These conflicting ideological pressures - simultaneous solicitude and revulsion for the labouring class - produce particular kinds of consequences in More's texts. As Gary Kelly notes, the major deficiency of the Cheap Repository Tracts is that they function less as story than as catechism, and offer "a fantasy of social order inspired, reconstructed, and presided over by the Evangelicals themselves." (155) This is seen perhaps most clearly in the best-known of the tracts, The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. This ambivalence - which is what I want to examine here - derives from More's hierarchization of the narrative space, through the use of a frame wherein the poor characters are observed and discussed by upper class characters.

Typically, the Cheap Repository tract stories are told by an omniscient, intrusive narrator; character is signalled through names (for eg, Mr Fantom, Mr Trueman, Mr Worthy, Mr Bragwell); and the moral message is conveyed primarily through debate in the form of dialogue. The Shepherd of Salibury Plain deviates from this somewhat in that the title character is based on a real shepherd named David Saunders, and dialogue is not marked off from the rest of the text as it is in other pieces.

The story highlights a series of conversations between "a worthy charitable gentleman" (I, 251) named Mr. Johnson and a poor, pious shepherd, who is later rewarded for his Christian virtue with a position as parish clerk and Sunday School master. The conversations are framed by an unnamed narrator, apparently a correspondent of Mr. Johnson's, who is privy to his thoughts and nods approvingly at various points when the shepherd says something particularly good. The conversations focus primarily on the difficulties of a shepherd's employment, the family's poverty, and of course scripture. There is a marked lack of plot until the end when Providence and Mr. Johnson intervene to help the worthy family out of their very difficult circumstances.

More has frequently been praised for the honesty of her representations of working class life. (see Hopkins; Brown; Myers) However, I would argue that her framing of the conversation suggests an attempt to contain, rather than to represent, the behavior, the speech and even the subjectivities of the poor. The text is a hybrid, in Bakhtin's sense of the term, in that it incorporates a variety of overtly classed discourses. These are arranged hierarchically through the framing strategy. According to Bakhtin, the "intentional hybrid" is "the perception of one language by another language, its illumination by another linguistic system." (359) The hybrid text brings together two types of utterances, with authority resting in the "illuminating" language. (361) In More, the framing language is that of middle class, Evangelical Christianity, and it presents itself as the "authoritative word" of scripture, which for More, originated and organized the entire social system. (Bakhtin 342) This class hybridization accounts, I think, for the voyeuristic quality of the story that many critics have noted, and for the fascination with lower class talk that permeates the story. (see Smith; Pedersen; Kelly; Kowaleski- Wallace)

This is a frame used in the service of not only narrative, but also social control. The frame presents a script of the proper social relations between the classes, and thus it becomes more than a simple narrative device. The hierachization of the narrative space in which the shepherd speaks himself parallels a more general social pattern that was taking place during the 1790s to regulate public spaces in which the poor traditionally congregated, particularly alehouses. Ultimately, More's framing strategy displaces conflicts over public space onto narrative space; in framing the lower class characters within an Evangelical discourse and a middle class gaze, she makes them visible, representable and ultimately containable. Because it prohibits any counter-discourse to enter the text, the frame naturalizes the class system, interpellating the poor characters within a predetermined ideological script.

The shepherd's talk occurs within specific class boundaries, and he himself only becomes a subject when he is the object of a validating upper class gaze. There are several moments when Mr. Johnson withdraws in order to observe the shepherd unseen, and his observations of the family are relayed to the narrator who self-consciously reports them to the reader. For example, after Mr. Johnson's first encounter with the shepherd, the narrator, who has evidently been told of it, addresses the reader with: "If Mr. Johnson keeps his word in sending me the account of his visit to the Shepherd's cottage, I shall be very glad to entertain my readers with it." (I, 267) The shepherd himself functions as dialogic material, as his talk is exchanged between the two upper-class correspondents as both a sign and a confirmation of their place in the social order. That social order is replicated in the implied correspondence between Mr. Johnson and the narrator, a discursive system to which the shepherd himself has no access, no control and, apparently, no knowledge. In this way, there is an intimate connection in More's literary project between discursive and social space, and this relates, ultimately, to the kind of social organization she envisioned.

Dialogue was a common strategy in chapbook and pamphlet literature (particularly those distributed by the conservative Association for Preserving Liberty and Property) to depict class distinction. (Smith 74) Generally, the dialogue occured between members of the same class, and any inter-class dialogue occured for specific, identifiable reasons (for example, if the author wished to signal the worthiness of a particular worker by having his master address him). The agenda of the tract writers was to reflect proper social relations in which,

the lower classes should not consider questions without the guidance of a superior,...their only readers were their peers,...their superiors did not disagree with each other, and...no matter what one's status, there was always someone threatening in the rank below. (Smith 75)

This rigid class dialogism operates in More's tale as well, but she deviates from this convention in mixing both lower and upper class speech within one textual system, and in having their interaction occur spontaneously. Not only do her different class characters speak about one another, but they speak to one another as self-conscious members of their particular class.

This is related to More's Evangelical ideology. One of the main functions of her Evangelical project is to demonstrate the active relevance of the Bible to social life. Consequently, she emphasizes a kind of everyday hermeneutics that allows the different classes to communicate with one another on a level other than pure utility. While she emphasizes the speech diversity of the different classes, she minimizes their ideological diversity in favor of a more homogeneous, unitary system, in which they all interpret the world according to the authoritative script of Evangelical Christianity.

This is signalled in Mr. Johnson's musing on the nineteenth psalm immediately before he encounters the shepherd. Admiring the natural landscape, he sees it as "the operations of the word and the Spirit of God," (252) and offers an Evangelical hermeneutics in which the world is merely a sign of the Word. This view operates as the interpretive paradigm for the conversations. Just as the world itself is bound and made intelligible by God's Word, the shepherd is bound and made intelligible by the narrative frame, and by the appropriative gaze of Mr. Johnson. The shepherd is thereafter subjected to the same sort of reading the landscape has been, and is only presented through Mr. Johnson's and the narrator's eyes. With a voyeuristic attention to details, he deduces both the shepherd's hard circumstances and his Christian character, noting him

to be a clean, well-looking, poor man, near fifty years of age. His coat, though at first it had probably been of one dark colour, had been in a long course of years so often patched with different sorts of cloth, that it was now become hard to say which had been the original colour. But this, while it gave a plain proof of the shepherd's poverty, equally proved the exceeding neatness, industry, and good management of his wife. (I, 252)

As this passage makes plain, the shepherd is an object to be actively deciphered by the framing narrators, and other possible interpretations of him are thereby preempted. The narrator and Mr. Johnson thus mediate between the reader and the shepherd, interpreting him and articulating the proper conclusions to be drawn about him. The narrative frame, which derives its logic from an authoritative (and for More, a priori) script, functions as the unitary ideological system that interpellates the shepherd as laboring class shepherd and Christian. Thus, his behaviour, his subjectivity and his talk are coopted in the name of that scriptural text, reflecting its central importance in the social organization.

The shepherd, moreover, self-consciously recognizes himself as a subject of particular class and religious ideologies. He marks that class consciousness by being self-conscious in the face of his upper class interlocutor, frequently apologizing for talking so much:

'But, sir, I beg your pardon for being so talkative. Indeed, you great folks can hardly imagine how it raises and cheers a poor man's heart, when such as you condescend to talk familiarly to him on religious subjects. It seems to be a practical comment on that text which says, 'the rich and the poor meet together, the Lord is the maker of them all.' And so far from creating disrespect, sir, and that nonsensical wicked notion about equality, it rather prevents it.' (I, 264)

Here, the shepherd expresses both a religious and a class- consciousness that maintains the right relationship between the classes. Because the Bible is the grounding for this interclass talk, the shepherd's access to the radical class consciousness advocated by writers like Paine is preempted.

Even before the formation of the Cheap Repository, More had addressed the power of popular literature to form subjectivity. In 1793, shortly after the publication of Paine's Rights of Man, More released a pamphlet entitled Village Politics. This polemic is told exclusively as dialogue between a blacksmith and a mason, the latter of whom has been converted to the tenets of jacobin politics and the "new philosophy." A typical passage:

Tom: Why, I find here that I am very unhappy, and very miserable; which I should never have known, if I had not had the good luck to meet with this book...
Jack: A good sign, tho' - that you can't find out you're unhappy, without looking into a book for it! What is the matter?
Tom: Matter? Why, I want liberty.
Jack: Liberty! That's bad, indeed! What! has any one fetched a warrant for thee?...
Tom: No, no, I want a new Constitution.
Jack: Indeed! Why, I thought thou hadst been a desperate healthy fellow. Send for the doctor directly. Tom: I'm not sick; I want liberty and equality and the rights of man. (II, 221-2)

Portraying Tom the mason as highly impressionable and alienated from his own "natural" condition, this pamphlet highlights the misuse of language by the radical set. The play on the words "liberty" and "constitution" suggests that Paine has corrupted the "natural" language spoken by ordinary people. The book in question interpellates Tom as a specific subject, but that is a corrupted subjectivity: a member of the family of "man."

Despite her misgivings about lower class literacy, More is not concerned with the influence of writing per se. Just as Tom the mason recognizes himself in Paine's text, the shepherd recognizes himself in the Bible. In doing so, he models the proper uses of literacy: "'my employment has been particularly honoured," he tells Mr. Johnson,

Moses was shepherd in the plain of Midian. It was to 'shepherds keeping their flocks by night' that the angels appeared in Bethlehem, to tell the best news, the gladdest tidings, that ever were revealed to poor sinful men: often and often has the thought warmed my poor heart in the coldest night, and filled me with more joy and thankfulness than the best supper could have done.'(I, 255)

The use to which the shepherd puts writing here is ultimately the kind of literacy More wants to bring to the poor: a working class self-consciousness that remains deferent to authority, virtuous and Godly, grateful to the rich for their patronage, and accepting of poverty. Elsewhere, the shepherd directly engages the question of his own literacy, and at this point More's close association of subjectivity, books and popular culture becomes apparent. He says that he applies his limited reading skills exclusively to the Bible, refusing to consider or to read "those new doctrines and new books" which "are now disturbing the peace of the world." (I, 276)

In what amounts to a miniature deus ex machina plot device, the parish clerk dies, leaving the job open to the shepherd whose piety the clergyman has always found exemplary. Mr. Johnson further augments the family's good fortune by commissioning the opening of the Sunday School and offering to make up the rent on their new dwelling. He justifies this by appealing to the same Evangelical script the shepherd has used, and this speech sums up neatly the Evangelical social project:

'Those who are raised, by some sudden stroke, much above the station in which Divine Providence had placed them, seldom turn out very good or very happy...I have...never attempted or desired to set any poor man much above his natural condition, but it is a pleasure to me to lend him such assistance as may make that condition more easy to himself, and put him in a way which shall call him to the performance of more duties than perhaps he could have performed without my help, and of performing them in a better manner to others, and with more comfort to himself.... I am not going to make you rich, but useful.' (I, 283-4)

This passage, and the ending as a whole, is the only point in the story that contains plot, and it is interesting because the reversal of the worthy shepherd's fortune is so attenuated. The passage is almost a statement against plot. As Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace notes, "the purpose of the tale is celebrate the binding, not the eliciting of desire," (78) and this includes what might be termed narrative desire to have the virtuous rewarded. It is also important to remember that traditional chapbook narratives frequently rewarded "spunk and luck" to the exclusion of virtue and hard work. (Pedersen 103) The ending is further significant because the agents of the reversal of fortune are, essentially, the class structure acting as and for Divine Providence. Mr. Johnson performs his paternalistic, charitable duty on the authority and in the name of God, and he does so because the shepherd has played his allotted role within class and religious ideological scripts. In this way, the shepherd represents More's ideal working class subject, who has been successfully interpellated by an authoritative ideology, and whose class consciousness articulates itself as subordinate. After such talk, the shepherd has proven himself worthy to transmit that authoritative script to others.

The roots of these anxieties about subjectivity, representation and literacy lie most obviously in the Industrial Revolution and in new kinds of collective, classed consciousnesses that emerged in the wake of it. The English radical reaction to the French Revolution is also an important catalyst for More's anxieties, as are improved commercial distribution systems for popular culture materials. But there is more involved in the fact that the shepherd (and other lower class characters in all sorts of texts) can only speak himself within the boundaries formed by Mr. Johnson and the narrator. Why can the shepherd only be represented (and represent himself) through the eyes of the upper classes?

An answer, I think, lies in the more symbolic realm of social and public space as they were being transformed in the late eighteenth century. Hugh Cunningham argues that, in the late eighteenth century, with the decline of patronage and the privatization of communal property, the working classes were driven progressively indoors, into alehouses and gin shops, which became the center of working class leisure time and a central disseminator of working class popular culture. (see also Myers, "Tracts"; Hopkins; Thompson) "The leisure class retreated to the home or to those fenced-off private enclosures," while "those excluded sought new patrons in publicans whose upper rooms or backyards could host a variety of entertainments unseen by their social superiors." (Cunningham 76)

The process that Cunningham describes is a kind of class ghettoization, and a consequence of the dismantling of the tradition of paternalism and patronage. The idea that the lower classes could meet unseen, could maintain their traditions and have (potential) access to seditious literature, is a motivating anxiety for More's text, and it helps explain the utility of the story's frame. First and most obviously, it allows More to address all classes of her audience (and in this way, may have contributed to the international circulation of this one tract). Second, the frame both foregrounds and displaces class distinction. In making the interclass conversations appear spontaneous, the frame glosses over class distinctions and thereby naturalizes and unifies the distinct social and ideological languages spoken by the characters. At the same time, the frame images the paternalistic interest that the higher classes were to take towards the poor, by inscribing a relationship of surveillance, and by making the upper classes the agents of the narrative (and implicitly social) change.

All of these relationships are a function of the frame's close modeling of proper social order. For the working classes, with their "vulgar" traditions and "disposition to riot," virtue had to be enforced through surveillance. To that end, the working classes must be visible, regulated by their superiors' gaze, which stands in for divine Providence. For More, to overturn the class system is to overturn divine authority. And, because of the intimate connection, for Evangelical reformers, between literature and the social, the frame functions to stabilize and organize spontaneous, interclass talk.

Ultimately, the formal strategies in The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain mark an ambivalence about the efficacy of the Evangelical social project. Hannah More read the world as Mr. Johnson does, as an enactment of a Biblical Script. Because of her absolute faith in the Word, she cannot easily dismiss words, and so, in the Cheap Repository Tracts, she reconstructs popular culture at the level of language rather than at the level of social conditions. Her engagement of the question of literacy (and working class literacy specifically), is an attempt to organize both language and social life into a hermeneutical system based on and in a unitary Word. In The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, we see that system dramatically figured.

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WORKS CONSULTED

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Cole, Lucinda. "(Anti)Feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft, and More." ELH. 58 (Spring 1991): 107-140.

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Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Their Father's Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity. NY: Oxford University Press, 1991.

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Myers, Mitzi. "Hannah More's Tracts for the Times: Social Fiction and Female Ideology." Fetter'd or Free?: British Women Novelists 1670-1815. Eds. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980.

---. "Reform or Ruin: 'A Revolution in Female Manners.'" Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. 11 (1982): 199-216.

Pedersen, Susan. "Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England." Journal of British Studies. 25 (Jan 1986): 84-113.

Smith, Olivia. The Politics of Language 1791-1819. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. NY: Penguin Books, 1968.