ABSTRACT
The late eighteenth century was a period of political turmoil fomented by the American and French Revolutions. The Cheap Repository Tracts were written and distributed to the same audience as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Whereas Paine’s Rights of Man advocated republicanism and social welfare for the poor; the Cheap Repository Tracts responded by promoting ‘budget-conscious, frugal, investment model, stressing the deferral of happiness, self-restraint, and reliance on paternalistic benefaction’. Over two million tracts were bought in the first year of the Cheap Repository publications and were also sent to the Americas, Sierra Leone and the West Indies. The Cheap Repository Tracts were published between 1795 and 1799, after which the Religious Tract Society, founded in 1799, grew to prominence. In the tract reproduced, the writer explains the duties of poor parents to oversee the religious observance of prayers in their families.
