The sorrows of Yamba; or, The negro woman's lamentation.

The Sorrows of Yamba, published in 1795 by Hannah More in her Cheap Repository Tracts series, was one of the most popular and frequently reprinted antislavery poems of its time. But the poem is not solely by Hannah More, who never signed it with her characteristic "Z." There are several versions of the poem that are about half the length of the version in Cheap Repository Tracts. Leaving aside the authorship question, this is an important antislavery poem. This printed pamphlet was sold by J. Marshall printer to the Cheap Repository for Religious & Moral Tracts, in London. Hannah More (1745-1833) was an English religious writer and philanthropist. In the 1790s she wrote several 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.

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