White Slavery: Hannah More, Women and Fashion

Abstract

This stirring declaration comes from the opening salvo of Hannah More,s 1805 essay entitled ‘Hints towards forming a Bill for the Abolition of the White Slave Trade, in the Cities of London and Westminster’. Though she had anonymously published the essay in The Weekly Entertainer; or agreeable and instructive repository, More eventually included it in her 1818 Collected Works, under a new, shorter title: The White Slave Trade’.¹ Through this new title, More signalled that the essay might be read as a companion piece to her earlier work, The Black Slave Trade’ - alternatively entitled ‘Slavery: A Poem’ - published in 1788.1 will argue here that More’s essay can be consider in two different contexts: on the one hand, this piece is a biting satire revealing an intimate knowledge of issues arising in relation to the slave trade - not just the lives of slaves, but also the arguments circulating in relation to abolition. The essay hints as well at More’s meliorist position on slavery. On the other, however, in light of recent work on the representation of slavery by Saidiya Hartman, Marcus Wood and others, More’s essay warrants closer scrutiny for the questions it provokes concerning the polemical appropriation of images of enslaved Africans.² If Hannah More participates in a significant late eighteenth-century backlash against consumption, she also renders affluent white women as the unthinking victims of an anthropomorphised male tyrant, a figure known as ‘Fashion’.³ Even as she promotes the idea of a ‘deep’ female subject, one remarkable for her spirituality and her resistance to material culture, she also denies women the agency that potentially comes from meaningful interaction with a world of goods.

Here, there is one, arbitrary, universal tyrant, and like the lama of Thibet he never dies. FASHION is his name.