Blush, grandeur, blush

Norma Clarke

  • Hannah More: The First Victorian by Anne Stott
    Oxford, 384 pp, £20.00, September 2004, ISBN 0 19 927488 6

The first edition of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More sold out within three weeks; a second and third followed rapidly. ‘Holy Hannah’, as Horace Walpole called her (William Cobbett called her ‘the Old Bishop in petticoats’), was already a celebrity. William Roberts, the family friend entrusted with the task of producing the book, made her into a saint. He presented her as a vessel chosen by God, who had carried her ‘through great temptations and trials’ to her ‘exemplary eminence’.

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