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 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
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
Wealth and Poverty Ann Yearsley
AY 's family suffered badly in an extremely hard season, and were reduced to near starvation; Hannah More wrote a few months later of their being found sheltering in a stable.
Wordsworth, Jonathan. The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age. Woodstock Books.
37
Wealth and Poverty Ann Yearsley
According to AY 's own recollection, this was when she first met Hannah More in person. (More's own memory seems to have been either confused or inconsistent on this point.)
Waldron, Mary. Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton: The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753-1806. University of Georgia Press.
48
Publishing Ann Yearsley
AY published Poems, on Several Occasions, with the help and patronage of Hannah More , who raised a thousand subscribers for the volume.
Wordsworth, Jonathan. The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age. Woodstock Books.
38
Textual Production Ann Yearsley
AY , apparently in response to and in competition with Hannah More 's poem on the same subject, published A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade.
Waldron, Mary. “A Different Kind of Patronage: Ann Yearsley’s Later Friends”. The Age of Johnson, edited by Paul J. Korshin and Jack Lynch, Vol.
13
, AMS Press, pp. 283-35.
295-6
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
65 (1788): 314
Author summary Ann Yearsley
AY became famous at the outset of her career as a primitive or untaught poet: a role she herself rejected in the course of a bitter row with her patron Hannah More . She went...
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 Ann Yearsley
In this volume she meant to prove that her poetry was even better when not tampered with by Hannah More . Her Preface relates the circumstances of their quarrel over the terms of the trust...
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...

Timeline

5 July 1757: The London Lock Asylum (a home for reformed...

Building item

5 July 1757

The LondonLock Asylum (a home for reformed prostitutes recently cured of venereal disease) admitted its first inmates.

About 1765: Catharine Cappeimg: move in unlikely event...

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About 1765

Catharine Cappe opened one of the earliest recorded Sunday schools, at Catterick in Yorkshire.

1769: Hannah Ballimg: move in unlikely event of...

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1769

Hannah Ball opened an early Methodist Sunday school at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire.

April 1774: The Monthly Review, in a notice on Hannah...

Women writers item

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...

Women writers item

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...

Women writers item

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...

Building item

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...

Building item

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...

Writing climate item

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...

Women writers item

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...

Building item

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...

Women writers item

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 monthly Female Preceptor, essays on the...

Writing climate item

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...

Building item

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,...

Writing climate item

Early 1818

William Hazlitt opened On the Living Poets, the last of his Lectures on the English Poets, with a statement on gender issues.

Texts

More, Hannah. A Search after Happiness. S. Farley, 1773.
More, Hannah. An Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of Saint Paul. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1815.
More, Hannah. An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World. T. Cadell, 1791.
More, Hannah. Bishop Bonner’s Ghost. Strawberry Hill Press, 1789.
More, Hannah, editor. Cheap Repository Tracts. S. Hazard; J. Marshall and R. White, 1798.
More, Hannah. Christian Morals. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813.
More, Hannah. Coelebs in Search of a Wife. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808.
More, Hannah. Essays on Various Subjects. J. Wilkie, T. Cadell, 1777.
More, Hannah. Florio: A Tale, for Fine Gentlemen and Fine Ladies; and, The Bas Bleu; or, Conversation. T. Cadell, 1786.
More, Hannah. Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1805.
Waldron, Mary, and Hannah More. “Introduction”. Coelebs in Search of a Wife, Thoemmes Press, 1995.
More, Hannah. Moral Sketches of Prevailing Opinions and Manners, Foreign and Domestic. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1819.
More, Hannah. Ode to Dragon. T. Cadell, 1777.
More, Hannah. Percy. T. Cadell, 1778.
More, Hannah. Poems. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1816.
More, Hannah. Practical Piety; or, The Influence of the Religion of the Heart on the Conduct of Life. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811.
More, Hannah. Questions and Answers for the Mendip Sunday Schools. J. Binns, 1795.
More, Hannah. Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont. T. Cadell, 1793.
More, Hannah. Sacred Dramas. T. Cadell, 1782.
More, Hannah. Selected Writings of Hannah More. Editor Hole, Robert, W. Pickering, 1996.
More, Hannah. Sir Eldred of the Bower; and, The Bleeding Rock. T. Cadell, 1776, http://McMaster University has rare 2nd ed.
More, Hannah. Slavery. T. Cadell, 1788.
More, Hannah. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1799.
More, Hannah. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. Cambridge University Press, 2010, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.
More, Hannah. The Fatal Falsehood. T. Cadell, 1779.