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Hannah More - Mendips and Slavery
Let's hope that she doesn't get forgotten in this year's celebrations of the ending of the slave trade.
She was our very own local heroine. Born in Bristol, left standing at the altar by a bridegroom who couldn't commit himself, she turned her back on marriage and became a thoroughly modern woman, 18th century style.
On visits to London she flirted with the great Dr Johnson, who was very fond of her, and had a lasting friendship with the legendary actor David Garrick and his wife. She wrote successful plays for the London stage. She wrote books, poetry and pamphlets, and netted £30,000 from her writing - a fortune in those days.
Young William Wilberforce changed the course of her life. He enlisted her help in his campaign to abolish the slave trade; and also drew her attention to a desperate need on her own doorstep, the plight of the workers in Cheddar.
She supported the abolitionists with her pen. Her poem on the slave trade was a best seller. A short extract:
I see, by more than Fancy's mirrow shewn,
The burning village, and the blazing town:
See the dire victim torn from social life,
The shrieking babe, the agonizing wife!
She, wretch forlorn! is dragg'd by hostile hands,
To distant tyrants sold, in distant lands!
Transmitted miseries, and successive chains,
The sole sad heritage her child obtains!
She used to show her dinner guests a graphic picture of conditions on a slave-trading ship. She, like Wilberforce, lived just long enough to see parliament abolish that shameful trade.
It was Cheddar and the Mendip villages that claimed most of her energies, and money. She found them steeped in abject miserable poverty and ignorance. She established schools, often facing stubborn opposition from wealthy farmers, cajoled the local clergy into doing something useful - many of them were bone idle and hostile to educating the poor - and managed to raise the poorest of the poor to a new level of self-respect and godly living. They loved her.
She can be criticised from our 21st century standpoint for opposing political change - she thought it would make the poor even poorer. But as best she knew how, she put the Gospel into practice, and did much more good than her critics. She has been called the most influential woman of her time. And she lived and worked in Somerset. Don't let her be forgotten.
More information on the web, e.g. www.infed.org/thinkers/more.htm
If you have a library card, you can view any article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by entering the card number on the ODNB website.
The life of Hannah More is here.
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