SOURCE: Hole, Robert. “Hannah More on Literature and Propaganda, 1788-1799.” History 85, no. 280 (2000): 613-33.

In the following essay, based on a 1997 paper presented to the Southampton Branch of the Historical Association, Hole outlines More's contributions to the emerging field of propaganda literature in the late eighteenth century.

I

In the 1790s the word propaganda began to be used in a new way, distinct from both its seventeenth-century and twentieth-century usages, to mean ‘any association, systematic scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice’.¹ It is no coincidence that this happened at a time when political debate in Britain was becoming theoretical in a way that it had rarely been before. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) sought to define a conservative set of values which was challenged in a large number of responses of which Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791-2) and...