Her two best known stories are Mr. Fantom and The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. Mr. Fantom: or the History of the New-Fashioned Philosopher, and his Man William was written to warn masters of the danger of teaching their servants disrespect for the Bible and for civil law. Mr. Fantom was a shallow man, who glided upon the surface of philosophy and culled those precepts which relieved his conscience from any moral obligations. When he was asked to help the poor in his own parish, he refused to consider their wants because his mind was so engrossed by the partition of Poland. Like Mrs. Jellyby of a later time, he was so much troubled by sufferings which he could not see that he neglected his family and servants. When he reprimanded his butler, William, for being intoxicated, the young man replied: "Why, sir, you are a philosopher, you know; and I have often overheard you say to your company, that private vices are public benefits; and so I thought that getting drunk was as pleasant a way of doing good to the public as any, especially when I could oblige my muster at the same time." In course of time William became a thief and a murderer, and expiated his crimes on the scaffold.
In contrast to this is The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. This shepherd was contented with his lot, and says: "David was happier when he kept his father'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 and Judah. And I dare say we should never have had some of the most beautiful texts in all those fine psalms, if he had not been a shepherd, which enabled him to make so many fine comparisons and similitudes, as one may say, from country life, flocks of sheep, hills and valleys, fields of corn, and fountains of water." The shepherd's neat cottage with its simple furnishings, his frugal wife and industrious children are described in simple and convincing language.
In the stories of the poor there are many interesting details of the everyday life of that class that did not blossom into heroes and heroines of romance for nearly half a century. Mrs. Sponge, in The History of Betty Brown, the St. Giles's Orange Girl, is a character that Dickens might have immortalised. Mrs. Sponge kept a little shop and a kind of eating-house for poor girls near the Seven Dials. She received stolen goods, and made such large profits in her business that she was enabled to become a broker among the poor. She loaned Betty five shillings to set her up in the orange business; she did not ask for the return of her money, but exacted a sixpence a day for its use, and was regarded by Betty, and the other girls whom she thus befriended, as a benefactor. At last, Betty was rescued from the clutches of Mrs. Sponge. By industry and piety she became mistress of a handsome sausage-shop near the Seven Dials, and married a hackney coachman, the hero of one of Miss More's ballads:
I am a bold coachman, and drive a good hack
With a coat of five capes that quite covers my back;
And my wife keeps a sausage-shop, not many miles
From the narrowest alley in all broad St. Giles.
Though poor, we are honest and very content,
We pay as we go, for meat, drink, and for rent;
To work all the week I am able and willing,
I never get drunk, and I waste not a shilling;
And while at a tavern my gentleman tarries,
The coachman grows richer than he whom he carries,
And I'd rather (said I), since it saves me from sin,
Be the driver without, than the toper within.
The Cheap Repository was written to teach moral precepts. Neither Hannah More nor her readers saw any artistic beauty in the sordid lives of this lower stratum of society. They were not interested in the superstitions of "Poor Sally Evans," who hung a plant called "midsummer-men" in her room on Midsummer eve so that she might learn by the bending of the leaves if her lover were true to her, and who consulted all the fortune-tellers that came to her door to learn whether the two moles on her cheek foretold two husbands or two children. Hannah More recorded these simple fancies of poor Sally only to show her folly and the misfortunes that afterwards befell her on account of her superstitions. Writers of that century either laughed at the ignorant blunders of the poor, or used them to point a moral. An interest in them because they are human beings like ourselves with common frailties belongs to the next century. Nothing proves more conclusively the growth of the democratic idea than the changed attitude of the novel toward the ignorant and the criminal.
Hannah More was always interested in the education of young ladies. She wrote a series of essays called Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, in which she protested loudly against the tendency to give girls an ornamental rather than a useful education. This was so highly approved that she was asked to make suggestions for the education of the Princess Charlotte. This led to her writing Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess.
Hannah More finally embodied her theories on the education of women in a book which she thought might appeal most strongly to the young ladies themselves, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife. Running through it, is a slight romance. Cœlebs, filled with admiration for Eve, as described in Paradise Lost, where she is intent on her household duties, goes forth into the world to find, if possible, such a helpmate for himself. As he meets different women, he compares them with his ideal, and, finding them lacking, passes a severe criticism upon female education and accomplishments. Finally, he meets a lady with well-trained mind, who delights in works of charity and piety, one well calculated to conduct wisely the affairs of his household. She has besides proper humility, and accepts with gratitude the honour of becoming Cœlebs's wife.
Until her death at the advanced age of eighty-eight years, Hannah More continued to write moral and religious essays, so that she was before the public view for over fifty years, Mrs. S. C. Hall in her book Pilgrimages to English Shrines thus describes her in old age:
"Hannah More wore a dress of very light green silk—a white China crape shawl was folded over her shoulders; her white hair was frizzled, after a by-gone fashion, above her brow, and that backed, as it were, by a very full double border of rich lace. The reality was as dissimilar from the picture painted by our imagination as anything could well be; such a sparkling, light, bright, 'summery'-looking old lady—more like a beneficent fairy, than the biting author of Mr. Fantom, though in perfect harmony with The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain."