Hannah More made "Sensibility" the subject of a poem dedicated to Mrs. Boscawen, and in her "Strictures" devoted an entire chapter to it. In both the conclusion runs that sensibility has received its true direction when it is supremely turned to the love of God: "But if religious bias rule the soul, then sensibility exalts the whole."
There is, of course, in Mrs. Chapone's letters the usual warning against the danger of fiction, especially of the sentimental kind, the chief nurse of false sensibility, and also an element arising from the wish to reconcile Christian charity with the "necessary inequality" among individuals: the question of the treatment of inferiors. Since the chief duties of woman are of a domestic nature, it follows that the management of servants will be her task, and the Christian in Mrs. Chapone would see them treated with kind civility, while the lady of quality in her warns against the danger of too close intimacy with people of low birth and education. The idea of raising them by slow degrees to a higher social level probably never suggested itself to her.
Her ideal of female instruction must be likewise described as in the main conventional, with a few useful hints to mark a partial advance. Dancing and French are "so universal that they cannot be dispensed with", but music and drawing she wanted to be taught only to those who were qualified by possessing talent. The study of history is recommended as giving a liberal and comprehensive view of human nature, and supplying materials for conversation, and the reading of poetry will improve the female imagination, which only wants regulating to be superior to that of men. Shakespeare, Milton, and Mrs. Montagu's Essay ought to be the object of diligent study, and even heathen mythology and Greek philosophy may be recommended as containing a strong moral element. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake clearly did not appeal to Mrs. Chapone at all.
The most pronounced character among the Bluestockings, as well as the most privileged among them in literary gifts was beyond any doubt Mrs. Hannah More.[32] It will be interesting, in continuation of the more general appreciation of respective tendencies in the introduction to this chapter, to contrast her with Mary Wollstonecraft with a view to establishing the chief causes from which the difference in their ideas arose, and arriving at a vindication of the laudable intentions of both.
If Mary Wollstonecraft was turned into a social reformer chiefly through the influence of the outward circumstances which dominated her youth, Hannah More's career was largely the consequence of certain innate qualities, which predestined her to become a moralist. She may have inherited her preaching propensities from her father, who had himself been designed for the church before circumstances interfered to turn him into a schoolmaster. Her mother, a farmer's daughter, devoted herself entirely to the children's education. In her earliest youth, little Hannah's favourite pastime—as her biographer and admirer Mr. W. Roberts tells us in his memoirs—was the writing of long exhortative letters "to depraved characters", and when in later years she lived at Mrs. Garrick's we find her referred to as the latter's "domestic chaplain". And yet she could be witty enough when she chose and was not without a sense of humour. At the time of the writing of her "Bas Bleu" she sent her friend Mrs. Pepys a pair of stockings for one of her children, accompanied by a letter, "The Bas Blanc", in which she treats the subject as if it were an epic, "so far of a moral cast that its chief end is utility,"—hoping the child will be able "to run through it with pleasure". She goes on to say that "the exordium is the natural introduction by which you are led into the whole work. The middle, I trust, is free from any unnatural humour or inflation, and the end from any disproportionate littleness. I have avoided bringing about the catastrophe too suddenly, as I know that would hurt him at whose feet I lay it", and so on in the same strain. Mary Wollstonecraft would have been utterly incapable of such playfulness. A further determining factor in the difference in the lives of both was the treatment received at the hands of the influential. Mary was first treated with indifference and coldness, and afterwards reviled for her opinions, whereas Hannah More was courted and flattered in a way which might have turned the head of any more volatile girl. To the struggle for life of which Mary bore the marks till her dying-day, Hannah was a total stranger, having had a comfortable annuity settled on her by a Mr. Turner, who once made her an offer of marriage. Thus secured against penury, that constant dread of rising authors, Hannah could go to London and give herself up to social amusements and to literature. Her meeting with Garrick ensured her a hearty welcome in Bluestocking circles, and his support smoothed her brief dramatic career and contributed to the warm reception of her first poetic attempts. They represent her contribution to romanticism, and gained the approval of no less a critic than Dr. Johnson himself.
Hannah More thus became a universal favourite, and her "vers de société" became very popular. However, her career as a dramatist came to an end with Garrick's death, and after the success of "Bas Bleu" and "Sensibility" she more and more directed her energies towards social and moral reform. The Bluestocking assemblies, much as they appealed to her love of witty conversation, afforded no outlet for that pent-up energy which made her long for some worthy object on which to concentrate herself for the benefit of society. It may be said that from the decade which saw the outbreak of the French Revolution dates the participation of English women in the discussion of the great social problems by which the times were stirred. It was as natural that Hannah More should openly declare herself in favour of a strict maintenance of the existing social order as that Mary Wollstonecraft should become the champion of radical social and political reform. Thus, each of the contending parties numbered among the warmest advocates of their cause a member of the female sex. And yet, previous to the great social upheaval in France, Hannah More at one time seemed likely to range herself among the partisans of moderate social reform. Her first social object was found in the struggle for the abolition of the slave-trade which in 1787 held the attention of Parliament. Mr. Wilberforce became her "Red Cross Knight", and Hannah wrote a poem entitled "The Black Slave Trade", in which her attitude towards the Revolution is foreshadowed. The lines:
Shall Britain, where the soul of freedom reigns,
Forge chains for others she herself disdains?
Forbid it, Heaven! O let the nation know,
The liberty she tastes she will bestow;