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Hannah More was born at Stapleton, near Bristol, on the 2nd of February
1745. She may be said to have made three reputations in the course of
her long life: first, as a clever verse-writer and witty talker in the
circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick; next, as a writer on moral and
religious subjects on the Puritanic side; and lastly, as a practical philanthropist.
She was the youngest but one of the five daughters of Jacob More, who,
though a member of a Presbyterian family in Norfolk, had become a member
of the English Church and a strong Tory.
He taught a school at Stapleton in Gloucestershire. The elder sisters
established a boarding-school at Bristol, and Hannah became one of their
pupils when she was twelve years old. Her first literary efforts were
pastoral plays, suitable for young ladies to act, the first being written
in 1762 under the title of A Search after Happiness (2nd ed., 1773). Metastasio
was one of her literary models; on his opera of Attilio Regulo she based
a drama, The Inflexible Captive.
She gave up her share in the school in view of an engagement of marriage
she had contracted with a Mr Turner. The wedding never took place, and,
after much reluctance, Hannah More was induced to accept from Mr Turner
an annuity which had been settled on her without her knowledge. This set
her free for literary pursuits, and in 1772 or 1773 she went to London.
Some verses on Garrick's Lear led to an acquaintance with the actor-playwright;
Miss More was taken up by Elizabeth Montague; and her unaffected enthusiasm,simplicity,
vivacity, and wit won the hearts of the whole Johnson set, the lexicographer
himself included, although he is said to have told her that she should
consider what her flattery was worth before she choked him with it Garrick
wrote the prologue and epilogue for her tragedy Percy, which was acted
with great success at Covent Garden in December 1777.
Another drama, The Fatal Falsehood, produced in 1779 after Garrick's
death, was less successful. The Garricks had induced her to live with
them; and after Garrick's death she remained with his wife, first at Hampton
Court, and then in the Adelphi. In 1781 she made the acquaintance of Horace
Walpole, and corresponded with him from that time. At Bristol she discovered
a poetess in Mrs Anne Yearsley (1756 - 1806), a milkwoman, and raised
a considerable sum of money for her benefit. Lactilia, as Mrs Yearsley
was called, wished to receive the capital, and made insinuations against
Miss More, who desired to hold it in trust. The trust was handed over
to a Bristol merchant and eventually to the poetess.
Hannah More published Sacred Dramas in 1782 and it rapidly ran through
nineteen editions. These and the poems Bas-Bleu and Florio (1786) mark
her gradual transition to mere serious views of life, which were fully
expressed in prose, in her 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). She was intimate with Wilberforce and Zachary_Macaulay,
with whose evangelical views she was in entire sympathy. She published
a poem on Slavery in 1788, and was for many years a friend of Beilby Porteus,
Bishop of London and leading abolitionist.
In 1785 she bought a house, at Cowslip Green, near Wrington, near Bristol,
where she settled down to country life with her sister Martha, and wrote
many ethical books and tracts: Strictures on Female Education (1799),
Hints towards forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805), Coeiebs
in Search of a Wife (only nominally a story, 1809), Practical Piety (1811),
Christian Morals (1813), Character of St Paul (1815), Moral Sketches (1819).
The tone is uniformly animated; the writing fresh and vivacious; her favourite
subjects the minor self-indulgences and infirmities. She was a rapid writer,
and her work is consequently discursive and formless; but there was an
originality and force in her way of putting commonplace sober sense and
piety that fully accounts for, her extraordinary popularity.
The most famous of her books was Coelebs in Search of a Wife, which had
an enormous circulation among pious people. Sydney Smith attacked it with
violence in the Edinburgh Review for its general priggishness. It is interesting
to note that the model Stanley children have been said to, be drawn from
T. B. Macaulay and his sister. She also wrote many spirited rhymes and
prose tales, the earliest of which was Village Politics, by Will Chip
(1792), to counteract the doctrines of Tom Paine and the influence of
the French Revolution.
The success of Village Politics induced her to begin the series of Cheap
Repository Tracts, which were for three years produced by Hannah and her
sisters at the rate of three a month. Perhaps the most famous of these
is The Shepherd of Salisbury Alain, describing a family of phenomenal
frugality and contentment. This was translated into several languages.
Two million copies of these rapid and telling sketches were circulated,
in one year, teaching the poor in rhetoric of most ingenious homeliness
to rely upon the virtues of content, sobriety, humility, industry, reverence
for the British Constitution, hatred of the French, trust in God and in
the kindness of the gentry.
Perhaps the best proof of Hannah More's sterling worth was her indefatigable
philanthropic work, her long-continued exertions to improve the condition
of the children in the mining districts of the Mendip Hills near her home
at Cowslip Green and Barley Wood.
The More sisters met with a good deal of opposition in their good works.
The farmers thought that education, even to the limited extent of learning
to read, would be fatal to agriculture, and the clergy, whose neglect
she was making good, accused her of Methodist tendencies. In her old age,
philanthropists from all parts made pilgrimages to see the bright and
amiable old lady, and she retained all her faculties till within two years
of her death, dying at Clifton, where the last five years of her life
were spent, on the September 7, 1833.
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