Hannah More

Front matter

Eminent Women Series

EDITED BY JOHN H. INGRAM

HANNAH MORE

Chapter I.

HANNAH MORE.

CHAPTER I.

STAPYLTON.

Hannah More may be reckoned as standing at the parting point of two periods, the one ending at the days when clergymen and schoolmasters were considered to be an inferior class; the other beginning at the time when their position had become a high one. Again, she was at first a brilliant member of the Bas Bleu Society, the faint English reflection of the Hotel de Rambouillet; and afterwards shared with Mrs. Trimmer the honour of making English ladies the foremost agents in the religious education of the poor. A writer at first of the plays and poems which were the fashion of the Eighteenth Century, she afterwards devoted her talents to the lighter forms of religious literature for the masses, and again was a pioneer; and lastly, she wrote treatises on education, morals, and religion, which had great effect on her own generation. Her excellence and devotion have, in a manner, obscured her fame, and the many who are inclined to take her as an impersonation of what is impertinently called "goodiness," have no idea of her talents, or of the society she had enjoyed. The friend of Garrick, Horace Walpole, and Johnson, was no narrow-minded woman absorbed in village gossip.

The family from which she sprang was one of the old Puritan stocks of Norfolk, which furnished many of Oliver Cromwell's Ironsides. Two great-uncles of her father had been captains in the days of the Protector, and her grandmother had stories to tell of nocturnal meetings for Presbyterian worship, in the time of the Five Mile Act; and would assure her children that the way to value Gospel privileges was to have to struggle through snow and rain at midnight, and then to listen to the minister while the door was guarded by one of the congregation with a drawn sword.

This grandmother, however, Hannah never knew, and though the rest of the family continued Presbyterian, Jacob More, her father, was a strong Churchman and Tory, in consequence, perhaps, of his education at the Norwich Grammar School, where he was a distinguished pupil. He hoped to have become a clergyman, but a law-suit turning out unsuccessfully on his part, left him so penniless that he was thankful to Lord Bottetourt for an appointment to a small foundation school in Somersetshire. Probably his change of principles had cut him off from the rest of his family, for they seem to have kept up no connection with him till after his daughter had made herself a name; and he accommodated himself to a position, then viewed as very humble, by marrying a farmer's daughter, who was a good, sensible woman of plain education.

Stapylton, the school which he held, has shared the fate of numerous small grammar schools scattered over the country, and is no more. The room where he taught is now used for parish purposes and absorbed into Fisherton itself, almost a suburb of Bristol, and well known as containing—very appropriately—a Training School for Mistresses, who ought to look back to Hannah More as one of the very first in the path they are to tread.

Between the years 1736 and 1747, five daughters were born to Mr. and Mrs. More—Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, Hannah, and Martha. Good abilities seem to have been the family heritage; but Hannah was soon acknowledged as the cleverest of the five. When at three years old her mother began to teach her to read, she proved to have already learnt much in play from her sisters; and, a year later, she distinguished herself when catechised in the parish church.

Their nurse had been in the service of Dryden, and had been impressed with his fame. Little Hannah used to beg for stories of him, and it would be amusing to know what ideas she thus imbibed of "Glorious John." Her two ambitions were curiously gratified—namely, to live in a cottage too low for a clock, and to go to London to see bishops and booksellers.

There were very few books in the house, for almost all Mr. More's library had been lost on the journey from Norfolk; but he had a memory so well stored that he taught his children history by word of mouth, and sometimes delighted his own ears and theirs by rolling out poems or orations in Latin or Greek. His intelligent little girls must have been no small refreshment to him after his grinding work on his regular pupils; and he gratified Hannah's ardent wishes, backed by her mother, by beginning to teach her Latin and mathematics.

He was soon alarmed at the way in which she outstripped his boys, and, fearing that the reputation of being a learned lady would be a disadvantage to her, he insisted on dropping the mathematical studies, and was with difficulty persuaded to go on with the classical readings.

Mary More, the eldest sister, was meantime sent as a weekly boarder to a French school at Bristol, coming home from Saturday till Monday, and then imparting the results of her studies to the younger ones, and with so much success that Hannah was afterwards enabled to act as interpreter to some French officers, who were living near Bristol as prisoners on parole, during the war of the Austrian Succession, and who frequented Mr. More's house.

The little bright-eyed, quick-witted girl was always picking up information, or writing poems and tales on scraps of paper. Her lesser sister, Martha, always entirely one with her, used to creep down after they were in bed to secure these fragments of paper, and then to hoard them in the housemaid's closet: it was the prime ambition of the pair to possess a whole quire of paper, and when this was given them by the kind mother, it seemed at first inexhaustible. We long to know more of that good mother, who must have been an excellent and wise woman; but she is never again mentioned in the biographies, nor do we even know the date of her death.

Chapter II.

CHAPTER II.

BRISTOL.

Mary More's talent for teaching and governing must have made itself evident, for she was only twenty-one when, by the assistance of friends, a house was taken in Bristol for a young ladies' school, of which she was manager, Betty acting as housekeeper and Sally as assistant teacher; Hannah, at twelve years old, and Patty at ten, were pupils.

Mary must have been a most remarkable young woman to carry through such an undertaking not only with complete success, but in perfect harmony with sisters so little younger than herself.

Sally's description of their attempt was thus made to Dr. Johnson:—"We were born with more desires than guineas. As years increased our appetites the cupboard at home grew too small to gratify them; and, with a bottle of water, a bed, and a blanket, we set out to seek our fortunes. We found a great house with nothing in it—and it was like to remain so—till, looking into our knowledge-boxes, we happened to find a little larning, a good thing when land is gone, or rather none; and so at last, by giving a little of this larning to those who had none, we got a good store of gold in return."

What did these young ladies teach? It is plain, from the letters of all, that they thoroughly understood their mother tongue, thanks to their scholarly father; and they probably gave what is now called an English education, including the arts of good reading and elocution; French and Italian they also taught, and needle work was then a high art. Miss More's pupils were well thought of for the complete grounding they received.

The change gave Hannah access to a feast of books, especially Shakespeare and Milton and others, among which the Spectator was her favourite and her model in the attempts at writing, which continued to be her delight. One of her first compositions that saw the light was an ode on some lectures on eloquence which Sheridan had been giving at Bristol. It was shown to him by a friend, and was good enough to excite surprise that the writer should be a girl of sixteen.

A little later the fever of the drama set in upon the pupils, and Hannah, at seventeen, produced a play for their acting, entitled The Search after Happiness, a highly improving pastoral, wherein a party of young ladies, weary of themselves and of the world, go to consult a worthy shepherdess—by name Urania—telling her 'Tis happiness we seek. Oh! deign to tell Where the coy fugitive delights to dwell.

There is Euphelia, the vain beauty, bred in the regal splendour of a court; Cleora, the learned damsel, who confesses,— This the chief transport I from science drew, That all might know how much Cleora knew.

Then there is the dreamy, novel-reading maiden, Pastorella, saying,— I scorned the manners of the world I saw, My guide was fiction, and romance my law. And, lastly, the gentle Laurinda "never wished to learn, nor cared to know"; so that she is "in sense a woman, but in soul a child." Urania moralizes appropriately to each damsel, and dismisses them all greatly edified.

The absence of all excitement, and especially its freedom from perilous male characters, recommended The Search after Happiness to all the ladies' schools.

There is no more delightful chapter in Miss Mitford's sketches than where she describes the getting up of this highly-improving comedy at the school she attended at Reading. There is something grotesque in the moralizings of the school-girl of seventeen about the ennui and unsatisfactoriness of the great world of which she knew so little, yet the language and versification make it a really remarkable achievement for a girl of her age, and it procured her some consideration in society.

In spite of ill-health and constantly-recurring severe headaches, probably nervous, she was evidently a very pretty girl, with delicate refined features, rather sharply cut, and beautiful keen, dark eyes, which were enhanced in brilliancy by the whiteness of her powdered hair. Her conversation was charming. She was just the sort of young creature whose fresh, innocent intelligence is specially captivating to the elderly men with whom she converses, fearless of all idea of coquetry. Once, when very unwell, she so delighted her physician by her discussion of some book that he entirely forgot that she was his patient, and, after taking leave, returned with "And how are you, my poor child?"

She studied Latin, Spanish, and Italian, and exercised herself in poetical translations, most of which she afterwards destroyed as worthless; but she attained to such facility that at an Italian opera, to gratify the friend beside her, she scribbled an English version, which was at once printed by the local newspaper.

The other sisters enjoyed her successes without a shade of jealousy. They seemed to have equalled her in all but depth of learning and faculty of composition, and perhaps in wit and vivacity in public, though at home Sally was considered the wag. They were in the best society of the old merchant city, numbering among their friends Dean Tucker, and Dr. Langhorne, whom Hannah had met at Weston-super-Mare, and who asked her to correspond with him. Dr. James Stonehouse was also on intimate terms with the sisters. They also knew a Mr. Peach, who had helped Hume to correct his history. In fact, the professional society of Bristol was evidently of a superior order, and, as was the case in other old cathedral towns, included persons in trade who were often as cultured as the classes higher in social rank. Poor Chatterton was living his strange life there, and it will be further remembered that here dwelt Amos Cottle, bookseller, who afterwards appreciated the Lake poets in their crude youth; and here, too, worked as dressmakers the ladies who married Southey and Coleridge.

Bristol was a great centre of operations to Charles Wesley, but Methodism never seems to have attracted the More sisters. They were thoughtful religious women after the eighteenth-century pattern, devout and careful of their own souls, but never looking beyond the ordinary duties about them.

It is rather curious in these days to see the utter insensibility to church architecture in those times. Though she lived in the city of St. Mary Redcliffe, near the Mayor's chapel, as well as the Cathedral, and within reach of Wells and Glastonbury, there is not a single reference to their beauty in any of Hannah More's letters; and it may be doubted whether she had any notion of admiring natural scenery beyond the trim garden and shady park, though perhaps she loved it more than she knew, for picnics among the lovely Clifton rocks and woods were the holiday recreation of the sisterhood. She certainly, in all her works, seems to feel that "the proper study of mankind is man."

However, at this period, she was to study man in a new and more trying light. Two young ladies named Turner, who were among the pupils, always spent their holidays with their guardian cousin, the Squire of Belmont, a house very beautifully placed on a kind of natural terrace on the steep slope of hills extending above the valley of the Avon. They were encouraged to invite their friends to come with them. Hannah and Patty, then twenty-two and twenty, were of the party, and there was much planning of walks and landscape gardening. Hannah wrote inscriptions for favoured spots, and these Mr. Turner, with more courtesy than taste, caused to be painted in black and white on boards exactly like notices to trespassers, and affixed to trees, where they were extant within the last forty years.

All this led to the natural result. Mr. Turner fell in love with the bright, young poetess, and, though he was twenty years her elder, she accepted him, gave up her interest in the school, and purchased her trousseau. The wedding day was fixed, but the gentleman continually deferred it, until the family became indignant, and Sir James Stonehouse, an intimate friend, was called into their counsels, and the engagement was broken off. Mr. Turner was anxious to make some sort of compensation in money, but this the lady refused. He persisted, however; and Sir James Stonehouse, without her knowledge, became trustee for an annuity which was settled upon her, and which she was finally induced to accept.

Everyone agreed that no blame attached to her in this strange affair, the result probably of an elderly man growing shy and fearing to have rashly committed himself. He always spoke of Hannah with the greatest respect, and at his death bequeathed to her one thousand pounds. But this unfortunate experience, when she must have suffered grievously, steeled her heart against other offers, and she rejected one that was made to her a little later. This matter may be held to have been the end of her joyous girlhood, and to have ushered in the second period of her life—her brilliant womanhood.

Chapter III.

CHAPTER III.

THE LONDON WORLD.

The private income which Mr. Turner's annuity placed at Hannah More's disposal set her free from the obligations of the school, and enabled her to gratify her longings to behold a larger, fuller world than that of Bristol,— Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield, Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field.

Her letters are undated, but it must have been in 1772 or 1773 that she first plunged into the new life of London, when she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. These were the days when the evils of the Court of George II. had not become unfashionable, in spite of the influence of George III. and Queen Charlotte. The philosophy of Voltaire and Rousseau was affected by the more pretentious; there was much open and unblushing immorality in the higher ranks; card-playing for large sums of money was almost universal; and the routs and masquerades described in Sir Charles Grandison and Evelina may be taken as types of the favourite diversions of the young and lively in The teacup times of hood and hoop, And when the patch was worn.

There were, however, other circles. There was that which was sometimes called that of the Wits, which assembled at their head-quarters at St. James's Coffee House, and which Goldsmith so ably sketched in Retaliation, though he durst not there touch on the elephant of this true menagerie of lions, Samuel Johnson, or his satellite Boswell, and contented himself with describing those of lesser pretension, such as Edmund Burke,— Though equal to all things, for all things unfit, Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit, For a patriot too cool, for a drudge disobedient, And too fond of the right to pursue the expedient. There, too, was Sir Joshua Reynolds,— Still born to improve us in every part, His pencil our faces, his manners our heart; and David Garrick, the great actor, "an abridgement of all that is pleasant in man."

And connected with these by intellect and taste, as well as with the higher aristocracy by birth and rank, was the Bas Bleu, a society of ladies, of whom the foremost was Mrs. Montagu, the daughter of a Yorkshire squire, and whose husband, Edward Montagu, was the grandson of the Earl of Sandwich. She was very charming in conversation, and had obtained considerable celebrity by publishing a vindication of Shakespeare against the attacks of Voltaire, somewhat disappointing to read after seeing all the encomiums lavished on it, but a wonderful performance for a woman at that time. Her house, at the corner of Portman Square, was one of the old aristocratic mansions enclosed in a court, and here on May Day she was wont to give a dinner to the chimney sweeps of London. One of her rooms had hangings of peacocks' feathers, admired and be-rhymed at that time, but thought less beautiful by the next generation. Other members of this delightful society were Mrs. Vesey, called by her friends the Sylph, wife of a member of the Irish Parliament; Mrs. Delany, of the old loyal Granville family, and wife of Dean Delany, is well known through Lady Hall's biography; Mrs. Boscawen, the widow of a distinguished admiral, and a woman of high culture; Mrs. Chapone, noted for some excellent letters to her niece on self-culture; and Elizabeth Carter, daughter to the perpetual curate of Deal, knew about nine languages, and had translated Epictetus from the Greek.

Frances Reynolds, who kept house for her brother Sir Joshua, had not brought from Devonshire any extraordinary attainments, but she was an agreeable, intelligent woman, who knew how to do what the French call tenir un salon, and her drawing-room was one of the points of contact between the Wits and the Bas Bleus. To her Hannah carried letters of introduction when she set forth, with Patty and an unnamed friend, on what was then a perilous journey, whether by post-chaise or stage-coach, through ditch-like roads beset by highwaymen. However, neither then, nor in her thirty-seven subsequent journeys, does she seem to have met with any accident.

When settled in lodgings in Henrietta Street, the first experience of the sisters was the sight of the new comedy, Sheridan's Rivals, with which Hannah does not seem to have been greatly impressed. "For my own part," she says, "I think he ought to be treated with great indulgence; much is to be forgiven in an author of three-and-twenty, whose genius is likely to be his principal inheritance. I love him for the sake of his ingenious and admirable mother. On the whole I was tolerably entertained."

It seems that the play was sacrificed by bad acting; especially of the part of Sir Lucius O'Trigger. But little did Hannah or the public guess that this almost unsuccessful drama would furnish household words long after the popular favourites of the day were forgotten. Soon after followed an entertainment at the amiable Sir Joshua Reynolds's, where the party dined, drank tea, and supped, and did not come away till one o'clock. There must have been at least eight hours of the "brilliant circle of both sexes, not in general literary, though partly so."

It must have been mid-winter, for in the next letter, written after visiting Hampton Court and Twickenham, she speaks of the Thames being frozen. This visit failed in making her acquainted with Dr. Johnson; that "Idler, that Rambler," she says, "was out of town." But Miss Reynolds promised to introduce her to him whenever it should be possible. The publisher Caddell, who was, like herself, a native of Stapylton, interested her by telling her that he had sold four thousand copies of the Journey to the Hebrides in the first week. "It is an agreeable work," says Hannah, though the subject is sterility itself." Another instance of the insensibility of the time to the marvels of nature.

But another great wish was fulfilled; she saw Garrick in some of his most famous parts, and a letter she wrote, describing him as King Lear, was handed about by her friends, and prepared the way for her introduction to him when she went to London the following year with her two sisters, Sally and Patty, both of whom were capital letter-writers.

David Garrick was then about sixty-five years old, and was on the point of retiring from the stage. He was a gentleman by birth, grandson to one of the exiles of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and had worked as an assistant master in Dr. Johnson's school at Edial, in Leicestershire, and, when both grew sick of the undertaking, had gone with him to seek his fortune in London. There, after attempting to be a wine merchant, by—as Foote averred—living in a cellar with three quarts of vinegar, Garrick found his vocation in the theatre. His talents raised him to the first eminence as an actor, and, by-and-by, he became manager of Drury Lane Theatre. The stage, as he conducted it, so engrossed people's minds that it was even called "the Fourth Estate." He married Eva Maria Veigel, a young Austrian dancer, who at Vienna had been so much admired by one of the young archdukes that, though her conduct was irreproachable, the Empress Maria Theresa thought it wise to send her out of reach. La Violetta, as she was called, by her beauty, grace, and an unusual charm of manner, at once gained the heart of the English Roscius. He married her as soon as possible, and never let her perform publicly again. It was a most happy marriage. She remained a Roman Catholic, and always retained her foreign manner and accent, which seem to have given a piquancy to her conversation; but she was an excellent mistress in his two houses at the Adelphi and at Hampton, and was received cordially in society. Indeed, Garrick kept his home entirely apart from his profession, and Mrs. Montagu declared that she had only once met an actor there, and never had seen a card in it.

The Garricks were curious to see the lady who had written the letter about "King Lear," and no sooner did they meet her than a liking began, which ripened into a strong friendship. At their house, the next day, Hannah met Mrs. Montagu; and Miss Reynolds immediately after procured her a meeting with Dr. Johnson himself, who astonished her by coming forward to meet her with Sir Joshua's macaw on his arm, and repeating the first verse of a morning hymn which she had written. Then followed an introduction to Edmund Burke, "the sublime and beautiful Edmund Burke," as Sally wrote; and altogether the sisters were made free of what was probably the choicest circle of intelligent society then in existence; not so brilliant, original, or elegant as those salons at Paris, where "philosophy" was already preparing the way for change, but infinitely purer, deeper, and more conscientious, and with no lack of vivacity.

The three sisters, with their high cultivation, lively manners, country simplicity, and warm enthusiasm, must have been delightful to their new friends, who were for the most part by a good many years their senior and must have looked on them as mere girls. Miss Reynolds delighted them by proposing to take them to visit Dr. Johnson in his own house at Bolt Court, where he had given shelter to a broken-down surgeon and three destitute ladies, one of them, Anna Williams, an old friend of his late wife, being blind, and with such a temper that he paid half-a-crown a week extra to the servants to put up with her.

Sally More thus describes the visit:—

After having had a call from Dr. Percy, the Collector of the Reliques of Poetry—quite a sprightly modern, not a rusty antique, as I expected—Miss Reynolds ordered the coach to take us to Dr. Johnson's very own house. Yes, Abyssinia's Johnson! Dictionary's Johnson! Rambler's, Idler's, and Irene's Johnson! Can you picture to yourselves the palpitation of our hearts as we approached his mansion. The conversation turned on a new work of his just going to the press (The Tour to the Hebrides), and his old friend Richardson. Mrs. Williams, the blind poet, who lives with him, was introduced to us. She is engaging in her manner, her conversation lively and entertaining. Miss Reynolds told the Doctor of all our rapturous exclamations on the road. He shook his scientific head at Hannah, and said, "She was a silly thing." When our visit was ended he called for his hat (as it was raining) to attend us down a very long entry to our coach, and not Rasselas could have acquitted himself more en cavalier. We are engaged with him at Sir Joshua's, Wednesday evening. What do you think of us?

I forgot to mention that, not finding Johnson in his little parlour when we came in, Hannah seated herself in his great chair, hoping to catch a little of his genius; when he heard it he laughed heartily, and told her it was a chair on which he never sat. He said it reminded him of Boswell and himself when they stopped a night at the spot (as they imagined) where the weird Sisters appeared to Macbeth; the idea so worked on their enthusiasm that it quite deprived them of rest. However, they learnt the next morning, to their mortification, that they had been deceived, and were quite in another part of the country.

A few weeks later Sally writes:—

Tuesday evening we drank tea at Sir Joshua's with Dr. Johnson. Hannah is certainly a great favourite. She was placed next to him, and they had the entire conversation to themselves. They were both in remarkably high spirits: it was certainly her lucky night. I never heard her say so many good things. The Old Genius was extremely jocular, and the young one very pleasant. Yon would have imagined we had been at some comedy had you heard our peals of laughter. They indeed tried which could pepper the highest, and it is not clear to me that the lexicographer was really the highest seasoner.

It has been said that Johnson was importuned by Hannah's compliments, and that he once told her that she should consider what her praise was worth before she was so lavish of it. That he may have said something of the kind in an ill-humour is quite possible; but it is evident that he was very fond of her in general, and that her bright readiness and power of repartee amused him greatly. It was an age of compliments that would now sound fulsome, if not absurd, and Hannah was a demonstrative person, so that what seems like flattery was the expression of genuine enthusiasm, and was usually accepted as such. From her letters, the drollery of Hannah can quite be perceived. For instance, she writes to one of her sisters:— "Bear me, some god, O quickly bear me hence, To wholesome Solitude, the nurse of——

'sense' I was going to add in the words of Pope, till I recollected that pence had a more appropriate meaning."

Chapter IV.

CHAPTER IV.

HANNAH AS A POETESS.

After the feast of compliments and civilities that she had received, Hannah said to her sisters on her return to Bristol, "I have been so fed with flattering attentions that I think I will venture to try what is my real value by writing a slight poem, and offering it to Caddell myself."

Accordingly she produced a melancholy ballad, by name Sir Eldred of the Bower, on the model of those collected by Dr. Percy:— There was a young and valiant knight, Sir Eldred was his name; And never did a worthier knight The rank of knighthood claim.

The versification is smooth, the story the same as that of the old ballad of Gil Morice, anticipating the catastrophe of Rokeby, by which Mortham mistakes his wife's brother for a former lover, and kills him in her arms, causing thus her death and eliciting the moral: The deadliest wounds with which we bleed, Our crimes inflict alone; Man's mercies from God's hand proceed, His miseries from his own.

To this she added some verses written at the time of her visits to Belmont, where there is a red rock with a little stream proceeding from it, in a sort of scaur, overgrown with copsewood. Tradition connected with it a story of the time of the Roman occupation of Britain, of a maiden who pined away like Echo on being neglected by her lover:— Then strange to tell, if rural folks say true, To hardened rock the stiffening damsel grew. No more her shapeless features can be known, Stone is her body, and her limbs are stone.

When the tidings reached the swain, he rushed to the spot and stabbed himself, the dagger piercing to the stone, so that blood issued from it:— And though revolving ages since have passed The melting torrents undiminished last.