A Better Bristol is a Better World
Barbara Burns talks to Dr Kerri Andrews, project leader of The Collected Letters of Hannah More: A Digital Edition, and Dr Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull, the project’s Bristol-based MHRA Research Fellow this year.
BB. Kerri, the Bristol-born writer and social reformer Hannah More was an influential figure in the late Georgian period. Can you tell us something about her work, in particular her role in Wilberforce’s campaign to abolish slavery?
KA. Hannah More (1745-1833) was a versatile and prolific writer. She started off as a teacher at the girls’ school her elder sisters ran in Bristol. There she started writing dramas for the pupils to perform. With the help of local gentlemen these were published, and she attracted the attention of some of the leading literary figures in London. She started to visit the ‘Bluestocking’ salons run by Elizabeth Montagu (the name came from the colour of the informal hosiery worn by men who attended the gatherings). It was there that More met Samuel ‘Dictionary’ Johnson and his friend James Boswell, as well as women scholars such as Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Vesey, and Frances Boscawen. The leading Shakespearean actor of his generation, David Garrick, was also part of the social circle, and with his help More enjoyed enormous success.
Around this time More underwent a religious awakening to Evangelical Christianity through her contact with the ex-slaver John Newton. It was a combination of Newton’s influence and the demands of her new faith that brought More into the campaign to abolish the slave trade (note, this was not the same as arguing for the abolition of slavery), which had been gaining ground throughout the 1780s. More wrote her famous poem ‘Slavery’ in support of a nation-wide campaign to influence the public and politicians. William Wilberforce, the MP for Hull at this time, came into contact with More through their shared religious beliefs. The two went on to work together on numerous social and political campaigns, with More gathering private support while Wilberforce was often the public face.
BB. More was also a major proponent of educational reform. What is her legacy in this regard?
KA. More had been educated to what was then a very high level for girls; she was adept at mathematics, and learned French and Latin. She began increasingly to consider women’s role in society, and started a new venture, with strong support from William Wilberforce, to establish a chain of Sunday Schools throughout the Mendips area in Somerset. The schools were to educate the poor, including women, in the Bible and reading. They were explicitly not to teach the poor to write, which More, like others of the time, thought was an invitation to revolution and social disorder. More employed women to oversee the schools, providing rare employment opportunities for lower-status women. More and her sisters also supported women’s progress through clubs that sprang up alongside the Sunday Schools, which provided women with small but meaningful rewards, including money and resources for their new home when they married, for dedicated attendance at their school and good behaviour outside it.
More formalised her views in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), arguing that women’s education mattered for the good of society. She also argued for education to be geared towards making women better wives and mothers, so that they might raise better-educated children for the good of the nation. These views were not very far removed from those of the acceptable face of eighteenth-century neofeminism, such as we see in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, for example. More, though, has since been excoriated for her ‘conservatism’, and the genuinely progressive things she said in that book have tended to be overshadowed.
BB. Kerri, your project is a digital edition of Hannah More’s letters. Who were some of the famous figures with whom she corresponded, and what are the challenges in bringing together a modern edition of her letters?
KA. More was extremely well connected and acted as the effective hub of a vast network of friends that included leading lights in parliament, finance, the Church of England, literature, and the arts. She was a friend of Samuel Johnson, and corresponded with actors, actresses, novelists, and poets. Given the richness of More’s social networks it is astonishing that there is no modern edition of her letters. Some of her correspondence was gathered together shortly after More’s death in 1833 by her literary executor, William Roberts, but he paid little attention to the integrity of the letters, and freely removed sections, invented others, and knitted together what had been originally separate documents. In addition to its limitations as a reliable historical document, Roberts’ edition contains only about 100 of More’s letters. In fact thousands were written, of which 1800 survive today, scattered across the world.
Gathering these letters together again has been one of our major challenges. On top of that are the usual issues in an edition of letters this size – the enormous cast of characters, the state of the manuscript items, the research that goes into annotating the letters, and we’ve thrown in a few more for good measure by deciding to make the edition digital. We therefore have needed to build a platform to host the letters and apply techniques from the Digital Humanities to enable sophisticated searches. Despite all this, the benefits of doing an edition digitally are multiple, not least that it is freely available to all. Working digitally also means we can embed large amounts of information about the letters that would not otherwise be visible (for example, we can apply a tag to the text to say that More is telling a lie, something she does with surprising frequency for a devout woman). And, best of all, we can add to the addition easily if new materials are found, and we can correct mistakes.
BB. Kerri, in what ways does the city of Bristol celebrate Hannah More’s legacy? Could it do more, perhaps? Are people aware of who she was?
KA. Bristol has some awareness of More as an important figure, but perhaps not of her complexity. She has the reputation of being stodgy, uptight, and deeply conservative, and her views are seen as being antithetical to modern values. While there certainly were objectionable aspects to her view of the world, More was trying to be a force for good, and enacted several programmes that materially made better the lives of many poor people in Somerset. The scale of her legacy is not recognised sufficiently.
The Sunday Schools she established, for example, were often located in buildings she either chose herself, or on one or two occasions, had built. Many of them stand today, but aside from some small signs and sometimes a little blue plaque, there is almost nothing to mark them out. The Cheddar Sunday School, for example, had a picture of More inside it when I last visited, but little other evidence of why the building was standing. So, I think both Bristol and indeed the wider Somersetshire area could, and should, do more to recognise the huge contribution More made to the communities in which she lived, and the country she loved.
BB. Ben, you began your work as an MHRA Research Fellow last January. Can you tell us a bit about your educational background and how that led you to become interested in this project?
BW-T. I’m very proud to be a first-generation, working-class, northern, disabled academic. I was lucky enough to get a place at the University of Oxford to read English, and I ended up staying on there for both my master’s and doctorate. Ever since my undergraduate studies I’ve had a strong interest in women’s writing and book history; the former I attribute to being raised in a family of strong northern women, the latter as I’ve always been fascinated by how material form effects textual meaning. I first encountered Hannah More during my master’s. This was through a course on eighteenth-century women’s poetry, where we looked at her relationship with the labouring-class poet Ann Yearsley. Coincidently, this was when I first read Kerri’s own transformational work on these writers.
I started researching More as part of my doctorate, which looked at how women used other media (stone, embroidery, wood, metal) to circulate their texts between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. More was a prolific, though increasingly frustrated, writer of poetic epitaphs, and I became interested in how these texts circulated beyond the funerary monuments we think of them being statically engraved upon, and how More details their production and reception in her letters.
Alongside all this I became very interested in digital humanities. Through an internship with Elizabeth Montagu Letters Online, I learnt how to code and create digital editions of eighteenth-century letters, and as a Research Associate at UCL on the AHRC-funded project ‘Shaping Scholarship: Early Donations to the Bodleian Library’, I learnt more about digital humanities and databases. I was drawn to the project as it allowed me to unite these interests and continue to develop my work as a feminist literary historian.
BB. Ben, what is your specific role on the project, and how has your work been going?
BW-T. As an MHRA Research Fellow on the project, I’m primarily focused on producing a digital edition of More’s letters to the MP and Abolitionist William Wilberforce (1759-1833), which forms part of Kerri’s collected edition. These are some of the most interesting and important of More’s letters, and they provide an important insight into her work establishing charitable schools and campaigning for the abolition of the trafficking of enslaved Africans. This editorial work involves tagging transcriptions of the manuscript letters using the Textual Encoding Initiative, as well as writing scholarly footnotes. I’m also responsible for working with Matthew Groves at Sheffield to design a new website that will host the project.
Alongside this, I’ve been organising the project launch event. Kindly supported by the YMCA and the Hannah More Trust, this will be held at More’s former home outside of Bristol, Barley Wood. I’ve also worked closely with Dr Jo Edwards, one of our wonderful trustees, to secure funding and put on a range of public engagement events to promote the project to the wider community around Bristol. This has included working with an actor, Lucy Brenchley, to write and deliver a herstorical theatrical walking tour of Georgian Bristol. It has also involved giving talks for local history societies and charities.
What I’m really enjoying about the project is how interested the local community is in the work we are doing. I think one of the surprises for me is how playful More is as a writer. She’s often seen as a rather stern and serious figure, but she can also be quite funny. For example, in one of the letters I’ve been editing, she takes glee in recounting to Wilberforce how someone reportedly dressed up as her at a children’s party to punish them for being naughty. One of the steepest learning curves for me was going about identifying individuals in historic correspondence. More is a social butterfly who mentions a lot of people in her letters, so identifying who these people are, often with little to go on, has been tricky, but also very pleasing when you finally work out who someone is!
BB. Ben, which aspects of being part of the academic community at Bristol have been most useful to you in terms of training opportunities and career development?
BW-T. I think one of the things I’ve benefited from most is the support I’ve had from Kerri, the Hannah More Trust, and the University of Bristol to develop funding applications that will continue to enhance the project. Alongside my wonderful colleagues in English, Kerri and Dr Jenny Batt, the university’s public engagement team and Division of Research, Enterprise, and Engagement have been brilliant in giving me feedback on what to apply for and how to make my applications successful. This has resulted in funding for the theatrical walking tour I mentioned, which was financed by and run as part of Being Human, the UK’s annual festival for the humanities. It has also allowed me to secure a follow-on AHRC Knowledge Exchange Placement award, which means I can continue working on More with the YMCA and the Hannah More Trust, telling the story of her remarkable home to the local community.
In addition to presenting our research at departmental seminars, I’ve been able to use funding from Bristol to present work on the project at the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies annual conference, as well as the Emerging Digital Methodologies Conference. I’ve also developed my teaching experience at both an undergraduate and postgraduate level through the opportunities I’ve been given by the School.
BB. Kerri, Ben, how would you each sum up the importance of this project?
KA. Hannah More is one of our least appreciated writers, and yet she was one of the most significant. She was funny, playful, and generous. She supported large numbers of poor people through her schemes or through direct charity, including scores of miners in Shipham and Rowberrow when the brass industry there collapsed. She was absolutely a force for good, but the sides of her work and character that might make modern readers warm to her have been hidden away in her letters for nearly two hundred years. Publishing a full scholarly edition of her letters on an open-access platform is vital if we are to fully understand not only our literary history, but our social and moral history too. This is a woman who punned for 600 words on a pair of knitted garters she made for a friend: why would we not want to know more about her?
BW-T. As Kerri says, More is so important to the understanding of the literary and political culture of the period, but she is underappreciated. This was someone who was so successful as a writer that she left the equivalent of £3,000,000 behind when she died, even after spending prolifically on her various charity endeavours throughout her life. More is in many ways problematic, and this is something that we address in our work, but even into her late eighties she was still campaigning for abolition and raising money for charitable causes. People want to know more about her career and the central role she played in Bristol’s history. We’ve had 1500 attendees at the public engagement events we’ve run over the past year, and the open access edition we’re producing is the perfect way for everyone from primary school kids to retired members of local history groups to do this.
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