The five little girls were the children of a Mr. Jacob More, the head master of a foundation school at Stapleton.
Mr. More had married the daughter of a farmer, who had been carefully brought up, and possessed considerable mind and also great judgment.
Hannah was born in 1745, and, together with her four sisters, learned to read at home, the mother herself teaching them.
It is not difficult to picture that happy home, with all its quiet influence of love, for the five little girls appear to have been good children, very affectionate to each other, and would form a sweet, bright group as they stood with respectful attitude and intelligent faces round the kind mother, and repeated with interest and earnest emulation, the familiar "A, B, C."
Presently, something more than this was needed, but books were scarce. Mr. More had been educated for the Church, but his desire to be a clergyman was frustrated. He removed from Norfolk, his native county, and in his transit to Stapleton, which in those days was a long and difficult journey, he lost the greater part of his library. He therefore endeavoured to supply from memory, information and instruction to his five daughters, and Hannah was always extremely delighted to stand by her father's knees and listen to his stories of Grecian and Roman history, and also to gain thus from him a fair amount of classical learning.
The nurse who assisted the busy mother with her happy charge, had lived for some time in the family of Dryden, and often interested and amused Hannah and her sisters with accounts of the poet.
When Mr. More found that Hannah evinced such a desire for information, he began to teach her Latin and Mathematics; but as she outstripped all his pupils in the foundation school with extreme rapidity, the father, fearing that it might tend to make Hannah unfeminine, ceased these instructions. They seem, however, to have been supplemented by a different mode of education. The parents were poor, too poor to supply all the requirements of so large a family. Very wisely they determined that the children should be trained to support themselves. Miss More was, therefore, sent to a good school in Bristol, as a weekly boarder, and every Saturday, on her return home, she was required to teach her four sisters all that she had learned in the week!
When this sister was twenty years old, she, together with Betty and Sally, opened a school themselves in Bristol; and Hannah, then twelve years of age, and Patty were sent as pupils.
On one occasion Hannah was taken ill, and Dr. Woodward, evidently a literary man of that time, was sent for to attend her. But so great was her conversational power, that the kind doctor forgot the purpose for which he came. After some time, he took his leave, but exclaimed, presently, "Bless me! I forgot to ask the girl how she is to-day!"
This remarkable talent, thus early developed, was one of Mrs. Hannah More's charms through life, and existed to the last lingering days of an intelligent old age.