THESlS This is to certify that the thesis entitled THE DIDACTIC ART OF HANNAH MORE presented by MARLENE A. HESS has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for PA. D. degree infi_% mm W Wat/“x Major prdfessor Date W 0-7639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution M-.. » mama it i Q- ‘1'“ M W-qvmdr ‘57} S“ 1 "5'39 *2" =3» :6“ M3 4 k sa::.‘--av.-£mm..» l Uni-avers?” -‘ ' _,__ ‘ lllll ll \lll l to \ll‘blll l r" x l l : ’5‘ ””13" 1‘ - r12;- 1 .l 1" 'v ’1 a ii %§-.-?T': . {.4 “3—" '- ’ «3% ' I Q \~ in.”' i r‘ MSU ’ RETURNING MATERIALS: Place in book drop to LJBRARJES remove this checkout from JIIIICIIIIL. your record. FINES will be charged if book is returned after the date stamped below. woman L‘_" THE DIDACTIC ART OF HANNAH MORE By Marlene A. Hess A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1983 37-2622 6) Copyright by MARLBNE ALICE HESS 1983 ABSTRACT THE DIDACTIC ART OF HANNAH MORE By Marlene A. Hess Hannah More's literary art was intertwined with her life, beliefs and the historical context of the late eighteenth-century. Because her works were audience ori- ented, they reflected a didactic emphasis which was ini— tially conventional but evolved into a more overtly reli- gious purpose. This study follows chronologically three major periods of More's life and art: first, her associa- tion with Samuel Johnson and the Bluestockings in London where she wrote conventional moral and sentimental poetry and stage drama; second, her withdrawal to the country where she became active with the evangelicals in political and social reforms and addressed the lowest levels of society in the moral tales of the Cheap Repository Tracts; and third, her attempt to address middle-class women through her religious novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife. This thesis shows that Hannah More's literary art was shaped by her evangelical beliefs, that she achieved suc- cess in her aim of appealing to three different levels of society, and that her didactic art made use of many liter- ary forms. Because of these achievements she deserves greater recognition than she has been given. In memory of my parents iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my great appreciation to those who assisted me in various ways in this project. To the members of my guidance committee I give thanks for their outstanding abilities as scholars, their dedication to academic excellence, and their willingness to give kind and generous help. I am grateful to Victor Paananen and Donald Rosenberg for their support and encouragement in the early stages of the work and to Arthur Sherbo who made it possible to begin my research at Cambridge University and who intro- duced me to the British library system. My special thanks go to Robert Uphaus, my chairman and thesis director, whose advice, support and editorial work carried me through the periods of loneliness and frustration. I am also grateful to Lorraine Hart in the English Department for taking care of the many details and to Sharon Hemingway for her per- severance in typing to meet my deadlines. Finally, I thank my husband and children who cheerfully gave up so many hours on my behalf. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. HANNAH MORE'S THEORY OF LITERATURE I. Pragmatic Theory II. Critical Review of Hannah More's Works III. Hannah More's Literary Assumptions II. HANNAH MORE AND HER LONDON AUDIENCE 1. Poetry . II. Drama III. Sacred Dramas III. HANNAH MORE'S CHANGE FROM ELITE TO POPULAR LITERATURE . . I. Moral and Religious Beliefs II. Social and Political Application III. Didactic Literary Art . . . IV. HANNAH MORE'S EXPERIMENT WITH THE NOVEL I. More's Objections to Novels II. Why More Wrote a Novel . . III. The Influence of Mary Wollstonecraft on Hannah More . . . . . . CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BIBLIOGRAPHY . 77 78 106 132 133 140 165 186 194 CHAPTER I HANNAH MORE'S THEORY OF LITERATURE I. Pragmatic Theory According to M. H. Abrams every theory of literature has had to take some account of four elements basic to the total situation of any work of art: the work itself, the artist, the universe or world the work reflects, and the audience the work affects.1 Abrams sets up the following framework: universe work ZN artist audience He asserts that any reasonably adequate theory takes some account of all four elements, yet almost all theories reveal a distinct orientation toward only one. In an historical survey, we find that the oldest and probably most influen- tial literary theory is the mimetic orientation which is grounded in Plato and Aristotle. Its principal concern has been with the world revealed by the work, and its key word is imitation. The idea that art is imitation was used all '2 the way through the eighteenth-century and played an impor- tant part in neoclassic aesthetics. However, as a result of the influence of the study of rhetoric and its affective influence, the second major orientation arose, the prag- matic theory with its more representative word, instruction. Philip Sidney set forth the nature and consequences of this change of direction in his classic, Apology for Poetry. Replying to Puritan charges that poetry was immoral and provocative, Sidney argued that the purpose of poetry is to instruct the mind, or if to delight, then merely in order to persuade. By disguising his doctrine in a tale, the imaginative writer, rather than the philosopher or histori- an, entices "even those hard-hearted evil men" into goodness "as if they took a medicine of cherries."2 Sidney's view of literature represents all those criti- cal theories from Horace to the Enlightenment which have considered literature chiefly as a means to an end, and which have therefore tended to evaluate individual works of literature in terms of their achievement of that end. For theorists of the pragmatic orientation, literature's ability to serve moral ends has always been its chief aim, pleasure only a secondary aim. Toward the end of the eighteenth-century, in the stir- rings of Romanticism, the interest of the audience gave way to an interest in the poet. The result of this major shift, according to Abrams, was the emergence of the third criti- cal orientation in literary theory--the expressive theory 3 of literature. In this orientation the literary work is the overflow, utterance or projection of the thought and feelings of the writer. Poetry, for example, is defined in 3 The artist, terms of the imaginative process of the poet. therefore, becomes the central focus rather than the uni- verse, audience or the work itself. Our primary concern here is with the pragmatic theory and its-collision with an emerging expressive basis of literature and the orientations in the works of Hannah More. A pragmatic theory of literature claims a purpose, a goal, a raison d'etre beyond the work itself; such literature exists in order to accomplish something, particularly in relation to an audience. Typically it attempts to teach and to please. As is the case with the other aesthetic orientations, a pragmatic theory is both a description of what literature is or does and a prescription on what it should be; the implication of pragmatic theories is that art is primarily an instrument for reaching others, and that it ought to be practiced as such. In Horace's Ars Poetica we find that imitation is an important element of poetry, but it is a means to a more effective rhetoric rather than the goal of art. Horace's entire understanding of art was predominantly rhetorical, and he and his followers fit into Abrams' triangle of criti- cal orientation as a group which looks from the work of art outward toward the audience. To pragmatic artists, there- fore, the art of poetry is tantamount to the art of 4 persuasion. Just as mimetic art refers to the universe, and expressive art relies on the writer's emotions, so pragmatic art seeks to affect the audience. For Horace, the purpose of poetry was primarily to please, but for his descendants in the Renaissance, particu- larly Philip Sidney, the justification of literature was its ability to instruct the moral sensibility. The epic, for instance, was the most noble genre of poetry because, as Sidney said, it "most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy."4 By the time of the Renaissance, the vocabulary of classical rhetoric had become the standard vocabulary of literary criticism (prodesse: to teach; delectare: to please; movere: to move), and the didactic function of poetry was built into the expectations of both writer and audience.5 Yet built into the pragmatic orientation were the means of its dissolution. Ancient rhetoric had provided criti- cism not only its stress on affecting the audience, but also its attention to the powers and activities of the speaker himself--his "nature," or innate powers and genius, as distinguished from his culture and art. Because the poet was held "strictly responsible to the audience for whose pleasure be exerted his creative ability," more stress began to be put on the poet himself.6 The pragmatic assumptions that prevailed in literature up to the eighteenth century were undergoing a change even while Samuel Johnson was affirming them. Through the S psychological contributions of seventeenth century philos- 0phers, such as Hobbes and Locke, more attention was given to the mental constitution of the writer and the act of composing. Up to this point the writer's invention and imagination were made dependent on the external world and the literary models the writer had to imitate in order to meet the requirements of a cultivated audience. Thus a shift occurred from . . . the formal characteristics of a work of art to the natural and spontaneous action of the minds that created it and enjoyed it. This meant that critics came more and more to talk of enthusiasm rather than good sense, and original genius (a 7 new phrase 1n the m1d-century) rather than w1t. This shift toward an increasing emphasis on the poet's natural genius, creative imagination and emotional sponta- neity, resulted in the concerns of the audience falling into the background and instead the poet or writer emerged on the literary stage as the central figure. Thus the period between the middle of the eighteenth century and the 1830's is when "the great system of neoclassical criticism as it was inherited from antiquity and built up and codi- fied . . . disintegrated, and when diverse new trends emerge early in the 19th century crystallized into roman- tic movements."8 Hannah More wrote during this historical period, and her literary works rise out of prevailing pragmatic assump- tions. However, through her religious beliefs she moved 6 toward an expressive basis of literature where she prac- ticed her didactic art in the powerful overflow of evan- gelical enthusiasm. II. Critical Review of Hannah More's Works In attempting to understand the works of Hannah More (1745-1833), we observe three historical phases through which her reputation has passed. First, in her own time she was, for the most part, given great adulation as her two nineteenth-century biographers, William Roberts and William Thompson, have noted. Second, after her death and from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth-century, both she and her works were regarded as representative of an older, rejected way of thinking and narrow mode of life. Writing at the end of the nineteenth-century, George Saintsbury says: "Hannah More, once a substantially famous person in literature, is now chiefly remembered by her association with great men of letters, such as Johnson in her youth, Macaulay and DeQuincey in her old age." However, he goes on to say she . . . is not to be spoken of with contempt, except by ignorance or incompetence. She had real abili- ties, and was a woman of the world. But she was very unfortunately parted in respect of time, coming just before the days when it became possi- ble for a lady 50 be decent in literature with— out being dull. 7 In the same period Twelve English Authoresses, with its cri- terion for inclusion being "world-wide reputation," begins with Hannah More and says her village stories and ballads "are the only writings of this remarkable woman now worth preserving."10 While one writer enthusiastically endorses Hannah More as "the greatest woman in England in the later part of the 11 a contemporary review of Annette eighteenth century," Meakins's early twentieth-century biography is more typical. Calling Meakins's work a "brave attempt to revive interest in a person of importance in her day," the review dismisses the works of More as "of small permanent value" since "the tone and spirit . . . are so far removed from the spirit of our modern life that it can have no message for us today."12 The Cambridge History of Enlgish Literature sums up her reputation for this period: "Hannah More's life was a re- markable one, and her fame as an author, at one time con- siderable, was kept alive until near the middle of the nine- teenth century. It is at present nearly dead and is not likely to revive." However, "her correspondence is most undeservedly neglected, for she was a good letter- writer . ..."13 The third phase of Hannah More's reputation in very recent years reviews her place in literary history. Critics have been able to recognize that we must "look at literature 14 not merely to confirm our own attitudes," to use the words 8 of Graham Hough; instead, as Roy Harvey Pearce has suggested, we must . . . consider the literary work as it is a kind of statement which can never be dissociated from either the time in which it was made or the time in which it is known: i.e., when the work was written or when it was (or is) read. 5 Therefore, appreciation for More's place in literary history has resulted in important studies such as Sam Pickering's demonstration that More's novel Coelebs led to the respecta- bility of the novel and greatly influenced Victorian novel- ists such as Charles Dickens. Pickering also has argued that her tracts are the first serial fiction and are fore- 16 Other studies have runners of the modern short story. demonstrated that More's fiction is a forerunner of the English social novel, and that More is the first to use fiction for prOpagandist purposes. Finally, Altick credits Thomas Paine and Hannah More with Opening the printed page to the English common reader.17 In addition to literature, other academic areas have recognized her contributions and the powerful impact she made on her time. While feminists react uncomfortably to some of her views and wish she had been as radical as Mary Wollstonecraft, they are recognizing her moderately advanced 18 The very fact that ideas on women's status and education. she was not radical and not far outside the accepted range of societal norms accounts for her great success in the re- forms she advocated. Social and cultural historians more 9 recently have been able to see her significant contributions in advocating the causes of the poor, the slaves, women and children. From religious historians she has received the greatest recognition, particularly for her contribution to evangelicalism. Yet she seems to bear much of the negative connotations of Victorian life and manners. Muriel Jaeger writes that Hannah More and William Wilberforce . . had so powerful an effect in the purifica- tion-~and the narrowing--of English social life that it seems doubtful whether even the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic wars could, without-them, have pro- duced a change recognisably like that which occurred. It is in the biographical area where she has been treated most extensively and sympathetically, particularly by Annette Meakin (1911) and M. Gladys Jones (1952). Her long life, personal popularity, and the variety of her associations and causes, make her a favorite subject for biography. Margaret Tabor calls her a pioneer in being almost the first woman writer in England, a pioneer in starting Sunday Schools, a "best seller" of her generation. "Her ability and wit" made her a friend of the most dis- tinguished men of her day, but "her love for her poorer fellows and desire to help them" is the subject of her biography.20 Despite the fact that Hannah More was an extremely popular writer in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, her literary works have not been critically 10 examined except briefly, primarily by her biographers. The major critical obstacle to the serious treatment of Hannah More's works in the last one-hundred and fifty years is primarily her didactic view of literature. As Elton's Survey of English Literature expresses wistfully: "Had Hannah More been able to think of literature as an end, and not as a means, we always feel that she might have made something of it; but then she would not have been herself . . ."21 Yet it is precisely this didactic aspect that defines the literature of Hannah More and places her in a context that must be understood. Realizing that literature . . . . 22 15 an express1on 1n h1story, . . . we shall continually be meeting minds that work on entirely different premisses from our own. We shall be confronting beliefs that we find im- possible, emotions that we have never entertained, experiences that the contemporary world gives us no inkling of. And we shall be continually forced to realize that they are a part of our human in- heritance . . . 23 III. Hannah More's Literary Assumptions To Hannah More the most important literary considera- tion was her audience. Operating under pragmatic assump- tions, she formed her objectives based on her perception and analysis of her audience. The aesthetic form in which she delivered her message she saw as subservient to the message itself. Finally, her perception of herself as writer through whom the message flows leads her to a unique ll role as authoritative instructor or educator because of the nature of her message and audience. To adapt Abrams' four elements--universe, writer, work, audience--to their appli- cation to Hannah More would result in the following: Creator Writer Work \1/ Creatures Put in her terms, we have a God-ordered world with communi- cation emanating from Creator and moving downward to the created audience. In between are the other two elements: first in importance is the human medium, the poet, prOphet, writer who is the voice or spokesperson conveying truth from the Creator to his creatures. Second is the artistic form or shape in which truth is presented. This conception gradually evolved in More's thought and works. When she wrote her stage tragedies and poetry in the neoclassical world of London literary society in the 1770's and 80's, she addressed an elite audience with cultivated tastes and expectations. In this earlier part of her writing career, she did not assume the cloak of prOphet nor did she write out of the evangelical context. Rather, she wrote according to conventional modes based on the imitation of great literary masters. She expressed an uncertainty about her moral position; she felt uncomforta— ble writing for the stage and was not sure of its 12 appropriateness as a moral vehicle. Yet her work was favorably received and fit the expectations of her metro- politan audience. She wrote her poetry in a social con- text to amuse and please certain individuals and was con- ventionally moral in tone. Thus while pragmatic assump- tions undergirded her London works, the moral aim was balanced by pleasure as an equally valid purpose. However, she appeared at a time when the demands of the audience were changing and a pragmatic theory underlying her writing was dying a slow but sure death, certainly in the circle to which she belonged. In the literary world where she had achieved great success, the change was taking place in which the interests of the audience were giving way to an interest in the writer and the expression of his own thoughts and feelings. This literary change accounts, in part, for More's radical personal shift as well. As all her biogra- phers note, when she left London society in the late 1780's, and retired to the country it marked a dramatic change in her writing, her audience and in her own goals. The old London world of Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds and the Bluestockings was fast becoming extinct and along with it the aesthetic doctrine which they advanced. She was caught in a dilemma. Having been educated in the neoclassical tradition and having found an aristocratic audi- ence to which her work had appealed, she was faced with the question of what direction her life's work would take and on what basis would it be built. 13 Having an amazing ability to sense the winds of change, she knew she had to take another direction; but instead of merely turning inward to express herself as an artist, which would have been logical for one leading an isolated life in the country, she adapted her pragmatic concern for audience to an expressive emphasis of her own role as prophet. With great force religion came to shape her life and literary practice. The implications of this move meant she could still re- tain her pragmatic orientation. She simply substituted the audience, directed her message, now more overtly religious, to the lowest ranks of society and engaged in political, social and educational reforms. In moving from the age of Johnson into the Romantic period, she shed neoclassical literary doctrine and promoted a literary art based on re- ligion, specifically evangelicalism. In practice she shed "correct" poetry and drama as elite forms expressing neo- classical principles and turned to pOpular fictional and verse forms more appropriate to her new audience, such as moral tales, street ballads and finally the popular novel. She changed her concern from the fashionable audience of the city to the middle and lower classes of rural Bristol. At the lowest end of the ladder of social activity in the 1790's she achieved her greatest literary success in the narra- tives of her Cheap Repository Tracts which she mass pro- duced in the millions for the widest possible audience, 14 indeed a national one. The fact that her London fame pre- ceded her to the country contributed to her rural success. Even though her writing became more overtly didactic, she saw that her audience expected entertainment as well as instruction, and her narrative skills served as pleasurable vehicles to convey moral truth. With "skill and talent alone, a popular artist may transmute mediocre material into something much better than it is, something even good."24 That is what Hannah More succeeded in doing in her fictional narratives. She became a part of what Russel Nye has described: The appearance of a popular artistic tradition, therefore, derives from a shift--initiated in the eighteenth century and completed during the nineteenth--from the patronage of the arts by the restricted upper classes to the support offered by a huge, virtually unlimited, middle-class audience, within the context of great technologi- cal, social, and political change. Not only could More retain her pragmatic assumptions while changing audiences, she also adapted an expressive orientation in which she became the prOphet or spokesperson of an evangelical romanticism. After writing her Sacred Dramas, based on biblical texts, More initiated her view of art as grounded in the Old Testament conception of poet as prophet, similar to the Roman conception of Vates. More began to see herself as a teaching, spokesperson represent- ing supernatural religion to the common people. In her tracts she began to imitate the simplicity of the lS Scriptures, having been influenced by Bishop Robert Lowth's works on the poetry of the sacred Scriptures. Her renunci- ation of classical and secular works is total, for in her sixth year after moving to the country, she admitted she had not read any "pagan" authors (Roberts I, 453). Like the Old Testament prophets who spoke to their cultures, More saw herself in a similar role in her Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great and in Religion of the Fashionable World. She gave moral and religious in- struction, warnings of future consequences of poor moral choices, and criticism against prevailing habits of the rich such as Sabbath-breaking, overindulging in luxury, and duelling. In her writing she became the most powerful spokesperson for the evangelicals, turning her beliefs into a literary product, particularly in her use of fiction as a vehicle for truth in her Cheap Repository Tracts and her narrative, Coelebs in Search of a Wife. Hannah More based her later aestheticsbring her audience to "higher things." But while she imitated the form and marketing of con- temporary mass distribution, she created her own art based on the didactic model set by Sarah Trimmer. However, she went beyond Trimmer's range or the range of anyone else in the field.11. She herself gave a clue to the creative pro- cess when she said to John Newton about her moral stories that "the main circumstances have occurred within my own knowledge," but they were "altered and improved as I thought would best advance my plan, carefully observing to found all goodness on religious principles" (Roberts 1, 457). Besides all the external factors contributing to the success of the tracts, the internal evidence found in the stories themselves help to account for their wide appeal and acceptance. Hannah More's contributions to the art of the moral tale are significant. For one thing she 110 maintained a clever balance between the mimetic and the di- dactic elements in the narratives. While the stories as a whole belong to the same genre as Aesop's fables, the para- bles of the Bible, medieval allegorical narratives and Pilgrim's Progress, they are thoroughly grounded in the realism of the time and place in which they are written. Like Bunyan, who succeeded in bringing to life some of his abstract allegorical characters on a typological as well as English landscape, More was able to breathe life into her eighteenth-century village stories. In some of her narra- tives the result is at once artistic and pragmatic. Although More's primary aim was to instruct, she knew how to please; and this was accomplished by her use of the mimetic representation of reality. In dialogue, character description, subject matter, setting and details of common life, More re-created life as her audience knew it while at the same time rearranging or manipulating the perspective through which she wished her audience to see the reality. The two stories alone, "Black Giles the Poacher" and "Tawny Rachel," would give More the deserving label of "sound eighteenth-century realist" which Q. D. Leavis 12 In "Black Giles," for example, we see the assigns her. realism conveyed in the opening lines by the sense of im- mediacy in the use of the present tense and by the appeal to a familiar location: "Poaching Giles lives on the bor- ders of one of those great moors in Somersetshire." To be more Specific, he "lives at that mud cottage with the 111 broken windows, stuffed with dirty rags, just beyond the gate which divides the Upper from the Lower Moor." We next notice that the narrator establishes a conversational and familiar tone, suggesting a certain rapport and shared knowledge between narrator and reader, for the story con- tinues: "You may know the house at a good distance by the ragged tiles on the roof, and the loose stones which are ready to drop out from the chimney . . ." However, the descriptive details are not offered simply as an end in themselves but as a means by which the narrator manipulates the reader's response as illustrated in the remainder of the sentence: "though a short ladder, a hod of mortar, and half an hour's leisure time, would have prevented all this, and made the little dwelling tight enough" (ngkg I, 251). In addition, when Black Giles is introduced, the nar- rator adopts a benevolent tone, kindly though subtly sa- tiric, in order to maintain the distance between reader and Giles whose label leaves no doubt as to his moral position. But with Chaucerian sympathy the narrator comments, "Giles, to be sure, had been a sad fellow in his time; and it is none of his fault, if his whole family do not end their career either at the gallows or at Botany Bay." However, Black Giles is always "very busy" teaching his sons to cheat and steal. The vivid picture of Giles' children is a masterpiece in realistic color and detail: 112 To be sure, it would be rather convenient, when one passes that way in a carriage, if one of the children would run out and open the gate; but instead of any one of them running out as soon as they hear the whEEls, which would be quite time enough, what does Giles do, but set all his ragged brats, with dirty faces, matted locks, and naked feet and legs, to lie all day upon a sand-bank, hard by the gate, waiting for the slender chance of what may be picked up from travellers. At the sound of a carriage, a whole covey of these little scarecrows start up, rush to the gate, and all at once thrust out their hats and aprons; and for fear this, together with the noise of their clam- orous begging, should not sufficiently frighten the horses, they are very apt to let the gate slap full against you, before you are half-way through, in their eager scuffle to snatch from each other the halfpence which you may have thrown out to them. (Works I, 251) The satiric tone continues whenever the activities of the bad characters are related. For example, "As soon as they [the children] grew too big for the trade of begging at the gate, [they] were promoted to the dignity of thieving on the moor." Not only the children but even the animals get caught by the eye of the shrewd observer who reports that "two or three asses, miserable beings, which, if they had the good , fortune to escape an untimely death by starving, did not fail to meet with it by beating." And again, while Giles always had a good supper that "his boys had pilfered in the day," his "undutiful dogs never stole anything worth having." The realism of the dialogue also is seen in its liveli- ness and correspondence to actual conversation, demonstrated when the exemplary clergyman tries to rescue Giles' son Dick 113 by giving him the honest task of planting beans. Unfortu- nately, Giles appears and tells his son: "Come, give me a handful of the beans; I will teach thee how to plant when thou art paid for planting by the peck. All we have to do in that case is, to dispatch the work as fast as we can, and get rid of the beans with all speed; and, as to the seed coming up or not, that is no business of ours; we are paid for planting, not for growing." (Works I, 252) With this instruction Giles buries a dozen beans in each hole instead of one at a time. Hannah More could build into her stories genuine sus- pense through the adventures of her bad characters in par- ticular. External techniques serve her well also. She was probably one of the first to use the "to be continued" serial approach which modern television has used so success- fully.13 The first part of "Black Giles the Poacher" ends with the unjust dilemma of Giles informing against a good man who kills a hare on impulse and is then punished by law while he, whose crimes in poaching are innumerable, goes free. The narrator ends with these words: We shall soon see whether Poaching Giles always got off so successfully. Here we have seen that worldly prosperity is no sure sign of goodness; and that the "triumphing of the wicked is short," will be made to appear in the Second Part of the Poacher, containing the entertaining story of the Widow Brown's Apple-Tree. (Works I, 254) That Hannah More consciously deals in realism while instructing is the subject of the opening paragraph in the 114 second part of "Black Giles." The narrator directly ad- dresses the reader, offering regrets at exposing Giles and his family's tricks. But since they are to blame them- selves, the narrator cannot be blamed. "If I pretend to speak about people at all, I must tell the truth. I am sure, if folks would but turn about and mend, it would be a thou- sand times pleasanter to me to write their histories; for it is no comfort to tell of any body's faults" (Wprkg I, 254). On the basis that it is the duty of a faithful historian to tell the bad with the good, the narrator justifies the lengthy descriptions of Giles' crimes in a manner not much different from the explanations for the crimes of Moll Flanders and Roxana given in the prefaces to Defoe's works. The resolution of the plot in Part II of "Black Giles" shows Giles dying in great agony after a wall has fallen upon him in the act of stealing. While some of the bad characters in the stories repent, Giles appears to be be- yond hope, for he dies crying out that he does not know how to repent. Through almost stark realism the didacticism is enhanced. Giles becomes one of the negative models in the stories and his end speaks of divine judgment because his death is not caused by a human agent--an awesome end to a life of crime. The death of Williams the idle shoemaker is equally sobering as he dies in a drunken fit with the repetitious "too late" echoing from his lips. Mr. Fantom's servant William dies on the gallows for murder after he has followed the new revolutionary philosophy. Thus with evil 115 painted in the blackest shades and treated in the most dra- matic fashion, the lessons, if indirect, are nevertheless pointed. While the portrayals of the evil characters and their crimes are the most mimetic, the most famous of all Hannah More's stories, "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," contains no negative model or even the formulaic good versus bad character confrontations. Rather the story of the shepherd presents an ideal model. F. K. Brown honors it by saying that with this story Hannah More "rose to a lonely level, for it has no competitor . . . . it towers over similar works like another Agamemnon, a flawless masterpiece per- fect in conception and hiexecution, likely to remain for- ever peerless on a height the moral tale will not reach again."14 Like a medieval exemplum, "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain" contains the richness of symbolic representation as well as realistic interest. The shepherd, whose realism is based on the hardships of his poverty, yet offers the reader an enlarged portrait of one who rises above life's circumstances. The story illustrates the quotation from Burke which introduces More's "Tales for the Common People": Religion is for the man in humble life, and to raise his nature, and to put him in mind of a state in which the privileges of Opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature, and may be more than equal by virtue. (Works I, 190) 116 The reader is offered biblical models that will help shape his attitude toward his own poverty and help him rise above it. David, for example, "was happier when he kept his fa- ther's sheep on such a plain as this, and employed in singing some of his own psalms perhaps, than ever he was when he became king of Israel." Moses too is cited as a shepherd in the plains of Midian, and it is to the humble shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night that the angels appear to announce "the best news, the gladdest tidings, that ever were revealed to poor sinful men . . ." (Wprkg I, 191, 192). But the greatest model by implication is that the shepherd becomes a representation of Christ the Good Shep- herd who teaches his perspective on life and demonstrates courage, hope, gratitude, unselfishness and contentment despite adversity. It does not matter if the rain comes through the little hovel, or if his wife is ill or the children are hungry. Instead the shepherd affirms that even though the world is sometimes bad, it is governed by a good God, that there is design in life and . though my trials have now and then been sharp, why then, sir, as the saying is, if the pain be violent, it is seldom lasting; and if it be but moderate, why, then we can bear it longer; and when it is quite taken away, ease is the more precious, and gratitude is quickened by the re- membrance; thus, every way, and in every case, I can always find out a reason for vindicating Providence. (Works I, 194) 117 While the portrayal of the shepherd is subject to criticism for being too good to be true, it is important to the Christ model that he be painted totally good in order to fulfill the didactic aim of the story. The conclusion in the second part supports the belief that for the righteous there are temporal rewards as well as eternal. While the shepherd and his family work hard to make the best of their miserable lot and never succumb to grief or pity, they are made comfortable in the end through Mr. Johnson who has been touched with their plight. It is important in Hannah More that the reward in the end be modest and appropriate to one's station in life. Thus the shepherd gets a modest paying job assisting the minister in the parish school and a two-room cottage for his family of eight children. Here the realism of life governs the mi- meticism of Hannah More's art. In addition to the balance maintained between the mi- metic and didactic elements in the narratives, Hannah More succeeded in attracting and keeping her audience through the use of a wide variety of literary forms and techniques such as drama, allegory, poetry and nonfiction. The dialogue form which helped to make Village Politics so successful she used again in other narratives such as Parts V and VI of the serial, "The Two Shoemakers" (Wprkg I, 201). When James Stock the shoemaker and his journeyman Will Simpson spend one hour working each evening in order to pay for a poor boy's education, they discuss the practical application of 118 religion in everyday matters. The effect of the exchange between the two characters is to stop the narration and de- liver instruction to the reader. But interest is sustained because the characters have previously acted out their parts and engaged the reader in the drama of their lives prior to the conversation. The dialogue guarantees reader participation, validates the instruction and avoids direct preaching. This is true also in the fourth part of "The Two Wealthy Farmers" (Wprk§_l, 144) where Mr. Bragwell and Mr. Worthy have a dialogue on prayer and the second part where they discuss keeping the commandments (Wprkg I, 135). Mr. Bragwell is obviously the antagonist; and by the end of the seven-part serial, More leaves him realistically not totally converted but still struggling against "sin and vanity." Hannah More not only effectively utilized the dramatic dialogue form in her narratives, she also seized on the allegory and used that form for six of her stories. The influence of John Bunyan is clear, although one editor of her story, "The Pilgrims," disclaims any "direct imita- "15 The truth is More had written to John Newton in tion. 1788, just several years before beginning the tracts, that she was "delighted . . . with the 'Pilgrim's Progress.‘ She said, 'I forget my dislike to allegory while I read the spiritual vagaries of his faithful imagination'" (Roberts I, 291). Apparently More was impressed enough by Bunyan to change her mind about the form and even use it for her own 119 stories. She undoubtedly saw its effectiveness as a tool in the hand of the pedagogue, for again as with other literary forms, she preferred the indirect approach over direct expo- sition as a means of appealing to her readers. "The Pilgrims" begins in typical Bunyan fashion: "Methought I was once upon a time travelling through a cer- tain land which was very full of people; but, what was rather odd, not one of all this multitude was at home; they were all bound to a far distant country" (Wprkg I, 176). The first paragraph is no sooner launched than authorial intrusion breaks in, not to teach, but to make closer that which appears distant; and to assure familiarity and identi- fication on the part of the audience. She says; Now, I only appeal to you, readers, if any of you are setting out upon a little common journey, if it is only to London or York, is not all your leisure time employed in settling your business at home, and packing up every little necessary for your expedition? (Wprkg I, 176) She continues asking a series of questions in order to set up an antithesis between the common action of literal travellers and the symbolic concept of life as a journey in in preparation for eternity. The antithesis occurs in that the narrator assumes her readers will make all good prepara- tions for literal travel, but pilgrims in the allegorical journey are negligent and careless about preparation. The series of questions create suspense as well: 120 And when you are actually on your journey, espe- cially if you have never been to that place before, or are likely to remain there, don't you begin to think a little about the pleasures and the employ- ments of the place, and to wish to know a little what sort of a city London or York is? Don't you wonder what is doing there? and are you not anxious to know whether you are properly qualified for the business of the company you expect to be engaged in? Do you never look at the map, or con- sult Brookes's Gazetteer? And don't you try to pick up from your fellowpassengers in the stage- coach any little information you can get? And though you may be obliged, out of civility, to converse with them on common subjects, yet do not your secret thoughts still run upon London or York, its business, or its pleasures? And, above all, if you are likely to set out early, are you not afraid of over-sleeping? and does not that fear keep you upon the watch, so that you are commonly up and ready before the porter comes to summon you? Reader, if this be your case, how surprised you will be to hear that the travellers to the far country have not half your prudence, though embarked on a journey of infinitely more impor- tance, bound to a land where nothing can be sent after them, and in which, when they are once settled, all errors are irretrievable! (Works I, 176) The tone of the narrator becomes almost Swiftian as she satirizes the foolish pilgrims with their petty temporal concerns as opposed to their indifference toward eternal truths. She vividly describes in symbolic terms the fol- lies of the pilgrims in heaping up "yellow clay," in spending it on "idle, pampered horses a running; but the worst part ot the joke was, the horses did not fun to fetch or carry any thing . . . but merely to let the gazers see which could run the fastest." Also "whole piles of clay" were spent on buildings full of dogs while thousands of pilgrims went without provisions. 121 The process of aging is especially graphic: First, the thatch on the top of the tenement changed color; then it fell Off, and left the roof bare; then, 'the grinders ceased, because they were few;' then, the windows became so darkened, that the owner could scarcely see through them; then one prop fell away, then another; then the up- rights became bent, and.thewho1e fabric trembled and tottered, with every other symptom of a fall- ing house. But, what was remarkable, the more uncomfortable the house became, and the less prospect there was of staying in it, the more pro- posterously fond did the tenant grow of his pre- carious habitation. '(Works I, 177) When it comes to death and each pilgrim is feeling "his tenement tumbling about his ears," the narrative moves rapidly and dramatically. "0! then, what a busy, bustling, anxious, terrifying, distracting moment was that!" And "Now, to see the confusion and dismay occasioned by having left everything to the last minute!" First someone must be called to turn over the "yellow heaps" to someone else; then the masons are called to make a pronouncement on the tum- bling tenement, which they declare past repairing. Then the wise men who "professed to explain the title-deed" are called. But the wisest of the pilgrims had been packing and preparing all along, for "they knew that if their taber- nacle was dissolved, they had a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" (Works I, 180). Thus we can see the visual quality of More's allegories. Their dramatic appeal, their action, their connection with reality make them easily understandable so that the unlearned and child- like could comprehend their purpose. 122 Another allegory, "Parley the Porter," does more with characterization than "The Pilgrims." This symbolic story with the subscript, "Showing how robbers without can never get into a house unless there are traitors within," illus- trates the lure of worldliness and evil for the unaware. Parley becomes the negative model through his vulnerability. He finds it "very hard to be forced to be so constantly on duty." He mutters to himself when he must guard the castle which is surrounded by wilderness, "Nothing but watching!" He complains that . it is hard that at night I must watch as narrowly as a house-dog, and yetlet in no company without orders, only because there is said to be a few straggling robbers here in the wilderness, with whom my master does not care to let us be acquainted . . . A merry companion and a mug of beer would make the night pass cheerily. (Wprks L 187) Parley is amusing because he is so human and one with whom anyone may identify. He is susceptible to Flatterwell who persuasively entices him to open the gates of the castle, whereupon a whole band of robbers swarm in, murder Parley and destroy the castle. Flatterwell's smooth tactics in convincing the unwary Parley reflect the classic temptation scene akin to Milton's serpent and Eve. The ending of Parley's story is a didactic plea from the character's own mouth as he warns: "O that the keepers of all other castles would learn from my ruin, that he who parleys with temp- tation is already undone; that he who allows 123 himself to go to the very bounds, will soon jump over the hedge; that he who talks out of the win- dow with the enemy, will soon open the door to him; that he who holds out his hand for the cup of sinful flattery, loses all power of resisting; that when he opens the door to one sin, all the rest fly in upon him, and the man perishes as I now do." (Works I, 190) In addition to the use of the dramatic and allegorical, Hannah More turned to verse forms, particularly the street ballad which she had seen effectively hawked about for the lower class. For her it was a perverse metamorphosis to go from writing literary ballads, such as Sir Eldred and The Bleeding Rock in which Samuel Johnson and David Garrick had found merit, to producing under pressure this lowly form. Yet because of her evangelical convictions and her zeal in reform, she was willing to use any means within reason and go to any depth down the literary scale to reach her audience. Bishop Porteus in a letter of 1795 compli- ments Hannah More on her "poetic sermons" which "will do more good to your simple cottagers than all our dull pro- saic compositions put together" (Roberts 1, 470). In her strict interpretation of Christianity More had even seriously questioned the use of music for religious purposes, yet we find her accommodating herself to this too. In the same letter Bishop Porteus makes the suggestion that there is one more thing to complete her plan for the tracts and that is, "You must takezimusic-master into your pay, to set your ballads to easy, popular, vulgar tunes, adopting, in preference to all others, the old favourite 124 ones of 'Chevy Chase,‘ 'The Children in the Wood,‘ etc." That she took the bishop's advice is evidenced by the edi- tion of her works in which tune suggestions are given with the ballads. "The Hackney Coachman" is to be sung to the tune of "I Wish I Was a Fisherman," for example; "Robert and Richard or The Ghost of Poor Molly" has the tune of "Collin's Mulberry-Tree," and "The Riot" carries the tune of "A Cobbler There Was." The ballads continue the didactic aim and are often written for a specific purpose or occasion. They attempt to explain the answer to a problem or at least convey the desired attitude toward a situation. "The Riot," for ex- ample was written in 1795, "a year of scarcity and alarm." It was directed to the miners and carried the optimistic subtitle, "Half a Loaf is Better Than No Bread." Hannah More herself reported in a letter that "a very formidable riot among the colliers in the neighbourhood of Bath, was happily prevented by the ballad of The Riot." Apparently the workers had settled on a plan and "were resolved to work no more, but to attack first the mills, and then the gentry." However, through the distribution of hundreds of the ballads, this was prevented (Roberts I, 434). That the aim of the ballad is political as well as moral can be seen in More's use of the same characters from Village Politics. Jack Anvil and Tom Hod are intro- duced again in a dialogue, although most of the words come from Jack the wise one. Tom is all for pulling down the 125 mills and seizing all the meat. He can no longer be patient and quiet. But Jack reproves him, offering reasons not to riot. One of the thirteen stanzas attempts to convince Tom that it is not the fault of the government when the weather is bad and the crops fail. Jack says: But though poor, I can work, my brave boy, with the best; Let the king and the parliament manage the rest; I lament both the war and the taxes together, Though I verily think they don't alter the weathen The king, as I take it, with very good reason, May prevent a bad law, but can't help a bad season. Derry down. (Works I, 49) Another ballad attempts to explain the miseries and evils of life by a visual lesson. In "Turn the Carpet," two weavers carry on a dialogue while working. Dick com- plains that times are hard; he can barely provide for his wife and children. There seems to be no justice in the way this world is ruled. John reproves him by saying, . . Our ignorance is the cause Why thus we blame our Maker's laws, Parts of his ways alone we know; 'T1s all that man can see below. John then points to the half-finished carpet with its mass of strings and seeming disorder, saying . . when we view these shreds and ends, We know not what the whole intends; So, when on earth things look but odd, They're working still some scheme of God. (Works I, 54) 126 John explains that when we get to heaven we will see the whole design, for "then the carpet shall be turned." This ballad of fifteen quatrains is both simple and beautiful with its object lesson affirming ultimate design and pat- tern in human existence. Bishop Porteus called it "Bishop Butler's Analogy, all for a halfpenny" (Roberts 1, 459). Finally, along with the drama, allegory and poetry found in the narratives,More uses the techniques of non- fiction. Coming very close to the modern journalistic utility article, some of More's stories not only contain the usual moral instruction, they offer practical aid in coping with various aspects of life. A letter from Hannah More to the Duchess of Gloucester in 1795 mentions that she is bringing out a piece called "The Way to Plenty." Its purpose, she explains "is to convince the common people that their extreme poverty is caused still more by their own total want of economy than by the badness of the times." We have a glimpse of her overwhelmingly pragmatic approach when she states further, "I have even descended to the minute details of management, in the hope of being serviceable to the mass of the people, though at the hazard of being rep- robated by my more polished and enlightened friends" (Roberts 1, 481). "The Way to Plenty" is actually the second part of "Tom White the Postboy" in which-we see Tom's transforma- tion from idle postboy to respectable farmer. Part II then 127 becomes an anecdotal how-to piece with a narrator upholding Farmer White as an exemplary model to illustrate various kinds of practical information. Farmer White demonstrates how to have a successful barn-raising without the customary drunken celebration. The same goes for sheep-shearing and harvest-home celebrations. And when it comes to the hard winter of 1795, "it was edifying to see how patiently Farmer White bore that long and severe frost" (Works I, 230). His thinking is always positive as he attempts to raise humanity above the most adverse circumstances. But more than a positive attitude is the advice of action and the plea to act upon the circumstances at hand and not to give up in fateful resignation. Like the disgruntled Hebrews in the Old Testament: All the parish now began to murmur. Farmer Jones was sure the frost had killed the wheat. Farmer Wilson said the rye would never come up. Brown the maltster insisted the barley was dead at the root. Butcher Jobbins said beef would be a shilling a pound. All declared there would not be a hop to brew with. The orchards were all blighted; there would not be apples enough to make a pie; and as to hay, there would be none to be had for love nor money. (Works I, 230) Into this seemingly hopeless situation Farmer White steps. While acknowledging its severity, saying "the season is dreadful," he goes on to advise not to make things worse than they are. Instead, "Let us then hope for a good day, but provide against an evil one. Let us rather prevent the evil before it is come upon us, than sink under it when it 128 comes. Grumbling cannot help us; activity can." He advo- cates planting potatoes "in every nook and corner, in case the corn should fail." Mrs. White gives lessons in making rice milk, nutritious pudding and cheap stews. Several other pieces offer similar advice on every imaginable area of practical living. "A Cure for Melan- choly," subtitled, "Showing the way to do much good with little money," uses Mrs. Jones as the model instructor to demonstrate, among other things, how to make large brown loaves of bread at home rather than buying small white ones, and how to start educational and vocational skills classes for village girls. In "The Sunday School" Mrs. Jones demon- strates the steps in setting up a school: how to find a suitable teacher with the qualifications of good sense, activity and piety; how to convince families to send their daughters; and how to get financial backing from "the gentry." Part II of "The Sunday School," which is "The History of Hester Wilmot," is a case study of one girl whose education in the village school changed and improved her. This feature article serves as a representative case of the influence and impact of Hannah More's schools. From these several practical features it can be seen that Hannah More did not simply advocate the status quo and quote Bible verses to keep the poor in their place. Rather, her charity toward the poor in her deeds is extended to her literary efforts as she attempted to lend concrete aid- She not only preached to the poor; she offered action, and this 129 applies to her theory of writing. She cannot be accused of simply advocating a "pie in the sky" approach. One must always balance in Hannah More her theme of "Turn the Carpet," in which ultimate questions about human misery remain un- answered in this life, with the concrete reality of her journalistic instructional manuals urging the hope of human action as well as faith in God. She herself was a model in tirelessly working for the poor through her numerous schools and in the writing of the Cheap Repository Tracts. Becausetxfher work she knew her audience well, and this dictated her level and form of literary production. In her Preface of 1801 she expresses her theory. The great father of Roman eloquence has asserted, that though every man should propose to himself the highest degrees in the scale of excellence; yet he may stop with honour at the second or the third. Indeed the utility of some books to some persons would be defeated by their very superior- ity. The writer may be above the reach of his reader; he may be too lofty to be pursued; he may be too profound to be fathomed; he may be too abstruse to be investigated; for to produce de- light there must be intelligenCe; there must be something of concert and congruity. There must be not merely that intelligibility which arises from the perspicuousness of the author; but that also which depends on the capacity and perception of the reader. Between him who writes and him who reads, there must be a kind of coalition of interests, something of a partnership (however unequal the capital) in mental property; a sort of joint stock of tastes and ideas. (Works I, n. pag) This partnership between writer and reader is the most im- portant consideration in the work of Hannah More. NOTES 1Roberts 1, 284; at least five editions were issued before More's name appeared on it. 2Life and Letters 9f William Cowper, ed. John Memes (Edinburgh: Frasher, 1834), II, 205, 7; quoted by William Courtney, Secrets of our National Literature (London: 1980), p. 47. 3See Feltus Sypher, Guinea's Ca tive Kin 5: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIII th Century (Chapel H111: University of North Carolina Press, 1942) for the signifi- cance of More's poem in relation to other anti-slavery lit- erature . 4Annals of the Reign of King George the Third (London, 1825), i, 449; see R. K. Webb, The British Working Class Reader: 1790-1848, (1955, rpt.'New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971, p. 38. S Webb, p. 43. 6Thompson, pp. 134-5; see also her letter about the French Revolution to Horace Walpole, 1789, Roberts 1, 319. 7Jones, p. 134. 8A translation of Dupont's speech is included in More's Works I, 305. 9Mendip Annals, The Journal of Martha More, ed. Arthur Roberts (New York, 1859), p. 6. 10Two excellent articles on the publication of the Tracts are C. H. Spinney, "Cheap Repository Tracts: Hazard and Marshall Edition," The Librapy 20 (1939-40), 295-350; and Harry B. Weiss, "Hannah MoreTs Cheap Repository Tracts in America," Bulletin of the New York Public Library 50 (July 1946), 539-49; the evidence seems to indicate that various collections of the tracts were published in America until 1857 (Weiss p. 546). 130 131 11It is not certain exactly what debt Hannah More owed to Sarah Trimmer for the Cheap Repository Tracts. More's biographer Thompson reports that if the Bishop of London had suggested the idea of the Tracts from Village Politics, it is "scarcely questionable that for the method and manner" More was obligated to Trimmer's Family Magazine. He sug- gests a competitive motivation in that "having outrivalled" Trimmer in her schools, More "felt encouraged to emulate her tracts." (pp. 150, 1). See F. K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians (Cambridge: 1961), p. 36 for his estimate of More's Tracts. 12Fiction and the Reading Public (1932, rpt. New York: Russell E’Russell, 1965), p. 136. 13For the claim that More was the first to use serial fiction, see Sam Pickering, "The First Part-Issue of New Fiction," English Language Notes, 13 (1975), 124-27. 14 Fathers of the Victorians (Cambridge: 1961), p. 44. 15Complete Works of Hannah More, 7 vols. (New York: Harper, 1836), I, 140. CHAPTER IV HANNAH MORE'S EXPERIMENT WITH THE NOVEL In 1808, when Hannah More published Coelebs in Search of a Wife, she knew it was a bold experiment. Even though her name did not appear on the work until the fourth edi- tion, the first three editions rapidly sold out, and in nine 1 What is more months it had gone through twelve editions. remarkable than the rapid sales of Coelebs, however, is the attempt of Hannah More to write a novel since some of her harshest indictments in all her writings were against novels. In Coelebs she was not using fictional narrative for the first time, since her tales in the Cheap Repository Tracts were in the same genre and several were actually serialized short novels of 25,000 to 35,000 words. But two differences exist between the tracts and Coelebs: first, she allowed her fictional two-volume work to be called a novel and, therefore, subjected it to review by the literary world; and second, through the circulating libraries she directed Coelebs to the middle-class woman to illustrate in fiction what her previous work, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), had essentially already said. Still, two questions remain to be explored: if she vehemently op- posed novels, why did she herself write a novel; and in 132 133 light of her bitter opposition to the most radical female writer of England, why was she possibly influenced by the works of Mary Wollstonecraft? I. More's Objection to Novels More's objection to novels appears throughout her early and late works and covers a wide territory--intellectual, literary, and most important, moral. Intellectually Hannah More lived in a world of books; she was extremely well- educated--unusual for a woman of her time--and had read the major authors from Latin classics to the important writers of her own day. Her letters are peppered with references to the works she was in process of reading, and she acted as critic for her friends, commenting on the merits and faults of a wide range of writers. She even read works with which she strongly disagreed. Rousseau, Gibbon, Fielding, Sterne, Hume, Voltaire, among others, came under her scrutiny and fell short in various degrees. The only time Samuel Johnson appeared really angry with her, she notes in a letter to her sister in 1780, was when she referred to a witty pas- sage in Tom Jones and he reacted in shock saying he was sorry she had read that novel (Roberts I, 101). In her own writings she imitated the style and substance of authors she admired but was careful to shape and adapt the borrowed ideas to fit her own purposes. She would counter or rebut authors with whom she disagreed such as Thomas Paine whose works were 134 the motivation for her enormous tract operation. She well understood the impact of the written page and of the pen being mightier than the sword, and her success with the tracts had confirmed her own power in effecting change since she was credited with saving her country from the evil influences of the French revolution. From a purely literary perspective, Hannah More felt that the late eighteenth-century proliferation of fictional works contributed to a decline in standards and taste that extended to even language and poetry. Her means of measure- ment she expressed in a letter to Horace Walpole in 1789, disucssing the corruption of the English language and say- ing, "Taste is of all ages, and truth is eternal" (Roberts I, 307). She had shown her literary acuity when, for instance, she wrote to William Pepys in 1808 that "it was said more than twenty years ago, that I was the only one of the old school who strongly relished COWper; but then he had not published the Task." Later in the same letter she observes that "conversation is absolutely extinct. The classic spirit has, I think, declined with it, and I should think poetry extinct also, did it not in Walter Scott give signs of life" (Roberts 11, 134, 135). Then in a letter to Alexander Knox in 1809, More lamented that the newly pub- lished biography of Elizabeth Carter hardly mentioned this Greek scholar's superior intellectual abilities and literary tastes. Even though Carter was "passionately fond of poetry and lived and flourished with Pope, Thompson, Gray, Collins, 135 Mason, Churchill, Warton, Cowper, etc., nothing is said." Instead Carter's "opinions of books are confined to Mrs. West's and Charlotte Smith's novels" (Roberts II, 163, 164). Here the emphatic word novels gives an indication of the low position with which More regarded these authors' fiction in a literary context. Finally, in Female Education More attacks the barbarian literary quality of German works when she describes "those swarms of publications now daily issu- ing from the banks of the Danube" that are "overrunning civilized society." She speaks for others by saying: Those readers, whose purer taste has been formed on the correct models of the old classic school, see with indignation and astonishment the Huns and Vandals once more overpowering the Greeks and Romans. (Works I, 319) Opposition to the novel in particular was fairly widespread throughout the eighteenth-century, from Pamela onward as documented in J. T. Taylor's Early Opposition to the English Novel and in Sam Pickering's The Moral Tradition. Both on literary and moral grounds the novel did not have the respectability which it gained after Jane Austen. The one means by which a novel could attain moral, if not Aliterary respect was through a strong didactic emphasis. Hannah More perceived this possibility and in writing her novel obtained such favor fromtfluapowerful evangelical and conservative elements in the country that she has been given primary credit for making the novel respectable and for shaping Victorian morality.2 However, Hannah More's didactic 136 assumptions could only be short lived. She recognized her- self a member of the Old generation in literary as well as religious modes of thinking. Thus we can account for the acceptance of her works in general and Coelebs in particu- lar as best sellers in her day but, they were almost totally discounted years after her death. Because of her authoritative position as an influential moral writer and because of her adopted prophet role in warning an apostate nation, More envisioned her society moving away from its moral traditions, losing its Christian heritage and blurring clear-cut divisions between truth and error. She felt responsible to help stop the forces of evil, obstruct suspect changes in any social structure and above all attack any idea, trend or movement founded on the assump- tion of man's natural goodness. Hers was an Augustinian con- ception of man, and what she saw sweeping through EurOpe and England were changes in society based on a Pelagian concep- tion, or in more contemporary terms, a Rousseauistic inter- pretation of the natural goodness of man. She saw evil growing from the individual's tainted nature and spilling into society by various means. Thus books, the agent of great ideas, were also the progenitors of corrupt ideas. She was not a lone voice crying in the wilderness, but her style of warning was more artistic and appealing than most other religious or moral voices. While More harshly criticized the works she considered destructive, such as Gibbon's two chapters on Christianity 137 in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, she singled out novels or fictional works for her moral attacks (Wprks I, 317). She used metaphors of poison, disease, infection and contamination to describe the proliferation of evil novels. One of the young ladies in her early pastoral drama, Th3 Search After Happiness, confesses that the "pois'nous in- fluence" of novels "led my mind astray" (Wprkg I, 114). In Female Education she attacks French novels, blaming Rousseau as "the first popular dispenser of this complicated drug, in which the deleterious infusion was strong, and the effect proportionably fatal" (Works I, 318). In Hints on the Education of a Princess, she again aims at the French, using poison imagery when she exclaims: . how far more deeply mischievous the French novel writers are, than those