Some Eminent Women of Our Times

Hannah’s unusual abilities soon began to attract notice. She wrote a play for school acting, which had a great success; we are told how on one occasion, when she was ill (her health was always delicate), her doctor was so carried away by the charm of her conversation that he forgot to make any inquiries about her health; he took his leave, and was on the point of departing from the house, when he returned with the inquiry, “And how are you, my poor child?”

Hannah’s first visit to London was about 1772 or 1773, when she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. She saw the first performance of Sheridan’s Rivals, and sagely remarks that the writer must be treated with indulgence, for that “much is to be forgiven in an author of twenty-three, whose genius is likely to be his principal inheritance.” She was introduced to Miss Reynolds, Sir Joshua’s sister, and this lady promised to make her known to Dr. Johnson. She saw Garrick, the great actor, in King Lear, and was so much impressed by him that she wrote a long description of his acting in a letter that was handed about among her friends and gained a sort of half publicity, as seems to have been not unusual at that time. This letter paved the way for an introduction to Garrick and his wife, and Hannah More became one of their most intimate and valued friends. Garrick encouraged Hannah to write for the stage, and some of her pieces, under his fostering care, had an astonishing degree of success. Garrick’s favourite name for the poetess was “Nine,” by way of delicate comparison with the nine muses. Horace Walpole used to call her “Saint Hannah.” Dr. Johnson called her “a saucy girl,” perhaps the nicest epithet of the three. When Garrick died, Hannah was one of the ladies admitted to Westminster Abbey to witness his funeral. Hannah spent the first year of her friend’s widowhood with Mrs. Garrick at her house near Hampton; and on many other occasions it was shown, in a similar way, that Hannah was one on whom her friends were accustomed to depend for sympathy and support in the darkest hours of mourning and sorrow. After Garrick’s death Hannah never visited a theatre again. She did not even go to see her own play, The Fatal Falsehood, which Garrick had been preparing to put on the stage at the time of his death.

From the time of her first entry into London society she seems to have had access to all that was best in the world of literature and art, and to have played a distinguished part there. It is, therefore, the more to her credit that she turned from this gay and brilliant life in order to devote herself to the work of education and civilisation among the poor people of Cheddar and the Mendips.

She and her sister Patty had settled in a pretty cottage home called Cowslip Green, in the parish of Wrington, Bristol. Here they were visited by their friends from the great world, and hence they, in their turn, made their annual visit to London. Mention has already been made of the painful impression produced in Hannah on hearing, in a Bristol church, the loss of a negro girl proclaimed by the crier in the midst of the morning service. She was a woman much influenced by her friendships. She had been a poetess and dramatist under the influence of Johnson and Garrick; Wilberforce and John Newton (Cowper’s friend) had now awakened in her a passion of pity for slaves and a passion of hatred against slavery. Miss Yonge states that Hannah was before this a friend of Lady Middleton, “who had first inspired William Wilberforce with the idea of his great work in life; and on going to make her annual visit to Mrs. Garrick in the winter of 1787, she first heard of the Bill that was to be introduced into Parliament for the abolition of slavery.” In 1789 William Wilberforce came to spend a few days with the Misses More, at Cowslip Green. By way of showing him the beauties of the neighbourhood the ladies sent him to see the picturesque cliffs and caves of Cheddar. When their guest returned he was remarkably silent; the food that had been sent with him was untasted, and he remained for some hours alone in his room. His hostesses naturally feared that he was ill; but when he rejoined them they discovered that instead of admiring the natural beauties of Cheddar, the tender heart of the future emancipator of the slaves had been wholly engrossed by the evidences which had presented themselves of human depravity, misery, and neglect. The inhabitants of the picturesque region were almost savages; their poverty was frightful; there was no sort of attempt at education of any kind; there were no resident clergymen; the people were utterly lawless; it was unsafe for a decent person to go amongst them unprotected; writs could not be served but at risk of the constable being thrown down some cliff or pit. These things Wilberforce had discovered, and they obscured for him all the pleasure which pretty scenery could afford. “Miss More,” he said, “something must be done for Cheddar;” and after much consultation and thought, before he went away, he again charged the ladies with the task of civilising and educating the wild district which lay at their doors, adding, “If you will be at the trouble, I will be at the expense.”

From this time the sisters led a new life. It is true that Hannah did not give up her literary pursuits; she laboured with her pen as well as with other instruments in pursuit of her end. But now the main object of both Patty and Hannah was to educate and reclaim the inhabitants of the districts which have been named. The work, merely from a physical point of view, was by no means light. There were no roads, or such bad ones that the only practical means of travelling was on horseback. Their first task was to endeavour to gain the goodwill and assistance of the farmers and gentry. Patty says of some of these, “They are as ignorant as the beasts that perish; intoxicated every day before dinner, and plunged into such vice that I begin to think London a virtuous place.” Such clergy as did occasionally visit the district might as well have stayed away. Of one Patty says, “Mr. G – is intoxicated about six times a week, and very frequently is prevented from preaching by two black eyes, honestly earned by fighting.” The sisters showed their good sense, as well as their benevolence, by finding out and utilising whatever in the way of a good influence existed in the district. They rejected no help because the helper did not conform to their particular pattern of orthodoxy. They did not hesitate, although they were strict churchwomen, to engage a Methodist to act as mistress in one of their Sunday schools. They soon had thirteen villages under their care, and an improvement began to be visible in nearly all of them. Of one of them, Congresbury, Hannah wrote describing the first opening of the school: “It was an affecting sight. Several of the grown-up youths had been tried at the last assizes, three were the children of a person lately condemned to be hanged, many thieves, all ignorant, profane, and vicious beyond belief. Of this banditti we have enlisted one hundred and seventy; and when the clergyman, a hard man, who is also the magistrate, saw these creatures kneeling round us, whom he had seldom seen but to commit or punish in some way, he burst into tears. I can do them little good, I fear, but the grace of God can do all…”

The Misses More did not escape bitter persecution and misrepresentation in their good work. A Mr. Bere, curate of Wedmore, distinguished himself by his furious hostility to them. He threatened them with penal proceedings for teaching without a license, induced the farmers to make formal complaint to the Archdeacon against them, and obtained an affidavit from a half-witted young man, whom they had befriended, making personal charges against them. Influential friends, however, came to the ladies’ assistance. The good Bishop said, “When he heard it was Miss Hannah More he knew it was all right.” But the persecution they endured was not without its effect on their health and spirits. Hannah was laid up for about two years at this time, and was unable to pursue her work amongst her poor scholars.

In 1802 the sisters removed from Cowslip Green to Barley Wood; here Hannah wrote some of her best known books. None of her works is better known, at least by name, than Cœlebs in Search of a Wife. Here also, by the request of Queen Charlotte, she wrote a book of advice on the education of Princess Charlotte, who, it was thought, was destined to become Queen of England. The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain was written at Cowslip Green, as one of a large series of simple stories for the poor, intended by the sisters to counteract and undersell popular literature of an objectionable character. The Misses More produced three of these tracts a month, and it is calculated that more than two millions were sold in a year. By many The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain was considered Hannah More’s masterpiece. Wilberforce said he “would rather present himself before Heaven with the Shepherd in his hand than with Peveril of the Peak.”

At Barley Wood Hannah experienced the great and unavoidable calamity of old age, the gradual loss, by death, of the friends and allies of her youth. Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and Garrick were dead long ago, and the brilliant society in London, of which Hannah had formed part, had lost many of its stars. One by one, death laid its hand on the members of the More sisterhood, till Hannah and Patty, the lifelong friends and companions, were the only two left. In September 1819, Mr. and Mrs. Wilberforce being on a visit to the sisters, Patty sat up till a late hour of the night talking to her guests of old days, and Hannah’s first introduction to London. In the morning the first news that met the visitors’ ears was that Patty was dying. She lingered about a week, but never regained consciousness, and then Hannah was left quite alone, the last of all the five. But her friends gathered round her, and her vigorous intellect and strong sense of duty did not allow her to be idle. She still had vivacity enough to write humorous letters and verses, and to poke fun at what she considered the misdirected zeal of some educationalists.

A few years before her death, Hannah More removed to Windsor Terrace, Clifton. Her old age was cheered by the companionship of a friend, Miss Frowd, of whom Miss More wrote, she is “my domestic chaplain, my house apothecary, knitter and lamplighter, missionary to my numerous and learned seminaries, and, without controversy, the queen of clubs” (penny clubs). When an old lady of more than eighty can write in this buoyant strain, it is the more to be regretted that she seemed to have thought gaiety was a thing it was dangerous to encourage a taste for in the poor. Still, though we cannot help regretting this, we shall do well if we can imitate, in however humble a degree, her unselfish devotion to goodness and the way in which she spent the best years of her life in trying to improve the lot of the most destitute and miserable of her neighbours. She lived to be eighty-eight. She had no long illness, and no failure of any of her mental faculties, except that of memory. Her body became gradually weaker, and she longed for death. One day “she stretched out her arms, crying, ‘Patty! joy!’” She never spoke again, dying a few hours later, on 7th September 1833.

XXIII

THE AMERICAN ABOLITIONISTS

PRUDENCE CRANDALL AND LUCRETIA MOTT

Everybody is an Abolitionist now. There is not, probably, in any part of Europe or the United States a single human being who would now defend slavery as an institution, or who thinks that for man to own property in his fellow-man, to be able to buy and sell him and dispose of his whole life, is not a sin and an outrage against all feelings of humanity.

Slavery was put an end to in the British Dominions nearly seventy years ago, but it is only twenty-six years since it was abolished in the United States of America. The time is well within the memory of many persons now living when to be an Abolitionist, even in the New England States, was to be hated and reviled, to render one’s self the object of the bitterest persecution, to risk comfort, happiness, and even life. In England the Abolitionist party was headed by men like Wilberforce, Clarkson, Macaulay, and Buxton, who all enjoyed the advantages belonging to education, good social position, and comparative wealth. It was always “respectable” in England to be an Abolitionist, and it was not necessary to possess the courage and devotion of a martyr to declare one’s hatred of slavery. But in the United States it was quite otherwise. Great and influential people of all parties there were for many years vehemently opposed to the emancipation of the slaves. Even as late as 1841 Miss Martineau describes the great sensation made among “the élite of intellectual Boston” when they found that Lord Morpeth (afterwards the Earl of Carlisle), who was then on a visit to the United States of America, had openly expressed his sympathy with the principles of the Abolitionists.

In 1835 the Boston mob dragged William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the American Abolitionists, through the streets with a rope round his neck; and his life was only saved from their fury through the stratagem of the Mayor, who committed him to gaol as a disturber of the peace. In 1841 the feeling against the Abolitionists was a little less violent; but “anti-slavery opinions were at that time in deep disrepute in the United States; they were ‘vulgar,’ and those who held them were not noticed in society, and were insulted and injured as often as possible by genteeler people and more complaisant republicans.” It was a matter of great astonishment to the polite world of Boston that the English aristocrat made no secret of the fact that he shared the opinions of the despised and hated Abolitionists.

In 1828 Garrison was a poor lad, working for his living as a printer; he determined to devote himself to the gigantic task of freeing his country from the curse of slavery. He began to print with his own hands and publish an anti-slavery paper called the Liberator. He wandered up and down the United States as an anti-slavery lecturer; by and by a few friends began to gather round him, and those who shared his principles and his enthusiasm gradually made themselves known to him. In 1833, being then twenty-eight years old, he received a letter from a young Quaker lady, Miss Prudence Crandall, who asked his advice under the following circumstances: Two years previously she had bought a large house at Canterbury, in the State of Connecticut, and had started there a boarding-school for girls. She had flourished beyond her expectations, and had every prospect of forming a highly successful school. She wrote to Garrison and asked his advice about changing her white scholars for coloured ones. She says in her letter, very simply, not giving herself any airs of martyrdom, “I have been for some months past determined, if possible, during the remainder of my life to benefit the people of colour.” Under these quiet words lay a firmness of purpose that would have supported her to the stake if need were. She did not, on that occasion, tell Garrison that she had already admitted to her classes, not as a boarder, but as a day scholar, a very respectable young negro woman, whose family she knew well as members of the church which she herself attended. By this action she had given great offence to the “genteel” inhabitants of Canterbury. The wife of an Episcopal clergyman who lived in the town told her that if she retained “that coloured girl” the school would be ruined. Prudence replied, that though the school might be ruined she would not turn her scholar out. She soon discovered that many of her pupils would leave, not to return, if the coloured girl were retained, but this did not shake her resolution. She began to consider whether it would not be possible to have a school for coloured girls only; and upon this point, not saying anything of her own sacrifices, she wrote, as before mentioned, to consult Garrison. Very soon after the date of this letter the Liberator newspaper contained an advertisement, stating that “Miss P. Crandall (a white lady), of Canterbury, Conn.” had opened a “High School for young coloured ladies and misses.”

By this time the town of Canterbury had put itself into the greatest state of excitement about Miss Crandall’s project. She might have reasonably thought when she had converted her school into one for “young coloured ladies and misses” only, that so long as she and her pupils and their parents were satisfied no one else had any concern in the matter. But this was not the view taken by the inhabitants of Canterbury. Three town’s meetings were summoned in one week to consider what measures could be taken to stop and thwart her project. At first it seems to have been thought desirable to try the fair means of persuasion, and Miss Crandall was waited on by a deputation of leading gentlemen of the place, who professed to feel “a real regard for the coloured people, and perfect willingness that they should be educated, provided it could be effected in some other place.” Miss Crandall’s scheme of educating them in her own house in Canterbury would, they assured her, bring disgrace and ruin on the whole town. Miss Crandall heard them out, and then announced her determination to carry out her plan. There was an immovable firmness under the tranquillity of the young Quakeress’s demeanour. Another town’s meeting was called, and Miss Crandall was allowed to be represented by counsel, but the gentlemen who took up her cause were not granted a hearing, on the ground that they were outsiders, not natives of the town, and the whole of Canterbury, in public meeting assembled, then proceeded to vote their unanimous disapprobation of the school, and their fixed determination to oppose it at all hazards. They certainly opposed it with great vigour, but the hazard was not so much to the town of Canterbury as to the young woman, who was the object for two years of the most relentless persecution. She all the while maintained her quiet dignity, causing Garrison to exclaim in a letter to a friend, “Wonderful woman! as undaunted as if she had the whole world on her side! She has opened her school and is resolved to persevere.” One of her friends wrote to Garrison: “We shall have a rough time, probably, before the year is out. The struggle will be great, no doubt, but God will redeem the captives… We are all determined to sustain Miss Crandall if there is law in the land enough to protect her. She is a noble soul!”

The fight between the heroic little Quaker woman and the town of Canterbury soon waxed very hot. Almost directly after the school was opened in 1833, her enemies procured the passing of an Act by the State Legislature of Connecticut, prohibiting private schools for non-resident coloured persons, and providing for the expulsion of such scholars. The fact is a warning of the way in which small local parliaments may be carried away by local passions. Such an Act would probably, even then, never have passed the Legislature of the United States. As it was, its originators must have been ashamed of it as soon as their rage against Miss Crandall had had time to cool, for it was repealed in 1838; but in the five years during which it was in operation it gave Miss Crandall’s enemies great power over her. Under this Act she was twice arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned. She appealed to the Supreme Court, and had the satisfaction in the superior tribunal of defeating her persecutors, though only on a technical point of law. But in the interval she was subjected to the most extraordinary and inhuman persecution. There was not a shopkeeper in the town who would sell her, or any member of her household, a morsel of food; she and her scholars were not admitted to take part in public worship; no public conveyance would take them as passengers; doctors would not attend them. Miss Crandall’s own relations and friends were warned that if they valued their own safety they must not visit her or have anything to do with her. “Her well was filled with manure, and water from other sources was refused; the house itself was smeared with filth, assailed with rotten eggs and stones, and finally set on fire.” (See Life of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. i. p. 321). But the little “school-marm” held her own. Unlike that Frenchman of whom we are told that he consecrated a long life to coming invariably to the assistance of the strongest side, she was emphatically the friend of the oppressed, and one of that band “who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”

The existence of a group of such women is one of the most precious national possessions of the American people. Miss Crandall, now Mrs. Philleo, is still (1889) alive and in full vigour of mind and body. The revenge which the whirligig of time has brought to her is the triumph of her cause. She now enjoys a small pension granted to her by the Government of the United States in recognition of her services to the anti-slavery cause.

Another of the famous anti-slavery women of the United States was Lucretia Mott. She, too, was a Quakeress, as were a very considerable proportion of the women who first took up the Abolitionist movement. At one time the Puritan inhabitants of New England, who had fled from their homes in Europe to escape persecution, instituted the most cruel persecution against the Quakers and all sects who differed from the Puritan creed. The persecuted are often only too ready to become persecutors in their turn. Lucretia Mott’s ancestors, the Coffins, descended from the ancient Devonshire family of that name, had fled before this Puritan persecution to the island of Nantucket to the east of Massachusetts. Here Lucretia was born in 1793, and here her childhood was passed till she was eleven, when her father removed to Boston, Massachusetts. Lucretia and her younger sister, spoken of in her father’s letters as “the desirable little Elizabeth,” had opportunities of education at Boston that would have been quite out of the question in the primitive island of their birth. At the age of eighteen Lucretia married James Mott, and her home henceforward was at Philadelphia. Partly for the sake of educating her own children, and partly with the view of helping her mother, who had been left a widow with five children to support, Lucretia Mott opened a school. When she was about thirty years of age she began gradually to be drawn into work of a more public kind, through her deep interest in many moral movements of her time. Foremost among these stood the anti-slavery agitation; she travelled many thousands of miles, speaking and lecturing for the anti-slavery cause. It was then, even in America, quite a novelty for women to take an active part in public movements, and some of the more old-fashioned of the Abolitionists did not approve of the participation of Lucretia Mott and other women in the work. But Garrison was always, from the first, as eager for the equality of women as he was for the emancipation of the slaves; and he felt too deeply what the anti-slavery cause in England and America owed to women to tolerate their being set on one side without any recognition of their work. However, at first only a minority held this view, and the difficulty which some men felt in working with women caused Lucretia Mott to form the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. At the first meeting of this society, none of the ladies felt competent themselves to take the chair, so they elected a negro gentleman to that position, a choice which Mrs. Mott explained a few years later in the following words: “Negroes, idiots, and women were in legal documents classed together; so that we were very glad to get one of our own class to come and aid us in forming that society.”

In 1840 Lucretia Mott was one of the delegates chosen to represent American societies at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in that year. It is well known that she and all other lady delegates were refused recognition because they were women. Sir John Bowring, Mr. Ashurst, and Daniel O’Connell were among those who protested against this arbitrary act of exclusion; but the protest was in vain. Garrison had not been present when the question of refusing to allow the lady delegates to take part in the Convention was discussed. He arrived in England five days after the question had been settled. With characteristic generosity, he refused to sit as a delegate where the ladies had been excluded. They had been relegated as spectators to a side gallery, and he insisted on taking his seat there also. The absurdity of holding a World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in which the chief workers against slavery were present as spectators, not as participators, caused a great deal of discussion at the time; and the general movement in England towards the social, educational, and political equality of women may be said to date from that period.