Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Writer, Educator, & Renewer of Society
September 7 · d. 1833
Hannah More was one of the most influential people in Georgian England, and almost no one remembers her now. A celebrated playwright and poet who traded wit with Samuel Johnson and saw her plays staged by Garrick, she gave it all up to become the moral conscience of a nation: a leading voice in the campaign to abolish the slave trade, the author whose penny tracts reached millions of the poor, and the founder of schools that taught the children of the Mendip mines to read. She argued, against her whole century, that a woman could be as learned and as serious as any man, and proved it with her own pen.
Hannah More began as one of the brightest stars of London's literary world. Born near Bristol in 1745, a schoolmaster's clever daughter, she came up to the city as a young woman and was taken at once into the most glittering company of the age. The great actor David Garrick staged her plays and called her his pupil; Samuel Johnson, the terror of every drawing room, delighted in her and traded wit with her as an equal; she was a favorite of the Blue Stockings, the circle of learned women who met to talk of books instead of cards. She could have spent her whole life as a celebrated playwright, fêted and comfortable. And in midlife, under the influence of the evangelical revival, she turned away from the theatre and gave her gifts to God and to the poor.
She joined herself to William Wilberforce and the circle of earnest Christians known as the Clapham Sect, and threw her pen into their great cause, the abolition of the slave trade; her poem against slavery was a weapon in that long war. Then she did something cleverer still. She saw that the cheap, crude, often filthy chapbooks sold to the common people were the only things they read, and she resolved to beat them at their own game. She wrote her own, the Cheap Repository Tracts, little stories and ballads and homilies, sold for a penny or given away, full of plain Christian sense and hope; and they sold in the millions, more than any novel of the day, carried in peddlers' packs into cottages all over Britain. The most fashionable wit in London had become the most widely read author among the poor.
With her sisters she went into the Mendip Hills, the hard mining and farming country of Somerset, where the children grew up wild and unlettered and the local farmers thought teaching the poor to read was a recipe for revolt. There the More sisters founded Sunday schools, walking the lanes, coaxing suspicious parents, teaching the children to read the Bible and a trade. And in her books she fought another battle, against the idea that a woman's mind was a trifle to be decorated. Real education, she wrote, was not "the shreds and patches of useless arts" but the thing that inculcates principles, cultivates reason, and trains to self-denial, and refers everything, at the last, to the love and fear of God. She meant it for girls as fully as for boys, and a generation of women grew up taken seriously because Hannah More had insisted they should be.
She lived to be eighty-eight, mourned at her death in 1833 as one of the great moral forces of the age, grown rich from her books and having given most of it away. Her plays are forgotten now and her tracts seem quaint, and that is part of why the world has let her slip; the causes she fought for, that slavery was a sin, that the poor should be able to read, that a woman's mind was worth educating, won so completely that we forget they were ever in doubt, and forget the people who won them. But the schools she planted outlasted her, and the cause of abolition she had served came home in the very year she died, when the Parliament of Britain set free the slaves of its whole empire. The brilliant girl who gave up the applause of London to teach miners' children their letters had helped, quietly and enormously, to change a nation's conscience.
Hannah More is abundantly documented, by her own large body of published work, by a vast correspondence with the leading figures of her day, and by contemporary memoirs and the biographies that followed; few women of the eighteenth century left so full a record. She was born in 1745 at Fishponds near Bristol, was educated at the school her father kept and her sisters ran, and came to London in the 1770s, where she won fame as a playwright under Garrick's patronage and a place in the circle of Johnson, Burke, Walpole, and the Blue Stocking hostesses. Under the influence of the evangelical revival she turned from the stage to moral and religious writing, allied herself with the Clapham Sect and the abolition campaign, published the hugely popular Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) and the novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808), launched the Cheap Repository Tracts from 1795, and with her sisters established Sunday and day schools in the Mendip Hills. She died in 1833.
More was a reformer of her own age and not of ours, and honest history holds both. Her schools taught the poor to read the Bible but were cautious about teaching them to write, and her tracts preached contentment with one's station alongside faith and sobriety; she has been read, accordingly, both as a liberator of the poor and as a pacifier of them, and there is some truth on each side. What is not in doubt is the scale of her influence, nor its direction. She put the whole weight of her enormous popularity behind the abolition of the slave trade, the education of the poor and of women, and the moral reform of a coarse and often brutal society, and in each of those causes the world moved her way. She was, in her own time, probably the most influential woman in England and the most widely read of all its authors; that she is now so little remembered is itself a measure of how completely her causes won.
Hannah More is commemorated on 7 September in the calendars of the Church of England and other Anglican churches, which honor her among the teachers and reformers of the faith; her liturgical color is white. She founded no order and worked no miracles; her commemoration rests on her life's work, the use of an extraordinary literary gift wholly in the service of God, the poor, and the enslaved.
Her memorials are the institutions and the causes she advanced. The Sunday-school movement she helped to pioneer became one of the great engines of popular literacy in nineteenth-century England; the abolition she championed was won; and the argument she pressed, that women were rational and moral beings to be educated as such, passed in time from scandal into common sense. She is remembered as the very type of the Christian woman of letters, who proved that learning, piety, and reforming zeal belonged together, and who spent her fame and her fortune on those who had neither.
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Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More(English, 2014)
Recommended: Karen Swallow Prior (Thomas Nelson)
A warm, well-told modern life by a believing scholar of literature, the best single book for recovering a woman her own age could not stop reading and ours has nearly forgotten.
Further reading. The fine modern biography is Karen Swallow Prior's Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More, listed above, sympathetic and well told; More's own works, the Strictures, Coelebs, and the Cheap Repository Tracts, are widely reprinted and freely available.
Online resources. A selection of Hannah More's writing on education and morals is freely readable at Quotidiana.
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Readings for a Renewer of Society
Exodus 3:7–12Psalm 145:1–13vRomans 12:9–21Luke 6:20–38
Almighty and everlasting God, you kindled the flame of your love in the heart of your servant Hannah More to manifest your compassion and mercy to the poor and the persecuted: Grant to us, your humble servants, a like faith and power of love, that we who give thanks for his righteous zeal may profit by his example; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.