Hannah More
Hannah More (2 February 1745 – 7 September 1833) was an English religious writer, philanthropist, poet, and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, who wrote on moral and religious subjects. Born in Bristol, she taught at a school her father founded there and began writing plays. She became involved in the London literary elite and a leading Bluestocking member. Her later plays and poetry became more evangelical. She joined a group opposing the slave trade. In the 1790s she wrote Cheap Repository Tracts on moral, religious and political topics, to distribute to the literate poor (as a retort to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man). Meanwhile, she broadened her links with schools she and her sister Martha had founded in rural Somerset. These curbed their teaching of the poor, allowing limited reading but no writing. More was noted for her political conservatism, being described as an anti-feminist, a "counter-revolutionary", or a conservative feminist.[1]
Hannah More
2 February 1745
7 September 1833 (aged 88)
Wrington, Somerset, England
Early life[edit]
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),[2] a schoolmaster from a strong Presbyterian family in Harleston, Norfolk, who had joined the Church of England. He sought to pursue a clerical career, but after losing a lawsuit over an estate he had hoped to inherit he moved to Bristol, where he became an excise officer and later taught at the Fishponds free school.
The sisters were first educated by their father, learning Latin and mathematics. Hannah was also taught by elder sisters, through whom she learned French, which she improved conversationally by spending time with French prisoners of war in Frenchay during the Seven Years' War.[2] She was an assiduous, discerning student. Family tradition has it that she began writing at an early age.[3]
In 1758 Jacob established a girls' boarding school at Trinity Street, 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 in the girls' school when she was twelve and taught there in early adulthood.[3]
In 1767 More gave up her share in the school on becoming engaged to William Turner of the Belmont Estate, Wraxall, Somerset, whom she had met when he began teaching her cousins.[2] 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 this led More into a nervous breakdown, from which she recuperated in Uphill, near Weston-super-Mare. She was induced to accept a £200 annuity from Turner as compensation. This freed her for literary pursuits. 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 she had written on David Garrick's version of King Lear led to an acquaintance with him.[3]
She later moved to Bath where she stayed between 1792 and 1802 on Great Pulteney Street.[4]
Views on schooling for poor and for girls[edit]
Intending "to escape from the world gradually",[2] More moved in 1802 to Wrington in rural Somerset, where she had built a comfortable house and laid out a garden.[21] She remained, however, active with several Somerset schools for the destitute that she and her sister Martha had founded from the 1780s, with Wilberforce's encouragement.[22] She modelled the idealised hero and heroine in Coelebs in Search of Wife (1809) on the schools' prodigious benefactors: John and Louisa Harford of Blaise Castle.[2]
The schools taught the Bible and the catechism on Sundays and during the week taught "such coarse works as may fit them for servants". In regards to her choice of subjects More declared "I allow of no writing for the poor" and that they were not to be made "scholars and philosophers".[21] There was local opposition: Church of England vicars suspected her of advancing Methodism[21] and some landowners saw even rudimentary literacy as a step above the children's proper station.[23] At Wedmore, the Dean of Wells was petitioned to have More removed from the school.[2]
To the Bishop of Bath and Wells she protested that her schools taught only "such coarse works as may fit them [their charges] for servants. I allow no writing for the poor. My object is... to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety."[24]
More refused to read Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). While many women may be "fond of government", they are not, she believed, "fit for it": "To be unstable and capricious is but too characteristic of our sex." More turned down honorary membership of the Royal Society of Literature, seeing her "sex alone a disqualification".[2]
Those heeding Wollstonecraft's call to embrace the liberty without which women could "neither possess virtue or happiness" or reading with equal ardour the pedagogy of Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Elizabeth Hamilton saw More much as Wollstonecraft had seen Burke in her earlier Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790): as a writer with a "mortal antipathy to reason".[25] Having met Hannah More and her sisters in Bath and discussed their schools and other good works, Jane Greg reported to a friend, Martha McTier in Belfast, that she found their "minds crippled in an astonishing degree".[26] McTier was proud that in her school for poor girls her pupils "do not gabble over the testament only" and that she had those who "can read Fox and Pitt".[27]
More in 1820 donated money to Philander Chase, the first Episcopal Bishop of Ohio for the foundation there of Kenyon College. A portrait of More hangs in its Peirce Hall.[28]
Archives[edit]
Letters to, from and about Hannah More are held by Bristol Archives, including one from William Wilberforce (Ref. 28048/C/1/2) (online catalogue). Records relating to Hannah More appear at the British Library, Manuscript Collections,[32] Longleat,[33] Newport Central Library,[34] the Bodleian Library,[35] Cambridge University: St John's College Library,[36] the Victoria and Albert Museum,[37] Bristol Reference Library,[38] Cambridge University Library,[39] The Women's Library,[40] Gloucestershire Archives,[41] and National Museums Liverpool: Maritime Archives and Library.[42]
