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
Textual Features Lucy Aikin
Though most of her anthologized writers are men, LA includes Hannah More , Anna Letitia Barbauld , and Lady Luxborough . Perhaps recalling her own childhood activism, she included anti-slavery poems.
Friends, Associates Jane Austen
During her time at Bath, JA may have met the elderly and immensely distinguished Hannah More . Ten years after this putative event, More claimed (in the context of confessing that she had not read...
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 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...
Family and Intimate relationships Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre
The senior Wilmots' circle of friends included people still remembered, like Hannah More , David Garrick , Sir Joshua Reynolds , and Lady Charlotte Finch .
Barbarina Charlotte, Lady Grey,. A Family Chronicle. Editor Lyster, Gertrude, John Murray.
3-6
Valentine Wilmot had a taste for recklessness with...
Textual Features Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB draws on Hannah More , her niece Lucy Aikin , and (anonymously) Joanna Baillie . She is even-handed in that she includes six excerpts from James Fordyce 's Sermons to Young Women, a...
Friends, Associates Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB met Hannah More , and they began a correspondence. The year after this More visited the Barbaulds at Palgrave.
McCarthy, William et al. “Introduction”. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, University of Georgia Press, p. xxi - xlvi.
xliv
Rodgers, Betsy. Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and her Family. Methuen.
81
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
226
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Letitia Barbauld
Taken together, ALB 's various writings for children during her career as educator at Palgrave School exerted enormous influence on other children's writers, such as Maria Edgeworth , Sarah Trimmer , Hannah More , and...
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
Literary admirers of the hymns included Hannah More , Anna Seward , and Elizabeth Carter , who found some passages amazingly sublime.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
193
The innumerable children who loved and later remembered them included Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
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...
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
Publishing Anna Letitia Barbauld
Joseph Johnson did not advertise this work, yet an edition was printed as far away as Dundee. It was popularly priced at sixpence, six months before Hannah More 's Village Politics and nearly three...
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
She also kept up her output of political poetry. Only a few years after this Hannah More 's Bishop Bonner's Ghost (a ballad extolling, through irony, the modern, enlightened Church of England ) drew from...
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
The importance of politics in ALB 's journalism is shown by her declining an invitation from Maria Edgeworth in 1804 to associate herself with a journal written entirely by women, on the grounds that the...
Textual Features Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld for praising Elizabeth Rowe . She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington is the real author of...

Timeline

5 July 1757: The London Lock Asylum (a home for reformed...

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5 July 1757

The LondonLock Asylum (a home for reformed prostitutes recently cured of venereal disease) admitted its first inmates.

About 1765: Catharine Cappeimg: move in unlikely event...

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About 1765

Catharine Cappe opened one of the earliest recorded Sunday schools, at Catterick in Yorkshire.

1769: Hannah Ballimg: move in unlikely event of...

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1769

Hannah Ball opened an early Methodist Sunday school at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire.

April 1774: The Monthly Review, in a notice on Hannah...

Women writers item

April 1774

The Monthly Review, in a notice on Hannah More 's The Inflexible Captive, quoted some lines which transform the Muses from ancient Greece into the living female poets of Britain.

1777: Richard Samuel engraved his Nine Living Muses...

Women writers item

1777

Richard Samuel engraved his Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (or Portraits in the Character of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo) for Johnson's Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum for 1778...

April 1789: The Gentleman's Magazine published Anna Seward's...

Women writers item

April 1789

The Gentleman's Magazine published Anna Seward 's selection of living celebrated Female Poets.

mid 1792-1815: These were the active years of the informal...

Building item

mid 1792-1815

These were the active years of the informal evangelical Anglican group later called the Clapham Sect (then known as the Saints ).

Later November 1792: John Reeves set up the Association for Preserving...

Building item

Later November 1792

John Reeves set up the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers (which was called for short simply the Association).

2 July 1798: The conservative Lady's Monthly Museum: or...

Writing climate item

2 July 1798

The conservative Lady's Monthly Museum: or polite repository of amusement and instruction published its first number. Sometimes called The Ladies' Monthly Museum . . . it ran until the 1830s.

1799: The year after Mary Alcock (sister of the...

Women writers item

1799

The year after Mary Alcock (sister of the playwright Richard Cumberland ) died, one of her nieces published her Poems, to which Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More , among others, subscribed.

By November 1802: The Society for the Suppression of Vice was...

Building item

By November 1802

The Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded in London and grew into the gap left by the Proclamation Society ; ironically, it was often called the Vice Society.

By June 1806: Poems Written on Different Occasions by the...

Women writers item

By June 1806

Poems Written on Different Occasions by the domestic servant Charlotte Richardson were selected, edited, and published with some account of the author by the middle-class activist and social reformer Catharine Cappe .

1813: The monthly Female Preceptor, essays on the...

Writing climate item

1813

The monthlyFemale Preceptor, essays on the duties of the female sex, conducted by a lady and dedicated to Hannah More , began publication.

June 1816: Lady Isabella King opened at Bailbrook House...

Building item

June 1816

Lady Isabella King opened at Bailbrook House near Bath a communal home for single gentlewomen (or Protestant nunnery): a project going back to Mary Astell , which King picked up from Sarah Scott 's Millenium Hall.

Early 1818: William Hazlitt opened On the Living Poets,...

Writing climate item

Early 1818

William Hazlitt opened On the Living Poets, the last of his Lectures on the English Poets, with a statement on gender issues.

Texts

More, Hannah. A Search after Happiness. S. Farley, 1773.
More, Hannah. An Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of Saint Paul. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1815.
More, Hannah. An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World. T. Cadell, 1791.
More, Hannah. Bishop Bonner’s Ghost. Strawberry Hill Press, 1789.
More, Hannah, editor. Cheap Repository Tracts. S. Hazard; J. Marshall and R. White, 1798.
More, Hannah. Christian Morals. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813.
More, Hannah. Coelebs in Search of a Wife. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808.
More, Hannah. Essays on Various Subjects. J. Wilkie, T. Cadell, 1777.
More, Hannah. Florio: A Tale, for Fine Gentlemen and Fine Ladies; and, The Bas Bleu; or, Conversation. T. Cadell, 1786.
More, Hannah. Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1805.
Waldron, Mary, and Hannah More. “Introduction”. Coelebs in Search of a Wife, Thoemmes Press, 1995.
More, Hannah. Moral Sketches of Prevailing Opinions and Manners, Foreign and Domestic. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1819.
More, Hannah. Ode to Dragon. T. Cadell, 1777.
More, Hannah. Percy. T. Cadell, 1778.
More, Hannah. Poems. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1816.
More, Hannah. Practical Piety; or, The Influence of the Religion of the Heart on the Conduct of Life. T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811.
More, Hannah. Questions and Answers for the Mendip Sunday Schools. J. Binns, 1795.
More, Hannah. Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont. T. Cadell, 1793.
More, Hannah. Sacred Dramas. T. Cadell, 1782.
More, Hannah. Selected Writings of Hannah More. Editor Hole, Robert, W. Pickering, 1996.
More, Hannah. Sir Eldred of the Bower; and, The Bleeding Rock. T. Cadell, 1776, http://McMaster University has rare 2nd ed.
More, Hannah. Slavery. T. Cadell, 1788.
More, Hannah. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1799.
More, Hannah. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. Cambridge University Press, 2010, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.
More, Hannah. The Fatal Falsehood. T. Cadell, 1779.