Hannah More: A Long Overdue Commemoration

I didn’t set out to write about Hannah More this week. I was walking.

First visiting The Swan, Rowberrow, where she once described the calamine miners as living in “ferocious” conditions. Then through Nailsea, visiting The Blue Flame, where she opened a school for the children of colliers. Two very different landscapes, two very different walks—and the same woman kept appearing, stepping quietly out of the hedgerows of history as if to say: you’ve forgotten me.

And then I stood in front of the information board outside the tithe barn in Nailsea. A polite paragraph. A handful of facts. Forty years of work reduced to a laminated board.

It was, in a word, inadequate.

So this is my attempt to offer what that board does not: a deep, rich, honest commemoration of a woman who built futures in places most people never thought to look.

Britain in the age of Hannah More

Hannah More was born in Bristol in 1745, into a Britain being pulled apart and re‑stitched by the early Industrial Revolution.

Wealth was concentrating in cities. Rural poverty was deepening. Children were sent underground before they were tall enough to see over a table. The gap between rich and poor widened with every new machine.

There were no trains. No public education. No welfare state. No reliable post. No telegraph. No vote for women. No vote for most men.

If you wanted to help a village, you didn’t send an email or pick up the phone to someone. You got in a carriage, or on a horse, or you walked.

At the same time, something new was forming in the social landscape: a recognisable middle class. Merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, clerks, shopkeepers, artisans—people whose lives depended on contracts, accounts, correspondence and news. With them came something quietly revolutionary: literacy.

Reading wasn’t just a skill. It was a passport. It allowed people to follow debates, read pamphlets, form opinions, and—slowly—expect to be heard.

Into this world stepped Hannah More.

What “abolitionist” really meant

On the Nailsea information board, she’s described in passing as a “writer, abolitionist and social reformer”. It’s the sort of phrase most people skim over. “Abolitionist” sounds like a mild preference, a historical label.

It wasn’t.

In Hannah More’s time, to be an abolitionist was to stand against one of the most profitable industries in the British Empire: the transatlantic slave trade.

It meant opposing the interests of merchants, shipowners and investors—many of them in Bristol—whose fortunes were built on human bondage. It meant challenging the moral complacency of Parliament. It meant aligning yourself with a movement some considered dangerous, destabilising, even unpatriotic.

It was not a neutral stance. It was a declaration.

Hannah More didn’t just quietly disapprove of slavery. She wrote Slavery (1788), a long poem that became one of the most influential abolitionist texts of its day. It was read, quoted, and used as moral ammunition in the campaign to end the trade.

She was part of the same movement as William Wilberforce, the Yorkshire MP whose name is now synonymous with abolition.

In a city where Edward Colston’s name was carved into stone for centuries—his wealth drawn from the very trade she opposed—Hannah More’s abolitionism alone should justify a statue.

But that was only one strand of her life.

Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, and the company she kept

Wilberforce was not just a friend with a carriage. He was the leading parliamentary voice of the abolition movement, the man who spent decades introducing bills, making speeches, and slowly shifting the conscience of the House of Commons.

He and Hannah More were close allies. He trusted her judgement. He admired her organisational ability.

It was on a journey through the Mendips with him that she first saw, at close quarters, the brutal poverty of villages like Cheddar, Shipham and Rowberrow—and decided to act.

Around them was the Clapham Sect—not a sect in the modern sense, but a loose network of evangelical Anglicans based around Clapham Common in London. They were politicians, bankers, writers, clergy and philanthropists who believed that faith should be expressed through practical reform. They campaigned for abolition, prison reform, education for the poor, and a host of other causes.

Hannah More was not on the fringes of this group. She was at its heart: a trusted strategist, a prolific writer, a woman whose pen could move opinion across classes.

She was not a local eccentric. She was a national figure.

Literacy, class and the danger of teaching the poor

It’s easy, from this distance, to treat “teaching people to read” as a gentle, uncontroversial good. In Hannah More’s world, it was anything but.

As the middle class grew, so did the reach of print. Newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, tracts—these were the social media of their day. They carried arguments, rumours, campaigns and ideas. To be literate was to be plugged into a growing national conversation.

And here is the heart of it:

Literacy creates opinion. Opinion creates pressure. Pressure creates change.

Hannah More understood this. So did her opponents.

When she and her sisters began founding schools in the Mendips and the coalfield fringe, they weren’t just teaching children to sound out words. They were giving the poor access to scripture without mediation, to news without filtering, to ideas without permission.

Educated children don’t accept inevitability so easily. They ask questions. They imagine alternatives. They see themselves as more than a pair of hands.

For landowners, industrialists and some clergy, this was alarming. Education for the poor was often seen as unnecessary at best, dangerous at worst. It might “unfit” them for their station. It might encourage discontent. It might, in time, demand change.

Hannah More was doing three dangerous things at once:

• Attacking the economic foundations of slavery as an abolitionist
• Using her platform as a bestselling author to shape public opinion
• Educating the children of labourers and miners, giving them tools to think

No wonder she was resented in some quarters. No wonder she was feared.

What she actually did

Against that backdrop, the bare facts of her work become astonishing.

With her sisters—Patty, Sally, Mary and Martha—she founded schools across the Mendips and into the coalfield fringe: Cheddar, Shipham, Rowberrow, Nailsea, Blagdon, Axbridge, Congresbury, Yatton and more.

They taught children by day and adults by night. They set up women’s clubs and friendly societies. They wrote and distributed moral tales in their hundreds of thousands. They trained local teachers. They persuaded landowners and clergy to tolerate, and sometimes support, their work.

There was no Department for Education. No grants. No charity commission. No safeguarding frameworks. No public money.

So how did she fund it?

Partly from her own income as a writer—she was, by the standards of her time, a bestselling author. Her plays and prose brought in money. Her tracts for the poor were printed cheaply and in vast numbers, often subsidised by supporters. The Clapham network helped with subscriptions and donations. Local patrons contributed. And her sisters gave the one thing no board ever records: a lifetime of unpaid labour.

The tithe barn in Nailsea, standing solid beside the church, is a reminder that there was a form of local taxation. But tithes funded church and parish obligations, not education. Hannah More built a parallel system from scratch.

It ran, in Nailsea’s case, for forty years.

The story on the board—and the story behind it

The information board outside the tithe barn in Nailsea tells you, in a few tidy sentences, that:

• In the 18th century, Hannah More opened a school in Nailsea
• A schoolhouse was built next to the barn
• As the school grew, the barn was repurposed as a schoolroom
• The school ran successfully for forty years
• Two teenage colliers, John Hart and Thomas Jones, came as pupils
• Patty More taught them to read and write
• They later became long‑serving teachers
• John Hart lived in a cottage opposite the barn
• After Hannah’s death, the barn became a National School

It’s all true. It’s all important. And yet, read in isolation, it lands with the emotional force of a bus timetable.

What the board doesn’t tell you is that those forty years were part of a deliberate, organised attempt to change the fate of children who would otherwise have gone straight from childhood into the pits. It doesn’t tell you that turning teenage colliers into teachers was an act of social alchemy. It doesn’t tell you that this quiet village school was one thread in a national movement for education and abolition.

It doesn’t tell you that, in a city where Colston’s name was once everywhere, Hannah More—abolitionist, educator, reformer—is remembered here, in Nailsea, with a single paragraph.

Inadequate doesn’t begin to cover it.

Why she isn’t a household name

We know Brunel. We know Cabot. We knew Colston, until the water took him. We know Davy.

They built bridges, ships, voyages, institutions. Their legacies are made of iron, stone and brass plaques.

Hannah More worked in cottages, schoolrooms and village lanes. She worked with the poor, the forgotten, the unrecorded. She didn’t leave a bridge or a tower. She left something harder to monumentalise: people who could read, write, think and hope.

History is often unkind to those who work in the shadows of the everyday. Their impact is diffuse, absorbed into the lives of others. There is no single object you can point to and say: she built that.

But if you walk long enough through Somerset as I've been doing—through Rowberrow, through Nailsea, past tithe barns and old schoolhouses—you start to see her traces. In the stories. In the place names. In the quiet fact that, by the time the state finally took education seriously, women like Hannah More had already proved it could be done.

A commemoration, not a footnote

This piece began with a sense of irritation at an information board. It ends, I hope, as something else: a small act of restitution.

Hannah More was:

• A bestselling author in an age when print was power
• An abolitionist who stood against the economic engine of her time
• A reformer who believed the poor deserved education and dignity
• A woman who travelled rough roads to hard villages to build schools from nothing
• A teacher of teachers, turning teenage colliers into long‑serving schoolmasters
• A trusted ally of Wilberforce and the Clapham reformers
• A figure followed to her grave by the children whose futures she had changed

In Nailsea, she has a road name near the CooP and a paragraph. In Bristol, a plaque or two. In most people’s minds, nothing at all.

That is inadequate.

Both Hannah More and William Wilberforce died in 1833, surviving just long enough to know that the act abolishing slavery in the British empire had finally been passed. She was buried next to her sisters in the churchyard at Wrington, not far from their old home at Barley Wood. A great procession of Mendip children followed her to her grave.

So consider this blog, if you like, a different kind of memorial: not carved in stone, but written in the language of the places she walked and the lives she touched. A commemoration long overdue.

And if, on some future day, a Leader of the House were to stand at the despatch box and propose that Hannah More be honoured among the great and the good, I’d like to think that somewhere in the background, this story of a woman who built futures in the hardest of times would be part of the case.

For now, it is enough to say: she deserves to be remembered. And we can begin that work every time we walk past a tithe barn, a schoolhouse, or a road called Hannah More Way, and refuse to let her be just a name on a sign.