Hannah More

English writer and philanthropist

• Born: February 2, 1745
• Birthplace: Stapleton, Gloucestershire, England
• Died: September 7, 1833
• Place of death: Clifton, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England

More, often credited with leading the ideological change from the permissiveness of eighteenth century English literature to the moralism of the Victorian age, was an influential literary advocate of Evangelical Christianity and practical charity during a time that saw the English react to French revolutionary ideology. She wrote imaginative literature advocating morals, religious faith, and civil obedience as a counter to the radical, revolutionary street literature that was circulating at the time.

Early Life

Hannah More was born near Bristol to Mary Grace, a farmer’s daughter, and Jacob More, a schoolmaster. The fourth of five sisters, Hannah was a delicate child who showed intellectual promise. She was educated in classics and mathematics by her father and by tutors in Bristol. However, when Hannah’s father realized his daughter was better than his male pupils in mathematics, he discontinued her mathematics lessons, believing them inappropriate for a girl. She studied history, literature, and romance languages instead, keeping hidden notebooks of essays, stories, and poetry.

As a young teacher in the girls’ school set up by her sister Mary, she used her literary talents for the benefit of her students. In 1761, the school performed her pastoral play The Search After Happiness, with its moral message. Published in Bristol in 1773 and reissued in London by Thomas Cadell in 1800, it was ubiquitously performed in girls’ schools. This play, in essence, set the tone for her life’s work: Her career as a teacher and moral reformer had begun.

Life’s Work

The ironies of Hannah More’s life and works are many. While she advocated feminine modesty, her work thrust her into the public arena. She wrote poems, a novel, plays for the stage, and essays and tracts for the poor as well as for the upper classes (and for a princess). She fostered the growth of charity schools and religious foundations. She was at once the stereotype of the ultra-proper Evangelical schoolmarm of Bristol and the creative artist, the London Bluestocking.

More never married. Neither did her longtime suitor, William Turner, who postponed marriage three times in six years, but established for her an annuity of œ200 and a bequest of œ1,000, which gave her the freedom to write. In 1776, John Langhorne reviewed her poems in the Monthly Review, giving her visibility in London’s literary circles. David Garrick helped produce her first play, The Inflexible Captive, at Bath’s Theatre Royal (1775) and wrote its epilogue; he also wrote the prologue and epilogue for her enormously popular Percy, which played in London’s Covent Garden in 1777. Translated into French, and performed in Vienna, Percy secured her place in the literary establishment.

In 1774, she began annual visits to London, where she met Samuel Johnson and, among others, Samuel Richardson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Frances Boscawen, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke and Richard Burke, and Elizabeth Montagu, through whom she became part of the illustrious Bluestocking circle. When More was writing Fatal Falsehood in 1779, for which Sheridan wrote the epilogue, Garrick died. More abandoned playwriting, but she did not withdraw from literary production. In 1782, her poem Bas Bleu, about the Bluestockings, earned Johnson’s praise as “the most powerful versificatrix” in English.

In her earlier life, More had been part of the witty and sparkling London literary scene, but in her later years, she became devoted to religious philanthropy and to the publication of religious tracts for the moral edification of the upper classes and for the education and improvement of the lower, earning from Horace Walpole the nickname “Holy Hannah.”

In 1784, More and her sisters built a cottage in Wrington Vale, Somerset, as a retreat from the bustle of the city. There she gardened daily, worked for religious and charitable organizations, and received numerous visitors, including London Bluestockings and William Wilberforce, with whom she worked in the Abolitionist and charity school movements in the Mendips. In the 1790’s, Wilberforce introduced her to the Clapham sect, a group of Evangelicals living in and around Clapham Common outside London. The Clapham “Saints,” as they were called, eschewed activities such as theatergoing and novel-reading and founded the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Church Missionary Society, and the Society for Bettering the Condition and Improving the Comforts of the Poor.

The elitist Clapham Saints initially addressed their reforming zeal to the upper classes, for whom More wrote Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788), which drew a devoted readership. A later work, An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1790), received a less-than-enthusiastic reception, which undermined her confidence in the reform of “quality” people. Finally, her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education: With a View to the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune (1799) advocated religion and education as the means by which upper-class women could be the stanchion of the nation’s spirit in troubled times.

In 1790, the More sisters retired to Bath. Controversy over Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791-1792) was now raging, and the establishment feared the spread of Jacobin sentiment among the lower classes. More was asked to counter radical inflammatory street literature with imaginative literature inculcating religion, morals, and civic obedience. She gained approval for her pamphlet series “Cheap Repository Tracts” from the bishop of London, Beilby Porteus, selling more than two million copies by 1796.

Although her schools were flourishing, the Blagdon Controversy plagued her from 1799 to 1802. The curate of Blagdon had accused the schools of being “methodistic,” because a teacher named Younge conducted extemporaneous prayers. For refusing to fire him, More was accused of heresy. Although she was supported by the bishop of Bath and Wells, the school nonetheless closed, Younge was transferred, and More fell ill.

Seeking respite from the world, but not from charity work, the More sisters left Bath for Barley Wood in Wrington parish in 1801. Despite ill health and accusations of “enthusiasm,” More responded to many requests to publish, earning more than œ30,000. Though she had little ideological sympathy with the efflorescent Romantic movement, she admired the poems of Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth’s The Excursion, and she was visited at Barley Wood by Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas de Quincey.

More’s reputation, which had suffered from the Blagdon Controversy, was restored with the enormously popular Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805), written at the request of Queen Charlotte to provide educational guidelines for the neglected Charlotte Augusta, daughter of the prince regent and Caroline of Brunswick.

More, who had expatiated on the immorality of writing and reading modern novels, now published, anonymously, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808), which, by the time of her death, had run through thirty editions in England and America. Part quest narrative, part conduct literature, part devotional manual, Coelebs in Search of a Wife also constructs a stereotype of the “lady” recognizable to the Victorians in Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854-1861): “Charity is the calling of a lady; the care of the poor is her profession.” More was mortified when the Evangelical press commented that Coelebs in Search of a Wife was “apt to be vulgar,” and refused to write another novel.

However, further best-selling works of moral instruction followed: Practical Piety: Or, The Influence of the Religion of the Heart on the Conduct of Life (1811); Christian Morals (1812), advocating the responsibilities of the upper classes; and the An Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of Saint Paul (1815). In 1813, she had participated with Wilberforce in his successful drive to amend the charter of the British East India Company to allow Christian missionary work among Indians, as well as advocating the abolition of suttee (the ritual burning of Hindu widows).

Because of the French wars and because of economic changes, the lower classes were living in extreme poverty and desperation, yet resultant manifestations of social unrest were little understood. When, in 1817, the government suspended the Habeas Corpus Act and called for the arrest of authors and distributors of seditious or blasphemous material, More produced, at official request, a work countering the writings of radical politician William Cobbett, author of the Weekly Political Register. More’s work advocated religion as a palliative and was enormously popular. As always, she continued to contribute her time, money, and energies to alleviate suffering. In 1817, when calamine miners at Shipham lost their jobs, with fifteen hundred people at risk of starvation, she provided food and clothing and, with others, purchased all the ore.

Between 1813 and 1819, More’s sisters had died. Her own health was declining, and, ill from 1818 to 1825, she was barely able to leave her rooms. Cheated by her staff, she was persuaded by Zachary Macaulay to close the house at Barley Wood and move to Clifton, where she lived in the care of friends from 1828 until her death in 1833. Her memorial at All Saints Church, Wrington, eulogizes her for devoting “her time and talents to the cause of pure religion, sound morality and wide culture.”

Significance

Hannah More’s life and writings exemplify the transformation from Enlightenment culture—via the Romantic era—to Victorian values, from the age of David Garrick and Horace Walpole—by way of the Clapham sect—to nineteenth century English evangelism and Pietism. In her “Cheap Repository Tracts” she adapted the format of contemporary chapbooks and broadsides to serve Evangelical goals.

Her Strictures contributed to the debate on women’s education, both amplifying aspects of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman while paradoxically advocating positions that anticipated Victorian stereotypes. Her only novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, embodied propriety as the most desirable quality of a good woman and helped popularize Evangelical tenets. Her life focused on bringing practical relief to suffering humanity while employing her literary talents to what she deemed the public good, and for Evangelical Christianity.

Bibliography

Demers, Patricia. The World of Hannah More. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Demers contextualizes More’s work in her life and times.

Jones, M. G. Hannah More. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1952. Jones presents the standard biography of More.

More, Hannah. Strictures on Female Education. New York: Woodstock Books, 1995. A modern reprint of More’s book advocating both religious education and general education for girls and women.

Stott, Anne. Hannah More: The First Victorian. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. A reevaluation that argues More was a pioneer of Victorian mores.