Book Review

The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter July/August 2003, Vol. 10, No. 4. A Lost Crusader Review of Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford University Press, April 2003);   384 pages. Hardcover $35.00   ISBN: 0199245320 by Ann Stott Reviewed by WFN Staff

With Hillary Clinton's Memoirs, Ann Coulter's Treason, and an appreciation of Katharine Hepburn jockeying for position at the top of the New York Times' nonfiction bestseller list, it seems appropriate to consider the life of a formidable woman of an earlier era. In Hannah More: The First Victorian, Anne Stott, an Associate Lecturer at the Open University and a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, offers a lively portrait of a woman to whom history has been adulatory, sometimes unfair and, of late, indifferent. Stott's excellent biography corrects this oversight and offers a story of a woman who, in her own time, "was better known than Mary Wollstonecraft" and whose "books outsold Jane Austen's many times over."

Hannah More (1745-1833) eventually became a celebrated woman of letters, an organizer of Sunday schools and women's clubs, and a maven of etiquette and conduct, whom Samuel Johnson once called "the most skilled versificatrix in the English language." Among her friends and correspondents were Horace Walpole, William Wilberforce, Edmund Burke, and a host of celebrated British "bluestockings"-- fellow men of literary inclinations whose homes became salons for some of the most interesting political and intellectual gatherings of the day. Later, after a religious awakening, she became enmeshed with some of the major figures of the Evangelical revival, including Thomas Scott and John Newton--the latter of whom was a born-again former slave trader who composed the popular hymn, "Amazing Grace."

More's beginnings were modest-- she was the daughter of a schoolmaster in Bristol, England--but her skills vast. Stott writes,

"This was a woman who received no formal education, who never voted, never trained for a profession; who battled continually with migraines, chest infections, stomach upsets, and fevers; who mixed with literary men, bluestockings, and politicians; who could turn her hand equally to an elegant poem for the London intelligentsia, a moralistic tract for polite society, an anti-slavery polemic, a chapbook story for the poor, or a work of political theory for a princess."

"More's conservatism, moralism, and anti-feminism have been exaggerated by historians with contemporary political agendas of their own."

More is perhaps best remembered, if she is remembered at all, as the author of tracts regarding female behavior. Her first such effort, published in 1777, was called Essays on Various Subjects Principally Designed for Young Ladies, but it was her 1799 conduct book, Strictures on the Modem System of Female Education, that was her most important contribution to this genre. "The book was an instant talking point," Stott writes, "both for its comparatively ambitious agenda for women's education and also because it contained the most explicit avowal to date of her Evangelical theology." It is not an easy read; Stott calls it "a loose, baggy monster containing a range of seemingly contradictory statements that, pulled out of context, can be used to depict her as a proto-feminist or an anti-feminist." It is also constantly compared to Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a book Stott says More could barely stomach and whose author--Mary Wollstonecraft-- More's friend Walpole called a "hyena in petticoats."

Nevertheless the territory covered by the Strictures, if overly broad, is provocative; Stott judges its tone "bracing." More's first line lays out her agenda:

"It is a singular injustice which is often exercised towards women, first to give them a most defective Education, and then to expect from them the most undeviating purity of conduct."

"There is so much truth in the remark, ' " More wrote, "that till women shall be more reasonably educated, and until the native growth of their mind shall cease to be more stilted and cramped, we shall have no juster ground for pronouncing that their understanding has already reached its highest attainable perfection, than the Chinese would have for affirming that their women have attained to the greatest possible perfection in walking, while their first care is, during their infancy, to cripple their feet."

A biography of Hannah More is likely not on most people's summer reading lists. But Anne Stott's book should be. She is that rare combination: an enthusiastic chronicler of More's life as well as a historian of scholarly precision. She notes the errors and misinterpretations of some of More's earlier biographers, and makes a persuasive argument that More's conservatism, moralism, and anti-feminism have been exaggerated by historians with contemporary political agendas of their own. For example, one letter More wrote, describing her educational efforts among the poor women of Cheddar, is often cited by historians hostile to More's sensibility as evidence of her "class oppression." But, as Stott notes, this is a "caricatured picture of More's programme," willfully ignorant of the larger context of More's work.

Stott peppers her book with interesting details, but never becomes too mired in antiquarianism. She notes that More "is cited in the 0xford English Dictionary as one of the earliest users of the term 'Propriety."'

"Don't mind dress! Come in your blue stockings!"

Stott even gives readers the origins of the word, "bluestocking." It was said to have arisen, Stott writes, "around 1756 out of an apology made by the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet, who declined an invitation to a literary meeting at Elizabeth Vesey's house in Bath because he was not properly dressed for an evening assembly. To which she replied, 'Don't mind dress! Come in your blue stockings!': meaning informal worsted stockings rather than fashionable silk stockings." She is fair-minded about More's intellectual and educational legacy: she judges her only a mediocre playwright, but a successful polemicist, and notes that many of the "Hannah More Clubs" she helped to found throughout the British countryside endured well into the twentieth century.

More herself lived to the extended age of eighty-eight. Active, enterprising and generous, a meritocrat not the inheritor of privilege," Stott writes, "More was an invaluable role model for the women who came later: the 'mother' of Victorianism possibly; certainly one of the midwives of the new age." In an age where education and opportunity are something Western women can take for granted, More's life is a fascinating chronicle of a woman who sometimes embraced and sometimes challenged convention, but whose efforts to expand women's opportunities are certainly worth remembering.