SOURCE: Nardin, Jane. “Hannah More and the Problem of Poverty.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43, no. 3 (fall 2001): 267-84.

[In the following essay, Nardin argues that More's views on poverty and her commitment to the established social order have been misunderstood by most scholars and literary historians.]

In August 1789 the abolitionist William Wilberforce paid a visit to his friend, the writer Hannah More. More and her sister Martha, known familiarly as Patty, were spending the summer at their cottage in the scenic Mendip Hills. At Patty's suggestion, Wilberforce set out to view the remarkable caves at Cheddar. But the squalor he witnessed in the village of Cheddar destroyed the young man's appetite, as well as his pleasure in the excursion. He returned with his picnic dinner untouched, unable to dismiss “the poverty and distress of the people” from his mind (M. More, 13).

Wilberforce was wealthy; Hannah More lived only eight miles from Cheddar; both were Evangelicals, eager to serve man for the glory of God. And so Wilberforce told More that if she would implement a plan to improve conditions in Cheddar, he would help with the expenses. Shortly afterwards, Hannah and Patty More set out to visit the village. Their first project was to set up a school, but they also planned to see what else they could do for the local people.

During the next fourteen years, Hannah More devoted much of her time, money, and energy to improving the condition of the Mendip poor. Though they were middle-aged and in bad health when they took up philanthropy, the More sisters personally initiated and supervised a wide variety of projects. They established Sunday schools and day schools for children as well as religious discussion groups for adults. They founded mutual savings societies for women, and they freely contributed their own funds to ensure that the societies would remain solvent in times of economic hardship. They devised schemes to promote cottage industries. They distributed money, clothing, fuel, and food in the form of prizes for students enrolled in their schools, in the form of regular pensions for cases of unusual hardship, and in the form of temporary grants to communities suffering from trade depression, famine, or epidemics. Often they visited three or four parishes on a Sunday, traveling by horseback over muddy roads, staying out for thirteen hours at a stretch, and returning home prostrate with exhaustion.

During the “Blagdon Controversy” of 1800-1803, the many schools which the sisters had established were, as More herself put it, publicly vilified as “seminaries of fanaticism, vice, and sedition” (Roberts, 2:69). Some of the attackers opposed popular education altogether, on the grounds that a literate working class would have access to revolutionary propaganda. Others thought that the lower orders should indeed be educated, but only under the strict supervision of the Anglican Church, and not by “methodistical” fanatics acting on their own responsibility. After the ugly controversy ended, More's efforts on behalf of the poor diminished, though they did not cease entirely.

In spite of her generosity and dedication, More's activities as an educator and social worker have been harshly criticized by later writers. In her scholarly 1952 biography Hannah More, the historian M. G. Jones wrote that More's involvement with the Mendip poor is

responsible in great part for the unsympathetic portrait of her which has been handed down to posterity. In it she appears as a masterful, dogmatic woman, a high Tory in politics, a rigid Evangelical in religion, using her undeniable talents for organization to dragoon the wretched, ignorant, ill-nourished population into schools which did not attempt to offer opportunity to children and adults to improve their material conditions.

(Jones, 152)

Unable to refute these charges, Jones can offer only the partial excuse that More's attitudes were typical of her time. Like “the bulk of her contemporaries,” More attributed poverty “to the depravity of [the working] class,” rather than “to the failure of the Great Society to realize its responsibilities. … Hannah More reacted to the problem of poverty in a manner characteristic of reformers throughout the eighteenth century. To her the problem was a religious, not an economic one” (Jones, 152-53).

Most of the scholars who have followed Jones condemn More in similar terms. She has generally been portrayed as an unbending Burkean conservative, who undertook to educate the lower classes primarily, if not entirely, as a means of indoctrinating them in the principles of social submission. For example, Patricia Demers argues in a recent study that More's “belief in a natural hierarchical social order,” a belief which Demers finds “angering in its condescension and immobility,” prevented More from doing anything significant to improve conditions among the poor (Demers, 2). Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace takes an even darker view of the relationship between More's Tory convictions and her philanthropic projects. Her 1991 book admits that the More sisters did indeed offer economic aid to their protégés, but argues that their efforts were “controlled by a class politic,” rather than by a genuine desire to relieve suffering (Kowaleski-Wallace, 72). Though Kowaleski-Wallace acknowledges that “literally” it was “charitable” of the More sisters to distribute “warm clothing” and other material benefits, she unmasks their true motive as the desire “to establish a particular kind of bodily discipline” among the poor by forcing them to dress and behave like members of the middle classes (Kowaleski-Wallace, 68). Like Jones, Demers and Kowaleski-Wallace argue that More's attitudes were “characteristic” of the period.¹

There are two problems with these judgments. First, they greatly exaggerate More's dedication to church and state. Though it is true that the “mainstream” Tory position incorporated constructive criticism of existing institutions within a generally conservative framework, More was angrier and more deeply critical of both church and state than the scholars discussed above allow. And her disaffection increased markedly during the 1790s. Second, these judgments do not relate More's activities to their historical context in a sufficiently nuanced manner. No “characteristic” or “typical” attitude toward the poor marked the years from 1789 to 1803. An acrimonious debate over the cause and cure of poverty characterized the period, a debate to which More responded in an idiosyncratic manner. As her own views changed, a period of reaction set in, and this conjunction of events prevented her from negotiating a wholly satisfactory public stance.

The aim of this essay, then, is to re-examine More's opinions about poverty, paying particular attention to the contemporary situation and the cross pressures to which it subjected her. I hope to show that, although More was a less enthusiastic believer in the “hierarchical social order” than most scholars have argued, the evasions and compromises she engaged in as a practical reformer helped to damage her reputation with posterity.

One reason why so many scholars have misrepresented More's view of poverty is that they have based their judgments on the tainted evidence provided by the three most substantial sources that bear upon the issue. The first of these is William Roberts's Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Hannah More. Published shortly after More's death in 1833, this 900-page work combines a biographical narrative with a large collection of letters that More wrote or received. The second source is Mendip Annals; or, a Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and Martha More in their Neighbourhood, Being the Journal of Martha More, published in 1859. The third source is the tracts for the poor that More wrote during the 1790s. These three sources appear to validate one another's trustworthiness, for the ideas about poverty that they express are remarkably similar. And so most scholars have assumed not only that the letters reprinted in Roberts's Memoirs embody More's private opinions concerning the poor but also that Patty More's journal expresses attitudes about social work which the sisters shared. Thus Kowaleski-Wallace writes that Mendip Annals reveals “the sisters' perception of the rural culture they were encountering,” as if every opinion Patty voices can be ascribed to Hannah as well (Kowaleski-Wallace, 65). Because Patty made a few outrageous remarks about the poor, this equation has done her sister's reputation no good.²

But despite their similarity both to Patty's journal and to her own tracts, More's letters, as reprinted in the Memoirs, do not offer reliable evidence of her views. Roberts, a dedicated Evangelical cleric, wanted More to emerge from his memoir as “an Evangelical saint” whose example might move his readers closer to his own religious position (Jones, viii). Contemporary standards permitted editors of private letters to deal freely with potentially embarrassing material, and Roberts took full advantage of this privilege. A comparison of More's surviving manuscript letters with Roberts's versions reveals that he omitted passages which cast doubt on More's loyalty to church and state, such as her courageous admission during the Blagdon controversy, when her Anglican credentials were under attack, that she had once taken Holy Communion at a Presbyterian Meeting House. If More's diaries or letters presented their author in a light he found unacceptable, Roberts simply rewrote them. More's friend Marianne Thornton reacted angrily when Roberts “improved” the letters she had loaned him to print in his memoir. More, Thornton wrote in her Recollections,

calls Sir Thomas Acland in one of her notes to me “the recreant knight of Devonshire,” which Roberts thinking uncivil I suppose, has altered to “the excellent and estimable Sir T. Acland.” … Somewhere else she began to me “When I think of you I am gladerer and gladerer and gladerer”, which he, thinking bad English has done into “I am very glad”. Now if such an oaf as that will write a book at least he should be honest.

(qtd. in Forster, 148)

Since Roberts doctored the letters to magnify their author's contentment with the established order, as well as her social conventionality, the versions he printed may not represent More's true opinion on the tense subject of the poor. Nor can we be sure that the most frequently quoted remarks from Patty's diary do so, for the simple reason that they were written by Patty and not by Hannah. More's tracts for the poor are equally suspect as a source of information about her views. They reveal what she thought the poor should be told about their plight, and this could have been quite different from what she really thought about it. These sources derive their authority from their similarity to one another. Considered separately, none of them offers trustworthy evidence of More's social philosophy.

For that, we need unexpurgated letters written during the period of More's most intense involvement in social work and addressed to confidantes who shared her approach to social reform. Fortunately, a large collection of such letters is extant, written by More to Sir Charles and Lady Middleton and their friend Mrs. Bouverie, the wealthy owner of Teston Court. More first met the “Testonites” in 1776. Already deeply involved in the nascent abolitionist movement, they were soon to be instrumental in persuading Wilberforce to lead a parliamentary crusade against the British slave trade. This philanthropic trio influenced the turn away from literature and toward humanitarian concerns that marked More's development in the 1780s. During the 1790s More corresponded regularly with the Teston people concerning her activities in the Mendips, activities to which they gave generous financial support. These letters, which never fell into the hands of William Roberts, were published in 1861 by Lady Chatterton, one of the Middletons' descendants. Believing that More's reputation had been harmed by the “unmeasured laudations” of narrow-minded Evangelical admirers like Roberts, Lady Chatterton decided that the truth would set her subject's reputation free (Chatterton, 1:146). “I give the letters in their entirety,” she wrote, “believing that, thus unprepared and unweeded, they will present the most faithful, though perhaps not the most flattering, portrait of the writer” (Chatterton, 1:147).

But the Teston letters have not received the attention they deserve. Though M. G. Jones read them, she did not notice the extent to which their sharp criticisms of the status quo differentiate them from most of the letters printed in Roberts's Memoirs. Roberts would certainly have deleted many passages from the Teston letters if he had gotten the chance to do so. And since Jones's biography, the standard twentieth-century work on More, fails to suggest that these letters are especially significant, most succeeding scholars have not bothered to unearth the rare volumes that contain them.³ One recent writer, Mitzi Myers, who did consult the Teston letters for her essay “‘A Peculiar Protection’: Hannah More and the Cultural Politics of the Blagdon Controversy,” treats them as one element in a body of generally reliable evidence, averaging them in, so to speak, with everything else. By quoting their disaffected remarks alongside some of the angrier statements which Roberts allowed to remain in the Memoirs, Myers depicts a less wholehearted high Tory than the Hannah More portrayed by her fellow scholars. But if one focuses upon the tensions between the Teston letters and other sources of evidence, as I intend to do here, the picture changes yet again. For the letters show that throughout the 1790s More was voicing ideas in private which she would not have wished to state in public.⁴ At first, these remarks related primarily to the church, but as the 1790s progressed, her social criticism expanded to include the state.

In most Mendip parishes, More learned as she began to travel around the area, ill-paid curates provided inadequate spiritual care, while absentee rectors pocketed substantial tithes. In a 1789 letter to her confidantes at Teston Court, More remarked:

I used to fancy I knew a great deal of the miseries of the poor and the negligence of the clergy, but I knew nothing compared with what I have lately seen. I have been in a district where three Welsh curates, without morals, without learning, and almost without bread, serve ten or eleven churches. These poor men dig potatoes and make cider for their maintenance, and dance and play at cards with the servants of the gentry for their amusement afterwards.

(Chatterton, 1:175)

Though More hoped that every clergyman would someday reside in his own parish and perform his duties scrupulously, she did not really “expect to live to see it” (Chatterton, 1:176). She doubted the church's resolution to reform abuses like pluralism, from which influential clergymen benefited so substantially.

The More sisters judged the Mendip clergy harshly, for their social conservatism as well as for their ignorance, laziness, or greed. The rector whom they invited to preach at the inauguration of their Cheddar school annoyed them by delivering a perfunctory “twelve minutes discourse upon good Tory principles, upon the laws of the land and the Divine right of kings,” a discourse which omitted all mention of “the King of kings” (M. More, 23). By 1793 More was sharing some pessimistic conclusions with her friends at Teston: “To the popular foolish cry, ‘the Church is in danger,’ I most heartily assent, with this mental reservation, that she is more in danger from internal rottenness than outward attack” (Chatterton, 1:211).

As the 1790s passed, the Teston letters revealed a growing inclination to attack the state for its failure to discharge its responsibilities toward the poor. At the very time when her fellow Evangelicals were beginning to realize that domestic reforms might be effected through political action, the terrible sights More saw in hovels and poorhouses angered her and started her thinking along new lines. As the period of scarcity that continued intermittently from 1794 to 1801 got underway, the Teston letters began to speculate about the economic causes of poverty, with an intense interest that they had not previously displayed. Thus, in 1795, More wrote:

I have been employing myself … in visiting the cottages of the poor in many parishes, and I am persuaded that no labouring man, even if he be healthy and sober, can maintain a family of any size, and find them clothes and pay rent. Nothing is more common than for the father and mother and four children (of all ages and both sexes) to sleep in one bed. Hardly any poor man can now get a bit of ground for a cow, as all of the land in a parish is swallowed up by a few great farms. Jobbers go round and buy up the butter, which they again sell to the little shops, so that there are three profits before the poor get it. … I do hope that these evils, by getting to such a size, will cure themselves. Yet these husbandry labourers are quiet and patient, while the manufacturers who get twice their wages are rioting.

(Chatterton, 1:296)

In this letter More identifies inadequate wages, not vices like drunkenness, as the root cause of poverty. She blames the enclosure movement and profiteering as contributory causes, and many Tories would have agreed with her. But it is hard to believe that they would also have ventured to suggest, as she does, that it might be desirable for the evils of the famine to increase “to such a size” that riots would break out and force the government to take action on behalf of the poor, or that they would have regretted the “quiet and patient” demeanor of the agricultural workers. In another Teston letter of the same year, More attacks the authorities for failing to control profiteers: “We, alas! have no magistrates who care for the poor and needy, who seek to right the oppressed” (Chatterton, 1:304).

In 1796 the harvest improved, but More had grown even more critical of the authorities.

The country really presents such a scene of riches as ought to cheer one. … But the wickedness of monopolizers, or forestallers, or contractors, or the negligence of the rich, will I fear contrive to defeat the kindest bounties of Providence. … The sight of this oppression really embitters my life, and I do continue to cry in the ears of the few magistrates and managing persons who come in my way; but I might as well spare my breath,

she told Mrs. Bouverie (Chatterton, 1:307-8). Here More suggests that the suffering she laments is not caused by the anger of Providence, but by the greed and indifference of man.

The letter quoted above is not the only one in which More mentions her desire to influence magistrates, Members of Parliament, or other “managing persons” to take action on behalf of the poor. As early as 1794, she had become indignant at the condition of the poorhouses she visited. “Figure, then, to yourself, my dear Madam,” she wrote Mrs. Bouverie,

from ten to thirty, forty, fifty, or more poor ignorant creatures of both sexes and all ages crammed under one roof, that roof so ragged, in many instances of my own observation, as to admit the rain on such poor wretches as are confined to their beds. Six or eight persons in one room … this attended with some circumstances I cannot write. In one of our most decent parishes I am now visiting, two poor women, on the point of lying-in, are terrified beyond expression at the idea that men will sleep in their room at that time.

(Chatterton, 1:263)

More would have liked to rent better lodgings for these women, but she “dare[d] not do it, they have five or six little children each, and it would provoke the parish to withdraw their allowance” (Chatterton, 1:263).

Instead she tried to promote legislation regulating the condition of workhouses. She told Mrs. Bouverie that she had written on the matter to

some of our young Reformers, but those who do good have already so much to do, and the rest of the world cares so little whether it be done or not, that [she grew] hopeless about all points of domestic reformation and redress.

(Chatterton, 1:262-63)

When her friend Henry Thornton, an Evangelical Member of Parliament, visited her in 1795, More dragged him from workhouse to workhouse. He witnessed the “vice, cruelty, and oppression” which had led More to conclude that she could “convict some [workhouse] overseers of murder, if those who could redress the grievance would listen” (Chatterton, 1:291). Though she hoped Thornton would propose legislation to reform workhouse management, he never did so.

Continued frustration was the keynote of More's efforts to persuade authorities to control profiteering and alter the Poor Law. Thus, the promise of a good harvest in 1797 pleased More less than it might otherwise have done, for she was sure that defective institutions would prevent God's bounty from reaching the needy. Because of continued profiteering, she told Mrs. Bouverie, loaves had not “enlarged in proportion as the corn has cheapened,” and meat remained “a luxury which [the poor] are scarce ever likely to taste again” (Chatterton, 1:326).

The Teston letters, then, reveal a very different Hannah More from the one portrayed in most scholarly works, a Hannah More who was learning to think about poverty in economic, rather than religious, terms. This Hannah More never wrote a single word to confirm the frequently reiterated assertion that she blamed the “depravity” of the working class for its sufferings; indeed, she castigates the rich for denying that the poor “have the same tastes, appetites, and feelings with ourselves; aye, and the same good sense too” (Chatterton, 1:276). Nor did the Hannah More of the Teston letters ever attribute poverty to the will of providence. This Hannah More did not confine herself to offering palliative charity, but desperately attempted to effect political reforms.

She failed, in part, because her reformist efforts were made during a period of reaction. At no time in the eighteenth century did English thinkers agree about the cause or cure of poverty. During the 1790s, however, economic explanations gained prestige, while both the ideas of religious thinkers and those of political radicals lost influence.⁵ The result was a hardening of attitudes toward charity and poor relief. More's philanthropic activities must be examined against this backdrop if we are to understand how she unwittingly helped to convince posterity that those activities were largely motivated by a desire to support the established order.

For most of the eighteenth century, Anglican clergy and their flocks viewed poverty as an intrinsic part of the human condition. When Adam and Eve rebelled against their creator, their descendants were condemned to labor for the fruits of the earth inequitably and in sorrow. Without poverty to goad him, fallen man would refuse to work, and so this apparent evil helps to ensure his survival. Workers who do their best in the state of life to which it has pleased God to call them deserve praise, not censure. His will, not their own failings, determines their place in the social hierarchy. There were, of course, other religious explanations of poverty; Puritan theologians had often associated it with vice. But before the late eighteenth century the Anglican establishment disagreed.

According to the Anglican view, when illness, unemployment, or famine temporarily exacerbate the inevitable privations of the poor, it is the obligation of the rich to offer generous aid. Charity, indeed, is the foremost of Christian duties. This view harmonized well with the assumptions underlying England's “Old Poor Law” of 1601, which remained in force until 1834 and which assigned to every parish a minimal responsibility for relieving its needy residents, either by giving them doles of goods and money in their own homes or by supporting them in centralized workhouses.

Because they rejected religious justifications of the existing social hierarchy, late-eighteenth-century political radicals like William Godwin and Thomas Paine felt something more than sympathy for the poor: they felt indignation. Following Rousseau's lead, these thinkers held that poverty causes vice, not vice poverty. Rousseau had argued that society was born when an unidentified impostor looked around him and announced arrogantly, “This is mine.” Private property, with its attendant evils, poverty, greed, crime, inhumanity, and pride, destroyed the harmony of the pre-social condition.

Though they attributed poverty to very different causes, neither the radicals nor the Anglicans blamed the poor for their plight. Both groups held that the poor should be relieved in every possible way, though the former advocated the political reform of corrupt institutions, while the latter advocated only palliative charity, which would leave the existing social order intact. As the 1790s progressed, the excesses of the French Revolution speedily deprived the radicals of their converts among the ruling classes. The theories of political economists, which had been gaining prestige for some time, replaced radical speculations as the most influential secular hypotheses concerning poverty. And these harsh theories also undermined the charitable approach to poverty which had long dominated Anglican thought.

Practitioners of the “dismal science” opposed both the political programs of the radicals and the philanthropic programs of the church. Suppose private property were to be redistributed as the radicals advised; would that really improve the position of the poor? Most political economists thought not. Edmund Burke stated the consensus position in 1795:

That class of dependent pensioners called the rich, is so extremely small that if all their throats were cut, and a distribution made of all they consume in a year, it would not give a bit of bread and cheese for one night's supper to those who labour.

(qtd. in Poynter, xiv)

Many rich people proved receptive to this argument, liking its implications for the condition of their throats.

In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus argued that redistribution might prove more harmful than Burke had realized. Malthus's influential work restated an old idea, that societies tend to produce more people than they can feed, in persuasively quantitative terms. “Population,” Malthus wrote, “when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio” (qtd. in Poynter, 145). Population cannot grow indefinitely without being checked. Malthus postulated two such curbs: positive checks, which end life prematurely, and preventive checks, which lower the birth rate. Since Malthus did not admit the possibility of birth control, temporary celibacy, which he called “moral restraint,” was the only preventive check he had to recommend. Moral restraint operates through fear. Every laborer, Malthus wrote, must realize “that, should he have a large family, and any ill luck whatever, no degree of frugality … could preserve him from the heart-rending sensation of seeing his children starve” (qtd. in Poynter, 147). Only a prospect as terrifying as this would convince the poor to defer marriage.

Malthus argued that the Old Poor Law promoted the indigence it was intended to relieve. Encouraged by the promise of support, he wrote, “a poor man may marry with little or no prospect of being able to support a family in independence,” exacerbating the population problem and lowering wages (qtd. in Poynter, 152). Though he thought it would be impracticable to do this immediately, Malthus hoped eventually to abolish the existing poor law. And he was no less suspicious of private than of state-supported charity. Because aid must never be given so as to make potential recipients dependent upon it, private charity should be offered only sporadically and on a limited scale. Instead of exhorting Christians to relieve suffering freely, Malthus argued that clergymen must “restrain the hand of benevolence,” lest they “encourage indolence and want of foresight” (qtd. in Poynter, 157).

Reasoning from economic premises, Malthus reached the same conclusion that had satisfied so many prosperous churchmen of earlier generations: the laws of God and nature prevent significant reform. But the beliefs of his Anglican predecessors had mandated efforts to relieve distress, while Malthus's beliefs interdicted charity almost entirely. By the early 1800s many Anglican clerics were echoing Malthusian views from the pulpit.

During the period of More's most intense involvement in practical philanthropy, then, new “scientific” theories about poverty justified more grudging attitudes toward the poor. And the growing cost of relief during this very period created an eager audience for these theoretical developments. The series of crop failures between 1794 and 1801 raised both the price of wheat and the poor rate to astronomical levels. Malthus was by no means the only thinker who suggested reasons for reducing state-supported poor relief to restive ratepayers during these years.⁶

The developments we have just discussed combined with political events to make the management of poverty a much-debated problem throughout the 1790s. For the issue not only affected people's pocket-books, but as the French Revolution progressed, it came to seem increasingly relevant to the very survival of the state. Reinforcing the lessons of political economy, events in France convinced many Englishmen that the aspirations of the “swinish multitude” toward education, as well as toward political power and economic improvement, should be harshly repressed. Any demand for change could easily be portrayed as the entering wedge of Jacobinism and sedition. Pursuing her practical philanthropic projects in a climate that grew extremely tense and reactionary as the 1790s passed, More understood that she would have to be very tactful to achieve any results whatever.

In the course of setting up her first school, at Cheddar, More learned to describe her intentions in reassuring terms. Before she visited Cheddar, More was warned that she “would meet with great opposition” if she did not “propitiate the chief despot of the village,” a “very rich and very brutal” farmer, and accordingly she paid him a call (Roberts, 1:339). An effort to interest him in the spiritual welfare of his workers failed utterly: “He begged I would not think of bringing any religion into the country; it was the worst thing in the world for the poor, for it made them lazy and useless” (Roberts, 1:339). Most of the local employers proved to share this farmer's belief that only the most bestial ignorance on the part of the poor could guarantee their acquiescence in the status quo. But gradually the sisters “improved in the art of canvassing” (Roberts, 1:339). They learned to appeal to the prosperous farmers' self-interest. More would confide that she “had a little plan which [she] hoped would secure their orchards from being robbed, their rabbits from being shot, their game from being stolen, and which might lower the poor-rates” (Roberts, 1:339). More hoped to improve the material and spiritual prospects of the Cheddar poor, but she learned to pretend that her only wish was to fortify the existing social hierarchy.

The sisters encountered interference from the local clergy, as well as from local employers. These clerics did not intend to surrender their spiritual authority to a pair of female do-gooders, though few of them were interested in ministering personally to the poor. The Teston letters show how carefully More balanced defiance and deception as she battled clerical opposition to her schools and charities. At Cheddar, she jokingly remarked, she had felt “justified in ‘proclaiming open Methodism,’” by setting up an evening prayer meeting under her own direction (Chatterton, 1:180). But when she employed teachers who came from dissenting backgrounds, More often concealed this fact in an attempt to present her schools as the solidly Anglican institutions that the local clergy demanded. Nor was her reluctance to employ such teachers as strong as she pretended; the Teston letters reveal a sympathy with Methodists and other Dissenters which More suppressed in public.

By the mid-1790s, as we have seen, More was willing to entertain the hypothesis that corrupt institutions had caused the distresses of the poor. And this may explain why she was less obsessed with the political threat posed by the French Revolution than Horace Walpole and many of her other friends.⁷ Occasionally she ridiculed their reactionary panic and lamented their willingness to resort to repressive tactics. In a letter which escaped Roberts's nimble scissors, she asked Wilberforce,

Some of the fierce champions of the government side, by way of enhancing the horrors of anarchy, represent despotism as rather a desirable thing; but why, to prove that Scylla is a destructive rock, must it be implied that Charybdis is a safe shore?

(Roberts, 1:444)

Though she resisted the prevailing climate of hysteria, however, More undoubtedly feared revolution. And so, when her influential friends pressured her to help avert the threat by writing tracts for the poor that supported the established order, she acquiesced. Her tracts stressed the ideas which she thought most likely to stabilize the situation, though she had serious reservations about the accuracy of those ideas.⁸ In addition, she knew that she could retain her influence with the upper classes only by proving to them that she was, basically, their ally. If her tracts delivered acceptable messages, she might obtain a confidential hearing for her unpalatable political ideas or support for her charities. Wise as the serpent, though, in her own view, well-intentioned as the dove, More spoke with a forked tongue in her tracts, no less than she had done while setting up schools in the Mendips. It is the congruence of the evidence that these tracts provide with the evidence offered by Roberts's Memoirs and Patty's diary that has persuaded scholars to accept those two sources as reliable evidence of Hannah's views.

More began writing tracts for the poor at the urging of her friend Bishop Porteus, who told her in 1793 that she

should repent it on [her] death-bed if [she], who knew so much of the habits and sentiments of the lower orders of people, did not write some little thing tending to open their eyes under their present wild impressions of liberty and equality.

(Roberts, 1:430)

Though she was not enthusiastic about the assignment, which she initially refused, More eventually “scribbled a little pamphlet” called Village Politics that made the points Porteus had in mind (Roberts, 1:430). The pamphlet takes the form of a dialogue between the blacksmith, Jack Anvil, a sensible supporter of the established order, and the mason, Tom Hod, who has addled his brain by dipping too freely into Paine's Rights of Man.

Jack demolishes Tom's position with familiar Burkean arguments. It is worth noticing, however, that he does make some concessions to the Paineite perspective. In particular, the tract is quite frank about the failings of the rich, whom Jack admits to be not “a bit better than they should be … if I was a parson, I'd go to work with 'em” (H. More 1:365). Jack's boast that in England “there's a matter of two million and a half paid for the poor every year” is immediately qualified by the important admission that the funds must be “a little better managed” if they are to benefit their intended recipients (H. More, 1:365). Though Jack concludes his harangue by advising Tom to “be quiet, work with your own hands, and mind your own business,” the tract is not purely quietist in its implications (H. More, 1:369). In a mild Tory way, it is reformist as well. In Village Politics More managed to produce a pamphlet that delighted Porteus and other members of the ruling classes, yet was not completely innocent of social criticism. But in succeeding years, as the reaction set in, she was unwilling to voice even this much dissent in public.

Many Evangelicals lamented their inability to teach the poor how to read the scriptures without enabling them to read immoral books as well. Confronting this problem in 1794, after her success with Village Politics, More devised a plan to provide literature for the poor that would be both uplifting and entertaining. This plan resulted in the publication of the Cheap Repository series of tracts, over a hundred of which appeared between 1795 and 1798. They were sold by street hawkers and distributed free by gentlefolk to their dependents. So subsidized, the tracts were dramatically successful.⁹ By March 1796 over two million copies had been disposed of.

In starting the Cheap Repository, More envisioned a series of “such religious pieces as shall be likely to catch the attention of the thoughtless” (Chatterton, 1:267). Her main intent was undoubtedly spiritual instruction, not political indoctrination of the sort that she had engaged in at Porteus's urging. But she was soon pushed in that direction. Many supporters subscribed to the Repository plan solely because of its potential as political propaganda. And not surprisingly, they pressured More to support the established order as powerfully as possible. By the time she closed down the series, More had written several tracts that made light of the social problems she took most seriously. As we shall see, her conscience sometimes bothered her, but she pressed on.

The tracts More wrote for the Repository diverge from the Teston letters in many respects. One significant difference concerns the issue of charity. While More was writing these tracts, her letters often accused the upper classes of indifference to the sufferings of the poor. Thus she told Mrs. Bouverie that she seldom dared to call “the misery arising from the terrible disproportion of human conditions” to the attention of her wealthy friends, because people who “‘fare sumptuously every day,’ are apt to fancy the whole world is a scene of content and jollity” and to get annoyed if anyone undermines this comforting conviction (Chatterton, 1:292). In the tracts, however, the genteel characters are often models of generous concern. Nor did her rage at the establishment prevent More from including an exemplary Anglican cleric in almost every story. Though deeply disappointed in both the upper classes and the church, she did not want to foster revolutionary sentiment or offend her upper-class friends by sharing her views with her readers.

Sometimes More concealed her reservations more or less voluntarily, from her own sense of what it would be prudent or acceptable to tell the lower orders; at other times she did so as a result of purely external pressures. The history of her tract The Way to Plenty shows how such pressures operated. In the first year of the scarcity, More wrote to Mrs. Bouverie that she had received “applications in the newspapers, as well as from private friends, to turn [her] attention next month to the subject of the bad economy of the poor” (Chatterton, 1:285). She laid aside the story she was working on and wrote The Way to Plenty. One of those who asked More to write this tract, Bishop Porteus, suggested that she should attribute the scarcity entirely to the will of God. But More, as we have seen, believed that profiteering and government inaction had played a significant role in producing the crisis. She had even decided, at one point, that human corruption had somehow managed to overrule the deity's benevolent intentions. Her response to Porteus's request was to temporize rather than to resist. “I told the Bishop,” she reported uncomfortably to Teston, “I would screen the collateral and subordinate causes of the scarcity, as much as my conscience would allow me, for the sake of keeping peace at home.” She added rather innocently that she could only hope that “it is not Jesuitical to tell the truth without telling the whole truth” (Chatterton, 1:287-88). But it was Jesuitical to attribute wholly to God what she believed to be partly the fault of man, or to blame bad management for sufferings which she privately attributed to inadequate wages. And her tract did both.

The Way to Plenty tells the story of the virtuous farmer, Tom White, and the other substantial citizens of his parish as they encounter the scarcity. These putatively admirable characters attack the very ideas that More was articulating in the Teston letters when she wrote the tale. Unlike More herself, Tom White believes that the scarcity is a just punishment for the vices of the working class: “He was in hopes that a little poverty might bring on a little penitence” (H. More, 1:271). In flat contradiction to More's private views, Tom calculates that if the workers did not commit “the sin of wasting time and getting drunk,” they could easily afford meat for their families (H. More, 1:273). Extravagance alone causes their sufferings.

In the symbolically named Dr. Shepherd, Tom's rural parish possesses the sort of exemplary cleric that More rarely encountered in real life. We are told that he has won the love of his entire flock by his sympathetic conduct. But it is hard to believe this when we hear him threatening his parishioners: “There is one rule from which we will never depart. Those who have been seen aiding or abetting any riot, any attack on butchers, bakers, wheat-mows, mills, or millers, we will not relieve” (H. More, 1:284). More wrote these words in the very year when her Teston letters suggest that she would have been pleased if the rural poor had expressed their discontent more vehemently, perhaps even by rioting, and that she herself blamed tradesmen for the sort of profiteering that attacks upon them were intended to protest.

More's most famous tract, The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, misrepresents her views in a more shocking manner than any of her other works. The Teston letters tell of many families who faced the same tragic conditions that plague the story's exemplary, working-class protagonist: low wages, a starvation diet, swarms of children, illness, and squalid living conditions. The tract, however, aestheticizes these conditions, describing the improbably “rosy” cheeks of the shepherd's daughter Molly and the shining cleanliness of his scanty furniture, rather than his bedridden wife's twisted, paralytic form or the sleeping arrangements in his overcrowded hovel. In addition, the tract commends the shepherd's family for their superhuman resignation to appalling deprivation. Lovable little Molly fervently thanks God for a meal of water, potatoes, and salt, while her father is overwhelmed with gratitude at the prospect of moving his wife into a cottage with a functioning roof. “Will my poor Mary have a dry thatch over her head? … Indeed, my cup runs over with blessings,” he cries ecstatically (H. More, 1:200).

In fact, the shepherd's Christianity is tested through his willingness to submit without resentment to the very conditions which, as the Teston letters demonstrate, More herself was unable to tolerate on behalf of working men: the leaky thatch that angered her when she encountered it in the poorhouses of the Mendips, the meatless meals whose inevitability she protested, and the overcrowding that enraged her when she visited the homes of the poor. The shepherd and his family believe that it has to be this way. But More did not. Her sympathy with the poor had grown more intense during the very period when she was under the greatest pressure to place her pen at the service of the state. As a result, her Cheap Repository tracts were unable to maintain the delicate balance between honesty and prudence that she had achieved in Village Politics.

When More closed the Cheap Repository in 1798, she did so in part because she was having difficulties with her publishers. But she was also tired of the series. The immediate threat of violent revolution was over and with it the urgent need to shore up a society which she wanted to change. Both on the national stage and in the Mendips, More had faced an insoluble dilemma: to retain her influence she had to support the established order, yet the main reason she wanted influence was to effect reforms. The Blagdon controversy was soon to reveal the failure of her efforts to escape association with Jacobinism and dissent. Though More's manipulative equivocations persuaded posterity that she was a reactionary, she never fully convinced even her fellow Tories that she was on their side.

Notes

1. Other writers who describe Hannah More's attitudes toward the poor in roughly similar terms include Valenze, Thompson, Smith, and Brown.

2. Patty's most frequently quoted remark relates to the well-paid workers in the glass factory at Nailsea, one of the towns where she and Hannah established a school. Patty describes “both sexes and all ages herding together” in the over-heated factory, a scene she found “voluptuous beyond belief.” She added that the “eating and drinking [were] luxurious, the body scarcely covered, but fed with dainties of a shocking description” (M. More, 61-62). On many occasions, however, Patty took a different tone. She was often critical of the Anglican Church.

3. The Teston letters do not appear in the bibliographies of Demers's and Kowaleski-Wallace's studies, for example.

4. I do not mean to imply that the Teston letters present More's “real” or “private” views in any simple sense. Obviously these letters, like everything else More wrote, were tailored for the particular audience to which they were addressed. But unlike the letters in Roberts's volumes, the Teston letters are unexpurgated. And these unexpurgated letters are characterized by a tone of intense indignation largely absent from Roberts's doctored versions of More's letters to Wilberforce, despite the fact that, since Wilberforce shared the Testonites' social views and was also More's confidante, we would expect More to take the same tone in writing to him that she took in writing to the Testonites. Apparently, then, Roberts found the tone More took with her most reformist confidantes incompatible with his portrait of her as a bland supporter of hierarchy, and he toned down her letters to Wilberforce accordingly. It is my purpose here to try to put the feelings and opinions with which Roberts tampered back into the overall picture of More's relations with the poor.

5. My discussion of eighteenth-century theories concerning poverty is heavily indebted to Dean, Poynter, and Soloway. Space limitations prevent me from going into the fascinating and complex debate that their studies describe in nearly as much detail as I would have liked.

6. Though many responded to the scarcity by rationalizing their own interests, others, like More herself, offered aid or suggested inventive schemes for alleviating distress. In 1797 Prime Minister William Pitt proposed a major reform of the Old Poor Law. His bill affirmed that every poor man had a right to employment at a “full wage” and to supplemental relief if he had an unusually large family. Though somewhat incoherent, Pitt's bill was, overall, a liberal measure, and it was more harshly criticized by those who wanted to discipline the poor than by those who wished to aid them generously. More and her friends at Teston supported it passionately. After Pitt withdrew the bill, the forces of repression were definitely in the ascendant.

7. On several occasions Walpole chided More for her refusal to condemn sympathizers with the revolutionary cause, such as Mrs. Anna Barbauld and Joseph Priestly, as harshly as he did Walpole (31: 361-62, 385-86).

8. The remarks that I have made about More's tracts are also relevant to the speeches she delivered at the public meetings of her schools and savings clubs, many of which are quoted in Mendip Annals. More generally suggests in these speeches, just as she does in her tracts, that the poor should submit to the established order in a spirit of Christian resignation. Like the tracts, these speeches are in tension with the private opinions that More expressed in the Teston letters. Her reasons for misrepresenting her opinions were the same in both cases.

9. How their impoverished readers reacted to More's tracts, however, is an open question. Robert Altick thinks the tracts presented a picture of poverty that was too distorted to fool their intended audience. “The contrast between the writer's bland assurance that all would be well and the actual state of affairs as social tensions mounted was too blatant to be ignored,” he remarks (106).

Works Cited

Altick, Robert. The English Common Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957.

Brown, Ford K. Fathers of the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.

Chatterton, Lady Georgiana, ed. Memorials, Personal and Historical of Admiral Lord Gambier, G. C. B.: With Original Letters from William Pitt First Lord Chatham, Lord Nelson, Lord Castlereagh, Lord Mulgrave, Henry Fox First Lord Holland, The Right Hon. George Canning, Etc. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London, 1861.

Dean, Mitchell. The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance. London: Routledge, 1991.

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More, Hannah. The Works of Hannah More. 7 vols. Boston, 1835.

More, Martha. Mendip Annals; or, A Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and Martha More in their Neighbourhood, Being the Journal of Martha More. Ed. Arthur Roberts. London, 1859.

Myers, Mitzi. “‘A Peculiar Protection’: Hannah More and the Cultural Politics of the Blagdon Controversy.” History, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Poynter, J. R. Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief 1795-1834. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

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Smith, Olivia. The Politics of Language, 1791-1819. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Soloway, R. A. Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England 1783-1852. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: V. Gollanz, 1963.

Valenze, Deborah. Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Walpole, Horace. Horace Walpole's Correspondence. Ed. W. S. Lewis. 48 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.