Hannah More, one of the most influential evangelical women of the 18th century, introduced

Imagine that a friend of yours becomes a Christian.

What would they have to change? Friends? Career? What they watch or read? How would you help them make those decisions?

You might think that conversion today is so complicated and the costs so great that examples from history are irrelevant. Hannah More, however, was an 18th-century woman who wrestled with such questions, leaving us a legacy of wisdom and courage from which we can still learn today.

Hannah was born into the turbulent 1740s and her situation was unpromising. England was at war with France, public life was decadent and the established churches largely stagnant. Her father had missed out on an inheritance and so had forfeited the genteel life of a clergyman he was aiming at. Instead, he eked out a living for his expanding family as the only schoolmaster of a village school outside Bristol. His precious collection of books had been lost on a sea voyage.

Educated at random

Hannah was the fourth of five sisters, doted upon by all, and precocious even by the standards of her talented siblings. Her father taught the children at home, and Hannah received special attention by being singled out to learn some Latin. Their father didn’t, or wouldn’t, provide more than this; the girls were not entitled to anything approaching a boy’s education. Hannah later wrote: ‘I, a girl, was educated at random’. So the sisters, with great resourcefulness, left the cramped schoolhouse to make their way, starting a school for girls in up-and-coming Bristol.

The school was the More girls’ passport to social status and financial stability. Hannah started as a pupil, but, by the age of 18, she was a teacher. As they were so young, Hannah and her sisters enjoyed great companionship with the pupils and were also able to play host to local dignitaries, from theatre directors to the MP Edmund Burke. She met an older landowner to whom she became engaged, but, after he had postponed the wedding three times in a six-year period, she was glad to accept a dissolution of her promise and an annual sum.

Literary career

What was in part a great blow, turned out to be Hannah’s great opportunity. Freed from the necessity of earning hard cash, she could pursue a literary career. In an age where the novel had barely got going, theatre was the place to tell a story. And so Hannah travelled to London, took up lodgings near the great actor-manager David Garrick, got invitations to parties and made herself indispensable. Her strategy was so successful that in a period of three years she went from unknown to being the favourite of Samuel Johnson, the great dictionary writer, and semi-permanent house-guest of the Garricks. She was painted by society artist Joshua Reynolds and became part of the famous Blue Stockings Society, a group of female thinkers and writers.

Disillusion

Three plays of hers were published and performed countrywide, a remarkable achievement for a woman from such a humble background. But then, in 1779, her great friend and protector, David Garrick, died and a disillusion with the theatre and London set in. She became companion to Garrick’s widow for five years, living an increasingly retired life until she moved to ‘Cowslip Green’ in Somerset, away from the dazzling talent and squalor of London.

And that’s where it could have finished; Hannah More, a footnote in 18th-century literary history. But, during those years in the capital, Hannah met Bible Christianity.

Spiritual hunger

Hannah had always been a God-fearing girl. She was brought up in a pious home and at school the More sisters were known for their ‘excellent principles’. And, although Dan Cruikshank tells us that London in the 1700s was ‘a vast, hostile, soulless, wicked all-devouring … fatally attractive place’, Hannah kept company there with conservative churchgoers. But that respectable religion was not enough to satisfy the spiritual hunger Hannah felt. She wrote: ‘The more I see of the “honoured, famed and great”, the more I see of the littleness, the unsatisfactoriness of all created good; and that no earthly pleasure can fill up the wants of the immortal principle within’. A friend passed her the poetry of William Cowper (‘A poet whom I can read on Sunday! I am enchanted!’), she began Matthew Henry’s Commentary and took away pockets full of sermons from John Newton’s church, St. Mary Woolnoth. Gradually Hannah turned from the confines of respectable religion to the find peace with God through faith alone.

Choices of a new convert

So then, what was Hannah to do? She had moved from the distraction of London, but that was not enough. ‘ To seek a retreat till we have got rid of [this] ambition … will only conduct the discontented mind to a long train of fresh disappointments’. So, first of all, she continued the networking which had brought her own promotion. Throughout her life she deliberately sought out the company of those who would do her good, or to whom she could do good. She corresponded with John Newton and was a close friend of William Wilberforce and the rest of his ‘Clapham set’, those evangelical Anglicans at the forefront of applying the gospel to society. She knew the Wesleys and maintained contact with a number of bishops. Hannah took up the causes of downtrodden individuals and groups, campaigning against slavery for the rest of her life. At the same time she cultivated friendships with the minor aristocracy and kept up letter-writing to some of the cynical London set, longing to see them come to faith.

Bringing gospel influence

Then there was writing. If Hannah had been busy as a secular playwright, she became a whirlwind in the service of the gospel. From plays telling the Bible stories which were translated by missionaries round the world to books presenting the gospel to the upper classes, she wrote year in, year out. She tried novels commending the virtues of simplicity and chastity, and a great volume of tracts. Her works were far more widely read than those of Jane Austen and exported in great volume to America. Even at the end of the 19th century her books could be found on the shelves of serious families in the US. Many of these works now seem quaint and dated, but they achieved great things in their time, and the works directly on spiritual matters are still forceful and resonant today.

After writing came organising. When William Wilberforce said in 1789 that something must be done for the impoverished and neglected villages of north Somerset, Hannah and her sisters took action. They went to the small agricultural and mining communities and established Sunday Schools, employing Christian teachers and eventually running savings clubs for mothers and evening classes for parents. The aim was to bring the influence of the gospel to places full of poverty and disorder so that lives could be saved and society changed. Such a huge undertaking took great organisation and fund raising and, in this, Hannah was tireless. Her involvement lasted to her death in 1833 and brought much trouble and distress as well as great reward.

Of course Hannah was not without flaws and did from time to time make poor decisions which hampered her work, but she was also repeatedly attacked. Her intense work and these public disputes caused quite regular breakdowns in Hannah’s health. She would retreat to her bed with what now looks like bouts of depression or extreme fatigue. After her death her legacy has been blighted by accusations of paternalism, anti-feminism and being, quite simply, a bad writer. The Victorian politician Augustine Birrell said that she was: ‘One of the most detestable authors that ever held a pen [she] flounders like a conger-eel in a dingy sea of morality’.

How sad that such a courageous woman should have got the reputation of being a small-minded spoilsport and a lecturing busy-body. Hannah More was a strong-minded and ambitious woman whose life is well worth study. Her example calls us to use all our gifts, energies and relationships for the glory of God. As she wrote in Practical Piety: ‘We must, while we keep our hearts humble, keep our aims high… As God is unlimited in goodness, he should have our unlimited love. The best we can offer is poor, but let us not withhold that best’.

Sarah Allen is a secondary school English teacher and mother to five children. She is currently involved in evangelism and women’s work at Hope Church, Huddersfield, where her husband Lewis is pastor.