doctrine to which she adhered gave her the inner strength and confidence to become the public figure she had dreamed of being. She came to champion feminist causes, including the right of young women to attend college, and she was the featured speaker at a number of woman suffrage conventions. It was to temperance reform, however, that she mainly devoted her energies in the 1880s. She participated in the founding of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and was a trusted associate of Frances E. Willard. In 1883 she served as the first superintendent of the National Evangelistic Department of the WCTU, winning converts with her inspiring prose and Bible readings.

The Smiths returned to England in 1885. Their daughter Mary Logan married Benjamin Conn Costelloe, an Anglo-Irish barrister. In 1888, when their son Logan Pearsall entered Oxford, the Smiths decided to stay permanently in London. Smith supported the household from royalties and the income from the family bottle works. She transferred her activities to the British Women’s Temperance Association, holding several offices and eventually becoming honorary vice president. In 1891 she returned briefly to the United States to attend the first meeting of the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Hannah Whitall Smith’s cultural vision broadened and became more secular in the latter part of her life. Her children, all intellectuals, turned the Smith home into a literary salon. Frequent callers were such notables as George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Santayana, and Henry James. Logan Pearsall Smith later became a well-known essayist and authority on English usage. Smith’s daughter Mary Costelloe, after the death of her first husband, married the art historian Bernard Berenson; the other daughter, Alys, became the first wife of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. In 1899 Hannah Smith’s husband died. The next year, when her daughter Mary moved to Italy, Smith retired from public life and devoted herself to bringing up Mary’s children by her first marriage, Ray and Karen Costelloe. Ray Costelloe Strachey in later years became a leader and publicist for the British woman suffrage movement and wrote a book about her grandmother. In 1906 Hannah Smith, by then an arthritic confined to a wheelchair, went to live with her son. She died at his home at Iffley, near Oxford, at seventy-nine.

Hannah Whitall Smith, through her oratorical and literary skills, helped inspire others of her class to become active in public life, thus broadening the social base of support for feminist causes. She expanded the boundaries of Christian doctrine to include not only temperance but also woman suffrage. Her conception of faith and commitment enabled many to reconcile their Christian upbringing with the secular currents of the age.

Manuscript sources pertaining to Hannah Whitall Smith are included in the Logan Pearsall Smith Papers at the Library of Congress and the Frances Willard Papers, at the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evanston, Illinois. Of the many published works of Hannah Whitall Smith, her most popular books were Everyday Religion: or the Common Sense Teaching of the Bible (1893) and The Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It: A Spiritual Autobiography (1903). Biographical sources include Notable American Women (1971); R. A. Parker, The Transatlantic Smiths (1959); L. P. Smith, Unforgotten Years (1939); L. P. Smith, ed., Philadelphia Quaker: The Letters of Hannah Whitall Smith (1950); R. Strachey, A Quaker Grandmother: Hannah Whitall Smith (1914); R. Strachey, ed., Religious Fanaticism: Extracts from the Papers of Hannah Whitall Smith (1928); and F. E. Willard, Woman and Temperance (1883). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1935).