SOURCE: Elliott, Dorice Williams. “‘The Care of the Poor is Her Profession’: Hannah More and Women's Philanthropic Work.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19, no. 2 (1995): 179-204.

In the following essay, Elliott maintains that More's writing was an attempt to encourage reform among the aristocracy as well as to provide uplifting lessons for the poor.

In an 1841 letter to William Ellery Channing, critic and historian Lucy Aikin noted that the practice of visiting the poor had now become “a fashion and a rage” among English women, thanks in large part to a novel published in 1808 by Hannah More, the famous Evangelical writer, philanthropist, and educator (Aikin 396). The novel was entitled Cœlebs in Search of a Wife.¹ Aikin credits More and her fellow Evangelicals with originating a major shift both in the moral “tone” of nineteenth-century society and in the role of women:

This philanthropic impulse acted at first chiefly within the Evangelical...