Hannah More on Literature and Propaganda, 1788–1799

Hannah More (1745‐1833) made an important contribution to the developing art of propaganda in the period 1788‐99. She first learned the techniques of the propaganda of agitation from her involvement in the movement for the abolition of the slave trade, though she devoted most of the 1790s to the propaganda of integration. In a large number of popular tracts she used fictional narratives to urge the poor to deference and the rising middle class to contentment. As an independent woman writer, much of her work was directed to the female sex, but her desire to see women play a more constructive role in society came to conflict with her fear of revolutionary ideas. Consciously aware of the techniques of propaganda, she saw these being used in radical literature, especially in German Romantic drama and in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. One of the major purposes of her Strictures on Female Education (1799) was to alert British women to the serious social and political dangers inherent in those forms of radical propaganda

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