SOURCE: Demers, Patricia. “‘That Which before Us Lies in Daily Life’: Social Discourse.” In The World of Hannah More, pp. 76-98. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Demers studies the essays of Hannah More, finding that they stress the importance of education, living a moral and practical life, refraining from frivolity, and fulfilling the feminine role.]

To attempt to compress more than three decades of More's essay writing in a single chapter may seem both trivializing and impossible. The authorial voice does become more resonant, moving from the neophyte's offer of “a few remarks on such circumstances as seemed to her susceptible of some improvement, and on such subjects as she imagined were particularly interesting to young ladies”¹ to the authoritative clarion call to “British ladies” and “what they themselves might be if all their talents and unrivalled opportunities were turned to the best account.”² But many of the informing ideas—from Essays on Various Subjects (1777), Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788), An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1790), Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), and Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805) to her only novel, which extends this discourse to the procedures of courtship, Coelebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals (1808)—remain the same. Addressing the privileged and the great, whom she labels in Strictures as “the higher class,” and specifically the women of this class, More blends first-hand observation of and a judgmental distance from the events and practices discussed. The ratio of influential relations is direct: as “Reformation must begin with the great, … [whose] example is the fountain whence the vulgar draw their habits, actions, and characters,”³ so women's influence is supremely suited “to raise the depressed tone of public morals, and to awaken the drowsy spirit of religious principle.”⁴ Whether from Cowslip Green, or Pulteney Street, or Barley Wood, she adopts a position comparable to Cowper's; like the poet, whose “natural” images and “original and philosophic” thinking “enchanted” her,⁵ More prefers “through the loop-holes of retreat / To peep at such a world.”⁶ A cultural but not an ethnographic critic, she trains her sights on British women, whose character is “never [to] be determined by a comparison with the women of other nations.”⁷ Although More contends that she is “not sounding an alarm to female warriors … [or] a female polemic,” and that she has no “desire to make scholastic ladies or female dialecticians” or any “wish to enthrone [women] in the professor's chair, to deliver oracles, harangues, and dissertations,”⁸ she does not hesitate to display her own rhetorical skill and debating expertise. As acute in her suspicions of a woman's “deep and designing panegyrist”⁹ as she is audacious in striking deliberately close to home where “certain faults … press too near our self-love to be even perceptible to us,”¹⁰ More uses these lengthy prose works to develop, extend, and illustrate her ideology of the female station and influence.

She does much more than cast an occasional glance, for her intimate knowledge of fashionable Christianity becomes the most powerful weapon of her declarative, bold prose. Among the “worm[s] … feeding on the vitals of domestic virtue,” this strict Sabbatarian points to such habits as the summoning of a hairdresser on Sunday, the “petty mischief” of card money, by which “part of the wages of the servant is to be paid by his furnishing the implements of diversion for the guests of the master,” and “the daily and hourly lie of Not at home.”¹¹ More bases her indictment of the great on the firm conviction that “an extempore Christian is a ridiculous character”;¹² hence, she is empowered to puncture the hypocrisy behind “their terror, lest the character of piety should derogate from their reputation as men of sense,”¹³ and the anomaly of their “encouraging so many admirable schemes for promoting religion among the children of the poor” but not “encouraging it in their own children and their servants also.”¹⁴ Her focus is unabashedly national, local, and domestic, since she charges those persons who “should gladly contribute to spread the light of Christianity in another hemisphere, actually obstruct the progress of it at home.”¹⁵ Like her attitude, her suggested remedies are not for the faint-hearted; although she knows that “the houses and hearts of the more modish Christians” will be closed to her, she nevertheless endorses laying “the axe to the root oftener than the pruning knife to the branch.”¹⁶ Uncompromisingly she insists that the fundamental Christian tenets should not stand out “like the appliquée of the embroiderer” but should be “interwoven, … so as to have become a part of the stuff”; the climax of this lesson is the sheer brand of “knowledge that is burnt in, … seldom obtrusive, rarely impertinent.”¹⁷

Undeterred by the eagerness of “fashionable Christians” to dismiss her as a “palpable enthusiast, the abettor of ‘strange doctrines,’ long ago consigned over by the liberals and the polite to bigots and fanatics,”¹⁸ More meets this belittlement head-on. As she argues repeatedly, the central, albeit unpopular, tenet of human corruption, with its aim “to humble the sinner and exalt the Saviour,”¹⁹ is not “a morose, unamiable, and gloomy idea.”²⁰ Whether attempting to dissuade ladies from simpering frivolity or outlining the moral advantages of the study of history for the Princess of Wales, More keeps her central thesis always in view. While lecturing Princess Charlotte that “history furnishes a strong practical illustration of one of the fundamental doctrines of our religion, the corruption of human nature,” she goes as far as to rescript events, with a seemingly naive emphasis on rectitude and purity of intention:

How much more effectually, and immediately, might the Reformation have been promoted, had Henry, laying aside the blindness of prejudice, and subduing the turbulence of passion, been the zealous and consistent supporter of the Protestant cause; the virtuous husband of one virtuous wife, and the parent of children all educated in the sound principles of the Reformation!—Again, had the popes effectually reformed themselves, how might the unity of the church have been promoted; and even the schisms, which have arisen in Protestant communities, been diminished!²¹

Is More's related stress on the need for women to be excellent and distinctive similarly oversimplified? It is expedient to dismiss her as reactionary and antifeminist; of the younger generation of Bluestockings, Sylvia Harcstark Myers rates More as “probably the most regressive in her attitudes towards the advancement of women.”²² Her conservative intransigence truly baffles. It is hard to figure out why in the earliest Essays she commits herself so totally to such a restricting view of the “bounds” “prescribed” by “nature, propriety, and custom.”²³ Why, at a time when she herself is nursing literary ambitions, does she pronounce so thunderingly that “pretensions to that strength of intellect, which it is requisite to penetrate into the abstruser walks of literature, it is presumed [women] will readily relinquish?”²⁴ In reserving “the lofty Epic, the pointed Satire, and the more daring and successful flights of the Tragic Muse … for the bold adventurers of the other sex,” is she deliberately minimizing her own dramatic success and silencing her quick, opinionated tongue about the foibles of fashionable life? She assumes that her belief in separate temperaments, aptitudes, and spheres for women and men is ordained and natural: “both shine from their native, distinct, unborrowed merits, not from those which are foreign, adventitious, and unnatural.”²⁵ By exhorting her readers “to be good originals, rather than bad imitators, … excellent women, rather than indifferent men,”²⁶ she also consigns them to a static fate. In More's imprisoning, Catch-22 argument, women's vocations are limited—there will never be “one female logician” or chronologer—just as their personalities are determined. While men provide the sobering counter-points, women will continue to “speak to shine or to please,” to “admire what is brilliant,” to “prefer an extemporaneous sally of wit, or a sparkling effusion of fancy, before the most accurate reasoning,” and to “admire passionately.”²⁷

Although More temporized somewhat in her next major sally into this field, in Strictures, she never officially recanted anything. In fact, when a pirated version of Essays was circulating as late as 1810, a “vexed” More insisted that Cadell and Davies publish the following announcement which she had devised in the London papers, while she undertook to advertise it in the Bath and Bristol papers.

Messrs Cadell and Davies desire to inform the Public that the new Edition of the Volume of Essays by Mrs. H. More lately advertised by Sharpe and Hailes is not only unauthorized by her, but against her consent. She having given public notice many years ago in the Preface to her twelve volumes that she had suppressed those Essays as a very juvenile work and having treated the same subjects more in detail in her Strictures on Education.

More was very adamant that the phrase “against her consent” be included because, as she crisply explained, “they asked it and I refused.”²⁸ Whether embarrassment at the severity of this juvenile work also accounted for its suppression remains only a speculation.

One way of assessing the singularity of her views within the literary coterie of the day is to compare her Essays with Catharine Macaulay's slightly later Letters on Education (1790). “Fair Macaulay,” whom More had praised in the epilogue to The Search after Happiness, was celebrated along with More in Richard Samuel's painting, “Nine Living Muses of Great Britain” (c. 1775). However, more than the allegiances of Whig and Tory separated these muses. Macaulay's Letters mounted a cogent argument for coeducation, exposing “the absurd notion that the education of females should be of an opposite kind to that of males.” Rather than assenting to “much false speculation on the natural qualities of the female mind,” Macaulay contends that women's vices and imperfections “are entirely the effects of situation and education.”²⁹ Not only does she neatly parry Pope's dictum that “a perfect woman's but a softer man” with her own proposition, that “a perfect man is a woman formed after a coarser mold,” she also tosses out as irrational and absurd Rousseau's theory of the natural subjection of women: “it is pride and sensuality that speak in Rousseau, and, in this instance, has lowered the man of genius to the licentious pedant.”³⁰ Although Macaulay starts from a position of equal abilities, unlike More's distinct talents, both argue against “bringing a young lady up with no higher idea of the end of education than to make her agreeable to a husband, and confining the necessary excellence for this happy acquisition to the mere graces of person.”³¹

When it comes to animadverting on vanity and the popular notions of women's education, no one can rival More. Her unparalleled position becomes clear in a comparison with an earlier work that, at first glance, might seem the originating model: Strictures on Female Education; Chiefly As It Relates to the Heart (1787) by John Bennett, a Manchester curate. Bennett's thesis of paternalistic proprietorship could not be further from More's galvanizing rhetoric. In contrast to More's calls for responsible action, Bennett advises the model of quiescent objectification. “Considering females as a species of treasure,” he writes, “a man will wish to become the sole, exclusive proprietor of one or more of them, as of any other object.”³² Quite content with consigning women to the role of pleasing charmers, “the fairest ornaments …, the embellishers of society, and the sweeteners of life,”³³ which More was inveighing against, Bennett denied women's capacity to pursue the firmness, depth and complexity of ideas in argument. In light of More's vastly superior essay and its aims to lead women “to think, to compare, to combine, to methodize,” Bennett's most egregious claim is surely that women “cannot, like the men, arrange, combine, abstract, pursue and diversify a long strain of ideas.”³⁴

The excellence More calls for involves gradual and virtuous, just and sober cultivation. It is “an experimental thing which is to grow gradually out of observation and practice.”³⁵ As it requires tractability in the pupil, it also relies on discrimination in the teacher to “appreciate the individual character of each pupil, in order to appropriate her management.”³⁶ Cultivation and management, though emphasizing divergent ideas of development, intermingle throughout More's prose. The teacher and the gardener need a similar astuteness, for “the cultivator of the human mind must, like the gardener, study diversities of soil, or he may plant diligently and water faithfully with little fruit.”³⁷ Secure on her moral highground, More casts a withering glance at the “merely ornamental” life of the young lady of her day, which “resembles that of an actress; the morning is all rehearsal, and the evening is all performance.”³⁸ Complacent, patronizing remarks on women's literary projects by male so-called panegyrists also warrant some cutting ripostes. To arm the author who “will have to encounter the mortifying circumstance of having her sex always taken into account, and her highest exertions … received with the qualified approbation that it is really extraordinary for a woman,” More adroitly turns the tables by exposing this condescension for the ridiculous banter it is.

Men of learning, who are naturally disposed to estimate works in proportion as they appear to be the result of art, study, and institution, are inclined to consider even the happier performances of the other sex as the spontaneous productions of a fruitful but shallow soil, and to give them the same kind of praise which we bestow on certain salads, which often draw from us a sort of wondering commendation, not, indeed, as being worth much in themselves, but because, by the lightness of the earth, and a happy knack of the gardener, these indifferent cresses spring up in a night, and therefore we are ready to wonder they are no worse.³⁹

However, the fact that More was promoting “the enlargement of the female understanding” as a “means to put an end to those petty and absurd contentions for equality” and to accommodate woman to a “more accurate” view “of the station she was born to fill” at the same time as she was petitioning that a woman “be more reasonably educated and … the native growth of [her] mind … cease to be stinted and cramped”⁴⁰ raises the fundamental issue of the liberation or imprisonment of women in her schemes for their education. Questions about More's distance from or affinity with the contemporary open advocate of rights for women, Mary Wollstonecraft, also require closer attention.

EDUCATING WOMEN TO SAVE THE NATION AND SERVE THE STATE: MORE AND WOLLSTONECRAFT

Only seven years separate the publications of Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects from More's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, With a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune.⁴¹ Yet “seventy times seven” (Matthew 18.21) differences appear to keep them apart and, unlike the Matthean injunction, unreconciled. With its dedication to Talleyrand, open talk of abused rights, and disdain for the inhibiting influence of the “pestiferous purple” (99), the Vindication was predictably well received in the Analytical Review but savaged in the Anti-Jacobin Review. With its citations of Burke and Wilberforce, quarreling with notions of rights and prefectibility, and upholding of religion as the force that “spiritualizes the social affections” (439), More's two-volume Strictures, which went through seven editions in 1799, won surprisingly temperate kudos among the Anti-Jacobin coterie in spite of its systematic battery of her Mendip village schools. Hailing the “manly praise” of country in her “detached observations on the present practice,” the Anti-Jacobin reviewer (Theobald J. Boucher) entreated More “to continue her labours … on the style of education that prevails among the daughters of those who, if not of rank, are yet of great importance in the social scale, that is, the gentry of the kingdom; the daughters of mercantile men; of officers of the army, whose fortunes and views are limited; and (though last not least) the daughters of clergymen.”⁴² Experienced teachers and established public figures—with Wollstonecraft moving in independent, liberal, radical, and reformist circles and More being championed by Bluestockings and Evangelical activists—both nevertheless envisioned transforming the state by modeling governance on a domestic arrangement. Wollstonecraft would have no quarrel with More's call to women “to exert themselves, with a patriotism at once firm and feminine, for the general good” (4), and her contentions “that private principle is the only solid basis of public virtue” (40), that “education is but an initiation into that life of trial to which we are introduced on our entrance into this world” (128), and that “the chief end to be proposed, in cultivating the understandings of women, is to qualify them for the practical purposes of life” (216).

My aim is not to obliterate the obvious and easily exaggerated differences between the caricatured hyena and old bishop. In fact, More's distinction from Wollstonecraft, whose work she vowed never to read, is virtually a critical commonplace. As early as the verse epistles of “Sappho Search” the idea of More's envy of Wollstonecraft was entertained.

On poor Mary's errors, she's coldly severe,
Nor drops o'er her wrongs, or her grave, one soft tear.
In vigorous expression, and passion's true tone,
Perhaps she was piqued to be greatly outshone.(43)

Although plaudits abounded from More's friends, lay and clerical, with Mrs. Carter predicting that Strictures would be universally admired, Dr. Burney praising its forceful language, and Mrs. Barbauld considering it a necessity for every drawing room, the author was assailed—and from within the Establishment, too—for daring to animadvert on the masculine topics of religion and order. The minister of Christ's Church, Bath, her friend the Reverend Charles Daubeny, published a fifty-six-page letter chastizing her “want of precision in language,” which could lead “ignorant Christians” to “downright enthusiasm,” in her presumed misinterpretation of the connection between faith and works.⁴⁴ Daubeny himself misread More; despite his sputters about remaining “secure from the imputation of being unnecessarily scrupulous on this subject,”⁴⁵ More declined to respond and Strictures continued to sell. In contrast to the prurient sensationalism surrounding Wollstonecraft's liaisons with Imlay and Godwin is the utter silence, even in More's at times chatty letters, shrouding the circumstances of her canceled wedding. Wollstonecraft traveled quite widely, living in France for over two years and, after the publication of Vindication, as Imlay's “best friend and wife,” a kind of business agent, visiting Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Though elected to the Académie Royale des Belles Lettres de Rouen and carrying on a grateful correspondence in French with her electors,⁴⁶ More never journeyed to France; yet it was she, knowing intimately the route between Bristol and London and the country lanes of the Mendips, who commented on the similar roles of the moralist and the geographer. Events across the channel affected the lives and works of both reformers. The seizure of the Bastille and strong feminist direction of revolutionary projects steeled Wollstonecraft's resolve to write about the need to establish equality, to confound ranks, and to free women. “This moment of alarm and peril,” as More referred to her own era at the opening of Strictures, reinforced the urgency of her appeal to firm and feminine patriotism.

Matters of expression, authority, and restraint keep Wollstonecraft and More apart, but the underlying issues of the excellence, capacities, and duties of their sex bind them as cultural reformers and warriors. Intensely focused on a woman's sphere and adept at speaking in a hortatory, public voice, each author addresses her audience—middle-class for Wollstonecraft and aristocratic for More—in an appropriately idiosyncratic style. Wollstonecraft eschews polish and elegance in favor of usefulness and persuasion, relying on “significant” (147) words to pack the requisite punch. She exhorts women to lay aside coquettish art and feigned delicacy, with an expressiveness that runs all the way from normative assertion to rhetorical question and climactic exclamation. Notice how adroitly she pits the insinuating strategies of securing affection against the longed-for goal of respect.

To gain the affections of a virtuous man, is affectation necessary? Nature has given woman a weaker frame than man; but, to ensure her husband's affections, must a wife, who, by the exercise of her mind and body whilst she was discharging the duties of a daughter, wife, and mother, has allowed her constitution to retain its natural strength, and her nerves a healthy tone,—is she, I say, to condescend to use art, and feign a sickly delicacy, in order to secure her husband's affection? Weakness may excite tenderness, and gratify the arrogant pride of man, but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for and deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship!

(112)

The link between domestic virtue and marital friendship supplies the conclusion that Wollstonecraft presents as an indisputable fact: “besides, the woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will, by managing her family and practising various virtues, become the friend, and not the humble dependent of her husband” (113). Aware of the “horse-laugh” that the noted exception “where love animates the behaviour” may excite, she decides not to “stifle” the observation that “with a lover,” a woman is “always a woman,” that is, with “his authority and her sex … stand[ing] between them and rational converse” (146-47). Despite her announced wish that women “may every day grow more and more masculine … which raises females on the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind” (introduction), Wollstonecraft's praise of the historian Catharine Macaulay stops short of calling hers “a masculine understanding.” Although she was quick to decode the meaning of “masculine understanding” as the ability to reason abstractly, she refused to compliment Macaulay in this manner, which would exclude all other women. What Wollstonecraft does admire about Macaulay's style seems to be the very features she strove to exemplify and incorporate in her own writing: “Possessing more penetration than sagacity, more understanding than fancy, she writes with sober energy and argumentative closeness; yet sympathy and benevolence give an interest to her sentiments, and that vital heat to arguments, which forces the reader to weigh them” (206-7).

Contemporary reviewers weighed and considered More's long but controlled sentences, finding them as powerful as those of Addison. “Sappho Search” quipped, “These rich babes of grace, Hannah knows how to dandle; / And the bright tools of rhetoric, with cunning to handle.”⁴⁷ No mention of the disorientations of love interrupts the orderly, though often digressive, march of her argument. A nonwhimsical toughness stamps More's talk of “right minded women,” the “practical purposes of life,” and “bounden duties” (41-42). In Nancy Cott's judgment, “More's work perfected the transformation of woman's image from sexual to moral being.”⁴⁸ Her hard stand on coquettishness—before and during marriage—removes her directives from Dr. Gregory's cat-and-mouse advice to his daughters “never to discover to him the full extent of your love”; both reformers would have balked at the “case,” cited in Gregory's A Father's Legacy (1774), “where a woman may coquet justifiably to the utmost verge which her conscience will allow.”⁴⁹ More's friendship⁵⁰ with the Reverend Thomas Gisborne, whose Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex preceded Strictures by two years, notwithstanding, she took a much less conciliatory stand on “the ornamental acquisitions” of female education, which Gisborne had valued as contributing “to preserve the mind in a state of placid cheerfulness.”⁵¹ This innocuousness is too removed from activity for such an advocate of precision, exactitude, and a realistic eliciting of truth as More, who challenges at the same time as she upbraids and admonishes her readers.

A lady studies, not that she may qualify herself to become an orator or a pleader; not that she may learn to debate, but to act. She is to read the best books, not so much to enable her to talk of them, as to bring the improvement which they furnish, to the rectification of her principles and the formation of her habits. The great uses of study to woman are to enable her to regulate her own mind, and to be instrumental to the good of others.

(216)

As “a female crusader” with an “explicitly conservative message,” More was, as Mitzi Myers reminds us, “infinitely more successful than Wollstonecraft” in inoculating “everyday routine with aggressive virtue”; Myers sees More's text “rhythmically alternating the systole of ingratiating genuflection and the diastole of combative assertion.”⁵² Concerned to train up neither “Amazons nor Circassians” but rational and accountable Christians, More forces her reader to confront the inevitable though rhetorical question, “should we not carefully cultivate intellect?” (52).

The especial power of a woman's mind, though figured differently by each author and working under quite different constraints, is the basic tenet that unites Wollstonecraft and More. Education is a discipline for life. Wollstonecraft and More write with passion about the education of women, in particular, and the preeminence of influence in the domestic sphere because each topic has been so sadly trivialized. Whether in the breathless, impulsive hurry of Wollstonecraft, or in the measured periodicity of More, these manifestos promote fundamental changes in attitude, which Wollstonecraft designates a reformulation of social order and which More envisions as a needed seriousness.

Wollstonecraft spends a lot of time detailing how women's potential has been wasted in a “disorderly, … random … [and] instinctive kind of education” (104), sacrificing “strength and usefulness to beauty” (79) and ensuring “a state of perpetual childhood” (81) in “gentle, domestic brutes” (101). Finding no amiability in weakness or in “romantic wavering feelings” (169), she writes to rouse her audience to consciousness and indignation about being “educated for dependence” (135), “immured in their families groping in the dark” (87), and “legally prostituted” (151), as “the mind is left to rust” (171), the “delusive flattery” (194) of being called an angel is tolerated, and woman's “reason, her mistry reason! is employed rather to burnish than snap her chains” (202). Quarreling with the “false hypothesis” (93) of Rousseau's state of nature, as well as with Milton's description of “our first frail mother” (100) and “Moses' poetical story” to justify man's exertions of “strength to subjugate his companion” (109), she directs attention to the consequences of this wayward, purblind miseducation of women. “They both acquire manners before morals, and a knowledge of life before they have from reflection any acquaintance with the grand ideal outline of human nature” (106). The stimulation and exercise of the understanding in “a proper education” that “store[s] their mind with knowledge” (285) are crucial because they encourage “rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience” (263), “mutual duties” (283) replacing “cattish affection” (295) in “more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers” (263). In championing her sex, Wollstonecraft situates potentially informed, modest, steadied women in the domestic, albeit nonornamental sphere. As a means of making “their private virtue a public benefit,” she argues that “honest, independent women” be encouraged “to fill respectable stations” (262) and be allowed entry to the professions, medicine in particular. Unfortunately a sustained treatment of women's legal and political rights, the topic for a projected second part, never materialized.⁵³

Although More's regret and huffiness about the “disdain of control” and “revolutionary spirit” that result in fulminations on “rights” (109) announces a different sense of legal entitlement, Strictures does convey an astute, astringent plea for women to be taught “that human life is a true history, many passages of which will be dull, obscure, and uninteresting, some perhaps tragical” (124). Her animadversions on human nature support the claim that women should be happy to be free of—and not disposed to envy—“the distinctions of public life and high offices, … the responsibility attached to them, and the mortification of being dismissed from them” (241). She wants women to be strong but sheltered, capable but strictly domestic managers. Conducting an argument as self-serving as the general conviction and righteous corrective of her preface to the tragedies, More holds forth in a professional voice while she warns against exciting “in women an uneasy jealousy that their talents are neither awarded with public honours nor emoluments in life” (241). But she is also as dismissive as Wollstonecraft about the “frenzy of accomplishments,” the intoxication of flattery, and the mere “talent for conversation” that is usually the “precursor” and not “the result of instruction” (130); like her contemporary, she has “no wish to bring back the frantic reign of chivalry nor to reinstate women in that fantastic empire in which they then sat enthroned in the hearts, or rather in the imaginations of men” (13). While the “complicated drug” (22) of novels and the “hot-bed of the circulating library” (130) are considered “vehicles of wider mischief” (22), the Bible and Milton are sacred texts for More; yet she is not blind to the inequities of Rousseau's treatment of Sophie. Equally suspicious of worldly praise as of a passive noblewoman sitting “with gratifying docility at the foot of a professor's chair,” More perorates: “In those parasites who offered this homage to female genius, the homage was the effect neither of truth, nor of justice, nor of conviction. It arose out of gratitude, or it was a reciprocation of flattery; it was sometimes vanity, it was often distress, which prompted the adulation; it was the want of a patroness; it was the want of a dinner” (228).

More's analogies from the theater, where she first earned acclaim, and from her lifelong passion for gardening preface the final point of comparison: the sensibility and predisposition each brings to the task of writing about women's education. Toward the end of Strictures, More draws another comparison from the world of theater to describe the need to combine curiosity with a certain cultivated capacity. In her explanation, “the drawing up the curtain at the theatre, though it serve to introduce us to the entertainments behind it, does not create in us any new faculties to understand or to relish those entertainments: these must have been already acquired; they must have been provided beforehand, and brought with us to the place; for the entertainment can only operate on that taste we carry to it” (368). One of the prevailing mental habits shared by Wollstonecraft and More, both of whom pay tribute to Locke, is their associative thinking. Wollstonecraft tends to be most expansive when describing the restrictions hemming women in. Images of chains, polished but not snapped, lead naturally enough to mentions of Egyptian bondage and to the yoking and harnessing of asses and horses. Such metaphors, though clarifying situations of enslavement, also locate the subject within a wide, natural world. They emphasize the inextricable linkage between social conditions and authority on one hand and the devaluation and voicelessness of women on the other. As predictable and unyielding as the parts of a chain is Wollstonecraft's logical insistence on the consequences of these mind-forged manacles in terms of women's education and station in society. All meliorist forecasting is necessarily based on a liberating social outlook; Wollstonecraft concludes that “it is reasonable to suppose that they will change their character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed to be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense” (319). More's most associative writing, always blunt and unequivocal, relates to careful nurturance and organic growth; it can encourage and excoriate, build up and eradicate. She has the curious knack of being able to use a jeremiad to promote a view of the organicity of change; however, her determination to chop, uproot, and nip vanity in the bud is every bit as pronounced. Evil tempers and troublesome passions—either in children or alluring but empty-headed ladies—are at the top of More's list for extermination: “the subduing hand cannot cut off the ever-sprouting heads so fast as the prolific hydra can reproduce them” (61). In her garden of associative delights More is the chief horticulturalist, deciding which sprouts to tend and which to slice.

Whether snapping chains or tending gardens, these authors live in and represent realms of privilege. A “servant-maid to take off her hands the servile part of the household business” (254) is as necessary to Wollstonecraft's picture of a woman's domestic happiness as, in fact, the French nurse Marguerite was essential to her during the trip to Scandinavia accompanied by her infant daughter by Imlay. More attempts public-spiritedly to meet her audience on their own ground by exhorting them to seize “all the little occasions of doing good, which every day presents to the affluent,” through comparing these opportunities to the mere “sacrifice of an opera ticket” (154).

As the vindicator, concerned with avenging, emancipating, defending, and justifying, Wollstonecraft constantly extends the influence of the domestic sphere to a wider social and political setting. She looks from the inside out, aligning manners with morals, affirming the importance for men to “become more chaste and modest” (84), and stressing that “reserve,” which “has nothing sexual in it,” is “equally necessary for both sexes” (236). As the formulator of strictures, which both tighten and, as in phonetics, allow for the articulation of certain speech sounds, More writes to lift “the reader from sensation to intellect,” to abstract “her from the world and its vanities” (136). But, looking from the outside into the home, she also relies on a privileged and uncommon acquaintance with the public world to advance her argument, disparaging the Chinese practice of binding and crippling women's feet and comparing it to the “stinted and cramped” (236) state of women's minds. To correct trifling this observer of faddish modes directs women, with their “delicacy and quickness of perception and … nice discernment between the beautiful and the defective,” to “see the world, as it were, from a little elevation in [their] own garden” (234). Despite her claim that “co-operation and not competition is indeed the clear principle we wish to see reciprocally adopted by those higher minds in each sex which readily approximate the nearest to each other” (226), the predominant characteristic of More's trope about women's gardens is their distinction from men's. While Wollstonecraft concentrates on mutuality, More emphasizes—more temperately and expansively than in Essays—what for her are the inherent, determining, essential differences.

Notes

1. “Introduction,” Essays on various subjects, 2; hereafter referred to as Essays.

2. “Introduction,” Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, The Works of Hannah More (London: T. Cadell, 1830), 5:xi; hereafter referred to as Strictures.

3. Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society, The Works of Hannah More 11:56-57; hereafter referred to as Thoughts.

4. Strictures, 3.

5. Letter from H. More to her sister, Adelphi, February 1786; W. Roberts, Memoirs, 2:10. Cowper's religious temperament was the prime attraction. In her diary entry for 5 May 1803, she records, “Cowper's letters are interesting, as they present to view the genuine, affectionate, benevolent heart of the incomparable author. I was disappointed to find so few of his religious letters printed. The biographer seems to forget or not to know that religion was the grand feature, the turning point in the character of Cowper.” See W. Roberts, Memoirs, 3:195.

6. William Cowper, The Task, Book 4, 88-89, The Poetical Works of William Cowper, 4th ed., ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 184.

7. Strictures, xi.

8. Ibid., 4-5, 138, 248.

9. Ibid., 229.

10. Thoughts, 18.

11. An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, The Works of Hannah More 11:18-19; hereafter referred to as Estimate.

12. Thoughts, 54.

13. Ibid., 42.

14. Estimate, 135.

15. Thoughts, 18.

16. Estimate, 175.

17. Strictures, 255.

18. Estimate, 172.

19. Ibid., 172.

20. Strictures, 390.

21. Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess, The Works of Hannah More, 6:143; hereafter referred to as Hints.

22. S. H. Myers, Bluestocking Circle, 260.

23. Essays, 3.

24. Ibid., 6.

25. Ibid., 9.

26. Ibid., 14. More extends this assertion in Strictures, where she accepts, paradoxically, both women's excellence and their secondariness: “Is it not desirable to be the lawful possessors of a more limited domestic territory, rather than the turbulent usurpers of a wider foreign empire? to be good originals instead of bad imitators? to be the best thing of one's own kind, rather than an inferior thing, even if it were of a higher kind? to be excellent women rather than indifferent men?” (232).

27. Essays, 9-10.

28. Letter from Mrs. H. More to Cadell and Davies, 2 July 1810; Bodleian MS. Facs. c. 44, ff. 83-84.

29. Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects, ed. G. Luria (New York: Garland, 1974), 47, 202.

30. Ibid., 206.

31. Ibid., 208.

32. John Bennett, Strictures on Female Education; Chiefly As It Relates to the Culture of the Heart (London: T. Cadell, 1787), 76. I am grateful to Tania Smith for the loan of her copy of Bennett. In her examination of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, Hester Chapone, and Hannah More, Smith contends that Bennett's text, though satirical and misogynist, was an influence on More's Strictures; see “Beyond Conduct: Three Eighteenth-Century Women Moralists” (M.A. thesis, Department of English, University of Alberta, 1995).

33. Smith, “Beyond Conduct,” 123.

34. More, Strictures, 217; Bennett, Strictures, 112.

35. Strictures, 15.

36. Ibid., 111.

37. Ibid., 112.

38. Ibid., 76.

39. Ibid., 225-26. Mr. Badcock's letter in Gentleman's Magazine (September 1789) about Catharine Macaulay's History, commending “Mrs. Macaulay Graham's work [as] really wonderful considering her sex,” underlines the pertinence of More's quid pro quo ridicule.

40. Strictures, 226.

41. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, ed. Miriam Brody (London: Penguin Classics, 1983). Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education; With a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune, The Works of Hannah More, vol. 5. Subsequent parenthetical citations will refer to pages in these editions.

42. Theobald J. Boucher, “Art. X. Review of Hannah More's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education,” Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 4 (1799): 190, 192, 198-99.

43. Sappho Search, A Poetical Review of Miss Hannah More's Strictures on Female Education, 23.

44. The Rev. Charles Daubeny, A Letter to Mrs. Hannah More on Some Part of Her Late Publication entitled “Strictures on Female Education<F255D170 (London: J. Hatchard and F. & C. Rivington, 1799), 43, 52.

45. Ibid., 46.

46. More's French correspondence is in the City of Bristol Record Office (26168). In a letter from Bristol dated le 10 juillet 1783, she thanks the members of the Académie for electing her “une membre de votre savante et tres célèbre Académie,” calling the announcement “la circonstance la plus honorable et la plus flatteuse de ma vie.” Another copy of this letter is at the Huntington (HM 31107).

47. Sappho Search, Poetical Review, 11.

48. Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850,” Signs 4, no. 2 (1978): 226.

49. Dr. Gregory, A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1781), 92.

50. Bishop Porteus assumed More had devoured Gisborne's book when it first appeared with her “usual voracity”; letter to Mrs. H. More, 16 Jan. 1797; Roberts, 3:4. Gisborne and his “amiable family” (he was the father of nine) stayed at Barley Wood for a few days, in 1811, and More returned by visiting Yoxall Lodge later that year; see Roberts, 3:341.

51. Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London: T. Cadell, 1797), 80.

52. Mitzi Myers, “Reform or Ruin: ‘A Revolution in Female Manners,’” 209.

53. While her English contemporaries John Cartwright and Jeremy Bentham were enumerating objections to female suffrage and, by contrast, the Marquis de Condorcet was writing openly of improved education and citizenship for women, Wollstonecraft made no comment on these differing constitutional agendas.

[The title of this essay is p]art of the passage from Paradise Lost, 8:191-94, which More chose as the epigraph to Coelebs in Search of a Wife.

Works Cited and Consulted

More's Published Work

Essays on various subjects, principally designed for young ladies. London: J. Wilkie, T. Cadell, 1777.

The Works of Hannah More. New ed. 11 vols. London: T. Cadell, 1830.

Roberts, William, Esq. Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More. 4 vols. London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1834.

Other Published Works

Bennett, John. Strictures on Female Education; Chiefly As It Relates to the Culture of the Heart. London: T. Cadell, J. J. G. and J. Robinson, Rivington, J. Murray, 1787.

Boucher, Theobald J. “Review of Hannah More's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education.” Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 4 (1799): 190-200.

Cott, Nancy. “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology.” Signs 4, no. 2 (1978): 219-36.

Cowper, William. The Poetical Works of William Cowper. Edited by H. S. Milford. London: Oxford University Press, 1934.

Daubeny, Charles. A Letter to Mrs. Hannah More, on Some Part of Her Late Publication Entitled “Strictures on Female Education.” London: J. Hatchard and F. & C. Rivington, 1799.

Gisborne, Thomas. An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex [1797]. Introduced by Gina Luria. New York: Garland, 1974.

Gregory, Dr. John. A Father's Legacy to his Daughters. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1781.

Myers, Mitzi. “Reform or Ruin: ‘A Revolution in Female Manners’.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 2 (1982): 199-216.

Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle; Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

Search, Sappho [John Black]. A Poetical Review of Miss Hannah More's Strictures on Female Education. In a series of Anapestic Epistles. London: T. Hurst, 1800.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, [1792]. Edited by Miriam Brody. London: Penguin Classics, 1983.