Ann Yearsley, Hannah More, and Human Commodification in the Literary Marketplace

Abstract

ABSTRACTCritics have analyzed the literary rivalry between Ann Yearsley (1753–1806) and her former patron Hannah More (1745–1843) evidenced by their abolition poems—Yearsley’s A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade (1788) and More’s Slavery, a Poem (1788). Yet none have recognized Yearsley’s strategic use of language from “Mrs. Yearsley’s Narrative,” the prefatory letter to the fourth edition of her Poems, on Several Occasions (1786), in A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade. The degree to with both women’s abolition poems capitalize on public investment in the proposed abolition of the slave trade also remains unacknowledged. This essay considers how Yearsley employs language from her “Narrative” to spite More, incite public interest in their feud, and promote herself as an author and how More, in turn, uses Slavery: a Poem to shape and elevate her authorial persona. The contrast between the two poems—More’s lofty, Christian rhetoric and Yearsley’s impassioned narrative of personal suffering—mirrors the women’s personal competition and situates them within a larger, eighteenth-century British dynamic in which white writers exploited the rhetoric and tropes of enslavement to popularize and profit from their texts, making the literary marketplace itself a site of human commodification.