Surrealism and the bombsites

"Study to be Quiet": Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain

“…She was, in Anne Mellor's provocative phrase, a "revolutionary reformer." 28 The Hannah More presented here is a more compromised though, I hope, no less complex figure, a reformer no doubt, but in important respects, a reactionary as well. While I share an interest in the transforming cultural work of the Cheap Repository and have learned a good deal from these feminist scholars about More's attention to women's work and her provocative redefinitions of gender, domesticity, education, and public life, it seems to me crucial that we not lose sight of the ways in which the evangelical enterprise of middle-class women imposed an astonishing range of social, political, and religious controls upon the behavior of men and women alike, and insisted, above all, upon the rigorous subordination of the lower orders.…”