Hannah More Letters Online features in BBC Bristol

Letters written by a prominent abolitionist are being digitised, filling in a "massive bit of the jigsaw" in the abolition campaign history, experts say.

Hannah More by Augustin Edouart, cut black paper with wash
Hannah More by Augustin Edouart, cut black paper with wash, 1827, NPG 4501. © National Portrait Gallery, London

Hannah More Letters Online presents an open-access digital edition of letters written by Hannah More (1745–1833), a playwright, poet, Bluestocking, anti-Jacobin novelist, anti-feminist and Christian moralist. She was at the forefront of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary culture, and her correspondence connects a wide network of writers, politicians, clergy and reformers.

The project brings together approximately 1,800 letters held across more than eighty archives in the UK and North America. Making this material available in a searchable online form enables both scholarly research and wider public access to a body of writing that has previously been difficult to consult in full, or only available through nineteenth-century editions that were heavily edited and, in some cases, censored.

The project was supported by the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), based in the School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities.

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