Hannah More (British edition 1888)/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI.
THE CHEAP REPOSITORY TRACTS.
Village Politics had been a first essay in writing, not in the Johnsonian language, which was second nature to Hannah More, but in a tongue "understanded of the people," not attempting to reproduce their dialects, but to give simple, vigorous, plain English. The delight with which the little book was hailed, was an incitement to produce something more of the same kind. There were plenty of young people by this time in the Mendip district who could read, but there was absolutely nothing for them to read, easy to understand or inexpensive, besides the ballads and broadsheets of last dying speeches and the tracts which the disciples of Tom Paine and the Jacobinically inclined were endeavouring to circulate.
The only book hitherto written for the poor was Mrs. Trimmer's Instructive Tales, and there were not enough of these, nor was the volume cheap enough, to supply what was needed. The council of sisters therefore came to a decision to produce three tracts a month, stories, ballads, and religious readings, at so cheap a rate as to undersell the revolutionary publications. It could not be done except at a heavy loss, and the labour prevented remunerative literary undertakings, but the want was felt to be so great that the sacrifice was willingly made. The Duke of Gloucester (that brother of George III. who had married the Countess of Waldegrave), Bishop Porteous, Wilberforce and others, assisted in the expenses of publication. The pamphlets were printed at Bath, on paper and with illustrations hideous to modern eyes, but which did not trouble the minds of the eighteenth century. They were termed "Cheap Repository Tracts," and stallkeepers and hawkers were persuaded and bribed to take a stock of them, and they went off most rapidly. Foremost was The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, which incidentally reveals many curious facts about the condition of the poor. The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, the model of courtesy, who is, we are told, a portrait from the life, has eight children and six shillings a week to keep them on. "Only three" under five years old. At that age, they begin to earn a half-penny, and afterwards a penny a day by knitting, the boys go out "crow-keeping" or stone-picking, and they live in a hovel with only one room above and below, with scarcely any chimney. Indeed, they hardly ever have much fire, for they do little cooking, and fuel is very dear. The poor wife had had a severe illness, and, as the shepherd justly observes, "Rheumatism, Sir, without blankets by night or flannel by day, is but a baddish job, especially to people who have little or no fire." However, this is mentioned by the good man to enhance his gratitude for two new blankets and a half a crown. It may be feared that cottage accommodation has not advanced as much as other matters. We have an inventory of the furniture—a table, four brown wooden chairs, an iron pot and kettle, a poor old grate that scarcely held a handful of coal, which was taken out as soon as the water boiled, an old carved elbowchair and a chest, a candlestick and a bright spit, kept for ornament instead of use. The Sunday's dinner consists of a large dish of potatoes, a brown pitcher, and a piece of a coarse loaf. When the shepherd has devoutly given thanks, his little girl exclaims, "Father, I wish I was big enough to say Grace; I am sure I would say it heartily to-day, for I was thinking what poor people do who have no salt to their potatoes." This same little Molly gathers the locks of wool left by the sheep on the brambles, the mother cards it, the biggest girl spins it, and the children knit it into stockings for themselves. The father mends their shoes, as he had a great dislike to their being barefoot, as destroying self-respect. Altogether the tale is an idyll of religious content and frugality.
Wilberforce said (not to the author) that he would rather present himself before Heaven with the Shepherd in his hand than with Peveril of The Peak, which was in fact contrasting the choicest work of one author with the least choice of the other. When, in 1795, Hannah went to London, she found that it had made quite as much sensation as her large books; but the loss was so heavy on these tracts, Cadell told her, "he would not stand in her shoes for £500 over and above the subscription"; nay, according to another calculation, £1000 would not cover the expenses at any rate.
Everyone was reading the tracts. The Duchess of Gloucester, to whom Hannah was presented by Lady Waldegrave, quoted the Shepherd three times, and told how she had desired one of her ladies to stop an orangewoman and ask her if she ever sold ballads. "No indeed," said the woman, "I don't do anything so mean, I don't even sell apples!" However, she condescended to take some of the tracts, and presently came back with two shillings gained by them.
On the other hand, Horace Walpole, now become Earl of Orford, rallied Miss More, she says, "on what he calls the ill-natured strictness of my tracts; and talked foolishly enough of the cruelty of making the poor spend so much time in reading books and depriving them of their pleasure on Sundays. In return I recommended him and the ladies present to read Law's Serious Call. I told them it was a book that their favourite, Mr. Gibbon, had highly praised."
She heard that in an illness he had exclaimed, "I am sorry I scolded poor Hannah More for being so religious, I hope she will forgive me." Soon after, he sent her Bishop Wilson's edition of the Bible, superbly bound in morocco, and with a flattering inscription. "Alas!" she wrote to her sister, "when I receive these undue compliments, I am ready to answer with my old friend Johnson, 'Sir, I am a miserable sinner.'"
A few persons volunteered assistance in the writing, one being Mason, the author of Caractacus, a tragedy of considerable merit, and the friend and biographer of Gray; but out of half a dozen ballads which he offered, four were rejected, "three because they had too much of politics, and one because it had too much of love." No one could write quite to the mark except Sally and Patty, who produced some of the best of the series. While in London, Hannah wrote the best of her ballads, called Turn the Carpet, a dialogue between two carpet-weavers, who are forming the pattern, as is well known, from the wrong side. One complains—
In spite of what the Scripture teaches,
In spite of all the parson preaches,
This world (indeed, I've thought so long)
Is ruled, methinks, extremely wrong.
With more to the same effect, to which the other replies—
This world, which clouds thy soul with doubt
Is but a carpet inside out;
As when we view these shreds and ends,
We know not what the whole intends;
So, when on earth things look but odd,
They're working out some scheme of God.
What now seem random strokes will there
In order and design appear,
Then shall we praise what here we spurn'd,
For then the carpet shall be turn'd.
When it was shown to Bishop Porteous, he said, laughing, "Here you have Bishop Butler's Analogy, all for a halfpenny."
A committee was formed, with Archbishop Moore at the head of it, for promoting the circulation of the tracts, and undertaking part of the expense. During this absence from home, however, a great loss befell the sisters in Mrs. Baker, that first school-mistress, whom the sisters had been wont playfully to term among themselves "Bishop Baker," for all their other mistresses had been trained by helping in her model school, and she had besides been a perfect evangelist to Cheddar, with Sunday-evening teachings under the sanction and guidance of the clergy, and by the care of the clubs which promoted among the women virtue, thrift, and decency.
She was not well enough to be present at the Mendip Feast of '95, from which also Hannah was absent, being still in London. When Sally and Patty visited Cheddar, on Sunday, they found Mrs. Baker very ill: she died ten days later, and her funeral was most remarkable. Patty writes to Hannah:—
When we came to the outer gate of the church-yard, where all the people used to wait to pay their duty to her by bows and courtesies, we were obliged to halt for Mr. Boake to get in and get his surplice on, to receive the corpse with the usual texts. This was almost too much for every creature, and Mr. Boake's voice was nearly lost. When he came to "I know that my Redeemer liveth," he could scarcely utter it—but to feel it was a better thing. On her entrance into the church the little remaining sight we had left disclosed to us that it was nearly full. How we were to be disposed of I could not tell. I took my old seat with the children, and close by her place Mr. Boake gave us a discourse of thirty-five minutes entirely on one subject. His text was from St. John. He said he chose it because it was the last she made use of to him (I was sitting on her bed at the time). He added: "She looked around her and observed 'It was comfortable to have kind friends, but much better to have God with one.'" His sermon was affecting and bold; as a proof of the latter, though the Vicar was there and he himself was curate, he said, with an emphasis in his voice and a firmness in his look: "This eminent Christian first taught Salvation in Cheddar."
In Hester Wilmot Hannah described her own method and Mrs. Baker's in the tracts. The "Village School," its second part, is a picture of the difficulties of the scholars. She is a girl with a tipsy father, and a mother with whom cleanliness is a passion, who refuses to let her go to school unless she is paid for it, but offers little children, whom the good lady of the story declines. However, Hester is at last allowed to come, and presents a shining example by her love of learning texts and Catechism, her obedience and diligence, and refusing to go out to eat cakes and drink ale at the fair which began on Sunday evening.
The Two Shoe-makers are, in a measure, like Hogarth's apprentices, one constantly travelling upwards, the other downwards, until at last he gets lodged in gaol for debt, where his life of riot is checked by that horror of the last century, gaol-fever. He is only redeemed by his virtuous friend just in time to save his life, but when he has become so crippled in his limbs as to be obliged to find a home in the workhouse.
The most spirited of the tales is Black Giles the Poacher, containing some Account of a Family who had rather live by their Wits than their Work. The children begin life by rushing to open a gate on the road, and besetting the occupants of every carriage that passes through, and then follow various lines of pilfering. Giles's avowed trade is rat-catching; but he always takes care to leave a few rats to keep up the stock, or even to introduce them into fresh hunting grounds. Tawny Rachel, his wife, is a fortune-teller, and we have the story of a poor victim whom she deludes into deserting a faithful lover to marry in favour of one who has administered a fee to the Sybil. Rachel's best red cloak is her ironing-cloth on Sunday, and her blanket by night! There is more action in this story than in most of them. The robbery of Widow Brown's red-streaked apples, and the suspicion being directed to the good boy of the parish, is very exciting, especially as the excellent Tom Price is in woeful danger of being set in the stocks or whipped round the market-place. However, on the next Sunday, Dick, the least depraved of the poacher's family, who has received some little kindnesses from the unlucky Tom, is found lingering about near the school, and is inveigled into it. There a lesson on the Eighth Commandment touches his heart, and when he sees Tom on the point of being punished, he springs forward and makes full confession. He is saved from his father's vengeance by the poetical justice which kills Giles by the downfall of a wall from which he is stealing a garden-net.
There is a story of farmer life, where the wealthy farmer's wife makes all her pies and puddings on Sunday mornings to last the week, and, though the family go to church in the afternoon, it is to converse with their neighbours in the next pew during the Lessons. The daughters go to a boarding-school, and a worthy lover is rejected because he cannot dance the menuet de la cour, though he had curried some favour by making out a rebus or two in the Lady's Diary. As their father says: "When I want to know what hops are a bag, they are snatching the paper to know what violet soap is a pound. And as to the dairy, they never care how cow's milk goes as long as they can get some stuff they call milk of roses. Seeing them disputing violently the other day about cream and butter, I thought it a sign they were beginning to care for the farm, till I found it was cold cream for the hands and jessamine butter for the hair." He takes up one of their books, and "I was fairly taken in at first, and began to think I had got hold of a godly book, for there was a deal about hope and despair and death, and Heaven and angels, and torments and everlasting happiness; but when I got a little on I found there was no meaning in all these words, or, if any, it was a bad meaning. Eternal misery, perhaps, only meant a moment's disappointment about a bit of a letter; and everlasting happiness meant two people talking nonsense together for five minutes."
Mr. Fantom is the life and death of an atheist of the Jacobin fashion, and The Delegate is a clever skit that with a very few alterations might be used at the present day. Sorrowful Sam, which was Sally' production, is mentioned as having given infinite comfort to a sick and despondent cottager.
There are a few allegories, by far the best of which is Parley the Porter, which is on the same idea as Bunyan's Siege of the City of Mansoul, though probably Hannah had never heard of the latter, since she did not like allegory, and never read the Pilgrim's Progress till after she had emerged into the literary world. Her poems and ballads are not of very high quality, perhaps from the deficiency in imagination which made her averse to mysticism or allegory,—though she could turn an epigrammatic couplet in a telling manner. The Bad Bargain is a sort of Devil's Walk:—
See there the Prince of Darkness stands
With baits for souls in both his hands.
To one he offers empire whole,
And gives a sceptre for a soul;
To one he freely gives in barter
A peerage or a star and garter.
To one he pays polite attention,
And begs him just to take a pension.
Some are so fixed with love of fame
He bribes them with an empty name;
For fame they toil, they preach, they write,
Give alms, build hospitals, or fight;
For human praise renounce salvation,
And sell their souls for reputation.
See at yon needy tradesman's shop
The universal tempter stop.
"Would thou," he cries, "increase thy treasure?
Use lighter weights and scantier measure;
Thus thou shalt thrive." The trader's willing,
And sells his soul to get a shilling.
The farmer who scorns to cheat is tempted at last; the jolly youth—
sells his soul
In barter for a flowing bowl.
And the maiden—
A slave to vanity's control,
She for a riband sells her soul.
In one year two millions of these tracts were sold, a really extraordinary amount, considering how few parishes were even tolerably worked in those days. In many instances, they banished mischievous publications from small shops, and they were eagerly hailed by most of those who wished to promote innocent reading among the poor, though Dr. Wordsworth, the Master of Trinity, pronounced them more "novelish and exciting "than he wished, perhaps because Hannah, in consequence it may be of her early apprenticeship to the Tragic Muse, was somewhat inclined to dispose of her worst characters by suicide. For the three years between 1794 and 1797 she devoted her pen entirely to this work; but the expense was so heavy that she could not keep it up any longer, and indeed her tracts continued for some twenty years to be the staple light literature in such orthodox village lending libraries as existed.