Hannah More

Hannah More (1745-1833) and her three elder sisters, Mary (1738-1813), Elizabeth (1740-1816), and Sarah (1743-1819), opened a school for young ladies in Bristol in 1758. By the early 1760s, Hannah and the youngest sister, Patty (1747-1819), had joined their older sisters at the school.  In 1767 the Mores moved their school to Park Street, where it remained until 1789.  During the 1770s, Hannah More was at the height of her London literary success, based primarily upon her poetry and plays.  In the 1780s she would experience an evangelical awakening that would move her away from the London Bluestockings and into William Wilberforce’s Clapham Sect. Her writings thereafter, as well as her philanthropic activities, reflect her evangelical fervor. In 1777, More published Essays on Various Subjects, Principally Designed for Young Ladies. Though the Steeles, including Mary Steele, were taken with her literary genius and success, More was not given to encouraging young ladies to pursue the arts, noting that women ‘may cultivate the roles of imagination, and the valuable fruits of morals and criticism; but the steeps of Parnassus few, comparatively, have attempted to scale with success’ (Essays 6). The Steele women were far more adventurous, as Mary Wakeford’s two poems, ‘To Silvia’, and ‘Silvia’s Rattle’, make clear. At a visit of the Steeles at Park Street in 1777, William Steele read Mary Steele’s Danebury before Hannah and her sisters. The ‘honor’ on the part of the Mores in meeting the Steeles has to do with the fame of Anne Steele and her Poems of 1760 and her dominant presence in the Bristol Hymns of 1769, edited by Caleb Evans and John Ash. Mr. Steele’s reading of Danebury before the Mores will not go unnoticed either. In 1786, Hannah More visited Mary Steele at Broughton and they walked to Danebury Hill, after which More wrote a poem in remembrance of the visit. See See Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vols 3 and 4.