While her husband Samuel Greg pioneered new ways of running a cloth mill, she supervised the housing and conditions of the employees, including the education of the child workers.

The Gregs, despite family connections to the slave trade, were considered enlightened employers for the time, and though in the 1830s the apprentice system was questioned, Quarry Bank Mill maintained it until her death.

She was eleven, studying in Henry Holland's School in nearby Ormskirk,[5] when her father died, leaving her one-third of his wealth, held in trust until she was 21.

When she was sixteen, her cousin Thomas Rogers invited her to his home in Newington Green, then a village a couple of miles north of the City of London.

He had children of a similar age (including Samuel Rogers, later an eminent man of letters), so she could attend Fleetwood House school in Stoke Newington a mile further north (in Dissenting circles it was "a fresh but important aim to educated daughters as well as sons"),[6] and worship with the family at the Unitarian Church on the Green.

Thomas Rogers was prominent among the London rational dissenters, and the two neighbouring villages were filled with Quakers and non-conformists, including those who started the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Her sisters' husbands Thomas Hodgson and John Pares were investing in a cotton spinning mill in Caton near Lancaster.

A man named Samuel Greg had found a similar site on the River Bollin near Wilmslow and had built a mill at Quarry Bank.

In her marital home of 35 King Street, she learned how to manage a household, and was soon entertaining the members of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society after their meetings.

Their non-conformist religious beliefs provided the Gregs with important business contacts, an influential network of Manchester and Liverpool trading and banking families, as many of the major Industrialists were Unitarian.

[14] Samuel had leased the Quarry Bank Mill at Styal, and took a farm nearby as a summer house in the country for the children.

It dated back to the Elizabethan Poor Law, and came to be used as a way to care for illegitimate, abandoned, and orphaned children (foundlings).

When the mill was extended, the Gregs laid out a model village, a precursor to Robert Owen's utopian socialist experiment at New Lanark a decade later.

The children were overseen by Hannah Greg, who delivered the services of a doctor, two teachers and two singing masters; in return, she expected weekly attendance at the Anglican parish church.

[18] Hannah's life was shaped by British Unitarianism, a denomination of English Dissenters who have always valued education for girls as much as for boys.

Dissenters suffered under various legal disabilities well into the 19th century, being barred from many professions and public appointments, which meant that their energy often went into trade and business instead.

[25] Their daughter Ellen later recalled that in the wake rebellion her parents were anxious lest her aunt's reputation, and letters she held from Lady Londonderry (Frances Pratt), step mother to Robert Stewart, the Chief Secretary for Ireland) revealing a mutual sympathy for the United Irish cause, might bring suspicion upon Samuel, as "the only Irish gentleman in the town".

A former director of the Quarry Bank Mill, and author of a book about Hannah Greg, provided this summary of her philosophy and work.