The ‘Catechism as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer’ of 1549 was one of the, if not the, earliest forms of universal instruction in the reformed English church, intended to induce conformity. All ‘youth and ignorant persons’ were to go to church on Sundays to be instructed, while heads of household were instructed to catechize their dependants.Footnote 1 The simplest version, in the Book of Common Prayer, covered the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer and the sacraments.Footnote 2 While the Church Catechism had similarities to those written by Luther and Calvin,Footnote 3 Dissenters also wrote their own versions, notably the Shorter or Westminster Catechism of the Westminster Assembly (1643–8), and others by Baptists, Quakers and Unitarians, as well as Roman Catholics.Footnote 4 Moreover, historians of the early modern period have argued that catechizing could involve informal questioning, facilitate the acquisition of literacy and promote more advanced intellectual engagement.Footnote 5
However, the historiography of catechizing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been less positive. Although it has been recognized that catechizing was an important tool of the eighteenth-century church, and that most clergy were diligent about public catechizing, its frequent restriction to Lent reinforced older historiographies of eighteenth-century religious decline.Footnote 6 A strong strand in nineteenth-century educational history regarded catechetical teaching to labouring- or working-class children as a form of social control, at best tedious, at worst intended to reinforce Anglican hegemony.Footnote 7 A dominant historiography of family religion has associated the ‘rise’ of evangelical religion from the 1780s onwards with family prayers as the bedrock of domestic devotion, making no reference to catechizing.Footnote 8
This article calls in question the frequent dichotomy constructed by literary scholars and historians of education between teaching of the Anglican catechism, which has been regarded as dull and restrictive, and other forms of more ‘liberal’, conversational domestic education allegedly practised by Dissenters.Footnote 9 Instead, it shows how all denominations had their own catechisms, and that pedagogy in Anglican households could include a questioning approach rather than mere rote-learning. While concurring with more recent authors that domestic religion persisted from the seventeenth century into the eighteenth, and that evangelical claims to have initiated the ‘religion of the home’ were exaggerated,Footnote 10 it demonstrates how domestic catechizing continued into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Above all, it seeks to contribute to the history of children by recovering the perspectives of the young (however difficult the task) on a central aspect of eighteenth-century pedagogy. Gender issues are also considered: religious education has frequently been regarded as the preserve of females, while the respective roles of parents have also been regarded as significant in relation to ongoing debates about masculinity, motherhood and gender roles.Footnote 11
How was childhood understood in this period? The age of majority for those who had resources to inherit was twenty-one,Footnote 12 yet pauper children as young as seven might be apprenticed. Anna Davin has noted, however, that children in service were likely to have been in a semi-dependent position: indeed, it has been argued that some people never attained full adult status.Footnote 13 No typology exists of commonly held Protestant understandings of the chronological development of children's spirituality. By contrast, seven as the age of first communion has been perceived as a landmark for Roman Catholic children.Footnote 14 Nevertheless, Protestant writers of catechisms and other devotional material for the eighteenth-century young showed an awareness of the differing cognitive and spiritual needs of children of different ages and, as discussed below, Isaac Watts and John Wesley adapted their catechetical materials accordingly, particularly for younger children. While a systematic analysis of catechisms published for different age groups and educational levels is beyond the scope of this article, analysis of domestic practice can contribute to a broader understanding of shared ideas about children's spirituality and religious development.
Sources
My primary aim here is to ‘recover’ family practices and children's experiences, rather than to document the content and production of texts. However, the problem with a routine practice such as catechizing is that it was frequently unrecorded.Footnote 15 The sources used cover many different parts of Britain, as well as English-speaking locations overseas, and include manuscript collections, home instruction schemes and published editions of letters, diaries and childhood recollections. Many different Protestant denominations and types of Anglican churchmanship are represented, and the families of a number of clergy, ministers or missionaries are probably over-represented. Inevitably, memoirs and letters were more likely to survive from the middling and upper ranks, but collections of autobiographies have been particularly useful for accessing the experience of families in the labouring class.Footnote 16 These memoirs, like the descriptions of pious children in missionary and other memoirs, are subject to the problems of retrospective reconstruction and genre writing;Footnote 17 nonetheless, specific rituals and practices may provide a more definite focus for memory than more diffuse emotional experiences.
Background
The period between 1740 and 1870 witnessed many religious changes, notably the emergence of Methodism from the 1740s, the ‘rise’ of evangelicalism from the 1780s, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and the appearance of the Oxford Movement from 1833. Throughout the period, catechisms were a benchmark for maintaining orthodoxy and could have enormous political significance.Footnote 18 Controversies over the teaching of the Church Catechism have been regarded as crucial in the foundation of the National Society in 1811, and in preventing agreement about the nature of state-funded education until the 1870 Education Act forbade the teaching of any specific creed or formulary in state-funded schools.Footnote 19 There is evidence of catechizing throughout the period. In the early 1700s, clergy distributed catechisms to the labouring poor in Kent, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and reported that some parents were catechizing their children at home.Footnote 20 Indeed, Michael Watts has argued that domestic catechizing in labouring and middling-sort families laid the foundation for many Methodist conversions.Footnote 21
The first part of this article aims to establish basic patterns, such as the age of instruction, when catechizing occurred and by whom it was conducted. The second addresses children's responses, illuminating themes such as the relationship of catechizing to religious experience, parents as pedagogues and denominational difference. The focus throughout is limited to catechisms designed for a religious purpose.
Ages, Times and Catechists
Susanna Wesley (1669–1742) was accustomed to begin religious teaching soon after her children began to talk, starting just after 1690. The Wesley children were taught
as soon as they could speak, the Lord's Prayer, which they were made to say at rising and bedtime constantly; to which as they grew bigger, were added a short prayer for their parents, and some collects; a short catechism, and some portions of Scripture … as their memories could bear … .Footnote 22
Adam Clarke's family were taught ‘with the earliest dawnings of reason’ to commit to memory parts of the Church Catechism and the Shorter Catechism.Footnote 23 Four was frequently mentioned in life-story writing as a significant age.Footnote 24 Two early Methodist preachers, born in 1738, Thomas Taylor (the son of a Presbyterian tanner) and George Story, both from Yorkshire, later claimed that they had been able to recite the Shorter Catechism or the Church Catechism to their respective ministers aged four.Footnote 25 Thomas Priestley asserted the same of his brother Joseph (1733–1804) with reference to the Shorter Catechism.Footnote 26 Other references to four- or five-year-olds learning the Church Catechism can be found in the 1740s, 1760s and 1840s.Footnote 27 The ages of six and seven were mentioned in the 1760s, the early 1800s and 1870.Footnote 28 However, Henry Venn, author of the popular Complete Duty of Man (1763), did not approve of teaching very young children and only started ‘formal instructions’ when they were eight.Footnote 29 Isaac Watts (1674–1748) also believed that content should be age-related, and very concrete for children under seven.Footnote 30
Learning and performing the catechism could develop throughout the child's life-cycle, with differing levels of difficulty. On Sundays, in the 1820s, five of the six children of the high church Young family of Limehouse (born between 1815 and 1823), aged three to eight, had to learn or recite one of a series of catechisms, whilst the eldest, aged ten, had to learn or write the collect.Footnote 31 The younger children learned Watts's First Catechism, the Church Catechism, the Mother's Catechism, Crossman's Catechism and Crossman's Questions.Footnote 32 Mrs Young's schedule prescribed the most intensive weekday catechetical instruction (up to four or five times each week) for children between the ages of six and nine; her elder and younger children had less catechesis.Footnote 33 The diarist Emily Shore (1819–39) recorded how her mother taught her with her younger siblings, three girls and two boys, born between 1819 and 1825, when they were aged between six and twelve.Footnote 34 Catherine MacFarlane (1879–1946), who had been brought up in the Free Church of Scotland and lived in Glasgow, noted that ‘thirteen was a serious age’, at which she could ‘recite the Shorter Catechism and chapters of the Old and New Testaments’.Footnote 35
The Church Catechism had an end point and a purpose, as knowledge of it was a requirement for Anglican confirmation. While Phillip Tovey's case studies identify confirmation as usually taking place at the age of fourteen, the age could vary from ten to twenty-two.Footnote 36 In the diocese of London, fourteen was the expected age from the 1760s, rising to fifteen by 1798.Footnote 37 In the nineteenth century, fifteen to sixteen was a usual age. John Henry Newman (1801–90) recalled that ‘of course I was word perfect in the Catechism at the age of fifteen’.Footnote 38 Fanny Keats was confirmed in 1819, aged fifteen,Footnote 39 and Charlotte Yonge was also fifteen when she was prepared for confirmation by John Keble by working through the Catechism and the communion service.Footnote 40 The high church Agnes Cotton was sixteen when she used her elder brother William's catechetical lecture cards.Footnote 41
Unsurprisingly, catechizing is usually referred to across the period as a domestic devotional exercise on Sunday: for the 1750s, 1760s and 1770s, the early and late 1800s, and on Sunday evenings specifically in the 1740s and 1820s.Footnote 42 On weekdays, it might comprise part of schoolroom exercises, as with the Youngs in the 1820s, schoolmaster Roger Langdon's children in the 1860s and 1870s, and Lydia North Paget's domestic teaching in the 1850s and early 1860s.Footnote 43
Whereas Luther assumed that mothers would be teaching their children, Anthony Fletcher has argued that from the Reformation on, catechizing was the father's responsibility, and that many fathers were ‘warm, intimate and caring’, rather than harsh patriarchs.Footnote 44 There is some consensus that there was a transition from the educational importance of the father, with the mother supplanting the father by the mid- to late nineteenth century,Footnote 45 and some consider this led to a ‘crisis’ of masculinity.Footnote 46 However, family evidence is more complicated. A number of this article's eighteenth century subjects were catechized by their fathers, including Mary Bosanquet and also Faith Hopwood, whose mother was engaged in ‘nursing the young ones’ and ‘left external matters’ to their father.Footnote 47 The Free Church of Scotland Robert Haldane (1805–77), high churchman Bishop George Augustus Selwyn (1809–78) and low church London businessman Richard White (b. 1822) also catechized their children, from the 1830s to the 1870s.Footnote 48 Nevertheless, mothers might lead the process from the seventeenth century onwards.Footnote 49 These included the Presbyterian mother of Adam Clarke in the 1760s,Footnote 50 Frederick Temple's mother in the Ionian islands from 1821,Footnote 51 Sarah Selwyn in New Zealand during the 1840s and the Free Church Mary Ann MacFarlane in the 1870s and 1880s.Footnote 52 In the 1840s and 1850s, the Congregationalist Mrs Henderson of British Guiana used to catechize her household on Sunday evenings on the sermon and their Sunday school lessons, as well as the schoolchildren who sat in the gallery in chapel.Footnote 53 Roger Langdon (b. 1829), the future scientist and stationmaster, learnt the catechism at a Sunday school run by his parents.Footnote 54 Governesses also acted as catechists, notably for Georgina Sitwell (b. 1824), the daughters of Lady Ilchester in Somerset, and the Strangeways children (aged ten, five and seven) from 1783.Footnote 55
Siblings might also act as religious instructors.Footnote 56 In 1819, the poet John Keats sent his sister Fanny, aged fifteen, very detailed answers based on the Church Catechism to help her with her confirmation preparation.Footnote 57 By 1828, it was reported by Mrs Young of Limehouse that her daughter Emma (aged ten) ‘assists in instructing the little ones in their Catechism and map of Canaan’. Horace (aged six) ‘repeats his catechism with Lucy and Sidney’ (aged seven and eight).Footnote 58 In the 1870s, Florence White's elder brother (aged fifteen) and his friend (aged fourteen) used to help her learn the catechism on Saturdays to recite on Sunday mornings, after which she received a cooked breakfast as a reward.Footnote 59 The catechism could also interest teenagers and adults. In 1846, Agnes Cotton wrote how, at prayers in Oxford, her brother-in-law, the future professor of medicine, Henry Wentworth Acland, ‘talks about the catechism guided by an old Exposition by Wm Bishop of Gloster when I know not. We all take a turn, in reading the texts referred to.’Footnote 60 Catechism work could also form a part of sociability for younger children. In 1765, seven-year-old Mary Heber wrote to her father: ‘Last Sunday afternoon I went to church and when we came home and was [sic] reading our books and saying our catechism, in came my aunt and cousin Glencowe.’Footnote 61 Grandparents might be involved. In 1858, Acland's daughter Sarah Angelina (1849–1930) reported: ‘I am just going to say my catechism to Grandmamma.’Footnote 62 In the 1890s, the grandmother and aunt of Captain Edward Kenyon's children insisted on hearing them try to recite parts of it.Footnote 63 Ministers might come to teach it at home.Footnote 64 No clearly gender-differentiated pattern of catechizing emerges across the period.
Pedagogy and Children's Responses
Many historians and literary scholars have regarded catechizing as a routine practice of repetition in contrast to the more experimental educational approaches used, by, say, the Edgeworths.Footnote 65 Although catechisms were written in a question and answer format, and despite the recognition that much learning occurred through ‘familiar conversation’,Footnote 66 recent historians and literary scholars have represented Anglican catechizing as rigid. Aileen Fyfe, for example, argued that ‘in the catechism the child had no flexibility or autonomy’, whilst children had more freedom in Dissenting education.Footnote 67 Yet while the Shorter Catechism was taught by Dissenters, both Anglicans and Nonconformists argued for the importance of understanding.Footnote 68 Watts, who in 1730 produced a series of catechisms aimed at different educational levels, wrote: ‘The business and duty of the teacher is not to teach words, but things. Words written in the memory, without ideas or sense in the mind, will never incline a child to his duty, nor save his soul.’Footnote 69 Watts ‘thought catechizing was an ideal medium of instruction for the young’, as it ‘broke material into short segments, the questioning stimulated curiosity and a reply, and this to-and-fro was “familiar” like a conversation’.Footnote 70 Anglicans also produced differentiated texts: for example, John Lewis, whose catechism written specifically for the ‘poor and unlearned’ of Kent had gone into thirty-four editions by 1778.Footnote 71 John Wesley wrote a simpler version of the Church Catechism in his Instructions for Children, as he regarded the Church Catechism as too complex.Footnote 72 Clerics argued for the importance of understanding,Footnote 73 as did some parents,Footnote 74 although it was reported in 1704 that some thought rote-learning sufficed.Footnote 75 In what follows I will discuss these themes in relation to children's learning, notably the links between catechisms and religious experience, parents as pedagogues, and texts and denominationalism.
Religious Experience
Teaching the Church Catechism could provide an opportunity for religious experience, stimulated by personal interaction. Thus the Anglican Mary Bosanquet recalled: ‘On Sabbath-evenings, my dear father used to instruct us in the Church catechism. At those seasons I can remember asking many questions … I wished to know whether anyone ever did love God with all their heart, and their neighbour as themselves.’Footnote 76 She recounted subsequently being converted to Methodism aged eight, with the assistance of a servant girl, but against the wishes of her family.Footnote 77 In this narrative, her early experience of learning the catechism was the starting point for her spiritual autobiography, not unlike the labouring-class examples cited by Watts.Footnote 78 Mary Bosanquet's concerns closely resembled those of Faith Hopwood, born in 1751 in York, who came from an evangelical background. Hopwood's diary recalled ‘being required to repeat the catechism, collects and portions of Scripture’, which ‘occasionally led to serious examination whether I loved God with all my heart’ as well as to fears about her future state.Footnote 79 Richard Hill (1732–1808), the first evangelical MP, was repeating the catechism one Sunday evening as a child of eight or nine, when ‘I found my heart sweetly drawn up to heavenly objects’. The Evangelical Magazine of 1799 contained an ‘Anecdote’ in which a youth ‘was convicted by being catechized’.Footnote 80 After learning the Westminster Assembly's Catechism in the 1850s, one seven-year-old Henderson child in British Guiana asked searching questions about the doctrine of assurance and God's love, which surprised her mother.Footnote 81 Thus asking questions or spiritual enlightenment could occur throughout the period as a result of catechetical engagement in different denominations, and could be perceived as assisting the spiritual development of adults.
Parental Engagement
Some parents were so dedicated to their task as religious educators that they wrote catechisms for their own children. Susanna Wesley wrote an exposition of the Apostles’ Creed and the Ten Commandments.Footnote 82 The biographer of the nonjuror John Bowdler (1746–1823) recalled Bowdler's mother's ‘peculiar turn for conveying instruction’, and how she drew up a ‘comprehensive’ and ‘plain’ explanation of the Catechism that anyone could understand.Footnote 83 The Quaker Abiah Darby wrote an introductory catechism for her own children and those of her Quaker meeting in 1754, which was printed in 1763.Footnote 84 The father of Mary Elizabeth Haldane (1825–1925) ‘wrote two catechisms for us, which we learned; one was on the Lord's Prayer, the other on the general doctrines of the Bible. I think now that both were rather beyond us.’Footnote 85
Children's reactions and experiences clearly varied. Adam Clarke, son of a schoolmaster and small farmer in Ireland, whose mother started with the Apostles’ Creed when he was six, recalled: ‘I had a godly puritanic mother. For my mother's religious teachings, I shall have endless reason to bless my Maker.’Footnote 86 Emily Shore, a clergyman's daughter, recorded how every Sunday evening, after tea, they said ‘some parts of the Catechism, mamma commenting as we go on in the simplest manner. I believe none of us are taught anything which is not thoroughly explained and I am afraid this is too unusual.’Footnote 87 By contrast, the children of Octavius Temple, commandant in the Ionian Islands and later lieutenant-governor of Sierra Leone, were expected to read the catechism with no explanation. Frederick (1821–1902), the future archbishop, recalled: ‘My six year old birthday was a far more terrible day than the earthquake’, as he and his siblings were all expected to say the Catechism by heart. ‘I succeeded, and got what was then a large sum of money – sixpence.’Footnote 88
Nevertheless, children might take control of the process. It was reported of Leslie Stephen that ‘after one short struggle’, he ‘submitted with much docility to Watts’ Catechism, but had a curious way of insisting on giving answers in his own words before he would give those that had been cut and dried’.Footnote 89 In 1846, Bishop Selwyn's son Willie, aged four or five, was ‘saying his catechism to Mrs S.’, and ‘on the question being put, rehearse the Articles of thy belief, he wanted to open his prayer book and read the Athanasian creed instead of repeating the apostles’ … he said the entire orders the former to be had [sic] on Trinity Sunday … he is never so happy as when reading the Prayer Book’.Footnote 90
Not all children enjoyed learning the Catechism. Augusta Drane, a future Catholic convert and prioress, from a high church family, recorded how their religious education in the schoolroom was ‘dry in the extreme’: ‘We said the Church Catechism, but I cannot call to mind any explanation ever being given on religious subjects.’Footnote 91 Although Charlotte Yonge claimed that ‘[i]n religious knowledge I was forward. We always said the Catechism every Sunday’, she also ‘always wished everything of the kind, except teaching the school children, to be over as fast as possible’. Nonetheless, she remembered being prepared for confirmation by Keble as ‘an especial blessing’.Footnote 92 Captain Edward Kenyon (1854–1937), son of a Queen's Counsel, recalled: ‘My mother used to teach us the catechism and read Sunday books to us, especially Miss Yonge's on the Collect, Catechism, etc.’Footnote 93 As a father, he did not wish to repeat this, but relatives insisted on hearing the children recite parts of the Catechism, to the children's dismay.Footnote 94
Texts and Denominationalism
The Assembly or Shorter Catechism was taught throughout the period in Dissenting households.Footnote 95 Betsey Doddridge (1731–6), daughter of the prominent Nonconformist minister, was described as trying to teach a catechism to her dog, indicating this could be a child-initiated activity.Footnote 96 The Shorter Catechism contained a far greater number of biblical references, or ‘proofs’ supporting the statements of doctrine, than the Prayer Book Catechism of the Church of England.Footnote 97 Abiah Darby thought that the absence of these from her catechism would make it easier, although there were still 106 questions.Footnote 98 The future Unitarian minister Eliezer Cogan (1762–1855) learnt the Assembly's Catechism as a child, although ‘its stern theology had by that time lost its hold of his father's mind, who told him, “he need not learn the proofs”’.Footnote 99 Others considered them useful. In the 1810s, the Congregational minister George Collison wished the young Anglican Bevans, who attended his chapel in Essex, ‘to learn this and called sometimes to hear them repeat it’. Their niece, the family biographer, later asserted: ‘The Scripture proofs it contains were of great use to them.’ Although their Anglican uncle George Bevan initially disapproved violently, he later relented.Footnote 100 Many Congregational missionaries’ families, such as the Hendersons in the 1840s and 1850s, also learned the Shorter Catechism.Footnote 101 Annie Small (b. 1857), daughter of a Free Church of Scotland missionary in India, learned ‘the first question and answer of the Shorter Catechism’.Footnote 102 However, by 1892 the Congregational missionary James Kennedy was regretting its ‘setting aside’ by families.Footnote 103
There were sometimes surprising connections between the texts used by Anglicans and Dissenters. Since Adam Clarke's father was Church of England, and his mother Presbyterian, they were taught both the Church Catechism and the Shorter Catechism.Footnote 104 Although the Hackney Phalanx prevented the SPCK from publishing Watts's catechism in 1831,Footnote 105 it was used even in high church families, for instance by the Youngs, as well as by the evangelical Stephens.Footnote 106 Some Anglicans never learnt the Church Catechism, even when confirmed: the former evangelical G. W. E. Russell (1853–1919) was taught the Nonconformist Shorter Catechism instead; he suspected this was because the Church Catechism was ‘too Sacramental’.Footnote 107
Yet, other evidence indicates domestic instruction in the Church Catechism was still considered de rigueur by Anglicans. The religious education of William Sharpe in the early 1800s was influenced by his Unitarian relatives, and his Anglican schoolmaster felt his ‘education in church matters, catechism etc.’ had been neglected.Footnote 108 When the Quaker Eliza Fox, at school in Chichester about 1800, explained: ‘Please, ma'am, I never say catechism! … the whole school turned their open eyes upon me’, and the children asked questions such as ‘What church did I go to on a Sunday? And did we say Catechism and the Belief?’Footnote 109
Leslie Stephen's biographer claimed that ‘his first days at Eton were made laborious by the Anglican catechism, as he had been brought up on Watts’, again indicating that knowledge of the Church Catechism was an expectation in Anglican establishment circles. Stephen later wrote of its ‘most irritating explanation of the Lord's Prayer’.Footnote 110
Conclusion
This essay has explored an almost wholly neglected aspect of the churches and education in the modern era. It indicates that domestic catechizing could be a consistent aspect of family life in Anglican and Nonconformist households throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Teaching of both the Church Catechism and Nonconformist Shorter Catechism frequently began by the age of four and could be extended through a developmental programme of catechetical learning. This might be promoted by parents creating schemes of instruction or writing catechisms themselves. Some memoirs indicate that catechetical learning could lead to spiritual experience, and that children might exercise active roles in asking questions or devising their own responses, rather than merely rote-learning.
The evidence supports a perspective which stresses continuity rather than abrupt change in family religious practice over the period from 1740 to 1870. Moreover, it suggests that the notion of a distinct shift in gender roles in relation to religious practice over the period 1740 to 1870 is problematic. While children might be catechized by fathers or mothers throughout the period, by the nineteenth century parental engagement was supplemented by governesses and siblings. Both sexes learnt one or more of the many available catechisms, with few references to gender difference, and elder brothers as well as sisters might help younger siblings. Evidence from schools indicates that knowledge of the Anglican Church Catechism was expected in many quarters, while in many Nonconformist families the Shorter Catechism was learned. Domestic catechizing could constitute a form of familiar conversation, rather than being qualitatively different. While a quantitative assessment of its frequency is impossible to attain, given that such a routine practice may not have been recorded, this article has opened up possibilities for future study, such as how children actually learned their catechism. It also draws attention to the need for more studies of religious practice throughout the longue durée, to make it more feasible to assess continuities across the early modern and modern periods.
