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

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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
Occupation Frances Arabella Rowden
FAR was clearly a key element, perhaps the key element, in the success of the Hans Place school. She taught the general curriculum there for nearly twenty-five years, from its founding until 1818, and she...
Occupation Sarah Tytler
As regards the typical feminine curriculum, ST resented the tradition of mandatory music teaching—of the piano—to young women, and the slight to other branches of education in the extravagant favour shown to one branch.
Tytler, Sarah. Three Generations. J. Murray, 1911.
235-6
Occupation Frances Reynolds
Samuel Johnson was eager to sit for her, and did so on three occasions: in March 1775, in June 1780, and in summer 1783. He may have been sitting for her on the day before...
Occupation Eliza Fletcher
This friendship was built on a shared interest in literature, in patronising the poor or socially oppressed who aspired to writing, in encouraging inoculation and in promoting Sunday schools. Eliza was interested particularly in the...
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...
politics Eliza Fletcher
EF 's patronage of writers was bound up with her political views as an abolitionist: in March 1788 she was actively circulating for sale Ann Yearsley 's A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave...
politics Hester Lynch Piozzi
The French Revolution sharpened her lifelong interest in politics into almost an obsession. She was fiercely anti-revolutionary, hating English radicals and afraid even of reformists in case they opened the floodgates of change. She became...
politics Hannah Kilham
During her interval of time in England in 1828-30, HK spoke to meetings of Friends about her anti-slavery concerns. Disregarding difference of faith, she quoted Hannah More in these talks.
Kilham, Hannah. Memoir of the late Hannah Killam. Editor Biller, Sarah, Harvey and Darton, 1837.
336-7
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...
Publishing Hannah Cowley
It was badly presented, by two of the cast in particular.
Escott, Angela, and Isobel Grundy. Email about supposed quarrel between Hannah Cowley and Hannah More to Isobel Grundy. 24 Oct. 2002.
It had been completed by 1777, but rejected by Thomas Harris of Covent Garden , who then produced Hannah More 's Percy instead. Tragedy...
Publishing Hannah Kilham
At twelve pages, they sold for a penny, or for seven shillings the hundred (to those who intended to distribute them among the poor, as had been done with Hannah More 's Cheap Repository Tracts).
Dickson, Mora. The Powerful Bond: Hannah Kilham 1774-1832. Dobson, 1980.
88
Publishing Olaudah Equiano
Equiano was already a well-known figure in the abolitionist movement in Britain when his book appeared. He had issued Proposals for his subscription in November 1788 (the same month that George III fell ill, probably...
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, 1997.
38
Publishing Sarah Trimmer
It was probably in 1785 that ST published her first set of prints: that is, engraved plates for educational purposes. Her first topic was English history, and the book of prints had a companion volume,...

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