Hannah More: The First Victorian
by Anne Stott
380pp, Oxford, £25
One April day in 1770, the ambitious teenage son of a Bristol schoolmaster made his way to London with the aim of furthering his literary career. His name was Thomas Chatterton, and his hopes soon ended in the spectacular failure of suicide. Four years later, an equally ambitious young woman, whose father was also a Bristol teacher, made the same journey and instead became the literary sensation of the day, taking the London stage by storm with her play Percy. But where posterity has been kind to Chatterton, transforming him into the legendary "marvellous boy", Hannah More - if she is remembered at all - is likely to be sneered at.
History's judgmental take is not based on More's exuberant youthful writings for the theatre, but on her later career as a setter-up of Sunday schools and author of religious tracts. Instead of dying romantically young, she lived into her 80s, and was instrumental in producing the ideological shift which saw the licentious 18th century transmute into the moralistic Victorian age. As a result, an unpleasant odour of sanctity hovers around her name, and her image is that of a sour and reactionary old maid preaching to the lower orders to keep them in their place.
Anne Stott's sympathetic biography, while it does not completely rescue More's reputation, aims to delve under the surface of this superficial caricature and retrieve the complexities not only of its subject's personality but of the tumultuous period in which she lived. Instead of judging More's views on politics and religion by anachronistic modern standards, she tries to maintain historical objectivity. As she charts the ideological map of the age of the French Revolution, it becomes clear how difficult it is to impose today's concepts of the progressive or the conservative on the past. For example, the anti-slavery movement, in which More played a significant role, was driven by Evangelicals whose religious mindset seems alien to modern liberal sensibilities, even though its basic aims may chime with our present day horror of racism. Disapproving of slavery seems right and rational to us, but it was likely to go hand in hand with obsessional fear of sabbath-breaking and other beliefs, such as thinking the theatre immoral, which seem odd. (This provides an insight into Jane Austen's Mansfield Park whose moral position is notoriously hard for modern readers to get to grips with.)
If the ideological world in which Hannah More moved seems confusing from a 21st- century viewpoint, it is important to remember that it could be equally so for those who were actually there at the time. As a woman writer of traditionalist views, More had to tread a fine line between giving full rein to her ambition and maintaining her feminine modesty. But instead of rationalising her position she seems to have been happy to exist in a state of contradiction. Indeed her whole life is shot through with paradoxes, some of which, to the uncharitable eye, can look more like hypocrisies.
More's career (like that of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Brontës) began in teaching but she soon left the girls' school she had started with her sisters to seek fame and fortune as a playwright and poet. An inveterate attention-seeker, she cultivated the patronage of such sophisticated luminaries as Garrick, Dr Johnson, Horace Walpole and the leading female "bluestockings". Her first prose publication as a moral commentator, a conduct book for "young Damsels", was written in the flush of her early success, while she was working on the tragedy, Percy , which would make her a celebrity. A mere glimpse at the title page - admonishing girls to "follow your natural modesty, and think it your greatest commendation not to be talked of one way or the other" reveals a glaring incongruity between what she was doing herself and what she advised others to do. Not surprisingly, her bluestocking friends were alarmed: "where shall we find a champion," asked one," if you (armed at all points) desert us?"
This disjunction between the Hannah More who sought fame for herself in the ambivalent arena of the stage, and the one who preached Christian humility to others, is something which even her biographer cannot quite explain. However, as time went on, More gradually detached herself from the racy world of the London literati and began to see her vocation in an exclusively religious light. This shift corresponded with her conversion to Evangelicalism, a growing movement within the Church of England which required a new, conscience-searching seriousness from its adherents.
Unlike the MP William Wilberforce, her friend and colleague in the fight against slavery, More was not "born again" in a lightning flash of spiritual awakening. Her conversion was more gradual, but it turned her thoughts quite as determinedly to what she could do for the social good. Her earlier attempts at personal philanthropy have something almost comical about them. In "saving" a beautiful, mentally ill young woman who had made her home in a nearby haystack, More seems to have been playing out some romantic fantasy of the cult of sensibility: once in an asylum, the girl soon lost her charms. Similarly, an attempt to help a literary milkmaid backfired: More got the woman's poetry published, but an enormous row ensued when she refused to give her protegée control over the money the book had earned.
These cases suggest an attitude towards the peasantry both patronising and idealising. But More's other charity work is less easy to dismiss. During the 1790s she and her sister Patty set up, almost single-handedly, a vast network of Sunday schools in the Mendip region to the south east of Bristol, investing large sums of their own money in the venture. While their motivation was primarily to save the souls of the poor, the sisters achieved an extaordinary feat of organisation which enabled countless children to learn to read. Stott dismisses the Marxist idea that the masses were blindly stupefied by More's propaganda; no one who didn't want to had to attend and it took enormous powers of persuasion (and bribery with free food) to keep up student numbers.
In her polemical writings, More found a skilfully popular voice, whether attacking the slave trade by parody (Ye that boast 'ye rule the waves'/ Bid no slave ship sail the sea/Ye that never will be slaves'/ Bid poor Afric's land be free') or simplifiying her Burkean conservative politics into easily digested pamphlet form. It is harder to appreciate the cloying morality tales of her Cheap Repository Tracts or her didactic novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife , but one cannot deny their huge success in terms of simple circulation. When More died, she left nearly £30,000, an unprecendented sum, as Stott says, for a woman writer.
This biography - the first in half a century - offers a realistic portrait of this energetic, unstoppable woman which acknowledges her unique strengths without idealising her. While her writings may have propagated traditionalist views on the place of women in society, her example was ultimately enabling to subsequent generations of both sexes. She should be hailed as a prime mover not only in the development of elementary education but in the growth of pressure group politics.
• Lucasta Miller's latest book is The Brontë Myth . To order a copy of Hannah More: The First Victorian for £22 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.