BLUE STOCKING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 727, 19 June 1953, Page 12

BLUE STOCKING

| : ; ee ee a HANNAH MORE, by M. G, Jones; Cambridge University Press. English price, 27/6. "\V HY should she flatter me?" said the Great Panjandrum. "I can do nothing for her. Let her carry her praise to a better market." By recording this remark of Samuel Johnson’s in the Life, Boswell got back at Hannah More because she had spoken to him sharply when he was in his cups at a dinner party. As this scholarly biography makes clear, she was on much better terms with Johnson than that. She was a favourite of the Streatham group, and after reading her poem Bas Bleu, written in praise of the Blue Stocking coteries among London’s literary ladies, he called her "the most powerful versificatrix in the

English language." But Hannah More’s literary reputation has tended to obscure her greater importance in English social reforms at the turn of the century,’ and it is to this that her biographer has devoted most attention. Her writings served her purpose-to reclaim the masses from vice and irreligion. In her youth she was a friend of the Garricks, Reynolds and Horace Walpole, and Garrick produced her drama Percy. But her religious and philanthropic sense deepened with age. She started, with her sisters, the Mendip Schools for the poor, and the Sunday school: On week days the pupils were taught "such coarse words as may fit them for servants," as she wrote to her. friend William Wilberforce. At a time when the French Revolution had unsettled England she championed the old order and wrote dozens of penny tracts which circulated in millions, emphasising that work, piety and humbleness were the virtues. But if she became the spokesman for orthodoxy she was also, as this book points out, a great humanitarian, and played an important part in the reform of manners and taste of her time. The author’s researches into Hannah More’s long career are based largely upon unpublished letters from her voluminous correspondence. The book is a little on the heavy side, but it contains fascinating side glimpses not only of the Blue Stockings, but of the evangelical movement and in particular of the crusading Clapham sect. Like them she tried hard to alleviate the misfortunes of the country’s underprivileged. And if her views on education seem now .to have been rather hidebound, she was not illiberal. In more ways than one Hannah was

a symbol of her age.

P.J.

W.