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 Harriet Martineau
Her subjects in the first essay are Hannah More (especially her Practical Piety and An Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of Saint Paul) and Anna Letitia Barbauld , whom she regarded as...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Helena Wells
The body of her work takes up her favourite topic: the difficulties of women as wage-earners—difficulties which impede the progress of my own sex to independence—and what should be done to solve them...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Clara Balfour
In her general overview of the history of English literature during these centuries, she focuses especially on English poets because as she says, great poets not only give form, power and beauty to a nation's...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Henrietta Maria Bowdler
In this work HMB warns against improper choice of friends and the excesses of romantic friendship, even while she idealises true friendship. She praises the well-employed talents of Elizabeth Montagu , Elizabeth Smith , Hannah More
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Martha Hale
She writes on public themes with equal panache, attacking colonial appropriations and in another poem calling Warren Hastings an oppressed hero. She addresses public men and women, and here too is attentive to women's issues...
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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Clara Balfour
CB included in her collection the well-known writers Hannah More , Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna , Anna Letitia Barbauld , and Sarah Trimmer . Subjects of other sketches which also appeared separately included many of evangelical...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Susan Ferrier
SF 's letters deal mainly with day-to-day occurrences, but her literary opinons are always worth having. She comments on several works by Lady Charlotte Campbell (later Bury) . Reading Austen 's Emma in 1816 (the...
Textual Production Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
MAS published a translation from a French pamphlet by Henri Louis Empaytaz dating from two years before: Some Particulars relating to the late Emperor Alexander.
Tsar Alexander died in 1825. He had begun as...
Textual Production Hester Mulso Chapone
HMC contributed a pamphlet, Mary Wood the Housemaid, to Hannah More 's Cheap Repository Tracts series, 1795-8.
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
She also wrote for school performance two short plays of slily political import, perhaps after reading Genlis 's Théâtre à l'usage des jeunes personnes, 1780. She must have enjoyed dramatic writing, since after seeing...
Textual Production Elizabeth Sewell
Like one of its predecessors, Hannah More 's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education with a view of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune, this work functions...
Textual Production Sarah Trimmer
The option of bulk purchase as a valuable present to the poor, and to young people in general,
O’Malley, Andrew. “The Coach and Six: Chapbook Residue in Late Eighteenth-Century Children’s Literature”. The Lion and The Unicorn, Vol.
24
, pp. 18-44.
42n25
indicates that she, like Hannah More after her, hoped to improve the labouring classes through the...
Textual Production Jan Morris
More than a decade later, in 1978, JM followed her own portrait of Oxford by editing The Oxford Book of Oxford, a quirky anthology of often very short anecdotes and other excerpts, aimed less...
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...

Timeline

15 July 1819: Byron began to publish in instalments (opening...

Writing climate item

15 July 1819

Byron began to publish in instalments (opening with cantos one and two) his satiricalmock-epicpoemDon Juan; he left it unfinished at his death.

1861: A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued...

Writing climate item

1861

A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...

April 1879: James Murray—editor since 1 March of what...

Writing climate item

April 1879

James Murray —editor since 1 March of what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary—issued an Appeal for readers to supply illustrative quotations.

By 18 August 1888: Lucy Walford published Four Biographies from...

Women writers item

By 18 August 1888

Lucy Walford published Four Biographies from Blackwood's.

14 October 1902: St Deiniol's Library, situated near Hawarden...

Building item

14 October 1902

St Deiniol's Library , situated near Hawarden Castle under the Welsh mountains, founded by William Ewart Gladstone to bring together readers who lacked books, was officially opened.

Texts

More, Hannah. The Inflexible Captive. S. Farley, 1774.
More, Hannah. The Literary Manuscripts and Letters of Hannah More. Editor Smith, Nicholas D., Ashgate, 2008.
More, Hannah. The Spirit of Prayer. T. Cadell, 1825.
More, Hannah. The Village Disputants. J. Hatchard, 1817.
More, Hannah. The Works of Hannah More. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1801.
More, Hannah. Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to general Society. T. Cadell, 1788.
More, Hannah. Village Politics. F. and C. Rivington, 1793.
More, Hannah, and William Roberts. Works. H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1834.