Hannah More (2 February 1745 – 7 September 1833) was an English writer, philanthropist, poet and verse dramatist. She was active the circles of Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and David Garrick and wrote on moral and religious subjects. Born in Bristol, she taught at a school her father founded there and began writing plays. She became involved in the London literary elite, and she was a leading Bluestocking member. Her later plays and poetry became more evangelical. She joined the Clapham Sect, a group opposing the Atlantic slave trade.
In the 1790s, More wrote Cheap Repository Tracts on moral, religious and political topics, to distribute to the literate poor (as a retort to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man). Meanwhile, she broadened her links with schools she and her sister Martha had founded in rural Somerset. These curbed their teaching of the poor, allowing limited reading but no writing. More was noted for her political conservatism, being described as an anti-feminist, a counter-revolutionary, or a conservative feminist.Harriet Guest, 2005, "Hannah More and Conservative Feminism", British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Early life
Hannah More was born on 2 February 1745 at Fishponds in the parish of Stapleton, near Bristol. She was the fourth of five daughters of Jacob More (1700–1783),Crossley Evans, M. J., Hannah More, University of Bristol (Bristol Historical Association), 1999. a schoolmaster from a strong Presbyterian family in Harleston, Norfolk, who had joined the Church of England. He sought to pursue a clerical career, but after losing a lawsuit over an estate which he had hoped to inherit, Jacob moved to Bristol. There he became an excise officer and later taught at the Fishponds free school.
The sisters were first educated by their father, learning Latin and mathematics. Hannah was also taught by elder sisters, through whom she learned French, which she improved conversationally by spending time with French prisoners of war in Frenchay during the Seven Years' War. She was an assiduous, discerning student. Family tradition has it that she began writing at an early age.
In 1758, Jacob established a girls' boarding school at Trinity Street, Bristol, for the elder sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, to run, while he and his wife moved to Stony Hill in the city to open a school for boys. Hannah More became a pupil in the girls' school when she was 12 years old and taught there in early adulthood.
In 1767, More gave up her share in the school on becoming engaged to William Turner of the Belmont Estate, Wraxall, Somerset, whom she had met when he began teaching her cousins. After six years, the wedding had not taken place. Turner seemed reluctant to name a date and in 1773 the engagement was broken off. It seems this led More into a nervous breakdown, from which she recuperated in Uphill, near Weston-super-Mare. She was induced to accept a £200 annuity from Turner as compensation. This freed her for literary pursuits. In the winter of 1773–1774, she went to London with her sisters, Sarah and Martha – the first of many such trips at yearly intervals. Some verses she had written on David Garrick's version of King Lear led to an acquaintance with him.
She later moved to Bath, where she stayed between 1792 and 1802 on Great Pulteney Street.
Playwright and Influential Associations More's first literary effort was a pastoral play written while she was still teaching, and needed something suitable for young ladies to act. This resulted in The Search after Happiness, a verse drama in heroic couplets, with occasional rhyming song lyrics, written in 1762. It is written entirely for a cast of female actors. Although More is writing in the same style championed by John Dryden a century previous, More frequently refers to her own play as 'this little poem'. By the mid-1780s, over 10,000 copies of this had been sold.S. J. Skedd, "More, Hannah (1745–1833)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Among her literary models was Pietro Metastasio, on whose opera Attilio Regulo she based a drama, The Inflexible Captive (1774). As she wrote in the introduction, 'In this, as well as in the general conduct of the story, she [More] has followed the Italian poet Metastasio, in his opera on this subject. However, unlike her earlier pastoral, this play is written largely in blank verse iambic pentameter, with more roles for men than for women.
In London, More sought to associate with the literary elite, including Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke. Johnson is quoted as scolding her: "Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth having." He would later be quoted as calling her "the finest versifatrix in the English language".
Garrick wrote a prologue and epilogue to Hannah More's tragedy Percy, after the Medieval warring families of Percy and Douglas. The play was a success at Covent Garden in December 1777 and revived in 1785 with Sarah Siddons at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, for which David Garrick wrote the epilogue. A copy of Percy was found among Mozart's possessions in 1791. Percy was More's most successful play, running for twenty-one days. The play's advertisement reads:The French Drama, founded on the famous old Story of Raoul de Coucy, suggested to the Author some Circumstances in the former part of this Tragedy.The "French Drama" which inspired some scenes in the early part of Percy is Gabrielle de Vergy (1770) by Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy. This drama went on to inspire the opera, Gabriella di Vergy (1826-1838) by Gaetano Donizetti with libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola. The story itself is derived from two French medieval legends, Le châtelain de Coucy et la dame de Fayel and Le Roman de la chastelaine de Vergy. Donizetti was one of several composers in the nineteenth century who used this source material for their operas.
Sadly, Moore became disillusioned with the theatre after the death of Garrick. Moreover, she was discouraged upon the reception of her final play, The Fatal Falsehood (1779), which was unpopular due to its dramatic and spiritual themes, as well as a lack of editing. Moreover, More was accused of plagiarizing the plot from Hannah Cowley's play, Albina, Countess Raimond: A Tragedy (1779).
Like all of More's plays, the dramatis personae is very small, with only six named roles. As with all of her "serious" tragedies, only the prologues and epilogues are in rhyming couplets, while the entire action is written in blank verse. Once more, More undermines her own work in the prologue, spoken by Mr. Hull:Nor does she emulate the loftier strains
Which high heroic Tragedy maintains:
Nor conquests she, nor wars, nor triumphs sings,
Nor with rash hand o'erturns the thrones of kings [...]
The scenes of private life our author shows,
A simple story of domestic woes [...] More became prominent in the Bluestocking group of women engaged in polite conversation and literary and intellectual pursuits. She attended the salon of Elizabeth Montagu, where she met Frances Boscawen, Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Vesey and Hester Chapone, some of whom would be lifelong friends. In 1782, she wrote a witty poetic celebration of her friends and circle: The Bas Bleu, or, Conversation, published in 1784. As More writes in her introduction, "The slight performance, occasioned by this little circumstance, was never intended to appear in print." The text is written without any speech prefix, and there is no dramatis personae, nevertheless, it was performed and subsequently printed, since "copies having been multiplied, far beyond the intention of the Author, she has been advised to published it, lest it should steal into the world in a state of still greater imperfection..." The text is written in rhyming couplets, generally in loose tetrameter, with occasional indentations acting as stanza breaks.
In 1781, she met Horace Walpole and corresponded with him.Hannah More, 1818 At Bristol she discovered the poet Ann Yearsley. When Yearsley became destitute, More raised a considerable sum of money for her benefit. Lactilla, as Yearsley was known, published Poems, on Several Occasions in 1785, earning about £600. More and Montagu held the profits in trust to protect them from Yearsley's husband. However, Ann Yearsley wished to receive the capital and made insinuations of stealing against More, forcing her to release it. These literary and social failures prompted More's withdrawal from London intellectual circles.
Evangelical moralist
In the 1780s, Hannah More became a friend of James Oglethorpe, who had long been concerned with slavery as a moral issue and who was working with Granville Sharp as an early abolitionist.Thomas Wilson, The Oglethorpe Plan. Epilogue. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2012. More published Sacred Dramas in 1782, which rapidly ran through 19 editions. These and the poems Bas-Bleu and Florio (1786) mark a gradual transition to graver views, expressed in prose in Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788) and An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1790). By this time she was close to William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay, sympathising with their evangelical views. Her poem Slavery appeared in 1788. For many years she was a friend of Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London and a leading abolitionist, who drew her into a group of anti-slave traders that included Wilberforce, Charles Middleton and also James Ramsay at Teston in Kent.
In 1785 More bought a house at Cowslip Green, near Wrington in northern Somerset, where she settled with her sister Martha and wrote several ethical books and tracts: Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805), Coelebs in Search of a Wife (only nominally a story, 1809), Practical Piety (1811), Christian Morals (1813), Character of St Paul (1815) and Moral Sketches (1819). She was a rapid writer. Her work, though discursive and animated, was deficient in form. Her popularity may be explained by her originality and forceful subject-matter.