The Literary Manuscripts and Letters of Hannah More

Nicholas D. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754662709
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351886635
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The result of extensive archival investigation, this meticulously researched book collects and describes for the first time the extant literary manuscripts and letters of the celebrated Bluestocking writer and Evangelical philanthropist Hannah More (1745-1833). Participating in the ongoing recovery of eighteenth-century women writers, Nicholas D. Smith's survey is an indispensable reference work not only for More scholars but for those researching the careers of many of her contemporaries. Features include an extended narrative analysis of the manuscripts that plots More's participation in the manuscript culture of the period and contextualizes the individual entries in the index; provenance details for the more substantial manuscript holdings in British and North American repositories; and identification of numerous autograph manuscripts and transcripts in public and private collections. More than 1,500 letters in 95 locations in Britain and North America have been inventoried and precise dates and internal locators are supplied when known. More's letters, the majority of which have never been published, are a largely untapped source of primary materials for scholars and students researching such diverse subjects as the literary activities and opinions of the Bluestocking circle, women's conduct and education, publishing and the book trade, the national debate over the abolition of the slave trade, the rise of the Evangelical movement, the conservative reaction to the American and French revolutions, and the Napoleonic wars.

Introduction

Provenance

During her lifetime, More was an assiduous collector of her own and her friends’ papers, although not a particularly methodical one in her later years: Mary E. Roberts, writing to Lady Olivia Sparrow, observed that

our dear Friend M^rs Han^h More has a considerable number of your letters to her, in her possession; these letters, as well as those of many other of her valued correspondents, she has been fond of looking over, but being no longer capable of exercising the same care & caution as formerly, she suffers them to lie scattered on her Table, liable to the inspection of any person who may have more curiosity than honour.¹

The earliest surviving reference to More’s literary acquisitiveness is dated 1776: she wrote to David Garrick, who was then poised to retire from the stage, asking him for the ‘least scrap, printed or manuscript, paragraph or advertisement, merry or serious, verse or prose’ which ‘will be thankfully received and hung up in the temple of reliques’.² Later, when visiting Eva Maria Garrick at Hampton in 1781, and finding her own letters among Garrick’s literary remains, More had an instinctive desire to reclaim them but considered it ‘a breach of trust to take them till they are all finally disposed of’.³ Another of More’s correspondents, Horace Walpole, referred light-heartedly to ‘the archives of Cowslip Green’, and More’s own letters to him, which his executors found ‘carefully preserved’, were returned to her in 1797 in accordance with the terms of his will:

I so request that all such Manuscript Letters which shall be in my possession at my death that shall not contain or relate to my Estate or Effects and shall be written by any person who shall be living at that time may be returned to the person or persons by whom the same were written.⁴

Of More’s letters to Walpole, however, Charles H. Bennett observes that ‘None of the manuscripts of the letters … printed by Roberts have yet come to light or been found in sale catalogues, but one original and copies of three others which he omitted have been recovered’.⁵ The original letter (More to Walpole, 20 July 1788) remained untraced until it was auctioned at Sotheby’s, 13 February 1928, lot 119. It was purchased by Maggs for William Zimmerman, Jr., and was acquired subsequently by W.S. Lewis in June 1952.⁶ More was clearly anxious to recover her letters to Walpole. On 6 September 1797, she expressed her impatience to Mrs Bouverie that ‘Lord Frederick Campbell and Mrs Damer have not yet returned me my own letters’ and confessed that ‘I shan’t feel quite easy till they are in my possession, nor will all the civil things they say content me till I have the letters to put into the fire’.⁷ Whether or not More carried out her threat of burning her letters, the fact remains that the majority of her letters to Walpole are missing.

When More died in 1833, her papers were entrusted to Margaret Roberts, her literary executrix, with a view to future publication. Preparation for the resulting biography, however, had begun over a decade earlier. In a letter to Charles Hoare, More disclosed that her sister Patty (d. 1819) had been the original architect of this biographical enterprise, and that it had been undertaken without her knowledge:

Patty had for a long time been collecting letters and papers intirely unknown to me, she knew how much I dreaded it. [T]hese she committed to her two Executrixes⁸ who it seems had been ever since arranging and copying them. It is now 4 years ago that she shewed them (as it now appears) to dear Rob^t Grant asking him if he could undertake the thing. He naturally pleaded want of time and refused it. Of all this I knew nothing til the other day he was on a <visit> at Blaise Castle; he came to see me, and expressed <a> wish to see the papers. I directed him to Miss Roberts’s. He called on them, being close by them and fixed several times successively for going to them to read the papers. This he never did; as to undertaking the work itself he declined it, for want of time. Now dearly as I love him if he could not find time in the 10 days he was so near, it could not be expected he would undertake a dry dull work. As all this has led to my knowledge of what was going on, I now hear that these ladies have arranged the papers, and dates, the most troublesome part of a posthumous concern, and regularly supplied all materials as far as narrative is concerned. Finding there was no chance of getting any of my old friends to undertake it, they naturally applied to their brother. All this without my knowledge. I do not know that Mr Roberts has ever seen the M.S. yet. Now I own I feel a great delicacy in interfering. It must take its chance after I am dead. My friends must do it not I for I cannot have courage to say you must give up what has cost you years to arrange, even if I knew any one who would go thro the drudgery with rapidity …⁹

In spite of her reference to William Roberts, an entry in John Scandrett Harford’s diary implies that the identity of More’s authorized biographer was not yet decided on, and that she preferred to leave responsibility for selecting this biographer to her friends:

In the evening of this day I had a long talk with Hannah More as to the disposition proposed to be made by the Miss Roberts, of the papers collected by them for elucidating her life – she said many humble things expressive of her indiffs. to posthumous fame, and of her being no subject of panegyric, but expressed a decided wish, of which she told me she would leave a record in her own writing, that the question who is to be her future biographer should be referred to the determination of four or 5 of her more particular friends.¹⁰

If More did leave a written record of her desire, it has not survived. Her particular concern, however, about the reliability of her future biographer presumably stems back to the piratical booksellers who had earlier exploited her literary fame and had had ‘the impudence to prefix to their Advertisements “With Memoirs of the life of the Author”’.¹¹

Custodial authority for her manuscripts was formalised in 1830 when More directed in her will that:

the Misses Roberts shall have the examination of my Papers and Letters and if any dispute arise their Opinions to settle it. I request that all those friends with whom I have corresponded will give up my Letters or Copies of them into the hands of Mary and Margaret Roberts my Executrixes to whose care I have confided all my Papers.¹²

When Mary Roberts predeceased More in 1832, More appointed her ‘dear friend’ Mary Frowd as joint executrix.¹³ In 1833, Margaret Roberts made More’s papers available to her brother, William, a lawyer and journalist, who published his fourvolume Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More in 1834. In compliance with More’s posthumous injunction, John Scandrett Harford gave all the letters at his disposal to Roberts.¹⁴ Not everyone, however, was happy with the choice of biographer or prepared to cooperate with him. Marianne Thornton, More’s goddaughter, told Patty Smith that ‘I did refuse him [Roberts] any letters, for ten thousand reasons, one, perhaps the best is, that I never read one of her’s to any of us that was fit to be published, & that is the reason he has got together such a lot of trash as I did not believe she had ever penned’.¹⁵ The Hannah More collection at the Clark Library indicates that Roberts did in fact succeed in recovering at least eleven letters to the Thornton family.

The dispersal of More’s papers began after William Roberts’s death in 1849. Roberts left his books and manuscripts to his son, Arthur, which presumably included the bulk of the Hannah More archive.¹⁶ Some manuscripts seem also to have passed to his daughter, Rosa, who in turn bequeathed a portion of them to her niece and executrix, Elizabeth Scott, who subsequently destroyed them: ‘There was among my dear aunt’s papers a collection marked H. More. I fetched it up one day and tried to decipher a few, but they came to pieces in my hands and I demolished them forthwith. I am sorry I did not preserve the fragments’.¹⁷ In the centenary year of More’s death, a correspondent to the Times Literary Supplement asked whether the manuscripts used by Roberts in the preparation of the Memoirs had been preserved.¹⁸ No information on this specific point seems to have been forthcoming (unless it was communicated privately), and the request was repeated five years later by Mary Alden Hopkins, who received a reply from Charles L. Simmons, descendant of John Lintorn Simmons, one of the executors of More’s will, directing her to ‘a relative, Mrs. Lintorn Orman, who was so pleased to find someone who would appreciate what she had treasured that she gave me faded letters written to Martha Lintorn by Hannah and Martha’.¹⁹ Requests for information by A.B. Stapleton and Mary Alden Hopkins in Notes and Queries failed to get a published response.²⁰

The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles

In view of Scott’s confessed destruction of her collection as well as the lack of responses to the enquiries printed in Notes and Queries and the Times Literary Supp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Repositories
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Verse and Prose
• Letters
• First Line Index of Manuscript Verse by Hannah More
• Bibliography of Recent Criticism on Hannah More
• Index