Hannah More in Context

Kerri Andrews, Sue Edney, Kerri Andrews, Sue Edney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000518443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik des Mittelalters & der Frühen Neuzeit

This book relocates the long life and literary career of the poet, playwright, novelist, philanthropist and teacher Hannah More (1745-1833) in the wider social and cultural contexts that shaped her, and which she helped shape in turn. One of the most influential writers and campaigners of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, More's reputation has suffered unfairly from accusations of paternalism and provincialism, and misunderstandings of her sincerely-held but now increasingly unfamiliar evangelical beliefs. Now, in this book, readers can explore a range of essays rooted in up-to-the-minute research which examines newly-recovered archival materials and other evidence in order to present the fullest picture yet of this complex and compelling author, and the era she helped mould with her words.

1 Tongues in Trees: Hannah More and the Nature Inscription

Robin Jarvis

DOI: 10.4324/9781003092971-1

The story of Hannah More's long-running engagement to William Turner of Belmont is typically passed over in a couple of pages near the start of biographies of the writer now feted as “the most influential woman living in England in the Romantic era” (Mellor 2000, 13). The details of More's sole romantic entanglement – begun in 1767 and amicably terminated six years later, after three wedding dates had come and gone – are less consequential than topics such as her theatrical career, her Evangelical conversion and activism, and her participation in the Revolution debate. For once, though, I want to focus on this obscure corner of More's life. In particular, this essay explores the unique contribution that More made to the grounds at Belmont, an estate situated a few miles to the west of Bristol. In Henry Thompson's words, Turner consulted More on the “ornamental economy of his estate” and much of its “artificial beauty” was indebted to her “creative taste” (1838, 16). Charlotte Yonge's biography explains in more detail:

there was much planning of walks and landscape gardening. Hannah wrote inscriptions for favoured spots, and these Mr. Turner, with more courtesy than taste, caused to be painted in black and white on boards exactly like notices to trespassers, and affixed to trees, where they were extant within the last forty years. (1888, 11)

In this chapter, I examine the four poems now known to have been among those displayed on the Belmont poetry boards. I relate them to the genre of the nature inscription, which was popular in the late-eighteenth century and Romantic period, and further contextualise them with reference to More's treatment of the links between gardening and moral education in her only novel, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife. I shall also consider the relationship between More's nature inscriptions and the epitaphs that became part of her stock-in-trade as a poet – albeit a part that she found increasingly burdensome as the years went by.

Turner, More and Belmont

The little that is known about Belmont and its affluent owner, William Turner, can be briefly summarised. Turner was 20 years older than More, whom he met when she visited Belmont as a guest of his two young female cousins, pupils at the Mores’ upmarket girls’ school in Park Street, Bristol. Despite the age difference, More's best modern biographer declares that everyone “would have thought her mad to refuse” what would have been “a Cinderella-like transformation” for a humble schoolmaster's daughter (Stott 2003, 18). Turner is said to have been the son of a timber merchant – presumably the source of his wealth. The same source describes him as a well-built man and a fine swordsman and boxer, who belonged to a family of “violent Jacobites” (Smith 1917, 143). If that is true, then – bearing in mind the religious and political leanings of the older Hannah More – perhaps the most puzzling thing is not that the marriage between More and Turner never took place but that the engagement lasted as long as it did. Less surprising, consistent as it is with the ethical capitalism later advocated by More, is the contemporary testimony that Turner was extensively engaged in public and private charitable activity. Felix Farley's Bristol Journal reported on 28 June 1788 that he had given a thousand pounds towards the establishment of the new Bristol Royal Infirmary (of which he was a trustee), while, on 26 February 1803, it noted a donation of 25 pounds to the newly formed Society for the Prevention and Suppression of Vice. His obituary in the same newspaper on 7 April 1804 states that there was no public charity in the city of Bristol “to which he was not a liberal benefactor”, and that his “private charities” partook equally of the “bountiful disposition which marked every action of his life”. More's own extensive charitable work postdated her engagement, but it seems reasonable to conclude that a shared social conscience and “bountiful disposition” were factors in their mutual attraction.

Nevertheless, that attraction proved insufficient to cement the relationship. There is no well-substantiated explanation for why Turner repeatedly postponed his marriage to More. William Roberts refers mysteriously to “objections, on which it is unimportant to dwell” (1835, 31), but there is no firm evidence for Karen Swallow Prior's inference that he “had a homosexual inclination” (2014, 35). Anne Stott suggests, more convincingly, that Turner was “a depressive by temperament, incapable of making a long-term commitment, but incapable too of taking the decisive step of breaking off a relationship” (2003, 18). Whatever the reason, on the evidence of his philanthropical activity, the annuity of 200 pounds that he settled on More to extract himself from their engagement in an honourable fashion – an arrangement brokered by a family friend without her knowledge, but which she reluctantly accepted – was clearly a sum that he could well afford.

Figure 1.1 Belmont House (south front) today. Photo: Robin Jarvis.

Turner had built Belmont in 1760, incorporating the existing small cottage into a substantial new property suitable for a gentleman's residence. The extensive grounds, which include parkland to the front of the house and woods to the rear, appear to have been laid out partly in the fashionable picturesque fashion. There are magnificent views from the front of the house and various points in the grounds over towards the Bristol Channel and the islands of Steepholm and Flatholm. This helps makes sense of the opening lines of More's early poem, The Bleeding Rock, which refer to “beauteous Belmont” rearing “its modest brow / To view Sabrina's silver waves below” (1776, 27). (Sabrina was the mythical goddess of the River Severn.) This poem, usually read as an allegory of More's painfully protracted relationship with Turner, tells the story of the beautiful Lindamira and her superficial, faithless lover, Polydore. Deserted by Polydore, Lindamira calls on the gods to turn her to “hardest rock” and they duly oblige, petrifying everything but her heart; the grief- or guilt-stricken Polydore subsequently stabs himself, and in falling to the ground his dagger pierces Lindamira's embedded heart, causing the “wounded stone” to bleed:

The life-blood issuing from the wounded stone,

Blends with the crimson current of his own.

And tho’ revolving ages since have past,

The meeting torrents undiminish’d last;

Still gushes out the sanguine stream amain,

The standing wonder of the stranger swain. (1776, 31)

This central conceit was inspired by something More had observed at Belmont, where an outcrop of red sandstone produced trickles of blood-coloured water on rainy days. In some fashion – albeit with uncertain intent – The Bleeding Rock plainly reflects upon More's first and last venture into the world of matrimony. Mary Alden Hopkins is in no doubt of the relish with which this “imitation of Ovid” helped a level-headed, Bristolian “nymph” draw a line under the affair: “when Mr. Turner was … faithless, Hannah did not turn to stone; she sold the poem” (1947, 33). This perhaps wrongly imputes materialistic motives to More and underrates the emotional cost of the break-up, but it articulates the common perception that the dissolution of her marriage prospects was the making of More the writer.

The history of Belmont subsequent to the aborted engagement is closely entwined with that of an adjoining property, Tyntesfield. Turner lived at Belmont as a bachelor until his death in 1804. He left the estate to his nephew, George Penrose Seymour, who left it in turn to his son, George Turner Seymour. In 1813, George Penrose purchased the adjoining Tynte's Place estate, later demolishing the existing property and, from 1836, having a new mansion built on the site. In the meantime he had first let, then in 1832 sold, Belmont and a portion of the estate to the Bristol West India merchant, George Gibbs, who made his money in the Atlantic slave trade and had financial interests in plantations in Barbados and Jamaica; together with his business partner, Robert Bright, he was awarded compensation for 94 slaves following abolition in 1833 (Legacies 2020). In 1844 his cousin, William Gibbs, co-founder of the family business, Antony Gibbs & Sons, which amassed a fortune trading in cloth, wine, guano and nitrates, bought Tynte's Place (at some point renamed Tyntesfield) from George Turner Seymour. Then in 1870 he also bought Belmont from his nephew, George Louis Monck Gibbs, thus reuniting the two estates. (G. L. M. Gibbs inherited the property from his father, the Rev. Joseph Gibbs, to whom Belmont passed following the death of his cousin, George Gibbs, who had no children.) This consolidation of the two estates lasted for more than a century, until in 2001, following the death of Richard Gibbs (now Lord Wraxall), the National Trust purchased Tyntesfield and a portion of the surrounding lands. Belmont thereupon became an independent estate again but underwent further fragmentation before being reassembled within a decade by its current owners; the house and grounds had fallen into disrepair in the post-war period but are now being sympathetically restored.

The story of Hannah More's poetry boards is a small yet fascinating part of this wider, complex history. The original boards, put up in the 1760s in the early stages of More's relationship with Turner, were still present in the middle of the nineteenth century. Towards the end of that century the Gibbs family repainted two of the boards and restored them “to their original positions” (Master 1900, 75). Finally, in 2018, 250 years after More's engagement to Turner, in a second resurrection, the National Trust produced four new poetry boards and erected them in suitable places to create a new Hannah More poetry walk on the Tyntesfield estate. One of the original boards and one of the Victorian replacements (of the same poem) are still held in a storeroom at Tyntesfield. For the anniversary project, a team led by Susan Hayward identified two other unpublished “plantation poems” in manuscript collections; a fourth poem had previously been identified and transcribed in Thompson's Life of Hannah More (1838, 17). Texts of all four poems, along with The Bleeding Rock, were published by the National Trust in a small booklet at the same time (Carr, Smith, and Hayward 2018).

Figure 1.2 One of the poetry boards on the Hannah More poetry walk at Tyntesfield (National Trust) in 2018. Photo: Robin Jarvis.

More's Nature Inscriptions

More's Belmont poems belong, broadly speaking, to the genre of the inscription, defined as verse “conscious of the place on which it [is] written” (Hartman 1970, 207), or might be written. This genre includes the epigram and the epitaph and has deep roots running back to classical times, but the specific variety or sub-genre that More's poems illustrate is the nature inscription – a form brilliantly and definitively anatomised in an essay by Geoffrey Hartman published more than 50 years ago. These are poems in which, as Hartman describes, “the inscription calls to the passer by in the voice of the genius loci or spirit of the place”, letting him or her know that they are in a special place and encouraging them to linger and respond sensitively and respectfully (212). Mark Akenside was among the earliest notable British practitioners in the mid-eighteenth century. Dodsley's Collection of Poems, a highly successful miscellany, contained six of Akenside's inscriptions, including one “For a Column at Runnymede” which urges the “stranger” to “contemplate well” the place where “England's ancient barons” secured their historic charter from a “tyrant king” (Akenside 1765, 43). Inscriptions became integral to the nature poetry practised by the Romantics. Southey's 1797 Poems, for e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Contributor Biographies
• Introduction: Hannah More in Context
• 1 Tongues in Trees: Hannah More and the Nature Inscription
• 2 Feeling Good: Sentimental Virtue in Hannah More's The Search After Happiness (1773) and “Sensibility” (1782)
• 3 Defending “Reason's rein”: Rationalism as Persuasive Strategy in Hannah More's Slavery: A Poem (1788)
• 4 Writing Women at Work
• 5 “Hunger is not a postponable want”: Hannah More's charity reconsidered
• 6 Hannah More's Percy, A Tragedy in the Spanish and French Theatrical Contexts
• 7 Bluestocking and Preacher: The Bifurcated Reception of Hannah More in Scandinavia
• 8 Hannah More’s Sympathetic Strategies: Coelebs in Search of a Wife and the Evangelical Novel
• 9 Books and Readers in Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife
• 10 Manuscripts and Books
• 11 Bringing More to the Fore: Championing the life and work of Hannah More in Schools and Community Education
• 12 Hannah More's Energetic Sociality: Enthusiasms and Consequences
• Extended Sermon on Hannah More
• Index