The New Compass: A Critical Review
Contradictory Impulses
Jennie Batchelor
Anne Stott. Hannah More: The First Victorian.
From her early years as a
fame-hungry playwright to her later career as an Evangelical social reformer
and philanthropist, Hannah More has always been a figure of controversy. Both
her phenomenally successful Percy (1778)
and her ill-fated Fatal Falsehood
(1779) provoked accusations of plagiarism their author vehemently denied. At
the turn of the nineteenth century, More was to find herself the subject of a
ferocious pamphlet war sparked by fears that her Sunday schools were promoting
Evangelical thought in order to undermine the established Church. In the two
centuries since the Blagdon Controversy Hannah More has continued to polarise
critics. Recent feminist scholarship has underscored these divisions, despite
the efforts of some to reappraise More’s philanthropic and literary labours.
Hannah More’s capacity to divide her readers remains unsurpassed.
The impulse to label
late-eighteenth-century women’s writing according to a rather unforgiving
radical/conservative binary has had a particularly detrimental effect on Hannah
More’s contemporary reputation. Feminist scholarship has struggled to
accommodate the paradoxes of More’s life and work where it has been able to
forgive and even embrace the contradictions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing.
Critics have struggled to reconcile More’s political conservatism with her
often spirited claims that women should realise their intellectual potential.
Others have viewed her efforts to provide an education for workers through a
network of Sunday schools as an invidious exercise in working-class oppression
fuelled by concerns that the French Revolution might lead to a plebeian
uprising in England.
In recent years, however, an
alternative critical trajectory has emerged, which reveals the striking and
often uncomfortable contiguities between the works of so-called radical and
conservative feminists and argues for a more flexible understanding of the wide
spectrum of feminist writings in the long eighteenth century. Within this
context, Anne Mellor has recently argued that Hannah More was a revolutionary
writer who worked for social and political change and advanced the cause of
women’s social empowerment (Mothers of
the Nation [Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2000]). Many critics remain
unconvinced, however, as do publishers. More’s most important works including Strictures on the Modern System of Female
Education (1799) and Coelebs in
Search of a Wife (1808) are
still to be published in readily-available, affordable editions and thus remain
a conspicuous absence from many university syllabi.
Anne Stott’s sympathetic biography
is part of this wider project to recuperate Hannah More and to make this
successful and influential writer accessible to a new generation of readers.
One of the book’s greatest achievements is its convincing account of the way in
which More was successfully written out of the popular imagination by the prejudiced
responses of her contemporary interlocutors whose attacks against the author
were motivated by political, gender or religious bias and perpetuated by
inaccurate research. Even More’s most well-meaning defenders added fuel to the
critical fire which has threatened to consume her. William Roberts’ 1834
biography, published only a year after More’s death, firmly sought to locate
his subject within the moral code of nascent Victorianism and in the process
created the “unpleasant, authoritarian bigot” (viii) she is often perceived as
today. But as Stott is acutely aware, it is More’s notoriety, rather than her
obscurity, which is really at stake here. By choosing to understand this
paradoxical woman on her own terms, Stott’s biography offers a far more compelling
argument for a critical re-evaluation of More’s cultural and historical
importance than that offered in much recent critical scholarship.
More emerges in this study as a
complex, hard-working, if not always likeable, woman, who tirelessly worked to
improve education for women and the labouring classes and campaigned against
slavery. In many ways, hers was a life of two halves. In her twenties she
captivated
Rather than seeking to explain away
the contradictory impulses which drove More’s life and work (her conviction
about female potential, on the one hand, and her pious religious and social
conservatism, on the other) Stott suggests that we need to understand both
sides of her personality in order to fully appreciate her literary and
philanthropic activities. In her perceptive analysis of More’s polemical Strictures, for example, Stott
demonstrates how this “loose, baggy monster” contains a “range of seemingly
contradictory statements that, pulled out of context, can be used to depict her
as a protofeminist or an antifeminist” (217). However, by placing the work
within the context of contemporary debates on female education, which, as Stott
suggests, produced a “surprising consensus” among women of different political
persuasions, another text emerges. In its plea for a rational education for
women, Stott argues, the Strictures
articulates a call for a “feminine patriotism” (that “politics in its broadest
sense could not be the preserve of men alone” [225]) that transcends the binary radical/conservative political paradigm
within which the text is commonly read.
Stott cannot fully exonerate More
from the accusations feminists and Marxist critics have levelled against her,
however. In a sensitive discussion of More’s relationship with the milk-maid
poet Ann Yearsley, More emerges as hopelessly naive and not a little
patronising, and even Stott’s subtle readings of the Cheap Repository Tracts¾she suggests they might preach
labouring-class aspiration as much as they preach submission¾cannot
reclaim these overtly propagandist texts. Largely, however, Stott does not
attempt to exonerate More and it is for this reason, above all, that the work
is such an important contribution to studies of this much-maligned figure and
the religious and political movements she has come to exemplify. This is a remarkable
biography of as remarkable a woman.
Batchelor, Jennie. “Contradictory
Impulses.” The New Compass: A
Critical Review 3 (June 2004)
<http://www.thenewcompass.ca/jun2004/batchelor.html>