By Harry Mottram: Playwright, poet, Christian evangelist and anti-slavery campaigner Hannah More (1745-1833) founded a number of schools in pre-Victorian Somerset which were aimed at women and children in an age when many working class people were illiterate.
And in Axbridge, Hannah and her sisters are featured in the Axbridge Pageant – a large outdoor community play charting the town’s history staged in The Square. In the scene she is seen to challenge the authority of the Reverend Gould who was known for his brawling, drinking and womanising. Despite his objections and those of other landowners Hannah founded Sunday Schools across the area teaching reading, home economics and Christian values.
Hannah lived for ten years in Bath at 76, Great Pulteney Street, from 1792 to 1802, and also lived near Wrington in Somerset before finally moving to Clifton. Despite her wide circle of male admirers she never married but famously was ‘jilted’ at the altar – not once but twice – leading to considerable scandal. I wrote a feature on her and her lack of success in getting hitched at https://www.harrymottram.co.uk/journalist/strawberry-line-times/features/jilted-bride/#:~:text=In%20the%202020%20Axbridge%20Pageant,a%20backword%2019th%20century%20town.
As a friend of the actor David Garrick, the MP and slavery abolitionist Edmund Burke and the writer and polymath Dr Johnson she was unusual in an age when women were largely side-lined by the political and intellectual elite.
Now some of Hannah’s letters have been published online by University of Bristol research fellow Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull. The BBC have reported the Nailsea historian Dr Jo Edwards as saying: “It’s not just an academic project that doesn’t involve normal people. It’s a community resource.”
Hannah More wrote a poem called Slavery, which was used as part of William Wilberforce’s parliamentary campaign to achieve abolition of enslaved Africans writes Jasmine Ketibuah-Foley.
Hannah’s writing saw her become friends with the likes of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and she met Jane Austen for tea on one occasion – and although it wasn’t a meeting of minds there was a mutual respect. Hannah was very conservative in her views and rejected the idea of women having the vote – but in her letters her social, political and Christian activism is apparent.
The letters can be read at www.hannahmoreletters.org/
Axbridge News:
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