Hannah More was a militantly Evangelical Anglican, the founder of a successful school for girls in Bristol and six Sunday schools in the Mendips region south of Bristol, the tireless promoter of a Christian education for women and workers, the author of numerous tracts advocating social and political reform, and an opponent of the slave trade. At the opposite pole of the political spectrum in England in the 1790s stands Mary Wollstonecraft, militant feminist, founder of a girls’ school, tireless promoter of the improved education of women and workers, author of numerous works advocating social and political reform, opponent of the slave trade. As Anne Stott and Barbara Taylor definitively establish, More and Wollstonecraft have far more in common than we have been led to believe.

In Hannah More—the First Victorian, Anne Stott gives us what will surely be the definitive biography of More for our time. Indeed, this is the first thoroughly researched account of More's life since M. G. Jones's fine Hannah More, published over fifty years ago, in 1952. Drawing on unpublished letters, new archival documents, and the public record, writing with verve and wit, Stott sensitively tracks More's development. Initially an enthusiastic young courter of literary celebrities (David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, and Elizabeth Montagu, “Queen of the Blues,” all helped More on her way to fame as a dramatist and poet), in her midthirties More became increasingly committed to Evangelical Christianity. Inspired by Elizabeth Bouverie and Thomas Scott, spurred on by the Evangelical awakening of the late eighteenth century, and driven by her disillusionment with literary society as a result of her soured relations with the poet Anne Yearsley, More devoted the rest of her life to an effort to convert the British, from the aristocracy through the working classes, to the moral life. As I argued in my Mothers of the Nation (2000) and as Stott here documents in detail, More's influence on British culture was enormous. Through her writings, especially her widely distributed Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98), her philanthropic efforts, and her personal relationships, she promoted a successful program for social change from within the existing political and social order. So profoundly effective was her campaign for a transformation in British cultural mores that Stott is entirely justified in calling More, who lived during the time of the greatest Regency moral and fiscal irresponsibility, “the first Victorian.”

So why has More's career hitherto attracted so little attention from serious scholars and historians? Is it because the leading historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British history have emerged from a theoretical tradition grounded on Marxist or left-wing socialist ideologies? These historians have hated Hannah More because in their eyes she did far too much to stop a liberating, French-style political revolution from occurring in England. John Hammond and Barbara Hammond began the assault on More in 1917 in The Town Labourer, in which they claimed More's educational projects were intended to define the working classes “as a subject population, existing merely for the service and profit of others.”Footnote ¹ E. P. Thompson powerfully summed up the prevailing case against More in 1963 in The Making of the English Working Class, where he condemned her Sunday schools and counterrevolutionary efforts as exercises in “discipline and repression,” contributing to a fear of social change among the landed gentry so powerful that “in these counter-revolutionary decades … the humanitarian tradition became warped beyond recognition.”Footnote ² And the attack on More has continued, fueled by Foucauldian paradigms of surveillance. Even the recent editor of More's Selected Writings, Robert Hole, criticizes her work as a project in “social control” in his Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760–1832.Footnote ³

Anne Stott is to be congratulated, along with earlier efforts by Mitzi Myers, Kathryn Sutherland, Patricia Demers, and Charles Howard Ford, for giving us a far more balanced and historically sensitive account of More's career. As these scholars show, More's Sunday schools empowered workers rather than oppressed them, by teaching them to read together with the habits of cleanliness, thrift, sound domestic economy, and good health. She also empowered women of all classes by giving them a new profession, what we would today call the “social worker.” More phrased it thus in her novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808): “The care of the poor is her profession.”Footnote ⁴ As Thomas Laqueur, in Religion and Respectability—Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850 (1976), and F. K. Prochaska, in Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (1980), have both documented, it was the workers who emerged from Sunday schools and the women who had spearheaded philanthropic institutions in this era who became the leaders of the later Chartist and suffragette movements in England.

Even the Cheap Repository Tracts, so reviled by E. P. Thompson, are a more complex case of social influence than one might have thought. As Anne Stott acutely notes, Village Politics contains “ambiguous and paradoxical” messages: on the one hand, it roundly denounces Tom Paine's call for the universal rights of man; at the same time it, advocates a balanced constitution and religious toleration (pp. 134–43). The “hyperactive Mrs. Jones,” the heroine of many of the Tracts and clearly modeled on More herself, enables the working poor of her parish to improve their lives, while assiduously caring for the sick and the dying. Overall, the Tracts, which were written with narrative flair and a telling ear for dialogue, urged the members of the working class to rise in the social hierarchy through industry, sobriety, thrift, and cleanliness. Two million Cheap Repository Tracts were distributed in the 1790s, primarily to the middle classes; of the subscribers, two-fifths were women. As Stott concludes, the Tracts actively contributed to the “feminisation of the reformation of manners agenda” (p. 178).

Through her writings, philanthropic efforts, and abolitionist and religious campaigns, More helped to transform the moral climate of the British nation. Rather than endorsing the “Old Corruption” or tolerating the license of the Regency interregnum, she demanded that the leaders of the British nation demonstrate their moral fitness for their roles. Chastising not only the aristocracy but also the established clergy for their failure to provide this Christian leadership, in her Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1791), she argued that it was the particular obligation of women to exercise this moral guidance, first at home in the education of young children and then in the community or nation at large. Females, More believed, were essentially different from males, and by sex possessed a greater capacity for virtue and sensibility. If this capacity were to be rationally educated and directed, she argued in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), it would make them better mothers, wives, daughters, and members of society.

In her treatise on good government intended for the next female ruler of England (Princess Charlotte), Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess, published in 1805, More carried her argument one step further. A rationally and morally well-educated woman was better suited to rule the nation than the men currently in power. Supported by the “Saints,” the Evangelical Clapham Sect, and by the abolitionist Bishop of London, Beilby Porteus, More's image as the “mother” of the newly remoralized British nation was widely disseminated, not only through her prolific writings (the Cheap Repository Tracts continued to be sold, even forged, after 1798) but also in the form of expensive Minton porcelain and cheap plaster-ware figures.

If Hannah More was a more revolutionary influence than we have been taught, insofar as she led what she herself called “a revolution in mores,” then Wollstonecraft, in Barbara Taylor's magisterial study of this much-discussed feminist heroine, was more religious than we knew. Persuasively insisting that we resituate Wollstonecraft in the context of eighteenth-century British and Scottish Enlightenment discourses, Taylor emphasizes her “religiously inspired utopian radicalism” (p. 11). Wollstonecraft's goal, she convincingly argues, was not so much the promotion of the bourgeois liberalism and sexual equality usually attributed to her but, rather, the emancipation of all human beings, especially women and working-class men, from the shackles of an inadequate education so that they could rationally pursue the acquisition of virtue, a divinely originating quality that Wollstonecraft defined as “right-doing.”

Exploring the development of Wollstonecraft's highly personal faith, Taylor argues that Wollstonecraft endorsed an eighteenth-century belief that female religious feeling was often more powerful than male conviction, that women possessed—as Hannah More also argued—a greater “sensibility” than men. Shrewdly defining this conviction as one of the “founding impulses of feminism” (p. 102), Taylor observes the ways in which this religious belief authorized Wollstonecraft and many other women of her day to defy male authority—if one's husband was not “virtuous,” one no longer owed him obedience. Instead, one transferred one's love to God—in this dynamic, Taylor suggests, lies the “fruity disgust” (p. 116) with physical sexuality manifested in Vindications of the Rights of Woman, as well as Wollstonecraft's theoretical commitment to a platonic ideal of perfect virtue (an ideal, by the way, which both More and Wollstonecraft personified as female).

Further, Wollstonecraft shared More's view that women were the bearers of civilization. In the stadial theory promoted by the Scottish Enlightenment and articulated most succinctly in 1771 by John Millar in The Origin of the Distribution of Ranks, the fourth or highest state of civilization would be achieved by those with the best manners, those capable of substituting rational mediation for physical violence in both their personal and national interactions. As Millar observed in his chapter on “The Rank and Condition of Women,” it was women's capacity for the feelings of the heart and for modesty in sexual relations that produced greater refinement and the advance of a more civilized society, an argument that both Wollstonecraft and More emphatically endorsed.

Taylor sensitively deals with recent scholarly condemnations of Wollstonecraft's “misogyny” by locating her attacks on her contemporary female peers within the context of an enlightened eighteenth-century hostility toward the ignorant, selfish female products of local girls’ schools, schools that taught only the “accomplishments” rather than the discipline of rational thought. At the same time, Taylor acknowledges that a strain of self-animus runs through Wollstonecraft's descriptions of her female peers, a strain that Taylor provocatively links to a tendency toward “mother-hating” in early feminist thought. If one cannot embrace one's mother as a role model, as Wollstonecraft certainly could not, then one may be forced to reject her, often with excessive cruelty.

Taylor's final chapters define Wollstonecraft's engagement with the political discourses of classical republicanism and natural rights. Here she rehearses much material familiar to us from Virginia Sapiro's superb 1992 study of Wollstonecraft's political theory, A Vindication of Political Virtue, albeit with differing emphases. As Taylor usefully points up, Wollstonecraft responded to the antifeminine bias of both French and English Jacobin thought with an affirmation of “civic manliness” (p. 211), a manliness that she extended to females. Always packaging a discourse of rights with a discourse of duties, Wollstonecraft finally emphasized the necessity of women as well as men to serve the interests, not solely of the immediate family, but of humanity at large.

The “Feminist Imagination” of Taylor's title, then, is Wollstonecraft's capacity to fuse the psychoanalytic sources of her own desires with a rational, counterfactual method of thought. The result, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was a truly seditious linking of the rejection of male authority with the liberation of women, combined with the elimination of all hierarchical divisions based on rank, age, sex, race, and wealth. If souls have no sex, as Wollstonecraft devoutly believed, then virtuous societies should make no discriminations grounded on the “artificial distinctions” of the body.

And here is where Wollstonecraft and More finally part company. Wollstonecraft would deny the significance of sexual difference, insisting on the sameness of souls whether they reside in female or male bodies. The “revolution in female manners” that she advocated entailed the seeking of virtue and right doing as a nonsexed, human activity available to anyone capable of responding to God's call. In contrast, More believed in sexual difference. For her, females had a greater capacity for sensibility and for virtue than did males. More therefore called for a “revolution in manners,” for the imposition of womanly refinement, modesty, and duty on all members of the body politic. From the perspective of contemporary feminist thought, then, More's position may well be the more radical.

This would not be the conclusion reached by a reader of William Stafford's English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s, however. Stafford competently summarizes the writings of the numerous participants in the debate over the rights and roles of women in Britain in the 1790s, focusing on such issues as female authorship; the psychological, legal, and economic exploitation and oppression of women; love, marriage, and the family; and the future of women. Intended presumably as an introduction to the material for undergraduates, Stafford's survey is hampered by his commitment to a now outdated paradigm, the distinction between “proper ladies” and “unsex’d females” (a distinction he borrows from Richard Polwhele's misogynist satire on women writers—a satire in which Polwhele denounces both Wollstonecraft and More as licentious). Stafford follows Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Mary Poovey in their early work (published between 1979 and 1984) in assuming that any woman who wrote for publication was by definition “improper.” This ignores the burgeoning scholarship of the 1990s, which has documented that literally hundreds of respectable women published their writings in the 1790s, encouraged by the advent of the lending libraries, the growth of a literate female reading public, and the increasing demand for women's writing, primarily fiction and poetry but also drama, history, politics, and science. Throughout his book, Stafford assumes that the ideology of separate sexual spheres dominated and controlled British social interactions, a view of the period powerfully contested in recent scholarship by Linda Colley, Amanda Vickery, Harriet Guest, Angela Keane, Betsy Bolton, and myself. He therefore ignores the myriad ways in which women functioned in the public arena in the late eighteenth century. Nonetheless, he rightly concludes that the 1790s was a period of “empowerment” for women.