WOMEN, MORALITY AND ADVICE LITERATURE
Manuscripts and Rare Printed Works of Hannah More (1745-1833)
and her Circle from the Clark Library, Los Angeles
Part 1: Manuscripts, First Editions and Rare Printed Works of
Hannah More
HANNAH MORE, REVOLUTIONARY REFORMER
Anne K Mellor
HANNAH MORE’S PUBLIC VOICE IN GEORGIAN BRITAIN
Patricia Demers
HANNAH MORE, REVOLUTIONARY REFORMER
Anne K Mellor
Hannah More was the most influential woman living in England during her day. Through her writings, political actions and personal relationships, she carried out a radical program for social change in the existing British social and political order. Rather than promoting the political revolution urged by the French Jacobins or the proletarian revolution of the workers later envisioned by Marx, Hannah More devoted her life to reforming the culture of the English nation from within. What she desired was a “revolution in manners” or cultural mores, a radical change in the moral behaviour of the nation. Writing in an era which she considered one of “superannuated impiety” (Works II : 316), of notable moral decline marked by “ the excesses of luxury, the costly diversions, and the intemperate dissipation in which numbers of professing Christians indulge themselves” (II : 309), More set out to lead “a moral revolution in the national manners and principles” that would be “analogous to that great political one which we hear so much and so justly extolled” (II : 296).
More fought her moral revolution on four fronts. Confronted with the decadent practices of the late eighteenth-century aristocracy - with codes of behavior that licensed libertinism, adultery, gambling, duelling and fiscal irresponsibility - she first attacked the high-born members of “Society.” Although generally overlooked, the Cheap Repository Tracts of the mid-1790s contain as trenchant a critique of the morally irresponsible aristocracy as of the revolutionary workers. In “Village Politics,” for instance, Jack Anvil the Blacksmith, while warning workers against the evils of violent rebellion, at the same time recognises the evils perpetrated by the “great folks”: “I don’t pretend to say they are a bit better than they should be … let them look to that; they’ll answer for that in another place. To be sure, I wish they’d set us a better example about going to church, and those things: … They do spend too much, to be sure, in feastings and fandangoes” (II : 230).
In two major tracts addressed directly to the upper-classes, 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), Hannah More directly condemned the hypocrisy of the “merely nominal” Christians among the aristocracy. Since the rich and powerful are perforce the role models for the lower classes, they have an increased social responsibility to set a good example, More argued. She pointed out all the ways in which the leaders of her time were failing in that civic responsibility: they did not attend Church, or did so half-heartedly, combining Sunday services with visiting, concerts, and
hair-dressing; they gambled, even the women, at card-parties in their own homes, using their winnings to tip the hostess’ servants; they engaged in a sustained practice of social lying, forcing servants to tell visitors they were “not at home”; they tolerated adultery, especially for husbands; and they systematically failed to develop an appreciation of what was for More at the center of personal and social fulfilment - “family enjoyment, select conversation, and domestic delights” (II : 285). Their behavior thus corrupted rather than educated their children and servants, forcing these servants to encourage gambling and to lie, cheat and steal.
More calculatedly attributes the amoral practices of the rich to their excessive dependence on French fashions and behaviours. By identifying aristocratic English society with France, at the very moment of the French Revolution, she subtly defines the British aristocrats as potential Jacobins, corrupted from within by their adherence to French Philosophy - the anti-Christian scepticism of Voltaire - and to French culture. By classifying upper-class social practices not merely as amoral or non-Christian but also as French, More undercut the aristocracy’s claim to both political and social authority at the time of the Terror. If the upper classes were to rule the British nation, they must become more English - which More defined as devoutly Christian, rigorously Sabbatarian, pious, chaste, honest and benevolent in thought and deed.
More’s clarion call for the reform of the manners of the rich was heard by many of the aristocracy and landed gentry. As David Spring had documented, an increase in aristocratic morality in the 1820s could be directly traced to the writings of More and the other members of the Clapham Sect of Evangelicals. Linda Colley had also concluded that the attack on the “cultural treason” of the elite mounted by More and others produced a new ideology of the British ruling class: one marked by “public probity,” “regular church-going and conventional sexual morality,” and “ostentatious uxoriousness” (Colley 188-189).
More’s attack on the lax morals and irresponsibility of the upper-classes was also aimed at the Church of England. As Alan Gilbert has documented, by the end of the eighteenth-century the Church of England was in severe decline. More’s impassioned pleas to the Anglican clergy to play a central role in bringing about the moral reform of the nation inspired numerous members of the clergy to join the Evangelical branch of the Church of England - by 1830, over one-quarter of its clergy were openly identified with the Clapham Sect Evangelicals. Their efforts, both as resident clergy and as missionaries, effectively re-vitalised the Anglican Church, absorbing much of the religious energy that had previously flowed to the New Dissent.
Equally aggressively, Hannah More attempted to reform the working classes of England. In her propagandistic Cheap Repository Tracts explicitly aimed at workers, of which she claimed over two million were sold or otherwise distributed in 1795 alone (Spinney 296), Hannah More hammered home her message: if workers would become sober, industrious, thrifty, healthy and religious, then they could rise into the lower rungs of the bourgeoisie. By providing numerous examples of workers who financially bettered their lot in life through sober industry - together with counter-examples of drunken, lazy, immoral workers like Black Giles the Poacher and his wife Tawney Rachel the thieving fortune-teller who end up in jail or transported or dead, cruelly neglecting and abusing their children along the way - More attempted to persuade the working classes that they too had a stake in an economically prosperous and politically stable England. In effect, she told the workers, you can have the material rewards your employers have; you can become the middle-class. And at the same time you can save your Christian souls.
To bring about the reformation of the working classes in a systematic way, More turned to the charity Sunday School, an institution recently initiated with success in Gloucester by Richard Raikes, as her primary instrument of social change. Between 1789 and 1799 she and her sister Martha established nine Sunday Schools amongst the rural poverty and social depravity of the Mendips Region. Described at length in Martha More’s Journal, these nine schools educated over a thousand children and adults a year, Designed to bring literacy, Christianity, sobriety, industry and good health to the rural poor, combining vocational training with religious instruction, these Sunday Schools have been widely criticised as exercises in the “politicisation” of children, even by so judicious a historian as Linda Colley (Colley 226). But as Thomas Laqueur had demonstrated in detail in his study of Sunday Schools and working-class culture, these schools in fact functioned to improve and to empower the working-classes. “What appears to have been an imposition from above,” he concludes, “was, in fact, a way in which those who spent their lives in disorder, uncertainty, dirt and disease brought some order into this environment. Cleanliness in body, punctuality, neatness in dress and in one’s home, and orderliness in one’s life style were very much part of the fabric of ‘respectable’ working-class society and by no means inhibited those engaged in their pursuit from attacking the repressive aspects of the contemporary political and economic system; rather the reverse” (Laqueur 170, his italics). As Laqueur points out, “a highly developed culture of self-help, self-improvement and respectability, which nurtured many of the political and trade-union leaders of the working-class, emerged from the late 18th and the 19th century Sunday Schools” (Laqueur 155).
By teaching the workers to read, Hannah More’s Mendips Sunday Schools for the first time made available to these rural poor the social world of Evangelical middle-class culture, a culture which they on the whole eagerly embraced. Both the Cheap Repository Tracts and the Sunday Schools strongly asserted a Christian and bourgeois ideology as normative for the entire nation. Together with the wide-spread growth of voluntary philanthropic societies in the early 19th century, they helped to stabilise a class-system now controlled, not by the landed gentry and the “old corruption,” but by a growing and newly empowered commercial and professional middle-class which by 1800 included, according to Jonathan Barry, over half of the population.
Fundamental to Hannah More’s project of social revolution was a transformation of the role played by woman of all classes in the formation of national culture. Unlike Mary Wollstonecraft, who argued that the two sexes were in all significant aspects the same, Hannah More insisted on the innate difference between the sexes. To women she assigns a greater delicacy of perception and feeling and above all, a greater moral purity and capacity for virtue. Men on the other hand have better judgement, based on their wider experience of the public world; at the same time their manners are coarse, with “rough angles and asperities” (VI : 266). If a “revolution in manners” is to occur, then, it must be carried out by women.
But first women must be educated to understand their proper function in society. More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) lays out her program for the education of “excellent women” (III : 200): a systematic development of the innate female capacity for virtue and piety through a judicious reading of the Bible, devotional tracts and serious literature, extended by rational conversation and manifested in the active exercise of compassion and generosity. The goal of More’s educational project for woman is no less than a cultural redefinition of female virtue. As summed up in that “pattern daughter … [who] will make a pattern wife,” Lucilla Stanley, the heroine of More’s novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808: 246), female virtue is equated with rational intelligence, modesty and chastity, a sincere commitment to spiritual values and the Christian religion, an affectionate devotion to one’s family, active service on behalf of one’s community, and an insistence on keeping promises. More’s concept of female virtue thus stands in stark contrast to the prevailing cultural definition of the ideal woman as one who possessed physical beauty and numerous accomplishments and who could effectively entice a man of substance into marriage.
More’s concept of female virtue also stands in opposition to the prevailing masculine concept of virtue as “devotion to the public good,” and “the practice … of relations of equality between citizens” could no longer be reconciled with the “ideals” of commerce which required an exchange between non-equals, credit and dependence. Hence masculine “virtue” was redefined as the possession of property and “the practice and refinement of polished manners,” manners which would engage the trust and credit of like-minded men of property (Pocock 41-8). This specifically male “commercial humanism” seemed to More to be soul-less and mechanistic, substituting the form of good manners for the substance. Female virtue was not a matter of credit and exchange but rather a matter of spiritual conviction, sincere compassion for the welfare of others, humility and self-sacrifice.
Embedded in More’s program for the education of women was a new career for middle-class women, namely, a sustained and increasingly institutionalised effort to relieve the sufferings of the less fortunate. As Lucilla Stanley’s mother defines this career: “Charity is the calling of a lady; the care of the poor is her profession” (Coelebs 138; More’s italics). More here conceptualises for the first time the career of what we would now call the “social worker,” the organised and corporate - as opposed to the spontaneous and individualistic - practice of philanthropy. As exemplified by Lucilla Stanley, this profession involves spending one day each week collecting “necessaries” for the poor - food, clothing, medicine - and two evenings each week visiting them in their own cottages where she can best determine “their wants and their characters” (Coelebs 63).
In her Strictures on Female Education, More advocates a more institutionalised philanthropy, a “regular systematical good” resulting in a “broad stream of bounty … flowing through and refreshing whole districts” (Strictures III 270). She urges her women readers to participate actively in the organisation of voluntary benevolent societies and in the foundation of hospitals, orphanages, Sunday Schools and all-week charity or “ragged” schools for the education and relief of the poor. And her call was heard: literally thousands of voluntary societies sprang up in the opening decades of the nineteenth century to serve the needs of every imaginable group of sufferers, from the Bristol Orphan Asylum to the Sailors Home, from the Poor Printers Fund to the Pensioners at Wrington, to name only four among the 71 charities to which More herself contributed generously in her will.
More’s Evangelical demand that women demonstrate their commitment to God through a life of active service for the first time gave her middle-class sisters a mission in life, the personal and financial support of institutionalised charities, from orphanages, work-houses, and hospitals to asylums and prisons. These philanthropic activities contributed directly to the emancipation and increasing social empowerment of women, as
F K Prochaska has documented in his superb study of women and philanthropy in nineteenth-century England.
Women were particularly suited to the active exercise of charity because, according to More, they possessed greater sensibility or active compassion for the sufferings of others than do men. Secondly, women were more versed in what More calls “practical piety,” the immediate assessment and relief of the day-to-day requirements of the poor, the sick, the dying. Finally, women who had learned how to manage a household properly could more readily extend those skills to the Sunday School or workhouse.
Implicit both in More’s Strictures on Female Education and in her novel Coelebs is the argument that household management or domestic economy provides the best model for the management of the state of national economy. As Mr Stanley explains, “Retrenchments, to be efficient, must be applied to great objects. The true [domestic] economist will draw in by contracting the outline, by narrowing the bottom, by cutting off with an unsparing hand costly superfluities, which affect not comfort but cherish vanity” (Coelebs 184). By assigning to women - and their mentor Eve - the capacity to develop and execute a fiscally responsible plan of household management which satisfies the physical, emotional and religious needs of all the members of the household (servants as well as family members), More effectually defines women as the best managers of the national estate, as the true patriots.
It is in the role of mother that More’s ideal of the well-educated, fiscally responsible and morally pure woman finds her fulfilment. But it is crucial to recognise that More’s mother is the mother, not just of her own family, but of the nation as a whole. As More affirms in Strictures on Female Education,
“the great object to which you, who are or may be mothers, are more especially called, is the education of your children … To YOU is made over the awfully important trust of infusing the first principles of piety into the tender minds of those who may one day be called to instruct, not families merely, but districts; to influence, not individuals, but senates. Your private exertions may at this moment be contributing to the future happiness, your domestic neglect, to the future ruin, of your country.” (Strictures III 44).
In emphasizing women’s public role as mothers of the nation, More necessarily downplayed their more private sexual roles as females. More has been roundly criticised, by Nancy Cott and many others, for insisting on a new ideal of female “passionlessness.” But this is too one-sided a reading of More’s campaign. More does not urge women to deny their sexual desires, but only to channel them into marriage with a morally as well as sexually desirable partner. As Michael Mason has recognised, “To Hannah More belongs the distinction of having written at greater length explicitly about sex than any other leading Evangelical” (Mason 77) in her novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife.
In making the private household the model for the national household, Hannah More effectively erased any meaningful distinction between the private and the public sphere. She insists that it is women, not men, who are most responsible for the progress of civilisation as such. Affirming the dominant role of women in establishing “true taste, right principle, and genuine feeling” in the culture of a nation, More assigns to women the primary labor in the production of what Norbert Elias has since called the “civilising process.”
Essential to More’s project of national reformation is the assumption that the “public revolution of manners” (Preface to Works I: ix) she demands must be led by women, and in particular by one woman, the supposed future Queen of England, Princess Charlotte. Her Hints towards forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805), like Thomas Elyot’s Book of the Governor and Machiavelli’s The Prince, is a treatise on the nature of good government. Part of the wisdom which the future female monarch must learn is the limits of her own royal “prerogatives.” Even as she must stand firm in endorsement of her own religious beliefs and intellectual understanding, she must acknowledge that her power is constrained by the laws of the British constitution which guarantee the freedom of her people. Tracking the history of fallen empires, More argues that the British constitution is uniquely “favourable to virtue,” congenial with religion, and conducive to happiness” because it seeks to provide for the “well-being of the whole community … by effectually securing the rights, the safety, the comforts of every individual” (IV: 67-8).
More is here defining a concept of the reformed British nation as based on an ethic of care, a Christian concern to meet the needs of all members of the community.
By far the most important duty of the Princess is to set the moral tone of the nation through her own example and through the judicious selection of the bishops who are to lead the Church. In this role, as the moral leader of England, More suggests, “ the just administration of this peculiar power may be reasonably expected as much, we had almost said even more, from a female, than from a monarch, of the other sex” (IV : 361). By making women the potential embodiment of what Mitzi Myers has called “aggressive virtue” (Myers 209), by addressing her tract on good Christian government to a woman, Hannah More specifically called on women to save the nation.
And her demand for a “revolution in manners” was answered. As I have argued at length elsewhere (Mellor 1-38), the career of Hannah More, who was virtually canonised as an “Anglican Saint” after her death in 1833, made the moralistic reign - not of Charlotte - but of More’s equally devoted disciple, Victoria - inevitable. After the Evangelical campaigns of the early nineteenth-century, the British public would not have tolerated the rule of another George IV: a fiscally irresponsible libertine devoted to luxury, stylistic display and dissipation. The new British nation required that its royal monarch be economically prudent, decorous in appearance and taste, and above all moral. And after the career of Hannah More, the physical embodiment of this new national morality had to be female: only a woman, in this case Queen Victoria, could fully represent British national virtue, that Christian virtue that More had everywhere in her writings gendered as female. Only a woman could become the Mother of the Nation, Britannia herself.
2003
WORKS CITED
Colley, Linda. Britons - Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992.
Cott, Nancy F. “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850.” Signs 4 (1978) 219-236.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilising Process, trans Edmund Jephcott, 2 Vols: The History of Manners and Power and Civility. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
Gilbert, Alan D. Religion and Society in Industrial England - Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914. London and New York: Longman, 1976.
Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Religion and Respectability – Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780-1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Mason, Michael. The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Mellor, Anne. Mothers of the Nation - Women’s Political Writing in Britain, 1780-1830. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000/2002.
Mendip Annals: or, A Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and Martha More, in Their Neighborhood, being the Journal of Martha More, ed Arthur Roberts. London: James Nisbet and Co, 1859.
More, Hannah. Coelebs in Search of a Wife. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995.
- - - - - - - - - . The Cottage Cook, or, Mrs. Jones’Cheap Dishes; Shewing the Way to do much good with little Money. London: Cheap Repository Tracts, 1795.
- - - - - - - - - . The Works of Hannah More, 6 Vols. London: H Fisher, R Fisher, and P Jackson, 1834.
Myers, Mitzi. “Reform or Ruin: ‘A Revolution in Female Manners’.” Studies in Eighteenth -Century Culture, Vol 11, ed Harry C Payne. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
Pocock, J G A. Virture, Commerce, and History - Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Prochaska, F K. Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
Spring, David. “Aristocracy, Social Structure, and Religion in the Early Victorian Period.” Victorian Studies VI (1963) 263-80.
- - - - - - - - - . “The Clapham Sect: Some Social and Political Aspects.” Victorian Studies V (1961) 35-48.
- - - - - - - - - . “Some Reflections on Social History in the Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Studies IV (1960) 55-64.
HANNAH MORE’S PUBLIC VOICE IN GEORGIAN BRITAIN
Patricia Demers
Counter-revolutionary Bluestocking and Evangelical reformer, Hannah More (1745-1833) was one of the best selling women authors in Georgian Britain. Her works, experimenting with every literary genre in a range of high and low styles, actually made this intelligent, ambitious crusader, very wealthy. More’s will distributed her accumulated £30,000 to major causes supported throughout her long life: education, missionary evangelism, and abolitionism. As a spiritually egalitarian Tory who promoted radical causes such as opposition to slavery and the education of the poor, and as a social critic who could engage both elite and plebeian readers, Hannah More does not fit a conventional class or ideological stereotype. The range and complexity of her writing, which appeared both in individual publications over a span of five decades and in three approved editions of Collected Works during her lifetime, are critical to understanding the literary politics of Georgian life and to enlarging concepts of Romanticism, extending its horizons to embrace the culture of female sensibility, social theory, and activism.
On account of her firm blending of High Church principles and social reform, as a sort of bimetallic strip, More attracted critics and scores of admirers, lay and clerical. Although she was the darling of female Victorian biographers, the most predictable invocation of her name today is as the conservative counterblast to Mary Wollstonecraft. These cultural warriors are more aligned than most readers realize. Both envisioned transforming the state by modelling governance on a responsible and strict domestic arrangement. Both emphasized the importance of reading and its role in the development of a culture. Both articulated what came to be known as a Romantic struggle for personal and national identity, and both made strong cases for the especial power of a woman’s mind.
Like Wollstonecraft, More was largely self-educated. The fourth of five daughters of schoolmaster Jacob More and farmer’s daughter Mary (Grace) More, Hannah was a precocious, enthusiastic pupil. A brother, Jacob, who died in infancy, was born after Hannah and before her favourite sister, Martha, nicknamed Patty. The More family quarters in the Fishponds free school, in the parish of Stapleton close to Bristol, were cramped, however, Hannah quickly distinguished herself for cleverness in learning Latin and mathematics–so much so that her father, fearful of creating a mere pedant, discontinued the lessons. Along with her siblings she learned French from the eldest sister, Mary, who returned from Bristol on the weekends to relay what she had been taught during the week. The girls’ fluency was helped when their father invited paroled French officers, prisoners during the Seven Years War, to the Fishponds home. When Mary, Betty, and Sally More moved to Bristol to establish a school for young ladies, opened in Trinity Street in 1758 with a later location in Park Street, Hannah and Patty followed, first as pupils and then as junior teachers. Unlike the Wollstonecraft sisters’ establishment at Newington Green, the school set up by the More women, offering instruction in French, reading, writing, arithmetic, and eventually dancing, was a success: “an upmarket school for the daughters of the affluent” (Stott 10).
None of the More sisters married. However, Hannah’s cancelled engagement became the target of snide comments from male critics who hid behind pseudonyms of “Peter Pindar” (John Wolcot), “Archibald MacSarcasm” (William Shaw), and “Sappho Search” (John Black) to attack More as the jilted bride or frustrated prude. Her dilatory suitor, William Turner, was the guardian of two girls at the Mores’ Park Street School. This old bachelor, twenty years her senior, invited the vivacious Hannah to accompany his wards to his country estate, called Belmont, in the village of Wraxall, south of Bristol; he proposed but postponed the wedding three times over six years. To save Hannah further embarrassment, though without her knowledge, Dr. James Stonhouse intervened, with the result that Turner settled an annuity of £200 on Hannah and bequeathed her £1,000. By not becoming the mistress of Belmont, Hannah became a writer. The critic “Peter Pindar” resorted to a form of clumsy and unfeeling psychoanalysis to explain More’s tartness about bad love poetry: “Somewhat has wounded thee, ‘tis very plain! / Revenge, I fear, lies rankling in thine heart” (Works 5:201). What did lie in her heart about this matter Hannah never disclosed.
The theatre was Hannah More’s initial platform and love. Her first publication, The Search after Happiness (1773), was written for student performers when she was an eighteen-year-old teacher at her sisters’ Park Street school and published when she was twenty-eight. A sober piece of juvenilia, this “pastoral drama” in rhyming couplets introduces four girls, all articulately aware of their faults, who seek the guidance of the widow Urania; through sententious nuggets in dialogue and song they are exhorted to realise that “the fairest symmetry of form or face / From intellect receives its highest grace” and to excel “In that best art–the art of living well” (Works I: 278-79). The school play had had a long tradition in the education of boys (with Ralph Roister Doister written for performance by boys at Eton and Gammer Gurton’s Needle for boys at Cambridge); More’s play, which went through thirteen editions before its inclusion in the Collected Works of 1801, was one of the first to cater for girls. Mary Russell Mitford fondly recalled “the English teacher and her favourite play . . . amongst the first, the gayest, and the tenderest of [her] school-day recollections” (Mitford 165). More’s idea of putting moral treatises into action with young performers was also prophetic. A translation of Madame de Genlis’s Le théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes (1779-80) was printed by More’s own publisher, Cadell, in 1781. With lighter touches in their dramatic pictures of family life and rowdiness, Maria Edgeworth, Barbara Hofland Hoole, and Anna Jameson wrote affecting plays for young performers.
Due in part to the successful reviews of Search and mainly to the interventions of Bristol Theatre Royal manager William Powell, Blagdon poet and clergyman John Langhorne, and Drury Lane impresario David Garrick, More’s three tragedies were produced in Bath, Exeter, London, and Bristol over the next five years. Though derivative, her plays are instructive experiments in the art of adaptation and expression of emotional torment. Each tragedy spotlights the dilemma of a daughter who espouses noble resolve but ultimately succumbs to emotional collapse in a world hostile to her virtue. These daughters, however, leave a mark because of the power of their feeling. The Inflexible Captive, her blank verse translation of Pietro Metastasio’s opera Attilio Regolo which premiered in Bath in 1775, examines the relationship between the Roman warrior Regulus, held captive in Carthage, and his daughter Attilia, who attempts unsuccessfully to secure his release. With Garrick’s sponsorship and textual editing Percy, which reset Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy’s Gabrielle de Vergy in the context of the Douglas and Percy families from Percy’s Reliques, opened at Covent Garden in December 1777 and enjoyed a remarkable nineteen performances. Elwina is the dutiful daughter who capitulates to her father’s request to marry a man she does not love and justifies her obedience to her lover Percy by recalling “the cruel tyranny” of a father’s tears: “If thou has felt, and hast resisted these, / Then thou mayst curse my weakness; but if not, / Thou canst not pity, for thou canst not judge” (Works 2:198). More’s last tragedy, The Fatal Falsehood, ran for only four nights in 1779, during which time she was distracted as much by the death of Garrick as by the groundless charges of plagiarism from Hannah Cowley. The self-possession of Emmelina, the jilted heiress of The Fatal Falsehood, impresses her father as the response of “a Roman matron . . . and not a feeble girl” (Works 2: 276), but this daughter, too, sinks into despair and death at the hands of “the afflicting angel” (Works 2: 303). A combination of mourning, distress at the scandalous suggestion of plagiarism, and continuing ambivalence about the instructive potential of the theatre probably led to More’s decision to renounce the stage as an appropriate medium. Her only other theatrical work was the treatment of biblical topics, Sacred Dramas (1782), which she designed as a closet drama for young readers. Although she included the tragedies in all the Collected Works, she confessed in the Preface to the 1801 edition that her “youthful course of reading, and early habits of society and conversation” had encouraged her “to entertain that common hope that the stage, under certain regulations, might be converted into a school of virtue,” a hope which she later dismissed as “delusive” (Works 2: 125).
Her début quarto as a poet, in 1776, for which her publisher paid handsomely, consisted of two ballads about unrequited love, “The Bleeding Rock; or, The Metamorphosis of a Nymph into a Stone” and “Sir Eldred of the Bower.” The former legend fancifully explains the red spots of sandstone in the rock in Failand (which becomes “Fairy Land”), a hamlet close to Bristol, and the latter retells the ballad of Gil Morice. In couplets and alternate-rhyme quatrains More’s narratives are didactic. Both poems feature virtuous women done to death by rash men. The location of the action of “The Bleeding Rock” is close to the estate of More’s on-again, off-again suitor, and hence it has been construed as a reflection of her own situation. But it is unlikely to have been a “protest” (Jones 17) poem about ill treatment. If More made no mention of the circumstance–however tragic or liberating for her it may have been–in her private letters, it seems implausible that she would have worn her heart on her sleeve in a public poem.
“The Bas-Bleu” was More’s confident, spirited exercise celebrating Mrs. Elizabeth Vesey’s conversation parties. Her support for “Vesey’s plastic genius” was a witty reflection of both the haphazard arrangement of the furniture and her hostess’s deafness. More’s vision of “sober Duchesses,” “chaste Wits,” “Whigs and Tories in alliance,” and “learn’d Antiquaries” conveyed the utopian challenge of the Bluestocking enterprise. Here was a female writer insisting on her role as “the guardian of mass sociomoral culture” (Ross 203). Her appeal to mercantilism was shrewd but highminded: “intellectual ore” and “education’s moral mint” must be transmitted by the “commerce” of conversation, “whose precious merchandize is MIND” (Works 1: 291-305). After having circulated in manuscript throughout the Bluestocking network, “The Bas-Bleu” was published in 1786, along with “Florio: A Tale for Fine Gentlemen and Fine Ladies,” a gentle Horatian satire on city and country manners.
Following her meeting in 1787 with the anti-slavery politician William Wilberforce (1759-1833) and the former first mate of slave ships who had become an ordained priest John Newton (1725-1807), More wrote “Slavery; a Poem” (1788) to assist Wilberforce’s parliamentary campaign. She composed it hurriedly (within two weeks) to support the passage of a bill that would limit the number of slaves transported to British colonies in the West Indies. The bill passed, although the parliamentary campaign for full emancipation was protracted; her poem was circulated widely in anti-slavery societies throughout Britain. She worked with Lady Margaret Middleton to have Thomas Southerne’s dramatization of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko produced in London at the same time. More showed a critical awareness of the support of slavery by both the Church of England and George III; with compelling strength the poem’s female abolitionist voice exposed and indicted greed, covetousness, and oppression. The pathos and sentiment of her depiction of the black as ‘other’ invite comparison with contemporary female abolitionist discourse by Sarah Trimmer, Helen Maria Williams, Ann Yearsley, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld as well as the slave narrative of Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography published in 1789.
Although More had withdrawn from the world of theatre, she did continue annual visits to London and maintained an alert insider’s knowledge of the fashionable world, as evidenced in the hard-hitting essays calling for reform: Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great (1788) and An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1791). Writing from the distance of her Cowslip Green retreat in Wrington, close to Bristol, More deftly blended first-hand observation with the bold declaration that “reformation must begin with the GREAT.” Her knowledge of apparently harmless Sunday amusements was wide and detailed; among the deceiving attempts to “patch up a precarious and imperfect happiness in this world,” she commented on hairdressers, dressmakers, card games, and the effusions of “transient sensibility.” Non-conformity to the world, especially the world of fashion, luxury, and bon ton, and consistency in “principles of the heart” are basic criteria in More’s horizon of judgement. Pithy dicta (“An extempore Christian is a ridiculous character”) also dotted her assured and unapologetic social theorizing.
Acerbic judgement and a somewhat naive sensibility coexisted in More, making her meliorist or philanthropic schemes easy targets for criticism as paternalistic instruments promoting subalternism. When in 1785 she started a subscription campaign among the gentry and aristocracy to publish the work of the impoverished milkmaid poet, Ann Yearsley, More insisted on control of the proceeds in a way that angered and ultimately alienated the woman she had tried to help. “[W]hat many of these middle-class and patrician patrons of Yearsley consistently failed to understand was the sense of ignominy and almost self-hatred that their support sometimes engendered in her” (Felsenstein 371). With a similar saving impulse to intervene and control, Hannah and Patty More courageously established, oversaw, and inspected eleven Sunday Schools in the poorest Mendip villages, beginning with Cheddar in 1789 and extending over the next decade to Shipham, Rowberrow, Sandford, Banwell, Congresbury, Yatton, Nailsea, Axbridge, Blagdon, and Wedmore. Not only did they rent locations and hire teachers, but the More sisters–even in their frail old age–regularly visited three or four schools each Sunday, fund-raised for the schools, and supported from their own purse the annual large-scale picnic of the Mendip Feasts. Although More’s rhetoric of authority and understanding of didacticism and poverty are subjects of critical reconsideration today (by Elizabeth Howells, Jane Nardin, Alan Richardson, Mona Scheuermann, and K. D. M. Snell among others), her most recent biographer, Anne Stott, observes that More’s work for the immortal welfare of the Mendip people, which involved consistent attempts at being popular, “went far beyond the reinforcement of the social order” and actually proved “a surprising agent of social mobility” (Stott 119, 168).
More’s acclaim as a writer of popular literature and her career as a propagandist was launched with the publication of a provocative, widely distributed poetic dialogue, Village Politics, in 1792. A riposte to Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, which had outsold Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Village Politics was ostensibly penned by the country carpenter Will Chip. Jack the blacksmith and Tom the mason talk about freedom, happiness and rights, exactly mimicking the topics in Paine. Jack, the master of terse remarks, always has the upper hand over malleable but inquisitive Tom. The upholding of hierarchy and paternalistic benevolence shows the remarkable degree of More’s opposition to dissent and her association of restlessness with drinking, licentiousness, riots, and bonfires.
The Cheap Repository for Moral and Religious Tracts (1795-97), the monthly publication of tales, ballads, and tracts, which More managed and to which she contributed substantially (under the pseudonym “Z”), is the counteroffensive to revolution that is most immediately associated with her name today. With the execution of Louis XVI in January and Marie Antoinette in October 1793 and the declaration of war on England in the same year, the sense of alarm and upheaval about the dissemination of revolutionary ideals prompted the Bishop of London’s enlisting of More to lead the charge against disorder. He exhorted that she dispense her “porter in pewter pots not in silver tankards” (Roberts 2: 427). More’s plan for the Cheap Repository, “to improve the habits and raise the principles of the common people, . . .not only to counteract vice and profligacy on the one hand, but error, discontent, and false religion on the other” (Works, 3: vii), was pragmatic and daring. Although her satirist’s eye exposed hypocrisy in all social classes, she made no bones about hoping to abate the relish “among the inferior ranks . . . for those corrupt and inflammatory publications which the consequences of the French Revolution have been so fatally pouring in upon us” (Works, 3: viii). Her skilful propaganda, “a significant channel for female reformist impulse” (Myers 269), involved a deliberate expropriation of popular culture, representing what has been called “a fantasy of social order” (Kelly 153). Her stories of colliers, farmers, shepherds, merchants, sailors, barmaids, poachers, philosophers, and fortune tellers, embracing a complete span from the upright to the criminal, display the often creative tensions between enabling and containing, perceptive and authoritarian, populist and fantastic aspects of More’s contributions.
The climax of More’s accomplishments in the 1790s was the publication of her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), the most comprehensive Georgian treatment of the education of women of the middle and upper ranks, their role in cultural formation, and their duties to act as engaged social beings. In this twenty-one-chapter polemic More’s combative, astringent principles of reform permeate every part of the argument about the cultivation of women’s intellect. Strictures went through seven editions in its first year, with five separate American editions in its first decade. Though praised by Elizabeth Carter, Hester Chapone, Charles Burney, Elizabeth Montagu, and Anna Barbauld, More was criticized by the Reverend Charles Daubeny and the pseudonymous “Sappho Search,” “Archibald MacSarcasm,” and “Peter Pindar” for what they considered the borrowed, misunderstood, or meandering aspect of her text. “Sappho Search” accused her of envying Wollstonecraft: “In vigorous expression, and passion’s true tone, / Perhaps she was piqued to be greatly outshone” (Search 23). More did not temper or change her views; on the contrary, she amplified the second edition in the space of a few weeks, and let others rebut her critics. Though Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman preceded Strictures by seven years, it is worth noting how closely related the main ideas of these female crusaders are, despite the palpable differences in rhetoric between the impulsive hurry of Wollstonecraft and the measured periodicity of More. They shared a prescient mistrust of novels, yet each wrote an idiosyncratic example of the genre. Both made resoundingly effective cases for the indispensability of moral freedom. This expansive treatment of women’s education eclipsed and replaced More’s earlier Essays on Various Subjects (1777), whose severity she realized by refusing to approve any publication beyond 1791. Strictures shares some ideological allegiances with essays by contemporaries Hester Chapone, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Priscilla Wakefield. Georgian conduct books by James Fordyce, John Gregory, John Bennett, and Thomas Gisborne supply misogynous contrasts to More’s passionate commitments that played a crucial role in the changing notions of femininity and the emergence of modern notions of subjectivity and gender. Though she deliberately avoided “education” in the title, More’s two-volume Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805), tailored for Princess Charlotte and for the situation in the nation at a time when Bonaparte had just been crowned emperor in France, offers praise of and instructive cautions about the responsible moral imperatives of monarchy.
At the age of sixty-three Hannah More wrote her only novel, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals (1808). This originally anonymous bestseller went through eleven editions in its first nine months. A hybrid of extended conversations, interleaved instructive stories, and remarkable character studies, Cœlebs is a novel of ideas, Morean ideas, about family dynamics, courtship, and the needed reform and evangelization of English society. Her twenty-four-year-old bachelor narrator, who styles himself “Cœlebs” (unmarried), encounters fashionable, nubile women in London before he visits the Hampshire home of his deceased father’s friend, where he meets his ideal partner, Lucilla Stanley. In the nineteenth-century Eden of Stanley Grove, More’s re-cast Adam and Eve find one another. More’s new Eve exhibits a winning practicality. In her careful cultivation of languages, social responsibility, and domestic savoir faire Lucilla shows none of the anti-intellectualism associated with the domestic woman. Her non-doting parents consider her a valued friend, and she often moderates the narrator’s priggish, censorious opinions. More leads the reader to realize that, as a Christian, Cœlebs is ultimately subject to the same authority as his future wife. In this novel about the meeting of two minds, opinion and talk supersede action and intrigue, yet More adroitly stages debates, interludes and confessions. Concerned to show the ways in which a couple becomes, to use her own distinction from Strictures, “matched” as opposed to merely “joined,” she relies on a rhetorical strategy tested and perfected in her plays, poetry, essays, and tracts: the instructive contrast. In Cœlebs this device allows More to expand the predictable roster of characters , from the wealthy bachelor, his perfect companion, and her eminently sensible parents as well as high-spirited siblings, to include satirical portraits of society matrons and their daughters, testy and irreverent challengers of the Evangelicalism of Mr. Stanley and Cœlebs, and the free-spirited, independent Miss Sparkes, who, in kicking against the pricks, poses unanswered questions about the restrictions of women’s education. Cœlebs invites comparison with the lessons by negative example of Sir Thomas Bertram’s education of his daughters and adopted niece in Austen’s Mansfield Park. More effectively “dismantles the microdynamic of hierarchy that disparages women’s capabilities” (Snook 136). By uniting evangelicalism and feminism in fiction she supplies “an essential link in the history of women’s public voice as it came down to the Victorians” (Krueger 119).
There is no hint that More was planning to launch a career as a religious novelist; however, some readers speculate that she was testing the market and was rebuffed by the criticism she encountered–from her friend Zachary Macaulay, editor of the official journal of the Evangelical Anglicans at Clapham, the Christian Observer, and from Sydney Smith’s dismissal in the Edinburgh Review. After the diversion–or, trial balloon–of Cœlebs More continued writing in her sixties and seventies, producing four book-length essays on religious topics: Practical Piety (1811), Christian Morals (1812), An Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of Saint Paul (1815), and The Spirit of Prayer (1825). Her idiosyncratic study of Saint Paul is the one in which More is most at ease and most revealing. Though she admits her deficiencies in Hebrew, she attends to the writerly aspect of the epistles, the “practical inferences” of their use of metaphor, and the ways in which conviction becomes the soul of eloquence. Daring to comment on the practical applications of biblical scholarship and theology, disciplines from which her sex was excluded, supplies a fitting close to the career of this determined, single-minded, and accomplished reformer.
2003
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Richardson, Alan. “Women Poets and Colonial Discourse: Teaching More and Yearsley on the Slave Trade.” Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period . Ed. S. C. Behrendt. 75-79. New York: Modern Language Association of America , 1997.
Search, Sappho [John Black]. A Poetical Review of Miss Hannah More’s Strictures on Female Education. In a series of Anapestic Epistles. London: T. Hurst, 1800.
Scheuermann, Mona. “Ferocious Countenance: The Upper Classes Look at the Poor.” Age of Johnson 11 (2000): 53-79.
Snell, K. D. M.. “The Sunday-School Movement in England and Wales: Child Labour, Denominational Control and Working-Class Culture.” Past and Present 164 (1999): 122-68.
Snook, Edith. “Eve and More: The Citations of Paradise Lost in Hannah More’s Cœlebs in Search of a Wife.” English Studies in Canada 26.2 (2001): 127-54.
Stott, Anne. Hannah More; The First Victorian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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