Hannah More

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Standard Name: More, Hannah
Birth Name: Hannah More
Nickname: Nine
Pseudonym: A Young Lady
Pseudonym: The Author of Percy
Pseudonym: H. M.
Pseudonym: Will Chip, a Carpenter
During her long and phenomenally productive career HM wrote plays, poems, a single novel and much social, religious, and political commentary. She was the leading conservative and Christian moralist of her day. Her political opinions were reactionary, and her passionate commitment to educating the poor and lessening their destitution has been judged as marred by its paternalist tone. But she was a pioneer educator and philanthropist, with enormous influence on the Victorian age.
Orlando gratefully acknowledges help with this document from Mary Waldron. Any flaws or errors are, of course, not hers.
Photograph of a painting of Hannah More by Henry William Pickersgill, 1822. She is seated on a red-upholstered chair beside a little table draped in red fabric and bearing a quill pen, inkwell, and piece of paper. She wears a blue-green mantle with V neck and creamy fabric at the cuffs and neckline, finished with a ruff around her neck. She has a gold shawl and a cap topped with pale blue ribbons. More wrote that she was "condemned, sorely against her will," to sit for this portrait. The version here, in th
Print of Barley Wood, Hannah More's home for almost thirty years. The print's grey tones depict a wooded countryside with some of Barley Wood's twenty acres. One of two female figures in the mid-ground is pointing towards the house.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Mary Deverell
Parts of MD 's Miscellanies were reprinted at Burlington, New Jersey (with essays by Hannah More ), as The Ladies' Literary Companion, for an American female audience.
Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834. Routledge, 1992.
129
English Short Title Catalogue.
Anthologization Sarah, Lady Pennington
An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to her Absent Daughters quickly became a staple of composite volumes directed toward young women's conduct. At Edinburgh a volume of this kind, Instructions for a Young Lady, in every sphere...
Cultural formation Mary Ann Kelty
Retrospectively she remembered that at this time her thoughts were most harrassing, most degrading; yet . . . a holy, yet evanescent sentiment was also present.
Kelty, Mary Ann. Reminiscences of Thought and Feeling. W. Pickering, 1852.
177
Under Simeon's influence she tried to convert Professor...
Cultural formation Hannah Cullwick
To all eyes she lived as Munby's servant; she often still slept in the basement kitchen. In the evenings, however, she played the role of a lady wife, sitting with Munby in the parlour, conversing...
death Thomas Chatterton
Afterwards Hannah More 's schoolmistress sisters got up a subscription in Bristol to help the young poet's bereaved mother and sister.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
8
A whole generation of Romantic poets drank in, believed, and re-circulated the myth.
Dedications Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
Osric was dedicated to her recently-met friend Hannah More . Another volume, Izram, A Mexican Tale, and Other Poems, followed this in 1826. In 1845 CET published a volume entitled The Convent Bell, and...
Education Anne Brontë
Their later reading drew on a selection of standard texts including Oliver Goldsmith 's History of England, Hannah More 's Moral Sketches, John Bunyan 's Pilgrim's Progress, Isaac Watts 's Doctrine of...
Education Georgiana Chatterton
In an effort to improve her daughter's health, Georgiana's mother took her with her everywhere, mostly to country houses, and mostly without her governess. Consequently, Georgiana's early education came from hearing people (many of them...
Education Charlotte Brontë
The fees for the school were £14 per year. It was primarily an Evangelical school aimed to assist needy clergymen with the education of their daughters in a plain and useful Education, which may best...
Education Charlotte Brontë
Their education continued at home from a selection of standard texts including Oliver Goldsmith 's History of England, Hannah More 's Moral Sketches, John Bunyan 's Pilgrim's Progress, Isaac Watts 's Doctrine...
Education Frances Ridley Havergal
FRH was an avid reader within limits: her selection of material was mostly dictated by her religious interests. After receiving a copy of a book about literary women she commented, The sad sketch of L. E. L.
Education Emily Brontë
Thereafter, Patrick Brontë educated his remaining children at home, using standard educational texts including Thomas Salmon 's A New Geographical and Historical Grammar, a condensed version of Oliver Goldsmith 's History of England,...
Education George Eliot
Her devotion to John Bunyan 's Pilgrim's Progress remained unchanged during this period. She also read heavyweight works of theology, Hannah More 's letters, and a life of William Wilberforce . By late 1838, however...
Education Mary Russell Mitford
She studied English, French, Italian, history, geography, Latin, and music (the subject at which she was least talented), and she acted in a production of Hannah More 's Search after Happiness.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. L’Estrange, Alfred Guy KinghamEditor , Harper and Brothers, 1870.
1: 189-92
She...
Education Alicia Tyndal Palmer
ATP attended the school in Park Street, Bristol, run by Hannah More 's sisters. Her education, despite the slurs of reviewers, seems to have reached a respectable standard.

Timeline

5 July 1757
The LondonLock Asylum (a home for reformed prostitutes recently cured of venereal disease) admitted its first inmates.
About 1765
Catharine Cappe opened one of the earliest recorded Sunday schools, at Catterick in Yorkshire.
1769
Hannah Ball opened an early Methodist Sunday school at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire.
April 1774
The Monthly Review, in a notice on Hannah More 's The Inflexible Captive, quoted some lines which transform the Muses from ancient Greece into the living female poets of Britain.
1777
Richard Samuel engraved his Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (or Portraits in the Character of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo) for Johnson's Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum for 1778...
April 1789
The Gentleman's Magazine published Anna Seward 's selection of living celebrated Female Poets.
mid 1792-1815
These were the active years of the informal evangelical Anglican group later called the Clapham Sect (then known as the Saints ).
Later November 1792
John Reeves set up the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers (which was called for short simply the Association).
2 July 1798
The conservative Lady's Monthly Museum: or polite repository of amusement and instruction published its first number. Sometimes called The Ladies' Monthly Museum . . . it ran until the 1830s.
1799
The year after Mary Alcock (sister of the playwright Richard Cumberland ) died, one of her nieces published her Poems, to which Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More , among others, subscribed.
By November 1802
The Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded in London and grew into the gap left by the Proclamation Society ; ironically, it was often called the Vice Society.
By June 1806
Poems Written on Different Occasions by the domestic servant Charlotte Richardson were selected, edited, and published with some account of the author by the middle-class activist and social reformer Catharine Cappe .
1813
The monthlyFemale Preceptor, essays on the duties of the female sex, conducted by a lady and dedicated to Hannah More , began publication.
June 1816
Lady Isabella King opened at Bailbrook House near Bath a communal home for single gentlewomen (or Protestant nunnery): a project going back to Mary Astell , which King picked up from Sarah Scott 's Millenium Hall.
Early 1818
William Hazlitt opened On the Living Poets, the last of his Lectures on the English Poets, with a statement on gender issues.