Hannah More’s social work is to be considered from the year (1789) that Mr. Wilberforce, one of her close friends, discovered the deplorable conditions existing in the districts around Cheddarcliff. Her long intercourse with the Garricks, and her various literary endeavours which took form during 1782 in her “Sacred Dramas” for the young, have no direct bearing upon her connection with the religious movement which places her in the general scheme with Robert Raikes and Mrs. Trimmer. Patty More had had, at an earlier period, large experience in school-teaching, and this was to prove of inestimable service, for it was with her assistance that Hannah carried on the work in the Mendip mining districts. The two met with some opposition, not only from the classes for whom they were specially striving, but from those who, less broad than themselves, held views regarding the Sunday-school that placed spirituality above the actual needs of the poverty-stricken communities. But, throughout, the Mores never swerved from their set purpose, even though illness overtook them and made the situation still harder than it was. For they were forced to ride many miles from their home, at first unknown in the region they had elected to benefit, a region cursed by ignorance, plagued by license, and wherein assault was a common incident. “Miss Wilberforce would have been shocked,” writes Hannah More, “could she have seen the petty tyrants whose insolence we stroked, the ugly children we fondled, the pointers and spaniels we caressed, the cider we commended, and the wine we swallowed.” A study of the centres established by these sisters, and which gradually exerted an influence over twenty-eight miles of territory, a distance traversed in a manner not unlike the journey of the circuit-riders who are to be met with throughout the mountain districts of the South, would throw considerable light on English labour conditions as they then existed. The setting is an isolated wild land, thus described by Miss More: “Several of the grown-up youths had been tried at the last assizes; three were the children of a person lately condemned to be hanged; many thieves,--all ignorant, profane, and vicious beyond belief. Of this banditti, we have enlisted 170; and when the clergyman, a hard man, who is also the magistrate, saw these creatures kneeling around us, whom he had seldom seen but to commit, or punish in some way, he burst into tears.” The work grew with the months, and mention is soon made of nine hundred children flocking to a Mendip feast--little ones whose brightest moments were centred in the regular visits of these ministering ladies.