Hannah More

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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.

Milestones

2 February 1745
HM was born at Stapleton near Bristol, the fourth of five daughters.
Demers, Patricia. The World of Hannah More. University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
3, 7
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908.
5 December 1792
William Waller Pepys wrote, backed by Elizabeth Montagu , to press HM to exert her talents for the good of your Country (Which is in great Peril) by writing a Dialogue between two persons of the lowest order.
Stott, Anne. Hannah More: The First Victorian. Oxford University Press, 2003.
139
Late 1792
HM 's Village Politics was anonymously published by John Reeves 's recently-founded Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers ; it thus preceded her other Cheap Repository Tracts.
Stott, Anne. Hannah More: The First Victorian. Oxford University Press, 2003.
144
Butler, Marilyn, editor. Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy. Cambridge University Press, 1984.
179
By 4 March 1795
The first twenty titles of HM 's Cheap Repository Tracts were launched with a ceremony at Hazard 's shop in Bath: pedlars were invited and presented with free copies to sell.
Demers, Patricia. The World of Hannah More. University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
109
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
141
By March 1796
HM had sold more than two million copies of her Cheap Repository Tracts.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
142
By October 1797
HM 's Cheap Repository Tracts were issued in a two-volume collection (a format designed for middle-class, not working-class readers) by Marshall .
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
2d ser. 21 (1797): 236
22 September 1798
The Cheap Repository Tracts ended; reprinting rights were sold to Rivington , but Marshall went on issuing tracts by the same title, some of them bawdy or (by HM 's terms) politically suspect.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
143
Early 1825
HM 's The Spirit of Prayer, her final publication, appeared (two more religious works had intervened between it and Moral Sketches).
Stott, Anne. Hannah More: The First Victorian. Oxford University Press, 2003.
323
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
274
7 September 1833
HM died at the home of the Rev. Thomas Sedgwick Whalley at Clifton near Bristol.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908.
Herron, Bonnie. "An Old Ballad Monger": Hannah More’s Unpublished Letters 1798-1827. University of Alberta, 1999.
68

Biography

Birth and Family

2 February 1745
HM was born at Stapleton near Bristol, the fourth of five daughters.
Demers, Patricia. The World of Hannah More. University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
3, 7
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908.

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