My thesis will discuss British Romantic period author and philanthropist Hannah More. I aim to portray her from a perspective that demonstrates her compelling and varying nature, that includes religion and rhetoric as persuasive tools met at times with resistance and at other times compliance. Her work called for educational reform on two accounts: firstly, for a system of education for the poor, and secondly, to reeducate middle and upper class women’s philanthropy. I focus on her didactic literature, namely Cheap Repository Tracts, and the prevalence of her Evangelical zeal embedded in the tracts. I draw particular attention to the stories of The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, Black Giles the Poacher, and Betty Brown, the St. Giles’s Orange Girl. I argue that traditional understandings of didactic narratives as a low form of literature are misleading and that More’s work exemplifies didactic fiction as a form of literature capable of empowering readers and authors alike. Furthermore, I study the social function aspects of Cheap Repository Tracts as they demonstrated a newfound accessibility to a large and varying audience.

While scholars have carefully and rightly noted the profound influence that More’s abolitionist writings had on both the abolition movement and the developing women’s rights movement, they omit what is an essential examination of her poetics, particularly the self-conscious poetic form that she develops in her poem, “Slavery, A Poem” (1788). In conjunction with noting the rhetorical and textual devices that More implements in “Slavery” to illustrate the art of self-conscious poetics, this paper explores these same devices in a later satirical essay of More’s entitled Hints towards forming a Bill for the Abolition of the White Female Slave Trade, in the Cities of London and Westminster (1804), arguing that, by comparing the rhetorical points of overlap in these two pieces, we can identify that More’s contribution to her contemporary literary culture transcended mere female participation and publication. More importantly, through “Slavery” and Hints, More develops a unique rhetoric – a poetics of control – with which to discuss the physical constraints of slavery, the trope of the individual versus the collective, and the essential poetic and rhetorical practice of blending authorial creativity with conventional constraint. / text

My thesis will discuss British Romantic period author and philanthropist Hannah More. I aim to portray her from a perspective that demonstrates her compelling and varying nature, that includes religion and rhetoric as persuasive tools met at times with resistance and at other times compliance. Her work called for educational reform on two accounts: firstly, for a system of education for the poor, and secondly, to reeducate middle and upper class women’s philanthropy. I focus on her didactic literature, namely Cheap Repository Tracts, and the prevalence of her Evangelical zeal embedded in the tracts. I draw particular attention to the stories of The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, Black Giles the Poacher, and Betty Brown, the St. Giles’s Orange Girl. I argue that traditional understandings of didactic narratives as a low form of literature are misleading and that More’s work exemplifies didactic fiction as a form of literature capable of empowering readers and authors alike. Furthermore, I study the social function aspects of Cheap Repository Tracts as they demonstrated a newfound accessibility to a large and varying audience.

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This report explores and questions the history of human rights rhetoric through the 18th century anti-slave trade poem of Hannah More, Slavery, a poem. Hannah More used the term ‘human rights’ more than 150 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nevertheless, when historians and political scientists track the history of human rights, it is frequently presented as “from Locke through Paine” as part of a narrative of the “coming of age” of democracy in a longer quest for rights stemming from 18th century revolutions and radicalism. This report looks instead at the episodic nature of human rights rhetoric through 18th century ideas of the human. As argued here, More’s use of the term ‘human rights’ indicates an attempt to reconcile the tension between Enlightenment and Christian discourses to promote the anti-slave trade cause. / text

Representations of the Gypsies and their lifestyle were widespread in British culture in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis analyzes the varying literary and artistic responses to the Gypsy figure in the period circa 1780-1870. Addressing not only well-known works by William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, John Clare, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot, but also lesser-known or neglected works by Gilbert White, Hannah More, George Crabbe and Samuel Rogers, unpublished archival material from Princess Victoria's journals, and a range of articles from the periodical press, this thesis examines how the figure of the Gypsy was used to explore differing conceptions of the landscape, identity and freedom, as well as the authoritative discourses of law, religion and science. The influence of William Cowper's Gypsy episode in Book One of The Task is shown to be profound, and its effect on ensuing literary representations of the Gypsy is an example of my interpretation of Wim Willem's term ‘paper Gypsies': the idea that literary Gypsies are often textual (re)constructions of other writers' work, creating a shared literary, cultural and artistic heritage. A focus on the picturesque and the Gypsies' role within that genre is a strong theme throughout this thesis. The ambiguity of picturesque Gypsy representations challenges the authority of the leisured viewer, provoking complex responses that either seek to contain the Gypsy's disruptive potential or demonstrate the figure's refusal to be controlled. An examination of texts alongside contemporary paintings and sketches of Gypsies by Princess Victoria, George Morland, Thomas Gainsborough, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable and John Everett Millais, elucidates the significance of the Gypsies as ambiguous ciphers in both literature and art.