Hannah More

Hannah More (1745–1833) was an influential writer, educator, and moral reformer who shaped British intellectual culture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A member of the Blue Stocking circle, she collaborated with William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect in advocacy for abolition and moral reform. She founded Sunday schools in the Mendip Hills and published widely on education, female intellectual formation, and Christian moral life, reaching common readers through accessible didactic fiction and essays.

Traditionally, Hannah More is venerated as a pioneer of female intellectual formation and as a moral voice calling society to virtue and reform. She is remembered as a woman of extraordinary learning who deployed her gifts for the moral instruction of all classes—from the nobility (addressed in Strictures) to the laboring poor (addressed in the Cheap Repository Tracts). Her collaboration with the Clapham Sect and her advocacy for abolition place her within the tradition of evangelical social reform. Her insistence that women could and should be intellectually rigorous without compromising their Christian virtues was revolutionary and influential. The tradition emphasizes her combination of intellectual excellence, moral courage, and pastoral concern—she was a writer and teacher first, but always in service to moral and spiritual formation.

Hannah More was born in Gloucestershire in 1745 to a prosperous, educated family. She received an unusually thorough education for a woman of her era, including training in languages and literature. In her youth, she was engaged to an older clergyman but the engagement was broken off, leaving her unmarried—a circumstance that afforded her unusual independence. She moved to London in the 1770s and became part of the Blue Stocking circle, a society of educated women (and a few sympathetic men) who gathered for intellectual conversation. She became friends with Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole, Edmund Burke, and other leading literati. In 1774, she published her first play, The Inflexible Captive, which was performed successfully. She continued to publish plays and verse throughout the 1780s. More's mature work, however, turned toward moral and religious instruction. In 1788, she became part of the Clapham Sect—the circle of evangelicals surrounding William Wilberforce that advocated for abolition and moral reform. Under this influence, she began to redirect her considerable literary talents toward education and moral formation. In 1799, she published Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, a substantial treatise arguing for rigorous intellectual training for women while maintaining their Christian virtues and domestic responsibilities. This work became immensely influential and was reprinted repeatedly. In 1808, she published Coelebs in Search of a Wife, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young man seeking a wife of moral and intellectual substance. The novel was wildly popular, widely read, and influential in shaping expectations about female education. Alongside these major works, More undertook a remarkable project: from 1795 onward, she published the Cheap Repository Tracts, a series of didactic stories, essays, and poems designed to reach common readers—servants, laborers, and the poor. These tracts were distributed at minimal cost or free, with the explicit aim of moral and religious instruction. She published over 50 such tracts over several years. In the 1810s, she withdrew from public life to manage estates in Somersetshire but continued writing. She founded Sunday schools in the Mendip Hills, establishing schools where poor children could receive moral and basic literary instruction. She also corresponded extensively with Wilberforce and other reformers, offering moral counsel and encouragement. She died in 1833, at age 88, widely mourned as a moral leader and public intellectual.

• Educator
• Social Reformer