 series, a delightful series of lectures that we have by invited speakers. And tonight, we have something really special in store. As Dr. Karen Swallow Pryor speaks to us, students, staff, faculty, visiting members of the community. And she'll be speaking with the faculty as well on Friday. So many of us have the delight of hearing from her twice over her time here. We're really looking forward to it. So welcome. Dr. Karen Swallow Pryor has been a professor of English at Liberty University for over two decades, where she is now serving in her last semester before moving on to her new position as research professor of English and Christianity and culture at Southeastern Seminary. Her writing appears in Christianity Today, First Things, The Gospel Coalition, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Books and Culture, among other places. She is the author of several books, including most recently, On Reading Well, Finding the Good Life Through Great Literature. It is in the field of literary studies that Dr. Pryor has placed her academic focus, especially in that of the 18th century, a period she loves, and I quote her words on this, for its emphasis on philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and community, as well as its efforts at correcting the universal human impulse to gravitate toward extremes. We will hear more about this century with all of its beauty and brokenness, I'm sure, as she speaks to us tonight about the content of her research and another book, Fierce Convictions, the Extraordinary Life of Hannah Moore. With anticipation, let's give Dr. Pryor a warm welcome. Picture the scene at a dinner party in London, England in 1789. The men are wearing powdered wigs, velvet coats, ruffled shirts, silk breeches, and silver-buckled shoes. The women don fine silk dresses. The hoops around their hips are several feet wide. Their hair is piled just as high, ornamented with ribbons, feathers, and flowers. Somewhere between the serving of the fruit tarts and the after-dinner wine, one of the women spreads a pamphlet open on the table. She turns to a gentleman seated next to her and asks him, have you ever seen the inside of a slave ship? The woman is Hannah Moore. The picture she points to is a drawing of the cargo hold of the infamous sea vessel, the Brooks. The ship was legally allowed to carry up to 454 slaves, each tucked into an unimaginably tiny space of about six foot by one foot. Yet the ship was known to have sometimes packed in more than 600 slaves, 600 human souls, like dried tobacco leaves stuffed into a bowl of a wooden pipe. The illustration of the ship had been produced through self-efforts by the abolitionists. It was one of the most powerful weapons in their campaign to end the slave trade and is said to have brought viewers to tears. Hannah Moore carried a copy of the print around with her in order to show it to people every chance she could. She understood that the way to societal reform was through the imagination, the moral imagination. The poet Percy Bischelli wrote a number of decades later in a defensive poetry, 1821, more than a decade before the abolition of slavery in Great Britain, this. The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our nature. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively. He must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. Now, while most of us today, especially for English majors, have heard of Percy Bischelli, Hannah Moore has largely been forgotten. Even so, her moral imagination, this thing that Shelley was talking about, helped to change the world. Now, the phrase moral imagination was actually coined earlier by Edmund Burke, who's considered today the father of modern conservatism in his 1790 pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Later, much later and more recently, in an article in First Things from 2009, titled Defining Moral Imagination, we get a more extended definition of what the moral imagination is. This article describes it as a uniquely human ability to conceive of fellow humanity as moral beings and as persons, not as objects whose value rests in utility or usefulness. It is a process by which a self creates metaphor from images recorded by the senses and stored in memory, which are then occupied to find and suppose moral correspondences in experience. Bear with me, it's a long definition, but it's worthwhile. It's an intuitive ability to perceive ethical truths and abiding law in the midst of chaotic experience. The moral imagination should be an aspiration to a proper ordering of the soul and consequently of the commonwealth. In this conception, to be a citizen is not to be an autonomous individual. It is a status given by a born existence into a world of relations to others. To be fully human is to embrace the duties and obligations toward a purpose of security and endurance for first and foremost, the family and the local community. In other words, the moral imagination forms us as individuals for each other, for our families and our community. This kind of definition, written in the 20th century, was instinctive to Hannah Moore, who never articulated nor needed to articulate what for her seemed simply to be a biblical approach to the wrongs she faced in her society across the British Empire and then, of course, across most of the world. But let me tell you a little bit more about Hannah. She was born in 1745 outside the Seaside City of Bristol in the Charity Schoolhouse where her father, Jacob Moore, served as schoolmaster. From early on, Hannah, who was the fourth of five daughters, all of them quite precocious, Hannah of all of them exhibited the most natural intelligence, sharp wit, and away with words. Her father instructed her at home, as was common then, and she exceeded the typical education provided to girls at that time of any class, not just the working class. So although she was born to humble parents who were of the laboring class, because a man who was a Charity School teacher was not considered high class, he was just barely above a laborer, she ended up rising to social and economic prominence in an age in which, for the most part, your birth determined your class for your entire life and therefore your entire destiny. She was schooled in classical languages because her father knew them, so she learned a number of languages, Latin, Greek, French, and she was able to hone her skills in language because Bristol saw many people of different languages coming in and moving in and out of this thriving city. And because she lived in this place of opportunity, this young girl who otherwise very likely would have lived and died in obscurity achieved some local fame while she was yet a teenager. Her sisters moved into the city and opened up a school to serve the daughters of the burgeoning middle class there and eventually Hannah joined them, first as a student and then she became a teacher herself and there she met a gentleman who was a relative of one of the students there who was a wealthy landowner and again, she would, ordinarily, a girl like this would not move in those circles and after visiting him at his beautiful estate a few times, she and he became engaged to marry, but it was not to be because this wealthy landowner who was very smitten with Hannah also had a terrible case of cold feet and he left her at the altar not once, not twice, but three times, yes. It was very heartbreaking for her, for Hannah, but as was customary for the times, her family arranged for him to settle an annuity on her so that she would get basically a yearly income for her trouble in her time and because having a broken engagement like that was considered, it just was a mark on a young woman and so this was a way of compensating her and this settlement was actually generous enough for Hannah to be able to live independently so she quit her job as a teacher at the school and decided to pursue her dream of being a writer by going to London. So again, here was a girl who was born in very humble circumstances, became financially independent and was able to pursue this dream of writing, which was pretty much unheard of in that day. There were women writers, but there weren't very many who were born poor. So she traveled to London and because she had already been writing poetry and plays for the school, some of her works were sent ahead of her and as soon as she arrived, she was quickly introduced into the most fashionable literary circles in London. She met Samuel Johnson, the famous critic who walked into his own sitting room where she was waiting for him and quoted some lines from her poems to her. Can you imagine being a young female writer and having this hero of yours come and quote your work to you? That's what happened to her. So she got into that circle. She was introduced to the actor, David Garrick, who also produced plays at the theater. I hear you guys have a great theater here and I'm competing with Mary Poppins tonight. And she just became basically the toast of the town. Again, it's hard to imagine because most of us haven't even heard of her. She actually is featured in a painting from the time called The Nine Living Muses, which was a painting of the nine most esteemed artistic and literary women of the time and she was one of them. So being present, being among the powerful of her day, increased her platform and her influence to use the kind of 21st century words we use and she found it very intoxicating. Her letters home are just simply delightful to read. She and her sister wrote back and forth to each other and to her other sisters and so we have quite a record of her time there. Yet, she never really felt at home there among the fashionable. And then one year, a friend of hers gave her a book that was written anonymously and it was a devotional book. It was a consistent of letters written from this anonymous writer to various people about his Christian faith. And it turned out that the book was written by John Newton, a name that is probably familiar to you, most famous for writing the wonderful hymn, Amazing Grace, which he wrote as a result of his own experiences being master or captain of a slave ship. So more read this book by Newton at this time in England and in Moore's life, the evangelical movement was growing in England and having an influence. I know that that's evangelical seems like in the past couple of years has become a dirty word for many people. I am one, so I own it, I'm proud of it. And a lot of us don't realize, we think that it was something invented in 2016 or something, but it actually goes all the way back to early 18th century England where Hannah Moore lived and this movement was growing and burgeoning at the time. And one of the reasons it was growing is because there was growing opposition to the slave trade and the evangelicals were foremost among them. So more at this time, she was in London, she was the toast of the town, she was very popular, everyone loved her, but she was disillusioned by all the frivolity of high society. And so she met William Wilberforce in 1787, the same year that she journeyed to John Newton's church to hear him preach. And both of them encouraged her to join them, actually she was already involved in the abolitionist circles, but she became a member of the evangelical circle called the Clapham Sect based in London where Wilberforce and Newton were working together. And Hannah was tempted to leave fashionable society, but both Wilberforce and Newton encouraged her to remain in the world, if not of it, in order to exert that influence that she'd gained for good and in particular toward the abolition of the slave trade. It's interesting because this is the same advice that Newton gave Wilberforce upon his conversion to Christianity who Wilberforce thought that when he became a Christian he should leave his post as member of parliament and go into what we call today full-time ministry. And Newton encouraged him that he could do ministry right there in parliament where they needed him. If you've ever seen as a side note, if you've not seen it, you should see the film Amazing Grace, which is about William Wilberforce and it features, it has John Newton in it and it has a couple of cameo appearances of Hannah Moore. And she's the one who, this is a, you know, it's pretty historical, not exactly precise, but there's a lovely dinner table scene where Wilberforce is thinking about leaving parliament and the writers of the script have Hannah Moore be the character who tells Wilberforce that he can basically serve the Lord and the people by staying in parliament. She says, I humbly suggest you can do both, serve the Lord and parliament. It's important to remember that this was a very different world. This was a time when the very idea of social progress barely existed. People believed, because it was true at the time, that being born rich or poor or a slave was ordained by God and there was nothing one could or should do to change it. People believed then as they had for all of human history before it that to challenge these things was to challenge the will of God. But the evangelical movements' emphasis on the importance of each individual soul actually helped people begin to imagine things that few had imagined before. Hannah Moore and her fellow evangelicals began to imagine and envision a society of greater humanity, greater humanness, greater flourishing, and greater faith. And they wanted these things for everyone, rich, poor, man, woman, free, and slave. Of course, this was also a time when being born a woman meant facing many obstacles, just like it does sometimes today. At this time, women could not vote, they could not hold public office, they could not get a university degree, and they could not even be members of most abolitionist societies. Hannah Moore was never officially a member, but these barriers did not stop her. She employed the power of her moral imagination, not in the inner circles of power but outside of them, not as a man with a classical education with land and a vote, but as a woman born in poverty and denied by law a university education and political office, and not with the strength of the sword but with the pen. In her published books, her pamphlets, poems, plays, and as I've already mentioned, many private letters. Her first efforts at reform, even before she was centrally involved in the abolitionist movement, were directed toward the upper class. She'd already won them over with her classically written poems and plays, and she believed that the upper class bore the most responsibility to bring about social change. She challenged the morality and religion of the fashionable by writing treatises that exhorted them to exchange their nominal empty secularized version of Christianity for genuine faith. Even the queen read Moore's works and confessed to being convicted by her words. I think she said that she was going to have her maid stop curling her hair on Sundays or something. That was a lot. Oh. Moore challenged also the traditional approaches to female education, and she urged more substantive, scholarly, and Christian education for young women than was then fashionable. But during all of this writing that she did, especially for the upper classes, the matter of slavery was becoming more and more pressing on her. In 1790, she wrote to her sister that she had obtained a copy of one testimony that was to appear before a committee of the House of Commons. So this is in her letter. She's relaying the testimony of this witness, and this is what she tells us. The witness was taken to a small gathering of slave traders about to put an African infant to death. I asked them why they murdered it. They answered because it was of no value. I told them in that case, I hoped they would make me a present of it. They answered that if I had any use for the child, then it was worth money. I first offered them some knives, but that would not do. They, however, sold the child to me for a mug of brandy. It proved to be the child of a woman whom the captain of our ship had purchased that very morning. We carried it on board and judge of the mother's joy when she saw her own child put on board the same ship. Her child whom she concluded was murdered. She fell on my knees and kissed my feet. I remember Maura's relaying this testimony to her sister and then she adds in the letter to her sister. These are her words. In what light does this anecdote place this detestable trade? Her letters are filled with these kinds of testimonies urging those who agreed with her and those who disagreed with her about slavery, about its abomination. With the most horrific parts of the slave trade occurring far from the British Isles, most British citizens had little idea what it actually entailed. It was easy for them to imagine modern slavery as something like that which existed in ancient Greek and Roman culture, a lifelong humane servitude into which one was born not violently stolen into or even the kind of slavery or bond servanthood that the Bible talks about. In fact, some people use biblical passages to justify slavery, not understanding that the role of a bond servant described in the Bible again is nothing like the violent, forcible bondage of the modern slave trade. So in addition to carrying about copies of these anti-slavery pamphlets to show at every opportunity, I mean, Hannah was really fun at the parties pulling out the slave pamphlets, right? She also sold prints of an oil painting of an African boy that her friend had painted. She acted as a liaison between the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and the London Associates keeping everyone informed of Clarkson's research in Bristol's slave ship ports. She kept a copy, as I've already mentioned, of that famous drawing of the slave ship. And this is a piece of abolitionist material that is considered to be the most effective among the abolitionist tools. She also led a boycott of West Indian sugar, which was really no small thing in a tea drinking nation. Those who supported the boycott were ridiculed as anti-saccharites and criticized as hypocrites and mocked for their sanctimonious asceticism. But more is considered by scholars to be to have led the most successful of all of these boycotts. She also urged the production of a dramatic adaptation of Afroben's fictional account titled Orinoco or the Royal Slave, which is a sympathetic portrayal of the slave of the title as someone who is heroic and noble. And in explaining why she thought this play should be put on the stage, she said, so many go to a play who will never go to church. She made her own contribution to the literature of the abolitionist movement when she produced the poem Slavery in 1788. Now this was a strategy that the evangelicals used. William Wilberforce was scheduled to present a piece of abolitionist legislation before parliament, so he was trying to change the laws. But they also knew that in order to change the laws, the hearts of the people had to be changed. So Hannah Moore had two weeks to write this poem so that it would be published and released the same day that Wilberforce was to present. And so she has all these notes in her letters about the writing of this poem and how furiously she worked on it. And it was released on time and it's called Slavery. And it is actually one of her most anthologized works today. If you pick up a volume, an anthology of women's literature or romantic literature, this is most likely the work that will be in it. And it's a brilliant work because she appeals to everything. She begins with a theological examination of the notion of liberty. And then she moves to appeal to the British citizen's notions of liberty and virtue. But ultimately the power of the poem is in the way she portrays the kidnapped slave being taken away from his home and subjected to the most brutal kind of servitude. It's an impassioned plea for the humanity of these fellow beings. But with that said, I've talked about Hannah Moore's Slavery poem, the treatises that she wrote to The Wealthy that were very influential and bestselling. It's important to note, because some of you might be wondering why you haven't heard of her, is that by the standards of readers today, a lot of her works come perilously close to being unreadable to most people. They can be dry and didactic, yet they were extremely popular and influential among her contemporaries. And that's a point I wanna make, especially for those of you who might be thinking about becoming writers, whether literary writers or writers in your field. Sometimes writing for one's time means that you're going to produce work that may not pass the test of time. It may not have the universal appeal to later generations. In some sense, more success was in so influencing her time that the times changed. And that's partly why her work seemed harder to read today because they are very didactic and very classical in their style. But she wrote some other works, and these are actually considered by most literary scholars to be her most successful. Because at the same time that she and Wilberforce and Newton and their friends were working to abolish slavery, that wasn't all they were doing. One day, Wilberforce came to visit her at her country home outside of Bristol. And she encouraged him to go and visit the famous cliffs of Cheddar nearby. And when he came back, he was so forlorn. He went into his room, wouldn't eat supper, and they tried to figure out what was wrong with him. And he was so upset because of the condition that he found the poor of Cheddar in particularly the children. Poverty was extremely bad in those times. And the laboring poor were not much better off than people imagined the slaves to be. And that's why it was sometimes hard for people to see slavery for the evil and wickedness that it was, was because it was a brutal time. And a lot of people were living in brutal conditions. And so more with Wilberforce and Newton's blessing and their financial support, she embarked on another project, and that was to open Sunday schools across the region in Somerset County where she lived. And of course, Sunday schools at this time, as you may know, were not the Sunday schools we have today with planal graphs and Bible stories. It was literally school on Sunday, held for the poor because Sunday was the only day that the poor didn't work, including very small children because very small children worked six hours a day, or six days a week in long hours. And so these were schools to teach arithmetic and reading and Bible lessons to the children. And lo and behold, once more opened the Sunday schools, she realized that there wasn't, and she taught the children and eventually parents too because she added some adult instruction. She realized that there wasn't much adequate material for them to read. So she started a new project called the Cheap Repository Tracks, and Cheap didn't have the negative connotations that it has today, and began to write very cheap pamphlet literature, tracks as they're called, with entertaining but edifying stories, poems, ballads, lessons, and so forth. And more was brilliant because these cheap tracks, this pamphlet literature, was very, very popular at the time, and there was a lot of it, but they usually contained off-color kinds of stories. Stories about sinful people and wickedness and lewdness or superstitions or witches. It was cheap-based entertainment. So Moore wanted to impart moral lessons. So she copied the style and the titles. Actually, she improved the art. She hired her special artist to create art for the covers of these pamphlets, and she gave them these enticing titles, like Sinful Sally, the Gin Shop, the Roguesh Miller. Like, she really did this, and then she draws them in with these stories, and then they always have like a moral lesson or a Bible lesson. Again, literary scholars consider this to be her most successful and innovative work because she actually elevated the art of the tract or the pamphlet. And people really bought into them, the sponsors would buy bundles of them and have them distributed to the poor. People offered trade-ins. You have trade-in, one of the scandalous ones, and we'll give you one of the edifying ones. Just like, what, do they have gun trades or drug? I don't even know, but we do these things today. So she did, there were, let me make sure I've got the number. She did this for a number of years, and I think there were two million tracks eventually in circulation. She wrote about half of them. She supervised all of them. And of course, like everything else that she did, it garnered a lot of controversy. First of all, I mean, the Sunday schools were controversial because even teaching the poor to read was seen as revolutionary and something that might incite a revolution like the one that was happening across the way in France. And then, so on the one side, there were people who thought that Moore was being too liberal, too revolutionary, and then there were the people who thought that you shouldn't mix a morality and religious instruction with entertainment, like that was dangerous. So she got it from both sides. But I do want to, I just, I can't talk about these tracks without giving a little excerpt to show you what I'm talking about of the kinds of hints that she would give, the lessons that she would give, and there were, I mean, I'll talk about that in a little bit, some other lessons, but she also was empowering the poor in an age that didn't believe in doing that because she was helping them to be more frugal and to get by with what they had, which some people would see as oppressive, but for her in today's terms, but in her time, nobody even cared about the poor, let alone tried to help them improve their lives. So there's a pamphlet called The Cottage Cook, and it ends with a list of what she calls Friendly Hints, and here are the Friendly Hints. The difference between eating bread new and stale is one loaf in five. If you turn your meat into broth, it will go much farther than if you roast or bake it. A bit of leek or an onion makes all dishes savor at a small expense. If the money spent on tea were spent on home-brewed beer, the wife would be better fed, the husband better pleased, and both would be healthier. Keep a little scotch barley, rice, dry peas, and oatmeal in the house. They are all cheap and don't spoil. Keep also pepper and ginger. Last one from the same list. Pay your debts, serve God, love your neighbor. Isn't that nice? But there was another class of readers besides the wealthy and the poor that Moore had not yet reached, and this is the swelling ranks of the middle class. Now, this was the time when the middle class was beginning to grow, because for a long time in human history, and really right up until this point in British history, there were just, you know, you were either nobility in high class or you were low, but at this time, there was a middle class growing. And by the way, pop quiz, anyone know what the source of wealth, newly emerging wealth for this middle class or where that might have come from? Slavery, yeah. So here's this middle class growing, and what they liked to read was not, you know, classical plays in poetry and not cheap tracks, but they liked to read novels. There was the circulating libraries were increasing and people were reading these sort of scandalous stories of love and amorous intrigue. And so Moore, again, as was her model, decided to write her own novel, patterned on these popular entertaining books, and yet she included in it lessons on education and religion, but it was all packaged in a story about a young man looking for a suitable wife. It was called Caleb in Search of a Wife. And this is actually, this novel was, by some standards, England's first bestselling novel. It was that popular. And Moore, again, used it to promote not only her ideas about education, especially for women, but also a newly emerging idea promoted by evangelicals called the companionate marriage, which is the kind of marriage that we understand today, which is based on friendship and love, not just political or financial gain. It's a radical revolutionary idea, or it was then. It hasn't always been around. And so this novel, again, this is, was probably the most popular of her works. It was the only novel that she wrote. But it, I mean, people just went crazy about it. It sold out all over the country. Everyone was asking for it. It's been translated into languages. It's one of the first, it is actually the first, one of the, not one of the first, but it was an early novel published in America. I have an actually a 17, I have an early 18th century edition of it published here in America. So it was all of these things, Moore's attempt to reform the upper class, to reform the poor, to reform the middle class. These are the things that earned her the title of that one historian has given her as the first Victorian, because it was the Victorian age. It has a bad rap and there's some negative connotations we have with Victorianism. But the Victorian age was an age of astonishing reform. This was, if you've read any Charles Dickens, you know, this was the age when people actually began to develop a conscience about orphans and the poor and chimneys sweepers. And this was just not something that had existed before. It was actually the 18th century evangelicals like Hannah Moore, who began to help people to think with a moral imagination about changing the world and decreasing suffering for everyone. And another point about their program and about evangelicals that a lot of people have forgotten today is that they actually included in their empathy, not just human beings, but animals as well. So Moore and Wilberforce and Newton and the other evangelicals were influential in developing many of the first programs for animal welfare. Many don't know that at the very same time that Wilberforce was fighting first and foremost to abolish slavery, he was also one of the founding members of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which eventually became the RSPCA in England, the ASPCA here, and Moore participated in this effort. She wrote against animal cruelty in her tracks for the poor and in her treatises for the rich because people were cruel to animals as well. It wasn't until almost a century later, about 75 years later actually that Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty, which is considered one of the first works to really help people to start thinking about the suffering of animals. So nearly a century before that book, Hannah Moore was including notions of animal welfare and humane treatment of animals in her works. So that's a lot of ground to cover. I'm gonna wrap up here and I can't wait to take your questions because I haven't even covered a scratch the surface here. Moore's last works in her life, she lived to be 88 years old, which is pretty old for that time, so she had a long career of writing and reforming. During her last years, her works were overtly biblical and spiritual and the last one that she published was when she was 80 years old. When she was too old to traipse about the English countryside or the London streets as she once had, the people came to her. She lived her last years as a patron saint for British and American evangelicals, countless numbers of whom made pilgrimages to her rural estate outside of Bristol, hoping to learn at the feet of the woman who had opened Sunday schools for the poor, taken on atheists and revolutionaries in the French Revolution, she wrote a tract about that too, written a bestselling novel and helped to abolish England's slave trade. Hannah Moore was one of England's bestselling writers. She produced volumes of books over the course of her life covering the span of 1745 to 1833. What was most remarkable about her literary output is that she wrote for audiences ranging from the highest of the high, including royalty to the lowest of the low, the poor laborers and everyone in between. Few, if any, writers had done this before. Few do it today. But few, if any, had both the fierce convictions and the moral imagination of Hannah Moore. Now, her reputation, like her literary fame, was but a vapor, yet the souls of the Africans, her efforts helped to free, and the poor whose lives were improved in her schools, and the elite who were moved by her example and her presence are eternal. Thank you. Lovely, so thank you for that. It's now the third time I think I've heard you speak on Hannah Moore, and every time it's just as moving and, what did you think I was gonna say? So I've got a couple of the guys in the back with microphones, and so if you have questions, just raise your hand and one of them, whoever's in proximity to you will come and deliver you a microphone to ask that question. It's okay, I'm gonna start. All right, so while you're forming a question in your mind, I'm gonna ask one myself. So this was a bit biographical pertaining to you. So I'm very interested in the idea of a usable past, and so how in your own life, and how I know something of your story, so pro-life activism, your own involvement with animal welfare and other things, how did she maybe shape or steer you in some of your own thinking about social involvement? Yeah, that's a good question. So I discovered Hannah Moore, oh, I can't do the math, I'm not a math person. It's 25 to 30 years ago, I guess, when I discovered her. And I was forming, obviously, at that time as a person and as a Christian, and when I discovered her, I found what I felt was a kindred spirit, but then as I studied her, yes, she definitely was a kindred spirit, but I was able to see a model, really, for living a life that bridges many divides. She lived in such an unusual time because it was so divided and stratified, and she, just by being a person of integrity and trying to apply her beliefs to every area, like she was just controversial. And so it's remark, I mean, I saw that then, but I guess all these years later, I see it even more now, and I just don't know that I would be able to do what I do if I didn't have an example in her. Yeah. Thank you, Dr. Pryor, for being with us, appreciate it. I'd like to know if she had any relationship or if there was talk about her among other women writers who are emerging at this time. We have Mary Walston Kraft. She was probably in her 40s when Mary was writing. Maybe they'd be about the same age. Mary Shelley, who would be a generation younger than her. Jane Austen, who would be maybe a little bit younger than she was. I just wanted to know what other women writers did. Great question. I feel like I should have planted this, but I didn't. So three answers. So more, she was a member of what was called the Blue Stocking Circle. She was a second generation member, and the Blue Stocking Circle was a circle of ladies in London who were learned and witty and scholarly, and they actually, men were sometimes members. There wasn't the sharp divide between the sexes in the 18th century that we see later in the Victorian age or today in evangelicalism. So she was a member of this literary circle, and she wrote poetry for them. She wrote a, Bob Blue was a poem. She wrote with that title as sort of dedication to them. And then she became evangelical and she kind of left that life. So there is actually, so about Mary Wollstonecraft, she refused to read a vindication of the rights of women. She said, this is painful, because even all of our heroes have flaws. She thought that the notion of rights for women was as ridiculous as having rights for children. She said, oh no, they'll be talking about children's rights. So, you know, Moira was, she was very conservative in almost every way by almost every definition, and that's what makes it so remarkable that she was doing these things that people thought was revolutionary and progressive. In Austin, what we have on the record about Jane Austen is that Jane, when Caleb, when Hannah Moore's novel came out, Jane Austen wrote to her sister, I think Cassandra wrote and asked Jane if she had read it yet. And so Jane wrote back and said she hadn't read it and how she detests the evangelicals. But then she said she'll probably read it someday and love it like everyone else. There's a pair of phrasing here. So that's the record that we have between those two. I don't know of anything where Moore mentions, of course, no one knew who Austen was, right? So Austen, nobody knew who Austen was. Nobody was, you know, her works were not popular in her own time. Hannah Moore was a huge best-selling author. Everybody knew who she was. And yet now today we know which works past the test of time and which ones didn't. So yeah, great question. President, Sweden. Dr. Pryor, if someone wants to read more about her life, are there good biographies? Where would somebody start? Well, I did write a biography and it's called Fierce Convictions, which is where the title of this talk comes from. So that is the most recent biography. There is a 1999 or 2000 biography by a historian, Ann Stott, whom I consider to be the world's foremost living scholar on Hannah Moore, and a scholar in general. She writes like a historian though, so then that's like good and bad. I mean, she's a wonderful scholar and hers is the book. That's where the first Victorian comes from. She named her the first Victorian. And then there are a lot, and the funny thing is there are many, many biographies that were written of Moore from the time of her death all the way through the early 20th century. I mean, they would come and go, but there are a number of them. And she really fell out of favor in the late Victorian age as many things did when the children of the Victorians grew up and rejected their parents. Anyway, that's another story. But thank you. Pleasure to play though. Yeah, you mentioned, of course, earlier, one of the key aspects of evangelical faith coming out was the interiority of the internal person. And of course, the age of the novel. With Richardson and Austin, who you just also mentioned, there you're having the focus in that literature on the interiority of the individual. And it's interesting, she was a novelist in the evangelical. Reading her novels, you mentioned their didactic quality. Is there any hint of that crossover she's in both of those worlds? Does that actually appear in her literature, or is that one of the weaknesses? Yeah, that is a great, I mean, I'm sure if I wanted to make a case for it, I could find it. But I would say that her novel really is not a, you know, it's just basically a thinly, you know, a treatise on education and religion that has a thin narrative veneer. I mean, it's more interesting than that, but it really is not novelistic in that sense. And that's why I do think that the scholars who think her tracks are her highest literary achievement are right because there's a colorfulness in the language and a sense of voice that rivals George Saunders maybe there. Maybe I'll write about that now that you've asked. So it's an interesting question I wanna think about more, but my fast answer is that it's missing and that's why she's unreadable today. Dr. Watson. Thank you. Hannah Moore was flourishing during the time of our founders and I was wondering if she ever made any comments about what she thought of the newly founded United States, maybe even our own slave problem here. Yeah, there is mention of it and I, but I, you know, I wrote so little about that. I don't think that there is much. She was very deeply concerned with the French Revolt. So she was writing, I mean, the American Revolution was kind of done and gone. She did the, she had an altercation with an American general who was actually that is, that she, no, I shouldn't say altercation. General Tarleton, is that a familiar name? I don't, I'm not a historian either, but he was this like brutal American general from the, from the American Revolutionary War who had a reputation for being just mean and scary. And he, she was at a dinner party with him and she wanted to show him the pamphlet and she didn't, she was afraid to. So that's the first thing that comes to my mind about, but again, this was much later. So her, she was consumed as many of her countrymen were with the French Revolution and the American Revolution just was not as much on her radar that I recall. So. We'll take one last question. Yallon Peter? You spoke briefly about her work in boycotting the West India Company sugar trade. And I was just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on why and what the effect of that was. There isn't a lot on the record about that, but the, but it, I mean, she did call it blood sugar. It was because it was, it was made, you know, it was entrated through the blood of slaves. So abolitionists did do boycotts. They weren't, they weren't that pervasive. And hers, I don't think was a huge one, but the fact that it's considered to be the most successful one just tells you how uphill this battle was for those who were, I mean, I didn't read it, but there was, I have it here. She is believed to have written a very letter to the editor in Bristol in response to the critics of the boycott. Because as I said, I mean, they were looked at. People who boycotted the sugar were just looked down upon as like do-gooders and promoting asceticism. I mean, they were just mocked and ridiculed and so she is believed to have written a letter to the editor responding to those kinds of critics. But there just isn't a vast record of that. Great, well, let's thank Dr. Tyra again. So we'll just conclude, I'll conclude with an encouragement, get fierce convictions by the book. Buy it for yourself and for your own edification. Buy it for your pastor, buy it for friends and parents because it's an awesome book. It's very accessible, very readable and you'll get much of this sort of encouragement. I'm just gonna close this out with a word of prayer. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you that you're the God of history and we thank you, Lord, that you raise up men and women that are testimonies to you and to your grace. Both those who are well-known and famous in church history, those who are more obscure and those whom we never hear of at all. Lord, thank you that you work in each of our lives and as we see the way you called Hannah Moore and brought her up from her own lower station to standing in society in order to use her for your purposes. Lord, I pray that you would give us a great sense of encouragement that you do the same for each of us and Lord that you would use us well in the spheres of influence that we have. Thank you for Dr. Pryor and for her work and being able to bring Hannah Moore's story to us. I pray your blessing on her and her time here at CCU. Be with each of us as we leave this place with bad weather. I pray that you would keep us safe and bring us back here tomorrow safely for Christ's sake. Amen.