Hannah More (British edition 1888)/Chapter 1
HANNAH MORE.
CHAPTER I.
STAPYLTON.
Hannah More may be reckoned as standing at the parting point of two periods, the one ending at the days when clergymen and schoolmasters were considered to be an inferior class; the other beginning at the time when their position had become a high one. Again, she was at first a brilliant member of the Bas Bleu Society, the faint English reflection of the Hotel de Rambouillet; and afterwards shared with Mrs. Trimmer the honour of making English ladies the foremost agents in the religious education of the poor. A writer at first of the plays and poems which were the fashion of the Eighteenth Century, she afterwards devoted her talents to the lighter forms of religious literature for the masses, and again was a pioneer; and lastly, she wrote treatises on education, morals, and religion, which had great effect on her own generation. Her excellence and devotion have, in a manner, obscured her fame, and the many who are inclined to take her as an impersonation of what is impertinently called "goodiness," have no idea of her talents, or of the society she had enjoyed. The friend of Garrick, Horace Walpole, and Johnson, was no narrow-minded woman absorbed in village gossip.
The family from which she sprang was one of the old Puritan stocks of Norfolk, which furnished many of Oliver Cromwell's Ironsides. Two great-uncles of her father had been captains in the days of the Protector, and her grandmother had stories to tell of nocturnal meetings for Presbyterian worship, in the time of the Five Mile Act; and would assure her children that the way to value Gospel privileges was to have to struggle through snow and rain at midnight, and then to listen to the minister while the door was guarded by one of the congregation with a drawn sword.
This grandmother, however, Hannah never knew, and though the rest of the family continued Presbyterian, Jacob More, her father, was a strong Churchman and Tory, in consequence, perhaps, of his education at the Norwich Grammar School, where he was a distinguished pupil. He hoped to have become a clergyman, but a law-suit turning out unsuccessfully on his part, left him so penniless that he was thankful to Lord Bottetourt for an appointment to a small foundation school in Somersetshire. Probably his change of principles had cut him off from the rest of his family, for they seem to have kept up no connection with him till after his daughter had made herself a name; and he accommodated himself to a position, then viewed as very humble, by marrying a farmer's daughter, who was a good, sensible woman of plain education.
Stapylton, the school which he held, has shared the fate of numerous small grammar schools scattered over the country, and is no more. The room where he taught is now used for parish purposes and absorbed into Fisherton itself, almost a suburb of Bristol, and well known as containing—very appropriately—a Training School for Mistresses, who ought to look back to Hannah More as one of the very first in the path they are to tread.
Between the years 1736 and 1747, five daughters were born to Mr. and Mrs. More—Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, Hannah, and Martha. Good abilities seem to have been the family heritage; but Hannah was soon acknowledged as the cleverest of the five. When at three years old her mother began to teach her to read, she proved to have already learnt much in play from her sisters; and, a year later, she distinguished herself when catechised in the parish church.
Their nurse had been in the service of Dryden, and had been impressed with his fame. Little Hannah used to beg for stories of him, and it would be amusing to know what ideas she thus imbibed of "Glorious John." Her two ambitions were curiously gratified—namely, to live in a cottage too low for a clock, and to go to London to see bishops and booksellers.
There were very few books in the house, for almost all Mr. More's library had been lost on the journey from Norfolk; but he had a memory so well stored that he taught his children history by word of mouth, and sometimes delighted his own ears and theirs by rolling out poems or orations in Latin or Greek. His intelligent little girls must have been no small refreshment to him after his grinding work on his regular pupils; and he gratified Hannah's ardent wishes, backed by her mother, by beginning to teach her Latin and mathematics.
He was soon alarmed at the way in which she outstripped his boys, and, fearing that the reputation of being a learned lady would be a disadvantage to her, he insisted on dropping the mathematical studies, and was with difficulty persuaded to go on with the classical readings.
Mary More, the eldest sister, was meantime sent as a weekly boarder to a French school at Bristol, coming home from Saturday till Monday, and then imparting the results of her studies to the younger ones, and with so much success that Hannah was afterwards enabled to act as interpreter to some French officers, who were living near Bristol as prisoners on parole, during the war of the Austrian Succession, and who frequented Mr. More's house.
The little bright-eyed, quick-witted girl was always picking up information, or writing poems and tales on scraps of paper. Her lesser sister, Martha, always entirely one with her, used to creep down after they were in bed to secure these fragments of paper, and then to hoard them in the housemaid's closet: it was the prime ambition of the pair to possess a whole quire of paper, and when this was given them by the kind mother, it seemed at first inexhaustible. We long to know more of that good mother, who must have been an excellent and wise woman; but she is never again mentioned in the biographies, nor do we even know the date of her death.