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 Anna Letitia Barbauld
Frances Burney thought this the best of all Barbauld's poems. Hannah More wrote to thank ALB for writing so well on a subject so near her, More's heart,
Paul, Lissa. The Children’s Book Business. Routledge.
111
and recommended the poem to Elizabeth Montagu
Literary responses Charlotte Lennox
Samuel Johnson pronounced in conversation that CL was worthy to rank with the exceptional women Carter , More , and Burney : more yet, she was superiour to them all.
Boswell, James. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Editors Hill, George Birkbeck and Laurence Fitzroy Powell, Clarendon.
4: 275
Literary responses Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
Notices in the British Review and other English journals were fairly appreciative, but quick to compliment British women writers at the expense of the French, as if the book had been a challenge to their...
Literary responses Sarah Trimmer
The Critical Review gave this work a warm welcome.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
66 (1788): 74-5
The British Critic praised the 1801 edition in a lengthy review, and said there was no woman except Hannah More doing such sterling...
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 Lydia Howard Sigourney
Edgar Allan Poe , reviewing this book for the Southern Literary Messenger, thought that LHS did too much borrowing: from Hannah More , William Cowper , William Wordsworth , and Byron . Critic Emily Stipes Watts
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 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 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 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 Setting Anne Steele
The young Mary Steele found her inspiration for her highflown narrative line in the hill named Danebury, a nearby landmark crowned with Bronze Age fortifications, where AS too often walked (once with Hannah More

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