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 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, 1740 - 1795. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Editors Hill, George Birkbeck and Laurence Fitzroy Powell, Clarendon, 1934, 6 vols.
4: 275
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 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 responses Hester Mulso Chapone
Her brother John wrote of the Praises that resound on all Sides following the publication of this book, though he regretted that reviewers, in praising the moral content, had ignored the literary style.
qtd. in
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
231
Recently Sylvia Harcstark Myers
Literary responses Sarah Trimmer
The Critical Review gave this work a warm welcome.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
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 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 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, 2008.
193
The innumerable children who loved and later remembered them included Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
Literary responses Ann Yearsley
Again one of Yearsley's most perceptive readers was Anna Seward , who wrote to Helen Maria Williams on Christmas Day 1787 that Yearsley and Burns were both miracles . . . . Perhaps she has...
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 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, 2011.
111
and recommended the poem to Elizabeth Montagu
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 Mary Deverell
Among those who felt the sermon genre was inappropriate to a woman was apparently Hannah More , whose use of the word parsoness for Deverell (quoted by Anne Stott in the Oxford Dictionary of National...
Literary responses Helen Maria Williams
It talked of the need to counter her poisonous false philosophy with antidotes from the writings of a More , a Hamilton , and a West .
Michael-Johnston, Georgina. Helen Maria Williams: Liberty, Sensibility, and Education. University of Alberta, 1998.
140
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...

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