Hannah More

Hannah More (1745–1833) was born near Bristol and made her name in London in the 1770s as a dramatist and as a friend of David Garrick, Samuel Johnson and the Bluestocking circle. Her early verse, among it Sir Eldred of the Bower (1776), the Ode to Dragon (1777), Florio and The Bas Bleu (1786), and Slavery, a Poem (1788), was written for that polite literary world, and the last of these joined the campaign against the slave trade.

From the 1790s she turned to religious and moral writing for a wider public. Her ballads, songs and verse tracts for the Cheap Repository (1795–1800), written in plain language to be sold cheaply and sung or read aloud, are represented here alongside the earlier poems. She spent her last years near Bristol and died at Clifton in 1833. The texts follow the early printed editions (via ECCO-TCP), with the long s modernised.