Teaching Children "Their Duty to God and Man": Religion and Roman Catholicism in English Nineteenth-century Children's Dictionaries

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Rather than simply being abridged versions of general dictionaries, many nineteenth-century children's dictionaries were stylistically and ideologically adapted for child readers with the aim of providing social and moral education. This paper explores one facet of ideological adaptation of monolingual English children's dictionaries in nineteenth-century England, namely religious education. Before elementary education was made compulsory and secular with the 1870 Education Act, all education was fundamentally religious. However, there was disagreement about the nature of this edification. Views on childhood in this period varied, but educationalists agreed that a person's early years were the most formative. Wordings of definitions and choices of entry-words within nineteenth-century children's dictionaries were not simply guided by limitations of space or ideas about children's intellectual capabilities, but also by lexicographers' moral and religious views and their ideas about how children should be educated. This paper considers the pervasiveness of religion in children's dictionaries in terms of establishing a Protestant Christian norm against which other beliefs were judged and in terms of inculcating children with the precepts of the "true" religion. Focusing on the treatment of Roman Catholicism, the article examines religious bias and moral-religious prescriptivism in definitions and illustrative examples.