In Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat by Mona Scheuermann, and: The Historical Austen by William H. Galperin (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.3, 2004 749 cal variances among the texts [. . .] disprove the universality of women's interests, but their narrative similarities (like the treatment of the mother's absence) suggest that certain writers deliberately imitated each other's strategies, aiming to manufacture a sense of kinship and even of matrilineal descent' (p. 22). Both Kennedy and Greenfield complement the information provided with endnotes that amply supplement the data offered in the text. There are also two exhaustive , comprehensive bibliography sections that include important critical essays that may help to convey the prevalent atmosphere of modern civilization's most influential turn of the century. University of Corunna Maria Jesus Lorenzo Modia In Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat. By Mona Scheuermann. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2002. xiv + 255 pp. $36- ISBN 0-8131-2222-8. The Historical Austen. By William H. Galperin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. viii + 286pp. $39.95; ?28. ISBN 0-8122-3687-4. Apart from their eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century theme, these two books have one other feature in common?neither provides a bibliography or list of works cited. This omission is a pity,in my view; readers, and more particularly reviewers, should surely be enabled easily to check up on the claims that works of this kind really of? fer the 'bold' and 'startling' new interpretations that are proclaimed on their covers. Reduced to trawling awkwardly through notes and index, readers are distracted from the substance of the book, and, not always unjustifiably, can become suspicious that something has been omitted which ought to be there. Both these books are affected by this uncertainty, as will be demonstrated below. But firstthe good news. Mona Scheuermann's offeringis a vigorous presentation of Hannah More's polemical writing in defence of the contemporary social and political status quo. She deals briskly and in great detail with More's part in the condemnation of Tom Paine and all his works, and with her extension of Edmund Burke's denun? ciation of violent revolution, adapted to the abilities and tastes of the lower orders of English society, who might at the time have found themselves uncomfortable enough to follow their fellows across the Channel into bloody revolt. Scheuermann's survey is outstandingly readable; she carries us along as, with gasps of horror, we recognize the almost total lack of common humanity with which More, in her pamphlets and tracts of the 1790s and later, condones the worst evils of her time?child labour in the mines and factories, incessant physical toil forall workers for minimal wages, and deprivation of even the most common necessities of life, in the cause of an interpre? tation of Christianity that can only be described as brutal, especially to the poor. To great effect she places More's work in its polemical context alongside such similar but lesser-known writings as Joseph Townsend's A Dissertation on thePoor Laws and Josiah Wedgwood's Address to the Young Inhabitants of thePottery. The main motive of the work is to overturn what Scheuermann sees as a mis? taken attempt by modern feminists like Mitzi Myers and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace to 'rehabilitate' More. These writers have sought to reconstruct her as a 'conservative feminist', and with a good deal of ingenuity have presented her as an 'empowerer' of women, who strove to give them the confidence to ameliorate their condition in the teeth of their menfolk's apparent determination to wreck their lives by dissipation, ignorance, drunkenness, and crime. Scheuermann will have none ofthis, claiming that they are failing to see More as operating in an eighteenth-century atmosphere, filtering their analysis through their own modern preoccupations. More had no fellow-feeling 75? Reviews for her lower-status sisters, insists Scheuermann; she simply saw them as a channel through which she might control the men. Though perhaps put with a new firmness, this is not altogether a new view. The writers cited begin with Myers in 1986; the latest is Jacqueline Pearson in 1999. There was plenty of comment on More before and during this period that exposes her politi? cal agenda?I think particularly of Ford K. Brown's...