Portrait of a Woman of Affairs—Old Style

PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS-OLD STYLE PHILIP CHILD I T would be a pious act for modern woman, who votes, drives a car, and enters business and the professions, to survey her origins in- the life of Mrs. Hannah More, who was one of the first women not born to the purple to ach1eve fame and a career without being somebody's mistress, and who died exactly a century ago at the ripe age of eighty-eight. In her youth a blue-stocking and a friend of Johnson and Garrick, in maturity ~n active·andablephiJanthrop1st, gradually during the long years of later life she settled into the congenial role of preceptress and maiden aunt extraordinary to the docile young of three generations. The titles of her books have the prim fragrance of an oldfashioned costume: Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education with a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune; An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World; Practical Piety, or the Influence of the Religion of·the Heart on the Life and Manners. These books, once best-sellers, speak only to ghostly readers now; yet behind the starched phrases still lurks the authentic tone of an old woman of flesh and blood. Two portraits of her, almost as starched and prim as her phrases, adorn her works. One 1nay choose between a rather stern old lady in a ribboned lace cap who in Volume I presides with "sanctitu.de severe and pure," and not a little complacency, over the parade of octavos, and a carefully posed, charming young lady in the last volumeprecisely ' typical of all charming young ladies who are 87 TI-IE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY carefully posed, in all ages. Between the extremes of those two symbolic portraits lay a life full of the placid monotony of a woman's existence in her time, yet full, too, of uncommon events, for she did unusual things and had unusual friends. Her life was a long one. Prince Charlie, last of the princes by divine right, marched to Culloden in 1745, the year of her birth; in the year of her death; almost a century later, the refonned parliament of 1833 gave democracy its first foothold. Certain scenes, 'SOme picturesq~e, some apparently trivial, flash forth from the small talk of her letters and reward one with glimpses of her real character. One sees the future blue-stocking first as a little girl, frightening her father by her precocity at studies and filling quires of paper with letters to famous depraved characters intended to reclaim them from error. Then, in her twenties, we see her with her sister Sally in London; and that Babylon, where many a literary genius had starved on Grub Street, lay at the feet of a goodlooking , amiable girl with just the right shade of selfconfidence and of mediocre talent to please fashion. She was· a sprightly young lady who loved small but very rational parties, "where the spirit of the evening is kept upon the strength of a little lemonade till past eleven without cards, scandal, or politics." Dr. Johnson had never been able to resist good-looking young ladies and Miss Hannah was handsome; Sally More writes with vivacity of how they had met "Dictionary Johnson, Abyssinia Johnson"·in the flesh. He had playfully shaken his scientific head at young Hannah and called her a silly thing. She and Dr. Johnson delighted to exchange compliments in·sonorous, perfectly balanced prose. Once there had been august censure, too, when she had owned to reading Tom Jones, "a confession which no modest lady 88 PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS should ever make." Boswell tells an anecdote that fixes for an instant her authentic gestures: Dr. Johnson looking very serious, very pontifical, had made a double entendre of some raciness and the company had tittered; Hannah had wanted to giggle too, yet at the same ti1ne she had valued her decorum, so she "slyly hid her face behind a lady's back who sat on the sa1ne settee." Inevitably she tiffs w1th Bozzy and scolds him majesticalJy for "entering her presence much disordered...