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
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...
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 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.
235-6
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...
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 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...
names Medora Gordon Byron
At the date of the first Miss Byron novel, Elizabeth Strutt was publishing as Mrs Byron while the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron , had had only a single juvenile collection reviewed. While the name...
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
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 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 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 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...

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