Cheap Repository Tracts

The Cheap Repository Tracts consisted of more than two hundred moral, religious and occasionally political tracts issued in a number of series between March 1795 and about 1817, and subsequently re-issued in various collected editions until the 1830s. They were devised by Hannah More and intended for sale or distribution to literate poor people, as an alternative to what she regarded as the immoral traditional broadside ballad and chapbook publications. The tracts proved to be enormously successful with more than two million copies sold or distributed during the first year of the scheme.

During the early 1790s there was widespread concern about the possibility of a popular uprising in Britain following the French Revolution, and the radical ideas which were circulating in popular publications. The English religious writer and philanthropist Hannah More referred to the ‘corrupt and vicious little books and ballads which have been hung out of windows in the most alluring forms or hawked through town and country.’ Following the commercial success of her Village Politics (1792), which was a rebuttal of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, she decided that an entire series might be undertaken to provide 'religious and useful knowledge, as an antidote to the poison continually flowing thro’ the channel of vulgar and licentious publications. These, by their cheapness, as well as by their being, unhappily, congenial to a depraved taste, obtain a mischievous popularity among the lower ranks. She, drew up her plan for publishing such works in the West Country during 1794 and circulated it among her friends who encouraged her to extend it to cover the whole country and to appoint London distributors. A committee to form the Cheap Repository for Moral and Religious Tracts was established with Henry Thornton as Treasurer. A printed prospectus was issued listing eighteen titles, to secure subscriptions to underwrite the project.

The new tracts were intended to point out the pitfalls of drunkenness, , idleness, gambling, riotous assembly, and seeking to rise above one’s station, whilst simultaneously praising the virtues of honesty, industry, thrift, patience and an acceptance of one’s pre-ordained place in society, by means of simple ballads and short instructive tales. They were published as either octavo chapbooks or else as broadside ballads, emulating the traditional forms of Street literature. Approximately one third of them were designated as ‘Sunday Reading’ and contained simplified Bible stories or else a more specifically religious message.

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