In Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat.(Book Review)

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 22-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

By Mona Scheuermann. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002. xiv + 255 pages.

In this study of Hannah More, the popular late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century writer of plays, a novel, tracts, conduct books, and poetry, Mona Scheuermann has several aims. First and foremost, she wants to demonstrate that the tracts for the poor which More published during the 1790s had a political purpose: to counter Tom Paine's Rights of Man by showing the poor that their place in the social hierarchy had been assigned to them by God and must be occupied without complaint. Scheuermann's second goal is to show that a repressive or condescending view of the poor was embraced not merely by conservative supporters of "Church and State" like More, but also by members of "the impatient radically-minded industrial bourgeoisie," and to some extent by the most fervent supporters of revolutionary French principles as well (125). Scheuermann's third aim is to prove that More's tracts demonstrate her personal agreement with her contemporary Joseph Townsend, who argues, in A Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786), that the English Poor Laws, which guaranteed supplemental income for the needy on relatively generous terms, should be repealed, because the safety net they provide encourages laziness and extravagance in their beneficiaries. Scheuermann's fourth goal is to show that More cannot, in any sense, be called a feminist. Her belief in a strictly hierarchical social order was premised, Sckeuermann argues, on the inferiority of women to men, as well as of the poor to the rich.

Scheuermann is, in my opinion, most successful in accomplishing the first of her goals: to show that More's tracts were intended to damp the revolutionary fires that the French example had ignited in England. She devotes a substantial proportion of her study to describing and discussing the political implications of More's tracts for the poor, from the earliest one, Village Politics (1793), which answers Paine directly, to the later tracts of the Cheap Repository (1800) series, which,...

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