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

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association

In Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat. By MONA SCHEUERMANN. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2002. xiv+ 255 pp. $36. ISBN 0-8131-2222-8.

The Historical Austen. By WILLIAM H. GALPERIN. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. viii+286 pp. $39.95; 28 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-8122-3687-4.

Apart from their eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century theme, these two books have one other feature in common--neither provides a bibliography or list of works cited. This omission is a pity, in my view; readers, and more particularly reviewers, should surely be enabled easily to check up on the claims that works of this kind really offer the 'bold' and 'startling' new interpretations that are proclaimed on their covers. Reduced to trawling awkwardly through notes and index, readers are distracted from the substance of the book, and, not always unjustifiably, can become suspicious that something has been omitted which ought to be there. Both these books are affected by this uncertainty, as will be demonstrated below.

But first the good news. Mona Scheuermann's offering is a vigorous presentation of Hannah More's polemical writing in defence of the contemporary social and political status quo. She deals briskly and in great detail with More's part in the condemnation of Tom Paine and all his works, and with her extension of Edmund Burke's denunciation of violent revolution, adapted to the abilities and tastes of the lower orders of English society, who might at the time have found themselves uncomfortable enough to follow their fellows across the Channel into bloody revolt. Scheuermann's survey is outstandingly readable; she carries us along as, with gasps of horror, we recognize the almost total lack of common humanity with which More, in her pamphlets and tracts of the 1790s and later, condones the worst evils of her time--child labour in the mines and factories, incessant physical toil for all workers for minimal wages, and deprivation of even the most common necessities of life, in the cause of an interpretation of Christianity that can only be described as brutal, especially to the...

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