ABSTRACT
Hannah More (1745-1833) was unusual among the educationalists of the long eighteenth century because her agenda overlapped both sexes and included all social classes. She began her career teaching the daughters of well-to-do families at her sisters’ school in Bristol, but abandoned teaching for play-writing in 1774 when she became the protégée of the great actor-manager, David Garrick, then the friend of Samuel Johnson and a member of the bluestocking circle of Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter. In 1778, following the success of her play, Percy, in the preceding year, she was depicted as Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, in Richard Samuel’s painting, The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, his tribute to the prominent intellectual women of the day. The turning point in her life occurred in the late 1780s with her conversion to Evangelical Christianity largely through the instrumentality of the clergyman, hymn-writer and former slave-trader, John Newton. The move to Evangelicalism was gradual – a slow shift rather than a Damascus road experience – but none the less significant. It led her to search for a new purpose in life which she found when her friend William Wilberforce encouraged her to set up a Sunday school in Cheddar in Somerset in October 1789. In the next ten years she and her sister, Patty, founded a series of schools in the Mendips, which at the height of their prosperity were attended by about a thousand children. Three of the schools – at Cheddar, Shipham and Nailsea – survived her death and were absorbed into the state system in the twentieth century. The More sisters thus made a significant contribution to elementary education in the Mendips. Their aim was to teach literacy to both children and adults so that the pupils would read the Bible, be converted to Evangelical Christianity and be insulated from subversive politics. This ambitious project involved the hiring and training of teachers, many of them women from the labouring classes, making More, in spite of her strongly professed conservatism, an effective agent of social mobility.1
