Picture a writer applauded in the literary salons of London, a friend of Samuel Johnson and David Garrick, trading that world for schools for peasants who could barely read. That was the turning point in Hannah More’s life.
Born in 1745 near Bristol, the daughter of a schoolmaster, she learned Latin and French as a young girl. Her plays, such as Percy, were a success in London and brought her into the circle known as the Bluestockings, learned women of the eighteenth century.
The death of the actor David Garrick in 1779 drew her away from the stage and deepened her faith. She grew close to the preacher John Newton and the member of Parliament William Wilberforce, joining the evangelical group known as the Clapham Sect.
In 1789, together with her sister Martha, she founded in Cheddar the first of several Sunday schools in the Mendip region, teaching the Bible and reading to poor children and adults.
Her vision, however, had limits: she refused to teach writing to poor students, fearing it would fuel social unrest, a stance now recognized as paternalistic even by her biographers.
She wrote the Cheap Repository Tracts, moral pamphlets sold by the millions between 1795 and 1798, and the poem Slavery, in support of Wilberforce’s campaign against the slave trade.
She argued for serious education for women in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, yet refused to read Mary Wollstonecraft and doubted that women should take part in politics, revealing the contradictions of her time.
She died in 1833, in the very week that slavery was abolished in the British Empire, a cause she had championed for decades. Her model of the Sunday school, joining literacy and the gospel, still inspires ministries that educate poor children around the world.