XXIIHANNAH MORE
Miss Charlotte M. Yonge’scharming little biography of Hannah More brings strikingly before us the picture of the authoress ofCœlebs in Search of a Wife, and also depicts in a way that will not easily be forgotten, some of the more striking contrasts between the present day and the England of eighty or ninety years ago. There are some who are always inclined to say “the old is better”; but they must be very curiously constituted who can look back on the social condition of our country at the end of the last century and beginning of this, without being filled with amazement and thankfulness at the improvement that has taken place.
It is not so generally remembered as it ought to be, that the second half of Hannah More’s life was devoted to the service of the poor, especially to the spread of some measure of education and civilisation in the then almost savage districts in the neighbourhood of Cheddar, and of the Mendip Hills. Yet even so advanced an educationalist as Hannah More thought that on no account should the poor be taught to write. In a letter to Bishop Beadon, describing her system of instruction for the poor children in the parishes immediately under her care, she says: “They learn on week-days such coarse work as may fit them for servants.I allow of no writing for the poor.My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.” We cannot have a more apt illustration of the fact that the advanced reformer of one generation may become, by the natural growth of society, the type of what is most exaggeratedly retrograde in the next. It would be very ungenerous and short-sighted on our part to condemn Hannah More for her narrowness of view. She belonged to a day when the farmers in the village, where she sought to establish a Sunday school, begged her to desist because “religion would be the ruin of agriculture, and had done nothing but mischief ever since it had been brought in by the monks at Glastonbury.” At another place her educational schemes were so stoutly opposed by all the leading inhabitants that it was impossible to obtain for the school the shelter of any roof, and the children were accordingly assembled to sing a few hymns under an apple-tree. They were soon, however, driven from this shelter by the fears of the owner of the tree, who said he was afraid the hymn singing was “methody,” and that “methody” had blighted an apple-tree belonging to his mother!
Even these examples of ignorance and superstition might possibly, however, be matched at the present day. More thoroughly significant of a state of things that is past and gone for ever, is the following incident. “On a Sunday,” about the year 1790, “in the midst of morning service the congregations in the Bristol churches were startled by the bell and voice of the crier, proclaiming the reward of a guinea for a poor negro girl who had run away.” The idea of property in human beings is one that is now universally abhorrent; but less than a hundred years ago the loss of such property could be cried in the midst of congregations assembled to acknowledge the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity, and it was only one here and there among the worshippers who felt the blasphemy and the mockery of the proceeding.
As an illustration of the extreme hardships endured by the poor before the era of steam manufactures had set in, we learn that the difficulty in obtaining clothes was so great that at Brentford, close to London, thrifty parents bought rags by the pound, and made clothing for their children by patching the pieces together. Brushes and combs, it is added, were entirely unknown. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that the poorest beggar of the present day can, if he choose, be more luxuriously clad and cared for than the children of the thrifty poor a hundred years ago. The difference in morals is as great as the difference in manners and education. Hannah More heard a charity sermon, in which the preacher, a dignified ecclesiastic, propounded that “the rich and great should be extremely liberal in their charities, because theywere happily exempted from the severer virtues.” This was the old Papal practice of the sale of indulgences appearing again in a Protestant dress. No wonder, if this was a type of the Gospel that was preached to the rich, that Patty, Hannah’s sister, was accustomed to say that she had good hope that the hearts of some of the “rich poor wretches” might be touched by her sister’s eloquence.
The change of manners may be illustrated by the following anecdote. Hannah More, in the height of her literary celebrity, was asked to sit next the Bishop of Chester, Dr. Porteous, at dinner, and make him talk. She pressed him to take a little wine. He replied, “I can’t drink alittle, child: therefore I never touch it. Abstinence is easy to me; temperance would be difficult.”
These were days when Edmund Spenser was not considered a poet, and when Dryden and Pope were preferred to Shakespeare. Hannah, however, defended Milton’sL’Allegro,Il Penseroso, andLycidas, against the strictures of Dr. Johnson; though they found themselves in entire agreement in depreciating Milton’s sonnets. Johnson’s simile for a sonnet was “a bead carved out of a cherry stone.” The noble and solemn music of Milton’s majestic sonnets certainly did not harmonise with Johnson’s image, and, therefore, as Milton’s sonnets were not pretty playthings, it was agreed that he could not write sonnets.
The bigotry and narrowness of religious criticism at that day may be measured by the fact, which Hannah mentions in one of her letters, that her book onPractical Pietyhad been attacked by the Calvinists as giving a sanction to idolatry, because she had spoken of the sun as “he.” She did not altogether escape being tarred with the same brush, if we may judge from the passage inCœlebs, where she makes Mr. Stanley complain of Day’sSandford and Merton, and other books which had lately been written for the young, that there was “no intimation in them of the corruption of human nature, and thus that they contradict the catechism when it speaks of being ‘born in sin, and the children of wrath.’” She could not help, it appears, taking her religion sadly, as English people are supposed to take their pleasures. There was, however, a great fund of natural gaiety and light-heartedness in her, but whether she considered this one of the results of being a child of wrath or not, she did not seem to think gaiety, any more than writing, was a thing to be encouraged in the poor. She describes a great meeting of the schools founded by herself in the Mendip Hills. This annual “Mendip feast” took the form of what we should now call a gigantic school treat. The schools established were spread over an area of twenty-eight miles, and nearly the whole population of the villages, to the number of seven or eight thousand people, attended. The children were generously regaled on substantial fare. But nothing in the form of a game or a festivity of any kind was permitted. The singing of “God save the King” “is the only pleasure in the form of a song we ever allow.... The meeting,” she says again, “took its rise from religious institutions. The day passed in the exercise of duties, and closed with joy. Nothing of a gay nature was introduced....”
One cannot help thinking, on reading this, that she had only herself to thank if, in spite of all her talents and goodness, her name became a byword for severity and primness. Charles Lamb speaks in one of his early letters of “out-Hannahing Hannah More”; and she herself tells what she states is a true story, illustrating the way in which she was regarded in circles where childish merriment was not discountenanced: “A lady gave a very great children’s ball,” wrote Miss Hannah, somewhere about 1792: “at the upper end of the room, in an elevated place, was dressed out a figure to represent me, with a large rod in my hand, prepared to punish such naughty doings.”
The pity of this was that her natural disposition seems to have been sprightly and gay enough; her verses and other compositions often show a very pretty wit. If she had been as merry when she undertook her great work on the Mendips, as she was in the days when she was the friend and constant companion of Garrick, Johnson, and Horace Walpole, the general impression left by her character would have been a much more attractive one. Miss Yonge thinks that the chief reason of the austerity of her religion is to be found in the low condition of morals at the time. “There was scarcely,” she writes, “an innocent popular song in existence, simple enough,” ... “and unconnected with evil, and the children and their parents were still too utterly rough and uncivilised to make it safe to relax the bonds of restraint for a moment.” We cannot think that this excuse is altogether valid: the age that had produced “John Gilpin” and “Goody Two Shoes” can hardly be said to be without one innocent popular song or story which would amuse children. The gloomy complexion given to religion by the school of which Hannah More was a member has a great deal to answer for; in some temperaments, among whom the poet Cowper may be quoted as a type, the gentle and sensitive nature was plunged into profound and morbid melancholy which wrecked the whole existence of its victim; in others, of a more energetic and rebellious character, it produced a violent reaction, not only against religion, but against all moral order, and every kind of restraint. Just as the excesses of the reign of Charles II. followed the grim and rigid piety of Puritan England, so the orgies of the Prince Regent and his boon companions followed the austere and mirth-killing religion of the early evangelicals. About the time of which we are now writing, a serious attack was made in one of the religious papers upon Jane Taylor, the joint authoress with her sister ofHymns for Infant Minds, because in one of her stories she had represented, without reprobation, a family party of young children enjoying a dance together. When people impute wickedness to actions that are in themselves innocent and harmless, they are tampering with and weakening their own moral sense, and that of all those brought within their influence. To invent sins generally ends in manufacturing sinners.
Hannah More, the youngest but one of five sisters, daughters of Jacob More, master of the school at Stapleton, near Bristol, was born about 1745. Her father belonged to a Norfolk family, several members of which had been numbered amongst Cromwell’s Ironsides. Jacob More, however, forsook the family traditions both in politics and religion. He became a churchman and a Tory; and this may have been the cause of his leaving the home of his fathers, and settling in the West Country. He here married a farmer’s daughter, of whom little is known except that she persuaded her husband to impart his classical and mathematical learning to his clever little daughter, and that by many acts of motherly sympathy she encouraged her children to use the talents with which Nature had very liberally endowed them. The five sisters, Mary, Betsy, Sally, Hannah, and Patty, were a tribe of whom any mother might have been proud. Hannah and Patty were inseparable, sharing every hope and every occupation and possession. Their taste was for literature. Sally was the wit of the family. Mary and Betsy supplied the practical, housewifely element in the quintet. As a little girl, Hannah’s two ambitions were to “live in a cottage too low for a clock, and to go to London to see bishops and booksellers!” At the age of twenty-one, Mary More set up a school on her own account in Bristol. Betsy and Sally were her assistants, and Hannah and Patty were among the first batch of pupils. Sally in after years thus described this adventurous proceeding to her friend 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 littlelarning—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” (pp. 6, 7, Miss Yonge’sHannah More).
Hannah’s unusual abilities soon began to attract notice. She wrote a play for school acting, which had a great success; we are told how on one occasion, when she was ill (her health was always delicate), her doctor was so carried away by the charm of her conversation that he forgot to make any inquiries about her health; he took his leave, and was on the point of departing from the house, when he returned with the inquiry, “And how are you, my poor child?”
Hannah’s first visit to London was about 1772 or 1773, when she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. She saw the first performance of Sheridan’sRivals, and sagely remarks that the writer must be treated with indulgence, for that “much is to be forgiven in an author of twenty-three, whose genius is likely to be his principal inheritance.” She was introduced to Miss Reynolds, Sir Joshua’s sister, and this lady promised to make her known to Dr. Johnson. She saw Garrick, the great actor, inKing Lear, and was so much impressed by him that she wrote a long description of his acting in a letter that was handed about among her friends and gained a sort of half publicity, as seems to have been not unusual at that time. This letter paved the way for an introduction to Garrick and his wife, and Hannah More became one of their most intimate and valued friends. Garrick encouraged Hannah to write for the stage, and some of her pieces, under his fostering care, had an astonishing degree of success. Garrick’s favourite name for the poetess was “Nine,” by way of delicate comparison with the nine muses. Horace Walpole used to call her “Saint Hannah.” Dr. Johnson called her “a saucy girl,” perhaps the nicest epithet of the three. When Garrick died, Hannah was one of the ladies admitted to Westminster Abbey to witness his funeral. Hannah spent the first year of her friend’s widowhood with Mrs. Garrick at her house near Hampton; and on many other occasions it was shown, in a similar way, that Hannah was one on whom her friends were accustomed to depend for sympathy and support in the darkest hours of mourning and sorrow. After Garrick’s death Hannah never visited a theatre again. She did not even go to see her own play,The Fatal Falsehood, which Garrick had been preparing to put on the stage at the time of his death.
From the time of her first entry into London society she seems to have had access to all that was best in the world of literature and art, and to have played a distinguished part there. It is, therefore, the more to her credit that she turned from this gay and brilliant life in order to devote herself to the work of education and civilisation among the poor people of Cheddar and the Mendips.
She and her sister Patty had settled in a pretty cottage home called Cowslip Green, in the parish of Wrington, Bristol. Here they were visited by their friends from the great world, and hence they, in their turn, made their annual visit to London. Mention has already been made of the painful impression produced in Hannah on hearing, in a Bristol church, the loss of a negro girl proclaimed by the crier in the midst of the morning service. She was a woman much influenced by her friendships. She had been a poetess and dramatist under the influence of Johnson and Garrick; Wilberforce and John Newton (Cowper’s friend) had now awakened in her a passion of pity for slaves and a passion of hatred against slavery. Miss Yonge states that Hannah was before this a friend of Lady Middleton, “who had first inspired William Wilberforce with the idea of his great work in life; and on going to make her annual visit to Mrs. Garrick in the winter of 1787, she first heard of the Bill that was to be introduced into Parliament for the abolition of slavery.” In 1789 William Wilberforce came to spend a few days with the Misses More, at Cowslip Green. By way of showing him the beauties of the neighbourhood the ladies sent him to see the picturesque cliffs and caves of Cheddar. When their guest returned he was remarkably silent; the food that had been sent with him was untasted, and he remained for some hours alone in his room. His hostesses naturally feared that he was ill; but when he rejoined them they discovered that instead of admiring the natural beauties of Cheddar, the tender heart of the future emancipator of the slaves had been wholly engrossed by the evidences which had presented themselves of human depravity, misery, and neglect. The inhabitants of the picturesque region were almost savages; their poverty was frightful; there was no sort of attempt at education of any kind; there were no resident clergymen; the people were utterly lawless; it was unsafe for a decent person to go amongst them unprotected; writs could not be served but at risk of the constable being thrown down some cliff or pit. These things Wilberforce had discovered, and they obscured for him all the pleasure which pretty scenery could afford. “Miss More,” he said, “something must be done for Cheddar;” and after much consultation and thought, before he went away, he again charged the ladies with the task of civilising and educating the wild district which lay at their doors, adding, “If you will be at the trouble, I will be at the expense.”
From this time the sisters led a new life. It is true that Hannah did not give up her literary pursuits; she laboured with her pen as well as with other instruments in pursuit of her end. But now the main object of both Patty and Hannah was to educate and reclaim the inhabitants of the districts which have been named. The work, merely from a physical point of view, was by no means light. There were no roads, or such bad ones that the only practical means of travelling was on horseback. Their first task was to endeavour to gain the goodwill and assistance of the farmers and gentry. Patty says of some of these, “Theyare as ignorant as the beasts that perish; intoxicated every day before dinner, and plunged into such vice that I begin to think London a virtuous place.” Such clergy as did occasionally visit the district might as well have stayed away. Of one Patty says, “Mr. G—— is intoxicated about six times a week, and very frequently is prevented from preaching by two black eyes, honestly earned by fighting.” The sisters showed their good sense, as well as their benevolence, by finding out and utilising whatever in the way of a good influence existed in the district. They rejected no help because the helper did not conform to their particular pattern of orthodoxy. They did not hesitate, although they were strict churchwomen, to engage a Methodist to act as mistress in one of their Sunday schools. They soon had thirteen villages under their care, and an improvement began to be visible in nearly all of them. Of one of them, Congresbury, Hannah wrote describing the first opening of the school: “It was an affecting sight. Several of the grown-up youths had been tried at the last assizes, three were the children of a person lately condemned to be hanged, many thieves, all ignorant, profane, and vicious beyond belief. Of this banditti we have enlisted one hundred and seventy; and when the clergyman, a hard man, who is also the magistrate, saw these creatures kneeling round us, whom he had seldom seen but to commit or punish in some way, he burst into tears. I can do them little good, I fear, but the grace of God can do all....”
The Misses More did not escape bitter persecution and misrepresentation in their good work. A Mr. Bere, curate of Wedmore, distinguished himself by his furious hostility to them. He threatened them with penal proceedings for teaching without a license, induced the farmers to make formal complaint to the Archdeacon against them, and obtained an affidavit from a half-witted young man, whom they had befriended, making personal charges against them. Influential friends, however, came to the ladies’ assistance. The good Bishop said, “When he heard it was Miss Hannah More he knew it was all right.” But the persecution they endured was not without its effect on their health and spirits. Hannah was laid up for about two years at this time, and was unable to pursue her work amongst her poor scholars.
In 1802 the sisters removed from Cowslip Green to Barley Wood; here Hannah wrote some of her best known books. None of her works is better known, at least by name, thanCœlebs in Search of a Wife. Here also, by the request of Queen Charlotte, she wrote a book of advice on the education of Princess Charlotte, who, it was thought, was destined to become Queen of England.The Shepherd of Salisbury Plainwas written at Cowslip Green, as one of a large series of simple stories for the poor, intended by the sisters to counteract and undersell popular literature of an objectionable character. The Misses More produced three of these tracts a month, and it is calculated that more than two millions were sold in a year. By manyThe Shepherd of Salisbury Plainwas considered Hannah More’s masterpiece. Wilberforce said he “would rather present himself before Heaven with theShepherdin his hand than withPeveril of the Peak.”
At Barley Wood Hannah experienced the great and unavoidable calamity of old age, the gradual loss, by death, of the friends and allies of her youth. Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and Garrick were dead long ago, and the brilliant society in London, of which Hannah had formed part, had lost many of its stars. One by one, death laid its hand on the members of the More sisterhood, till Hannah and Patty, the lifelong friends and companions, were the only two left. In September 1819, Mr. and Mrs. Wilberforce being on a visit to the sisters, Patty sat up till a late hour of the night talking to her guests of old days, and Hannah’s first introduction to London. In the morning the first news that met the visitors’ ears was that Patty was dying. She lingered about a week, but never regained consciousness, and then Hannah was left quite alone, the last of all the five. But her friends gathered round her, and her vigorous intellect and strong sense of duty did not allow her to be idle. She still had vivacity enough to write humorous letters and verses, and to poke fun at what she considered the misdirected zeal of some educationalists.
A few years before her death, Hannah More removed to Windsor Terrace, Clifton. Her old age was cheered by the companionship of a friend, Miss Frowd, of whom Miss More wrote, she is “my domestic chaplain, my house apothecary, knitter and lamplighter, missionary to my numerous and learned seminaries, and, without controversy, the queen of clubs” (penny clubs). When an old lady of more than eighty can write in this buoyant strain, it is the more to be regretted that she seemed to have thought gaiety was a thing it was dangerous to encourage a taste for in the poor. Still, though we cannot help regretting this, we shall do well if we can imitate, in however humble a degree, her unselfish devotion to goodness and the way in which she spent the best years of her life in trying to improve the lot of the most destitute and miserable of her neighbours. She lived to be eighty-eight. She had no long illness, and no failure of any of her mental faculties, except that of memory. Her body became gradually weaker, and she longed for death. One day “she stretched out her arms, crying, ‘Patty! joy!’” She never spoke again, dying a few hours later, on 7th September 1833.