Hannah More was either a notable religious and social reformer or a right wing bigot who did her best to keep the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate.
Hannah More is one of those people who sound fascinating at a distance, but who must have been utterly intolerable in real life. She was an unmitigated snob, never happier than when in the company of the rich and famous; a religious bigot, a campaigner against women’s rights and Catholics, and founder of schools for the poor which taught them to be good and pious servants – but not how to write.
She was a friend of royalty, yet was so badly bullied by her domestic staff she had to move house. And while one minister called her ‘one of the most truly evangelical divines of this whole age’, essayist Augustine Birrell said ‘She flounders like a huge conger eel in an ocean of dingy morality’ and buried her 19 books in his garden in disgust at ‘one of the most detestable writers that ever held a pen.
Hannah’s father, Jacob, was a schoolmaster here when she was born in 1745. The building is still standing today. She was born in Frenchay, fourth of five daughters of a Stapleton village schoolmaster, in 1745. She learned several languages, improving her French by chatting to French prisoners-of-war on parole, before becoming a teacher at her sister’s school on College Green, Bristol.
While in her teens she came under the influence of Anglican cleric Dr James Stonhouse, who she called her conscience. Her first book, Select Moral Tales, was printed in Gloucester by Robert Raikes, founder of the Sunday school movement.
An Edward Turner of Belmont, Wraxall, courted her, proposed and was accepted but (perhaps understandably) backed out on no less than three occasions. Dr Stonhouse intervened and Turner agreed to pay Hannah an annuity in recompense for her injured feelings. He also left her £1,000 in his will.
Hannah was certainly a woman of contrasts who wrote a number of successful plays, before deciding that the theatre was immoral. In 1732, she visited London for the first time and met such luminaries as writer Alexander Pope, actor David Garrick and painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds in turn introduced her to Dr Samuel Johnson, who was highly irritated by her excessive flattery of him but who did help her with her poetry.
One of her plays, a turgid tragedy called Percy, was a great success and a translation was found among Mozart’s effects when he died. It is thought he may have been considering using it as the basis of an opera. By this time, however, Hannah had turned against the theatre as something unchristian and wouldn’t attend.
She also rejected what she had once called ‘such agreeable and laudable customs as getting tipsy twice a day on Herefordshire cider’. She turned more and more to fundamentalist religion and even railed against saying ‘Merry Christmas’, on the grounds that the word ‘Merry’ suggested ‘idle mirth and injurious excess’.
But although she was now writing only religious dramas, she still turned out secular poetry and Dr Johnson called her ‘the finest versifatrix in the English language’. Her hatred of non-Christians grew – when she heard of the death of the ‘malignant’ Gibbon, author of the classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, she commented ‘How many souls has his writing polluted?’
But she was a strong and effective campaigner for the abolition of slavery, and helped Ann Yearsley, the Bristol milkmaid poet, to improve her grammar and poems.
Hannah and her sisters moved to Great Pulteney Street in Bath and then to Barley Wood, Wrington, where they entertained royalty and basked in their approval. It was then Hannah set up the chain of village schools for which she is best remembered, starting in Cheddar with backing from antislavery campaigner William Wilberforce, and then Rowberrow, Shipham, Sandford, Draycot, Banwell, Congresbury, Yatton, Axbridge and Nailsea.
But her pupils were taught ‘such coarse work as may fit them for servants plus her unyielding brand of Christianity, and she ‘allowed no writing for the poor’.
The schools faced opposition from farmers who feared the effects of religion on their workers and, six months after her death, all had closed. She was enthusiastic about the French Revolution at first but soon turned against it, accusing the revolutionaries of anarchy and, even worse, atheism. She was equally incensed by Tom Paine’s influential The Rights of Man, which argued in favour of republicanism, declaiming: ‘From liberty, equality, and the rights of man, the Good Lord deliver us.’ She also refused to read Mary Woolstencroft’s unrelated Rights of Women on the grounds that women were not fit for government, ‘To be unstable and capricious is but too characteristic of our sex’ she said.
Instead she bombarded the poor with religious tracts and recipes for scrag ends of meat and vegetables, and wrote a book called Village Politics which urged the labouring classes to reject all thoughts of bettering their God-given situation in life. In a century where the middle classes enthusiastically sang: ‘The rich man at his castle, the poor man at his gate, God keep them high and lowly, and each to his estate’, her homilies sold in their millions.
They attracted enthusiastic praise from churchmen but virulent criticism from outside, which she shrugged off. She was, she believed, invariably right and opponents of her views were condemned as anti-Christian and destined for Hell.
Her religious novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, was a best-seller, as were her strongly anti-feminist books on bringing up daughters. She castigated ordinary novels as showing ‘vice with a smiling face’ and became almost an icon to evangelical Christians. As she grew older, and even more bigoted and intolerant, she put the French on her ever-growing list of hates, warning that peace with France after Waterloo was a worse evil than war.
She was still a dreadful snob, delighting in praise from the aristocracy, opposing any attempts to give Catholics the vote and refusing membership of the Royal Society of Literature because she felt ‘her sex alone a disqualification’. By this time, Holy Hannah, as she was known, was almost an invalid and confined to bed for months at a time, and her family and friends were diminishing.
She was spending money faster than it was coming in and her servants at Barley Wood were running riot, stealing and partying and neglecting their work. In the end friends stepped in, sacked the servants and sold the house. Hannah was moved to Windsor Terrace, Clifton, where she died in 1833 at the age of 89.
The family home, Barley Wood, was situated just outside the village. M.J. Crossley Evans, who wrote a life of Hannah, believes she was a woman who ‘upheld practical Christianity and did incalculable good in inculcating Scriptural values at all levels of society. She was the enemy of vanity, debauchery, atheism and Sabbath breaking, a tireless worker for King and country, an upholder of the established order and an enemy to the philosophy and literature of the Enlightenment.’
He might have added that she was also affected, an arrogant elitist, and a strong campaigner against improving the lot of the poor, women or Catholics. Throughout her self-righteous life, she did as much harm as she did good. She is remembered these days in Hannah More Primary school, St Phillips, and in Hannah More Infants, Nailsea. What is more surprising is that her reputation remains intact and has never suffered from the kind of reappraisal of Bristol’s heroes that turned Edward Colston from noble benefactor into evil slave trader.
Posted by brizzle born and bred on 2007-12-02 15:08:43
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