In her admirable work on the reflection of the English industrial scene in English literature, in the years 1750-1850, Ivanka Kovacević introduced two samples of the writings of Hannah More: Village Politics, a Dialogue and the story of a child-miner, The Lancashire Collier Girl. The book is both an anthology of writings on industrial conditions and relations, as well as a study of the problem on a large scale.¹ The choice of Hannah More is thoroughly justified. She was extremely popular in her life time, though forgotten now. But her work should be studied for its interest in the situation of the working class not only in industry. A considerable number of her stories deal with village life. She is clearly a pioneer in presenting both industrial and rural workmen in fictional writing.

The daughter of a Bristol teacher, herself a teacher, she was very active in supporting Sunday Schools, improving their methods, and providing them with material for reading. Sunday Schools taught the children of the lower classes to read mainly so that they could read the Bible. Simple religious texts and hymns were supposed to be introduction to the reading of the Scriptures. Those tracts and broadsheets were published as early as 1698 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The next step in didactic writing for the common people was to offer them fictional tales to attract more readers. And here it is where Hannah More came to play a very important role.

But, surprisingly enough, before she became the well-known moralist story-teller, she had already acquired considerable fame: she was a blue-stocking. At the age of seventeen she made her début with a drama The Search after Happiness (1762), followed by The Inflexible Captive in 1764. Her pseudo-historical play Percy (1777) met with great success in London. It was produced in Covent Garden by Garrick, who wrote to it a prologue and an epilogue. Through her friendship with David Garrick she gained access to London literary circles. She met Bishop Percy, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds and she enjoyed the friendship and esteem of Samuel Johnson. After the death of Garrick in 1779 she stopped writing and devoted herself to philanthropic works.

In 1791 she was asked by the Bishop of London, a friend of hers, to provide an answer to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man in a way that would reach common people. She immediately wrote a pamphlet Village Politics by Will Chip, a Country Carpenter. It was a dialogue between Jack Anvil, a blacksmith and Tom Hood, a mason. The gist of the pamphlet was that “… the gentry look after the worthy poor; no relation exists between government and want; government is no concern of the common man. God knows what is best for his people”.² A few years later More published a ballad in the same tone, The Riot: or Half a Loaf is Better than No Bread. She told in it of the dire consequences of rioting. The clarity of the language, its simplicity, earned the author new fame. Church circles were so pleased that a project was formed to publish a series of Cheap Repository Tracts with Hannah More as the author of most texts.

The stories would appear as very cheap booklets, costing from 1/2d to 2d. Their task was to provide politically orthodox reading matter for the working classes. An advertisement said “… it was judged expedient, at this critical period, to supply such wholesome aliment as might give a new direction to their [i. e. the lower classes] taste, and abate their relish for those corrupt and inflammatory publications which the consequences of the French Revolution have been so fatally pouring in upon us.”³ Moral aims were involved too. The new series was to supplant popular romances, bawdy songs, vulgar almanacs. “Chapbooks, broadsides, ballads, many of them heartily vulgar if not actually licentious, had ridden in peddler's packs to country fairs and markets. …”⁴ Hannah More fulfilled the assignment as was expected by the Evangelical Clapham Sect financing the undertaking.

From 1794 to 1796, out of more than 100 issues about 50 per cent were filled with stories, ballads and dialogues written by Hannah More. Her tales turned out the most popular among readers. They were lively tales, whose titles did not reveal their didacticism: the Gin-Shop, The Lancashire Collier Girl, Black Giles the Poacher, Betty Brown, the St. Giles' Orange Girl, The Two Shoemakers etc. The moral pill was covered with a coating of the sugar of sensational plot and incident, the tales were, as someone said, “sheep in wolves' clothing”. They contained examples of Heaven's wrath and punishment for sins, fires, children in danger, sudden conversions of hardened criminals, confessions and death-bed scenes. The narrative often bordered on the sensational but the background material was realistic throughout, while the style was level, only slightly coloured by the writer's caustic sense of humour.

Hannah More wrote pamphlets for the middle class as well as tracts for the edification of the aristocracy, but the Cheap Repository Tracts were destined for the lower classes and they dealt with their lives, both in town and country. Her plots depicted life stories of individual craftsmen, farm labourers, servants or their climactic moments, fateful decisions. Characters from the upper classes were involved in the lot of the working class in some way or other, they were mostly physicians, teachers, Anglican clergymen, landowners or their wives. The representatives of the gentry served sometimes as porte-parole of the author, expressing their conviction that the British social and political system was admirable both in theory and practice. Evils like famine, unemployment, poverty were inevitable. Such sentiments were fully in agreement with the tenets of the bourgeois political economy. Just like the above mentioned Riot ballad, one of the most admired tales, the Shepherd of Salisbury Plain warns the readers against any rebellious thoughts and teaches the virtue of submission to fate. The tale presents a model of behaviour, a passive frame of mind to be imitated by the reader. The behaviour of the model (workman or peasant) may be unreal and idealized, but the situations, the décor of the scenes, the accessories, all the material details are treated very realistically, with the objectivity characteristic of the age of reason and with a graphic power new to didactic tales. The story was a favourite and it was translated into very many languages.

“Low life” figured in the XVIIIc novel as part of the background in the picaresque romance and the novel of sentiment, in Fielding's novels servants, innkeepers and villagers formed part of the picture, but the heroes were most commonly middle class. The popular romance was considered democratic if the hero or the heroine was not “of exalted rank”, like the heroine in Cinthelia by George Walker, the daughter of a London tradesman.⁵ Caleb Williams, Godwin's title hero, is a servant, but the plot turns round the villainies of an aristocrat, his crimes against his tenants. Caleb becomes his victim accidentally, involved by chance in the machinations of the great. More's approach is more in the mood of the novel of doctrine, the problems of the characters are treated rationally, without any touch of preromantic sentimentality. The analysis of a few tales will show her method of writing.

Betty Brown, the St. Giles's Orange Girl with some account of Mrs Sponge, the money-lender is a charming tale of a fruit-vendor written long before Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor appeared in 1851 with its sketches of street vendors. Betty is an orphan selling oranges. Her barrow and the fruit were paid by a Mrs Sponge, a receiver of stolen goods, an extortionist, who made Betty and other young vendors pay exhorbitant interest. The slave-driver knows all the tricks of usury and the girls were always in debt for board and lodging. Finally a stroke of luck saves Betty: a “good lady” (the wife of a justice of the new police) becomes interested in the orphan, rescues her from the clutches of the money-lender. The job of street vendor is considered a good one for it is an open air occupation and the girl is less exposed to bad company, thieves and prostitutes. “A barrow woman [said the good lady], blessed be God and our good laws, is as much her own mistress on Sundays as a Duchess; and the church and the Bible are as much open to her.”⁶

The street scenes showing Betty at her job or talking to friends and having meals are rendered in a lively way and provide a faithful picture of facts. The story ends with an advertisement of another tale. Betty becomes the owner of a prosperous sausage-shop in the Seven Dials district, marries a hackney coachman, “… that very coachman, whose history and honest character may be learned from the popular ballad which bears his name.”⁷

The conventions of moralizing tales demand not only models to be followed, virtue rewarded, but also warning examples of sinners punished by God's wrath. Among stories dealing with country life one of the most successful was the tale of Black Giles the Poacher; Containing some Account of a Family who had Rather live by the Wits than their Work. A footnote explains: “This story exhibits an accurate picture of that part of the country where the author then resided, and where, by her benevolent zeal, a great reformation was affected among the poor inhabitants. …”⁸ The tale clearly evokes the conditions of living and the customs of a poor villager's family. Giles is a poacher (most probably one of the victims of the enclosures), but the writer never mentions his previous occupation. Their lodging is a miserable mud cottage with broken windows, stuffed with dirty rags. Their prevailing diet consists of bread and butter and tea, except on Sunday when meat is served sometimes. Giles's wife never mends the family clothes so they wear rags, washed on Sundays. She would iron them, though, on Sundays: “You might, however, see her as you were going to church, smoothing her own rags on her best red cloak, which she always used for her ironing cloth on Sundays, for her cloak when she travelled and for her blanket at night; such a wretched manager was Rachel!”⁹ To eke her husband's ill-gotten gains she sold moonshine and told fortunes. The children were taught to steal, to beg. The bigger boys fished carp and tench when very small. The author's comment is that “By this untimely depredation, they plundered the owner of his property without enriching themselves. But the pleasure of mischief was reward enough.”¹⁰ The Giles boys robbed the garden of a poor widow, apples and vegetables. Incidentally we learn that all she had was a little bed of onions. “Her onions she always carefully treasured up for her winter's store, for an onion makes a little broth very relishing, and is indeed the only savoury thing poor people are used to get.”¹¹ The younger children would beg on the road and practice “tumbling” (i. e. turning somersaults) for the diversion of the travellers, which More considers an “indecent practice” and moreover leading to begging and stealing.

The story excels in dramatic scenes, graphic pictures of Giles catching partridges or robbing an orchard, his fall from a wall leading to his death, which is painted in the evangelical tract convention: Giles is penitent, his groans are caused more by the memory of his sins than by pain. There are excellent dialogues both between adults and children, e. g. when the Giles boys get in trouble with the Sunday School children. They try to throw the blame for stealing fruit on an innocent boy, Tom Price. The worst boys laugh at Tom, who is in serious danger although everybody knows he is innocent. The violent scene ends with a spectacular, tearful confession of Dick Giles, one of the culprits.

The Giles story creates a comprehensive picture of village life in the vicinity of Bristol, in the late eighteenth century.

A village workhouse is the place of action of The Hubbub; or the History of Farmer Russel, the Hard-Hearted Overseer. Long before Oliver Twist was written this tale shows the inside of a workhouse. The beginning immediately catches the reader's attention: there is an uproar on the commons, just in front of the workhouse door. “Never was there such a hissing, and hooting, hallooeing heard,”¹² all against farmer Russel, the overseer who starved the inmates, let the roof of the house leak. His selfishness is punished by God: when his son came back home as a sick soldier, the overseer did not recognize him and sent him to another parish to die there. The ending is melodramatic: the father discovered the identity of the soldier, turned half-mad and died in a state of shock and misery.

The History of Charles the Footman contrasts the situation of a workman in town and in the country. The author does not idealize life and labour in the country, but by means of the experiences of Charles she warns young villagers against migration to cities. Town life is more expensive and full of temptations: drinking, prostitutes, thieving. After all “… a labourer in the country, on a shilling a day, is better off than one in a city on two shillings.”¹³The Two Shoemakers contains both a model hero and a villain, in imitation of Hogarth's famous moral engravings, the story of the good and the bad apprentices. The life stories of lazy Jack Brown and the industrious, sober James Stock reveal conditions of work in a small workshop.

In all the tales the author's stress is laid on presenting industry as a cornerstone of success in life. It is clear to the upper classes that a labourer with too much time on his hands is a dangerous person. The biographer of Hannah More says caustically “… the idea of the lower class having liberty to be idle was most upsetting to the idle of the upper class.”¹⁴ After industry, the next virtue valued by Hannah More is abstemiousness. The heroes of the tales are either simply destitute or live ascetic lives until they reach some degree of material stability. Only individual effort, self-reliance and constant hard work can bring a labourer some measure of success if he supplements those traits with piety and abnegation. Nowhere is this gospel (so characteristic of bourgeois ideology and political economy) more forcibly expressed than in the story of the young miner, reprinted in I. Kovacević's anthology.

The Lancashire Collier Girl is a tale about what might be called the martyrdom of a girl, an orphan, working in a coal mine in order to keep her younger brothers and sisters away from a workhouse orphanage. Hannah More provides the reader with information that will be the subject of Parliamentary investigation, half a century later, in the First Report of the Children's Employment Commission of 1842. The report reproduced the famous drawing of a girl on all fours, dragging a coal basket along a deep shaft.

The girl suffers terrible deprivation, performs tasks much above her strength and almost dies of exhaustion. At last she finds a “protector” (a good lady, again), who admires her endurance and courage and, as a reward for her industry and piety, takes her home as a lady's maid. All the harrowing details of the condition in the mine are reported factually, in a detached way, with only some expression of compassion for the child. Throughout the tale the reader is taught, implicitly, that no regulations or Acts can interfere with child labour.

Hannah More's Tracts were amazingly popular. They were meant to supersede vulgar chapbooks, anti-church tirades, revolutionary pamphlets and such like—they took over their rivals' trading tricks. The Tracts were cheap, they were made more attractive by woodcuts, the titles suggesting adventure stories, and the plots were often sensational. More had substantial narrative gifts: she could create vivid characters, lively dialogue and dramatic situations. The tales were not devoid of humour—the dialogues were often very amusing. She introduced here and there some motif of folklore as part of the realistic background. The Story of Hester Wilmot shows both mother and daughter engaged in decorating their home. Hester would “stone the space under the chairs in fine patterns and flowers” and when on a Sunday, her mother, Rebecca, kept the daughter away from church, she was “disappointed if any ladies happened to call in, and did not seem delighted with the flowers which she used to draw with a burnt stick on the white-wash of the chimney corners.”¹⁵ Her style had the best qualities of XVIII c. prose—clarity, simplicity.

Two million copies of Repository Tracts were sold in the first year of publication. Victor E. Neuburg, a literary historian, expressed some doubts whether the tracts were really read by the people they were written for. On the other hand another historian of literature for the masses, R. D. Altick, maintained that “Tom Paine and Hannah More between them had opened the book to the common English reader. …”¹⁶ Both actually supplied cheap reading matter to people who had none at all. Paradoxically enough Hannah More's educational activity contributed also to the spreading of democratic ideas. The Sunday Schools were a tremendous success. “In ten years thousands and thousands who would otherwise have grown up illiterate learned to read their Bibles and from that book passed to other books and newspapers. These schools raised the general culture of the English people and also affected the politics of the nation, for the leaders designed the instruction to teach the working class to be obedient to their betters, it is not clear that this was the result. Children who could read the Bible could later read Tom Paine and Wilkes and many did.”¹⁷

More's stories introduced labourers from town and country into English prose fiction of the XVIII c., it is therefore of importance to find whether her booklets were actually read in such amazing numbers.

The religious bodies publishing the Cheap Repository Tracts gave away great numbers of copies, sold them at an extremely low price. They distributed them in railway stations, lodging houses, in jails and hospitals. The question is whether the recipient read the tracts? We remember Dickens's picture (in Bleak House) of an unemployed bricklayer to whom Mrs Pardiggle, a lady reformer, had given some religious tract. Asked whether he had read the booklet, he answered with anger and scorn that he could not read and even if he could read he wouldn't for that was stuff for children, not adults. More's tales were actually read by children attending Sunday Schools. The children of the upper classes had the opportunity of buying and reading them in special editions, on special paper to be bound up, only slightly more expensive.¹⁸ The Oxford History of English Literature suggests that, like other didactic tracts, More's tales were more popular among the people who distributed them than among simple people.¹⁹ R. D. Altick is of this opinion, but Q. D. Leavis maintains that the Tracts were read for the “delightful tales”.²⁰ We can surmise that the distributors of the tracts offered them to their own children as “wholesome aliment”. The beginning of the XIX c. was an age in which literature for children was in great demand. Methodist magazines “full of miracles and apparitions, and preternatural warning, ominous dreams and frenzied fanaticism …”²¹ were avidly read by the Brontë children. Maria Edgeworth's tales and More's stories were obviously more to the taste of parents expecting their children to read fiction with a rationalistic view of life rather than gothic fancies and methodist “enthusiasm”.

Hannah More's tales must have been read and approved by the middle class supporting their publication. We should not forget that she was not an obscure, genteel spinster, producing tale after tale for the sake of money. She had already enjoyed popularity as a dramatist and poet, later on as a skilful writer in opposition to revolutionary factions. The antidemocratic bias enhanced her value as a moralist. She was moreover the author of a number of moral writings, books and pamphlets for the upper classes, e. g. Thoughts on the Importance of Manners of the Great to General Society (first published in 1788, ran to 8 editions!), or a successful novel, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (1809). She enjoyed the patronage of the royal Princess, Sophia of Gloucester, who asked her advice about the education of her daughter. More wrote Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess (2 volumes, 1805). There is also a curious booklet published in Poland, perhaps for its snob value, pointing out the author's aristocratic connections. Its title is Selections from the Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More and Observations on Several Subjects. It includes, among others, letters from Lord Gambier, the Duke of Gloucester, Princess Sophia of Gloucester, More's letters to Wilberforce, Bishop Porteus, Princess Metchersky from Petersburg.²²

Enjoying such a popularity and august patronage Hannah More could not have been shelved as a mere writer for the poor or for children. Her Tracts were not only distributed but also read. They were also imitated by Mary Howitt (Tales in Prose for the Young, 1825-36), by Legh Richmond (The Dairyman's Daughter, 1809), by the periodical the Family Economist, a penny monthly (1840). The political and religious tendency of her writings provoked the rise of rival publications, non-denominational, informative literature of a fictional character. The most prominent among them was also a woman, Harriett Martineau. Her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) have something in common with the Cheap Repository Tracts, in spite of ideological differences in matters of religion. Both writers introduced into fiction subject matter from the life of the working class, both were skilful story-tellers and wrote for the unsophisticated reader without a trace of patronage. Hannah More was the pioneer. She sowed the seed of the interest in the condition of the working class and thus prepared the way for the growth of the social novels of Disraeli, Gaskell, Kingsley and Dickens.

Notes

1. I. Kovacević, Fact into Fiction: English Literature and the Industrial Scene 1750-1850, Leicester and Belgrade, 1975.

2. M. A. Hopkins, Hannah More and Her Circle, New York, 1947. p. 208.

3. Hannah More, Works, 6 vols. London, 1833-34, vol. 1, p. 249.

4. R. D. Altick, The English Common Reader. A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900, University of Chicago Press, 1957. p. 77.

5. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England. 1770-1800, London, 1932. pp. 176-77.

6. More, Works, vol. 2 p. 178.

7. Ibid. p. 180.

8. Ibid. p. 181.

9. Ibid. p. 186.

10. Ibid. p. 188.

11. Ibid. p. 183.

12. Ibid. p. 16.

13. Quoted after Hopkins op. cit. p. 9.

14. Ibid. p. 205.

15. More, Works, vol. 2 p. 120-21.

16. Altick, op. cit. p. 77.

17. Hopkins, op. cit. p. 161.

18. Altick, op. cit. p. 75.

19. W. L. Renwick ed. Oxford History of English Literature, 10 vols. vol. 9. p. 23.

20. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, London, 1939.

21. E. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, intr. by Margaret Lane, London, 1947. p. 90.

22. Selections from the Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More and Observations on Several Subjects. Warsaw, printed in the Missionary Institution, 1849.