ABSTRACT

Acting as guidance, parental figures, disciplinarians and mentors, the missionaries were a heterogenous group of men who hailed from distinct ethnolinguistic regions within central and northern Europe. Their influence upon their students was considerable, and their accounts of their charges provide both a vivid sense of individual experiences as well as harrowing trauma. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) was founded by the London abolitionists of the Clapham Sect as the "Society for Missions to Africa and the East" in 1799. Any effort to understand the experiences of the children who were in the care of the CMS would be partial at best without a recognition of their teachers. Whether a missionary spoke Swabian German or Silesian German, regional dialects would have shaped his cultural identity and how he interacted with his fellow CMS missionaries. Despite its intentions, the CMS was unable to recruit any English missionaries to serve its cause.