HANNAH MORE’S CENTENARY

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 October 1933, Page 7

HANNAH MORE’S CENTENARY

WRITER—PHILANTHROPIST.

LONDON, September 3.

Preparations for celebrating the centenary next Thursday of the death of Ilaunah More are being made at the little villlago of. Wrington, near Bristol, where the great religious writer and philanthropist produced many oj. her famous works. Ha mill li More was one of tlic first “best-sellers,” for some of her works were circulated throughout the then restricted English-speaking world, and .one at least ran into nineteen editions. First becoming known as a writer of verse and as a conversationalist, she then gained recognition as a writer ou religious subjects —she was a strict Puritan—and finally won fame as a practical philanthropist. The youngest of the five daughters of Jacob More, an Anglican and a strong Tory, she became at the age of twelve a pupil at a Bristol boarding school run by her elder sisters. Her first literary effort, a pastoral play, “A Search After Happiness,” was written when she was only 17, and run into two editions. Later, she surrendered. the share which been given in her sisters’ school and became engaged to a Mr. Turner. The wedding never took place—whj, no one ever knew. But Mr. Turner did the handsome thing. In 1772 he settled an annuity upon her without her knowledge. She demurred, but at last agreed to take the income, and this enabled her to come to London and concentrate sereiously on literature. In 1774 she published “The Inflexible Captive,” and thenceforward she continued to produce plays, books, verse and pamphlets at an almost incredible rate. It was her* first great success, “Sacred Dramas,” published in 1782 that ran through nineteen edfc tions: and her most famous book, “Coelebs in Search of a Wife,” published in 1809, had an enormous circulation. Despite iho strong opposition of the farmers, who thought her educational work on behalf of the children of the mining ureas would agriculture, and of the clergy, who accused her of Methodist tendencies, sho was immensely popular, and her her old age she lived 88 years—philanthropists made long pilgrimages to talk‘with her. Few people can have been on intimate terms with so many celebrities. Her friends included Johnson, Reynolds, Garrick, Horace Walpole, Wilberforce, Zachary, Macaulay, and many other people of note in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.