ABSTRACT
Accounts of the breakdown of the patronage relationship between Hannah More and Ann Yearsley are inevitably partisan: feeling was clearly strong on both sides. Richard Vaughan may have saved the family from the immediate danger of starvation in a barn, but it is More, as a well-connected, well-known writer, who has the ability to assist Yearsley in the longer term. She is the embodiment of middling-class gentlewomanliness. Subject to the significant social institutions, patronage and middling-class charity, both of which dictated that she should be the grateful object of philanthropic gestures, Yearsley had to deploy her only socially approved source of power in order to assert her case for self-determination: her motherhood. Yearsley’s fertility is beyond doubt; she has had a baby almost every year, and might at any moment produce another. As a woman, Yearsley is fulfilling her obligations to society by propagating the species, yet she is being cast as a ‘poor woman’ in more than one way.
