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
Literary responses Mary Deverell
Hannah More , who heard MD read from her poem in 1782, experienced the performance as burlesque. She claimed to have listened through 1,800 lines and took exception to Deverell's claims both to the genre...
Literary responses Harriett Mozley
This work aroused unease in the Athenæum reviewer, who feared that such probing and scrutiny of feelings, fancies, small cares and small intrigues
Athenæum. J. Lection.
739 (1841): 994
was more likely to render its young readers sanctimoniously...
Literary responses Catharine Macaulay
Her biographer Bridget Hill identifies CM 's fame as having lasted fifteen years: from the publication of her first volume to the date of her second marriage (1763-78). But in fact she continued to command...
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...
Literary responses Hester Mulso Chapone
Her brother John wrote of the Praises that resound on all Sides following the publication of this book, though he regretted that reviewers, in praising the moral content, had ignored the literary style.
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
231
Recently Sylvia Harcstark Myers
Literary responses Helen Maria Williams
It talked of the need to counter her poisonous false philosophy with antidotes from the writings of a More , a Hamilton , and a West .
Michael-Johnston, Georgina. Helen Maria Williams: Liberty, Sensibility, and Education. University of Alberta.
140
Literary responses Elizabeth Hamilton
Memoirs of Modern Philosophers was warmly praised by the Anti-Jacobin, which paid EH the supreme compliment of likening her to Hannah More . It received more moderate praise from the Critical Review.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
2nd ser. 29 (1800): 311-13

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