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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Ann Kelty
Her first subject is Princess Charlotte . After that MAK includes Henrietta (Mrs James) Fordyce , whose life had been written by Isabella Kelly in 1823, and many writers (including Lady Jane Grey , Lady Rachel Russell
Friends, Associates Samuel Johnson
Boswell's is Johnson's most famous friendship, but his women friends were immensely important to him. Carter and Lennox were joined by Hester Thrale (though Johnson always reckoned her husband, Henry Thrale , if anything the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Geraldine Jewsbury
Zoe reflects GJ 's own lifelong spiritual crisis.
Bloom, Abigail Burnham, editor. Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers. Greenwood Press.
223-4
Susanne Howe notes that it anticipates later novels by Mary Augusta Ward and J. A. Froude , which also deal with spiritual doubt.
Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury: Her Life and Errors. George Allen and Unwin.
72
Beginning in...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Muriel Jaeger
She begins this book with a method not unlike that of Experimental Lives from Cato to George Sand. Her first chapter, Pioneers in Conversion, centres its topic on individuals, relating the sudden transformation...
Textual Production Barbara Hofland
BH published a pamphlet on the quarrel between George IV and Queen Caroline, entitled An Englishwoman's Letter to Mrs. Hannah More.
Butts, Dennis. Mistress of our Tears, A Literary and Bibliographical Study of Barbara Hofland. Scolar Press.
70
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...
Textual Production Elizabeth Heyrick
She printed this for the Author,
Heyrick, Elizabeth. Familiar Letters Addressed to Children and Young Persons of the Middle Ranks. Darton, Harvey and Darton.
title-page
which means she took the risk and would keep the profit after paying her publisher, Darton, Harvey and Darton . (A Leicester bookseller was also listed on...
Textual Features Elizabeth Heyrick
She does not eschew politics on account of her readers' youth, but delivers an anti-war and anti-imperial message: The finest sight that could possibly be exhibited to me on earth, would be not a great...
Textual Production Elizabeth Heyrick
EH published another pamphlet on this topic this year, Bull-Baiting: a Village Dialogue Between Tom Brown and John Simms, its title modelled on Hannah More 's Cheap Repository Tracts.
Corfield, Kenneth. “Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical Quaker”. Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760-1930, edited by Gail Malmgreen, Indiana University Press, pp. 41-67.
61n3
Friends, Associates Mary Hays
In later life she was friendly with Penelope Pennington (with whom she stayed at Bristol) and Hester Piozzi , Anna Seward , and Hannah More , whom she met there.
Hays, Mary. “Chronology and Introduction”. The Correspondence (1779-1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist, edited by Marilyn Brooks, Edwin Mellen, pp. xv - xx; 1.
xvii
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.
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Hamilton
EH seeks to raise the canonical status of the novel in this work not only by serious politico-philosophical content, but also by chapter-heading quotations from the classics (from Horace , Shakespeare , and Milton to...
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
Literary responses Elizabeth Hamilton
The Critical Review took occasion from this work to link EH with Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth as three distinguished female writers who do honour to the countries of England, Ireland, and Scotland; but its...
Occupation Elizabeth Ham
She enjoyed an interval of energetic though unpaid activity during a stay with her brother. He was an early supporter of Reform, with opinions which at that date were looked on by bigoted church-and-king types...

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