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
Family and Intimate relationships Ann Yearsley
John Yearsley's family had formerly been inn-keepers, though he later worked as a farm labourer. Hannah More may have been prejudiced in calling him so stupid as to be incapable of any but the most...
Friends, Associates Ann Yearsley
After the debacle with More , AY acquired a higher-status patron in Frederick Augustus Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry , a man who could afford to ignore public opinion, and who supported...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Ann Yearsley
By opening her debut volume with an invocation of the tragic muse, Melpomene, AY suggests a very different concept of her poetic gift from the one which soon became publicly current.
Waldron, Mary. “’This Muse-born Wonder’: The Occluded Voice of Ann Yearsley, Milkwoman and Poet of Clifton”. Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820, edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, Macmillan, pp. 113-26.
118
Now as later...
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...
Textual Production Charlotte Yonge
CY edited Biographies of Good Women, Chiefly by Contributors to The Monthly Packet: her subjects include public activists like Elizabeth Fry and Hannah More .
Battiscombe, Georgina, and E. M. Delafield. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life. Constable and Company.
117
Coleridge, Christabel. Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters. Macmillan and Co.
357
Textual Production Charlotte Yonge
CY contributed a biography, Hannah More, to the Eminent Women series.
Nadel, Ira Bruce, and William E. Fredeman, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 18. Gale Research.
18: 311
Intertextuality and Influence Charlotte Yonge
These latter works are reminiscent of Questions and Answers for the Mendip Sunday Schools, 1795, by Hannah More (whose biography CY was later to write).
Intertextuality and Influence Charlotte Yonge
Her vindication of unmarried women drawing intellectual and social authority from their relationship with the Church of England brings to mind Mary Astell . She appears to have learned from women writers like Sarah Trimmer

Timeline

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Texts

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