Selected Writings of Hannah More

Robert Hole, Robert Hole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000387964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

First published in 1996, Selected Writings of Hannah More brings together some of More's most powerful work, illustrating her views on the proper role of women in all areas of society.

Hannah More was a member of the London literary scene and is known for her morally restrictive and politically reactionary views, confronting the arguments of radicals and feminists alike. The book explores a number of More's key works and includes a selection of her Letters from London in the 1770s, reflecting on the state of society. Also examined are several of More's poems and short stories.

Selected Writings of Hannah More will appeal to those with an interest in social, cultural, and literary history.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to the staff of the British Library, London, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Bristol Central Library, Bristol Record Office, the University of Bristol Library, the University of Exeter Library and the University of Plymouth Library, for their unfailing courtesy and helpfulness in the preparation of these texts.

First and foremost, I must thank Mike Edwards for all his help and support, without which this volume would never have been completed. I am also indebted to a number of my friends and colleagues for their expertise and their patience in answering queries concerning the footnotes: Chris Ellis, David Parker, Jeannette Gill, John Highfield, Joseph Staples Smith, Mark Halstead, Nick Smart, Rachel Christofides, Richard Williams and Sara Smart. In addition to this, Nick Smart and Richard Williams have also read drafts of the introduction and Chris Ellis has read both introduction and text. I am most grateful to them all for their criticisms and for their generosity with their time, enthusiasm and encouragement. Lizzie Ash, Dave Thorn-ley and Michael Webb provided invaluable technical assistance in Devon, and Gary Johnston supported me when working in London. I am happy to express my gratitude for financial help to the Research Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Education of the University of Plymouth. I am indebted to the general editor of this series, Janet Todd, for her wise advice on the selection of material for this collection, and to Bridget Frost of Pickering & Chatto for her encouragement and help at all times.

University of Plymouth, 1995

ROBERT HOLE

INTRODUCTION

I

In the late eighteenth century, there were few better exponents of the traditional, orthodox value system and view of the world than Hannah More. She numbered among her friends Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole and William Wilberforce. She was a poet and a dramatist, a writer of popular propaganda for the poor and didactic religious works for the educated and pious. Her thinking was traditional and conservative. She founded schools for the education of the children of the poor and had a highly developed awareness of the use of religion and education as means of social control.

In her lifetime, More had a huge readership amongst both the educated and the poor. For example, 19,000 copies of her Strictures on Female Education were sold to the educated; the work went into seven editions before the end of 1799, and thirteen editions by 1826, in addition to being reprinted in her collected works in 1801, 1818 and 1830. Moreover, by March 1796 over 2,000,000 copies of the tracts in the Cheap Repository had been sold or given away to the poor. It is, of course, impossible to say how many of either publication were read, but to some degree or other that is true of all books. Nor do we know how many of the poor agreed with the views with which they were being fed, or what effect the massive propaganda drive had. A few of the educated disliked More and her works but most applauded her; her arguments were the orthodox ones of the governing elite. Although definitive quantitative evidence is lacking, the views she espoused, however unattractive they may be to the late twentieth-century taste, were widely shared two hundred years ago.

The construction of history is, inevitably, the product of an interaction between the evidence of the past and the values of the present. No historian can be entirely value-free in his or her choice of topic or selection of relevant sources. Today, Hannah More appears a less significant figure than her contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft, but the reason for this lies in the values of the late twentieth century. Although many of Wollstonecraft’s detailed arguments have been discarded, the general thrust of her principles is one with which men and women at the end of the twentieth century feel comfortable. More, however, takes a stance that most now find unacceptable and it is all too easy to dismiss her simply as a repressed, sterile figure, clinging to traditional ways of thinking in an age of intellectual revolution. However, it would be a mistake to do so.

If the purpose of history is to understand the past, historians must make a conscious effort to construct their history according to the values of the age they are studying. In absolute terms, of course, such an enterprise is impossible. Historians must select, from the myriad of conflicting ideas abounding in any age, those which appear most significant. They frequently find that views that were then in a minority, now have greatest resonance for them. But the temptation to neglect the conventional views of the majority, the established tradition, is one that must be resisted if we are to understand an age aright and so properly to contextualise its radical thinkers.

In the last ten years, our understanding of English society in the age of More and Wollstonecraft has been revolutionised by the work of Jonathan Clark.¹ He argues

It is often necessary to remind ourselves that the political values of eighteenth-century England were those appropriate to a society Christian, monarchical, aristocratic, rural, traditional and poor; but those of historians of the 1960s and 1970s were drawn from a society indifferent to religion; hostile alike to authority and to social rank; urban; ‘plural’; and affluent. This in itself would have posed major problems of sympathetic insight in an attempt to cross such a divide. But from the 1960s, an increasing number of historians ceased to make such an effort, and chose to believe that fresh historical insights were to be derived, rather, from a celebration of their own values and a reliance on recent experience as a source of analytical categories and analogies.²

Clark argues that whilst the old Whig Interpretation of history (as a steady progress to the perfection of the two party democracy of the late nineteenth century) had been discredited, it was being replaced by a new Whig Interpretation which

focusses attention on those lines of development in the past which seem to culminate in present arrangements. This allows it, first, to justify present values (concerning those arrangements) by showing their historical rootedness, and, second, to read those values (once allegedly made tenable) back into the past to condemn the forces which are held to have inhibited the earlier emergence of modern practices. By being a theory of the direction of social change, it is enabled also to be a value system.³

In arguing so forcibly against the predominant historiography of the 1960s and 1970s, Clark was widely perceived to be taking an adversarial stance that invited response.⁴ It is significant that in the opening sentence of his next book, he criticises the fixation of English historical scholarship with the adversary system, ‘its desire to see the past as a debate between two ‘sides’, and to echo this in the rivalry of scholarly interpretations’.⁵

This selection and presentation of some of Hannah More’s writings about women is made in the light of Clark’s rejection of the new Whig Interpretation of history. If our purpose is to understand English society in the late eighteenth century, a study of More’s writings can provide crucial insights into a way of thinking which was then traditional and orthodox but which is to us distant and unfamiliar. However, we must avoid adversarial simplification. We should not think in terms of Burke versus Paine, Malthus versus Godwin or More versus Wollstonecraft.⁶ Each writer had his or her own agenda and More’s Strictures (1799) no more ‘answered’ Wollstonecraft’s Vindication (1792), than Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2) ‘answered’ Burke’s Rejections (1790). Moreover, instead of taking sides in such debates, the purpose of historians is rather to understand a point of view based on premises which very few share today, and so to resist the temptation to condemn those ideas with which they disagree.

II

Hannah More was bom at Stapleton in Gloucestershire on 2 February 1745 and died on 7 September 1833 at Clifton in Bristol. Her life stretched from before the Jacobite invasion of Bonnie Prince Charlie to after the First Reform Act. She was fifteen years old when George III ascended the throne, thirty-one when the American Declaration of Independence was issued, forty-four when the French Revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, seventy when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, and eighty-eight when the Whigs first provided state money towards education in 1833.

Hannah More was the fourth of five sisters, the children of a schoolmaster and a farmer’s daughter. A precociously intelligent child, she was educated first by her father in the home, otherwise a predominantly female environment. When she was twelve her eldest sister opened a boarding school for girls in Bristol and More learned Italian, Spanish and Latin from the masters at the school. At the age of twenty-two, she became engaged to be married to William Turner, a landowner with an estate near Bristol. Twenty years her senior, Turner kept on delaying the marriage day. After six years the engagement was called off and More decided never to marry. Although later referred to, out of respect, as Mrs Hannah More, she never wavered in her decision. It was the £200 a year which Turner settled on her, by way of compensation, that allowed More the freedom to become, first, one of the London literary set and, later, a philanthropist, a founder of schools, a propagandist and a didactic writer.

In 1774, during a visit to London with two of her sisters, she saw David Garrick play Lear. An admiring letter led to her meeting Garrick and soon she became a close friend of both him and his wife. She met Edmund Burke in Bristol and worked for him in the election campaign of 1774 when he became one of the city’s members of parliament. For over twenty years from 1774, she regularly wintered in London for the season and it was there, at the house of Joshua Reynolds, that she first met Samuel Johnson. She met also Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey, Elizabeth Carter, Hester Chapone and Frances Boscawen and became a part of their circle of self-styled ‘Blue Stockings’.⁷ These eminent hostesses encouraged both men and women to engage in serious conversation at their fashionable assemblies as an alternative to playing cards.

Encouraged in part by this group of intelligent, scholarly women, and in part by the friendship of Garrick, More became a writer, of verse and of plays. She had already, at the age of sixteen, written A Search after Happiness for the girls of her sisters’ school in Bristol to act, and had published it in 1773. At the same period, she had made a free translation of Metastasio’s Attilio Regolo and this, as The Inflexible Captive, was presented by Garrick at theatres in Bath and Exeter.⁸ In 1777 she wrote Percy, an historical drama about the twelfth-century Earl of Northumberland, which Garrick presented at Covent Garden. The play was enthusiastically received and More feted, but it is an unredeemably dreary piece. Her best (and otherwise sympathetic) biographer accurately describes it as ‘…entirely lacking in dramatic quality. There is no interrelation of character and action, no surprise or suspense in any situation, no variety of tone or pitch, no light or shade, no contrasts of any kind. It begins and ends on the same monotonous tone.’⁹

Garrick died before More finished her next play, The Fatal Falsehood in 1779. Without Garrick, the play ran for only three performances at Covent Garden. But his death did more than simply reveal the weakness of More’s drama. Whether or not it was the cause, Garrick’s death was co-incident with the beginning of More’s gradual withdrawal from the fashionable world of London society, what she called the Great and the Gay, and her adoption of a serious life and a high moral and religious tone.

More was a bom proselytist and soon she set out to reform the fashionable world of high society. Three of her major works were devoted to this end. Her Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great was published anonymously in 1788. Many attributed it to Wilberforce, but her identity soon became known. An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World followed in 1790 and, most importantly, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Educ...