In the 1790s she wrote Cheap Repository Tracts on moral, religious and political topics, to distribute to the literate poor (as a retort to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man).

[1] Born in 1745 at Fishponds in the parish of Stapleton, near Bristol, Hannah More was the fourth of five daughters of Jacob More (1700–1783),[2] a schoolmaster from a strong Presbyterian family in Harleston, Norfolk, who had joined the Church of England.

He sought to pursue a clerical career, but after losing a lawsuit over an estate he had hoped to inherit he moved to Bristol, where he became an excise officer and later taught at the Fishponds free school.

[3] In 1767, More gave up her share in the school on becoming engaged to William Turner of the Belmont Estate, Wraxall, Somerset, whom she had met when he began teaching her cousins.

In London, More sought to associate with the literary elite, including Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke.

[3] Garrick wrote a prologue and epilogue to Hannah More's tragedy Percy, which was successful at Covent Garden in December 1777 and revived in 1785 with Sarah Siddons at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

[3] In the 1780s, Hannah More became a friend of James Oglethorpe, who had long been concerned with slavery as a moral issue and who was working with Granville Sharp as an early abolitionist.

These and the poems Bas-Bleu and Florio (1786) mark a gradual transition to graver views, expressed in prose in Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788) and An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1790).

For many years she was a friend of Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London and a leading abolitionist, who drew her into a group of anti-slave traders that included Wilberforce, Charles Middleton and also James Ramsay at Teston in Kent.

In 1785 More bought a house at Cowslip Green, near Wrington in northern Somerset, where she settled with her sister Martha and wrote several ethical books and tracts: Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess (1805), Coelebs in Search of a Wife (only nominally a story, 1809), Practical Piety (1811), Christian Morals (1813), Character of St Paul (1815) and Moral Sketches (1819).

[8] The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 did not worry More initially, but by 1790 she was writing, "I have conceived an utter aversion to liberty according to the present idea of it in France.

After reading Paine, Tom Hood expresses admiration for the French Revolution to Jack Anvil and speaks in favour of a new constitution based on liberty and the "rights of man".

Tom Hood finally accepts Anvil's conclusion: "While old England is safe I'll glory in her, and pray for her; and when she is in danger I'll fight for her and die for her.

Frances Boscawen thought it exceeded William Paley's The British Public's Reasons for Contentment and Richard Owen Cambridge claimed "Swift could not have done it better.

[15] The two pamphlets attracted praise from the Association for the Discountenancing of Vice, an evangelical publishing society founded in Dublin in 1792.

[15] However, by the end of the year, More, encouraged by Porteus, decided to embark on a series of Cheap Repository Tracts, three of which appeared every month from 1795 to 1798.

In January 1795, More explained to Zachary Macaulay: "Vulgar and indecent penny books were always common, but speculative infidelity brought down to the pockets and capacity of the poor forms a new era in our history.

[19] They urged the poor to rely on virtues of contentment, sobriety, humility, industry, reverence for the British Constitution, hatred of the French, and trust in God and the kindness of the gentry.

[20] More was shocked by the strides made for female education in France: "They run to study philosophy, and neglect their families to be present at lectures in anatomy.

"[2] Intending "to escape from the world gradually",[2] More moved in 1802 to Wrington in rural Somerset, where she had built a comfortable house and laid out a garden.

[22] She modelled the idealised hero and heroine in Coelebs in Search of Wife (1809) on the schools' prodigious benefactors: John and Louisa Harford of Blaise Castle.

[21] There was local opposition: Church of England vicars suspected her of advancing Methodism[21] and some landowners saw even rudimentary literacy as a step above the children's proper station.

[2][page needed] Having met Hannah More and her sisters in Bath and discussed their schools and other good works, Jane Greg reported to a friend, Martha McTier in Belfast, that she found their "minds crippled in an astonishing degree".

She was buried beside her sisters at the Church of All Saints, Wrington, which has a bust of her in the south porch, beside one of the local son John Locke.