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Eighteenth-Century Life 25.2 (2001) 237-251



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Hannah More and the English Poor

Mona Scheuermann


Hannah More was one of those fortunate human beings who fit precisely into their society and so garner much praise for their actions and much psychological comfort from their situation. She lived a marvelously successful life, celebrated for her goodness and talent. The ideology of her works, which sold in enormous numbers, reflects the dominant ideas of the influential strata of her society, who praised and made use of her talents toward what for them seemed immediate social and political needs. Her reemergence into importance in the work of today's critics is only a minor reflection of the fame she experienced in her own time. This reemergence is in some cases quite ironic, because the extremely conservative eighteenth-century writer is redrawn as a standard-bearer for late-twentieth-century feminist concerns. Within such a context, we would do well to recall that More's most famous and influential works directly respond to the terror upper-class English society felt in the face of the French Revolution. More is the precise opposite of a revolutionary: she is indeed a standard-bearer, but for the status quo.

The problem with More is that while she is a most interesting figure, her ideas are largely repugnant to modern sensibilities. Critics often deal with this inconvenience either by apologizing for their subject or by changing what she says so that she seems closer to us in spirit. But although More's position on social issues is not in harmony with ours, it is entirely representative of her own times. Her full welcome into the most influential circles--she was a Bluestocking and an intimate of Samuel Johnson and his friends--points to this acceptance by her peers. The extraordinary sales of her Cheap Repository Tracts attest to the chord she struck in her own society. And when we look at eighteenth-century laws regarding the poor, and contemporary commentary on those Poor Laws, we understand just how accurately More reflects the spirit of her time.

More's most recent biographer, Patricia Demers, makes a charmingly earnest effort "to deal justly with Hannah More," although that "means admitting both the expansiveness and the limitations of her charity, methodology, and vision." 1 She worries about "how to accord justice" to this woman "who is--and, as some would argue, always was--so devastatingly out of step.... More's central belief in a natural hierarchical social order...is now angering in its condescension and immobility" (p. 2). More's work "is now widely assumed to have been a narrow exercise of knowing and keeping [End Page 237] one's place" (p. 11); this line is particularly irritating to feminists: "Feminist criticism has been understandably and rightly severe about More's dedication to the doctrine of the two spheres and her solemn discourses on submission" (p. 21). Gamely, Demers insists that More "is altogether more complex and conflicted than most detracting comments or piecemeal excerpts indicate" (p. 22). Mitzi Myers, delighted to have found a female eighteenth-century writer who was clearly successful, largely rewrites More so that her "didactic" works "scarcely stand second to the canonical novel in interest and importance" in terms of "what they reveal about women." 2 More becomes "a pioneer social novelist" (p. 267), although Myers is talking about short tales. Ignoring entirely the form More used for the tracts, Myers insists that "Transcribing her society's exigent problems into fiction, More helped give the novel a new seriousness, relevance, and direction" (p. 267). More's tales, designed to teach the poor to be satisfied with their lot in life and those better off how to help the poor without raising them too much, become in Myers' reading

fresh literary analogues of urgent social awareness; her thematic message of domestic heroism occasions a new domestic realism, ideas and aesthetics are generated from the woman novelist's characteristic stance. In its complex mix of literary and cultural innovation, More's Repository illustrates how women's educative and caretaking role...

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