The enormous working-class sale of Paine's Rights of man Part I was met on the right both by censorship and by the promotion of popular literature dedicated to political stability. Village politics urges the working man: 'study to be quiet, work with your hands, and mind your own business'. The Cheap repository tracts, which began to appear two years later, had similar aims but in the framework of religious renewal. The shepherd of Salisbury Plain, celebrating piety, poverty and simplicity, was one of the most popular; first published in 1795, it is here reproduced in a more legible text of the 1820s.
Hannah More was an English religious writer and philanthropist. She can be said to have made three reputations in the course of her long life: as a clever verse-writer and witty talker in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects on the Puritanic side, and as a practical philanthropist.
She was instrumental in setting up twelve schools by 1800 where reading, the Bible and the catechism - but not writing - were taught to local children. The More sisters met with a good deal of opposition in their works: the farmers thought that education, even to the limited extent of learning to read, would be fatal to agriculture, and the clergy, whose neglect she was making good, accused her of Methodist tendencies.
In her old age, philanthropists from all parts made pilgrimages to see the bright and amiable old lady, and she retained all her faculties until within two years of her death. She spent the last five years of her life in Clifton, and died on 7 September, 1833. She is buried at All Saints' church, Wrington.
Hannah More was an English religious writer, Romantic and philanthropist. She can be said to have made three reputations in the course of her long life: as a poet and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects, and as a practical philanthropist.
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