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
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The authorial voice is forthright about the poet's own desire to be a literary trail-blazer for womankind, and she is already defining that task in terms of rejection of the domestic. She also has a...
Intertextuality and Influence Harriet Corp
The title-page of Talents Improved quotes poetry by Hannah More on the subject of charity. HC 's preface (which reveals her sex) says her narrative is secondary to instruction, but that she has taken pains...
Intertextuality and Influence Ann Radcliffe
Influences on AR 's writings include the opera, contemporary travel writers, and Joseph Priestley 's Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, 1777.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press.
67
AR probably helped to produce the fashion for literary quotation...
Leisure and Society Mary Russell Mitford
Like other old people living alone (such as Hannah More ) she was imposed on by servants: she reluctantly dismissed several individuals, including a maid named Kerrenhappuck who had lied to her about having an...
Leisure and Society Maria Susanna Cooper
MSC kept up with contemporary publications. She asked her son Astley to send her from London the latest volume of Johnson 's edition of Shakespeare
Cooper, Bransby Blake. The Life of Sir Astley Cooper, Bart. John W. Parker.
1: 136
and found the works of Hannah Morea...
Leisure and Society Ann Taylor Gilbert
As a young woman AGT once, and once only, attended a theatre in London. Hannah More 's giving up the theatre on religious grounds was influential in her decision not to go back.
Gilbert, Ann Taylor. Autobiography and Other Memorials of Mrs. Gilbert. Editor Gilbert, Josiah, H. S. King, http://U of A, HSS Ruth N .
1: 130
Literary responses Elizabeth Smith
Hannah More praised the recently-dead ES in Coelebs in Search of a Wife, setting her in the distinguished company of Elizabeth Carter for acquirements which would have been distinguished in an University, meekly softened...
Literary responses Barbara Hofland
In the early 1820s BH seems to have been at the apex of her career. She was appreciated not only by her friend Mary Russell Mitford (who believed that nobody else could combine so much...
Literary responses Mariana Starke
The Critical Review was unappreciative. It thought that letters were the wrong form for this information and that while MS 's account of her own travels had merit, her catalogues of churches, pictures, amenities, and...
Literary responses Charlotte Maria Tucker
Marshall's prediction proved true: CMT 's audience disappeared as the Victorian age ended. However, the Dictionary of Literary Biography acknowledges that her successful introduction of imaginative richness into didactic literature influenced other authors and established...
Literary responses Caroline Norton
John Abraham Heraud , reviewing for the Athenæum, looked somewhat askance on CN 's having taken on herself (like Hannah More before her in Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess...
Literary responses Ann Yearsley
More and Elizabeth Montagu admired AY as a primitive, untrained writer whose excellence came from nature, not from carefully nurtured ability: as a phenomenon verging on a freak. More's Prefatory Letter to Yearsley's Poems, on...
Literary responses Elizabeth Carter
Ann Thicknesse dedicated to Carter the first version of her Sketches of the Lives and Writings of the Ladies of France, 1778, saying she wanted to head a work which celebrated French talent with...
Literary responses Ann Batten Cristall
The Critical Review discerned in the collection considerable merit and the hand of genius: so much so that it felt it safe to overlook a few blemishes (though it mentioned some for the sake...
Literary responses Ann Yearsley
Again one of Yearsley's most perceptive readers was Anna Seward , who wrote to Helen Maria Williams on Christmas Day 1787 that Yearsley and Burns were both miracles . . . . Perhaps she has...

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