ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a study of ways in which novels, textbooks and readers by eighteenth-century English writers provided much of the ‘formal’ curriculum in schools in Ireland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at a time when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, though managed from Westminster as though it were a colony.1 One purpose of this chapter is to identify the range of reading material for children, containing works by English writers, used in both official and unofficial school systems in Ireland. The other aim of the chapter is to comment on how such material was used to facilitate cultural assimilation by Irish ‘natives’. Implicit in the educational activity of many Protestant evangelical societies in Ireland was a view that the Irish had national characteristics which could be either modified or erased by education. While in the nineteenth century such characteristics were often attributed to race, it is now widely understood that these characteristics were ‘responses to the historical and social environment.’2 This chapter engages with that environment, by providing an examination of the social worlds of school and reading.
