Hannah More 1745 – 1833

Hannah More was an English religious writer, moral philosopher, and educational reformer of the late Georgian era, the most widely read English moral author of her time, and a central figure of the Clapham Sect of evangelical reformers. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education and her Cheap Repository Tracts argued for a serious moral and religious education for women across classes, in which intellectual cultivation is the handmaid, not the rival, of practical Christian virtue. Her work shaped the Victorian moral imagination and supported the long Anglican campaign for the abolition of the slave trade led by her friend William Wilberforce.

Hannah More was born at Stapleton near Bristol in February 1745, the fourth of five sisters in a schoolmaster's family. Together with her sisters she ran a successful girls' school at Park Street, Bristol, in the 1760s, and in the early 1770s she came to London, was taken up by the Bluestocking circle of Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter, and was praised by Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and Edmund Burke. Her tragedies Inflexible Captive (1774), Percy (1777), and The Fatal Falsehood (1779) were popular successes on the London stage.

Under the influence of John Newton and William Wilberforce she turned in the 1780s to evangelical writing and philanthropy, founded with her sister Martha a network of Sunday schools in the Mendip villages around Cheddar, and wrote the antislavery poem Slavery (1788). Her later books include Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805), the moral novel Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (1808), and Practical Piety (1811); the Cheap Repository Tracts which she wrote and edited from 1795 sold in the millions.

More combined a serious, classically literate Anglican evangelicalism with a conservative response to Tom Paine and to the French Revolution, a pioneering programme of education for the poor and of girls of the upper classes, and a leading voice in the abolition of the slave trade. Probably the wealthiest woman of letters of her age, she died at Clifton in September 1833.