In Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat (review)

After the revisionism of recent decades, in which the long eighteenth- century canon has expanded to accommodate many authors previously banished to its remote fringes, how many scholars of the period can profess to have read widely in the works of Hannah More? One senses strongly that here is a writer more talked about than read. There's a good reason for this, perhaps, since much of More's work in the 1790s, and particularly the writings for the poor that are the principal focus of Scheuermann's book, was not calculated to impress or interest academic or intellectual tastes. Even if we accept Scheuermann's contentious claim that these writings were responsible (though surely not so single-handedly as this book occasionally implies) for stalling the French Revolution on its northwards expansion, a problem remains: More's output in the revolution decade can today seem extremely dull. The most useful aspect of In Praise of Poverty is thus its willingness to deal at length with More's important but unengaging conduct writings for the poor. The moral fables and contrived dialogues which form Village Politics (1793) and the various Cheap Repository Tracts (1795-97) are thoroughly interrogated, though the sheer level of detail can become a little wearing. (Some of the Tracts are only slightly longer than Scheuermann's 'precis' of them.) The discussion is unleavened, moreover, by reference to Hannah More's more 'interesting' writing: Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) is treated only briefly at the end, while the early plays, and the works on slavery, merit no more than occasional mention.

Scheuermann does not stint in expressing admiration for More's gifts as a "brilliant," "marvellous," if sometimes "repugnant" rhetorician, and for her "amazingly successful career," as a writer able to "distill . . . the thought of the powerful of her time" (4). More certainly kept impressive company, and was soon close to the center of the conservative ascendancy of the period. Scheuermann provides an impressively thorough analysis of her associations and friendships in the late '80s and early '90s, especially in her correspondence with members of the Bluestocking Circle, the Bishop of London, David Garrick, and Horace Walpole. Walpole was among More's advisors in her handling of Ann Yearsley, the Bristol milkwoman poet with whom she later quarrelled. This compelling, scandalous interlude is now well known, and pleasingly recounted here in an early chapter, but Scheuermann's account turns up no new facts or interpretations, though it is helpful to see the incident in the light of More's thought on poverty and lower-class deference and discipline generally, which is ably synthesized here. Yearsley's name is perhaps too often invoked in the rest of the book as a typical representative of the poor, however: readers of the several recent extended studies of Yearsley will not readily recognise her in this costume.

Much more problematically, the book's central thesis—that More's polemics successfully countered Paineite radicalism—is virtually unsubstantiated and in the absence of reliable evidence, may indeed be unsupportable. I wanted to hear much more about the composition of the audience for Village Politics and the Tracts, and the range of its responses. Where are the testimonies of inflamed, Paine-toting peasants being successfully hosed down by More's common sense and contentedness? Where are the accounts of riotous mobs halted in their tracks by a gratis copy of "The Lancashire Collier-Girl" or "The Happy Waterman"? Scheuermann offers ample evidence of the Tracts meeting with the approval of More's conservative friends, and of their widespread distribution (even to India and the West Indies), but other than a single secondhand report from a York bookseller, who tells Bishop Porteus that the people "were very fond of them" (101), there is no credible evidence of their...