Transgressions as a socialisation strategy in Samuel Richardson’s
The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734)
Conduct manuals disseminating norms of behaviour
were popular in Early and Late Modern England. In this contribution I offer
a close reading of an influential eighteenth-century conduct manual for
newly apprenticed boys, Samuel Richardson’s The Apprentice’s Vade
Mecum (Richardson
2012[1734]). In my analysis of its contents I aim to identify the
specific set of norms of conduct young apprentices were impelled to comply
with, in an attempt to shed light on the ways in which representations of
acts of transgressive behaviour in didactic advice literature were
instrumental in the process of indoctrinating social novices about the norms
of the dominant world order. I then examine the distinctive traits of the
author’s instructive language, that is to say, the specific linguistic
strategies Richardson employs in order to deliver his instructions in the
most efficient, unequivocal and accessible way. Finally, I argue that in
Richardson’s in-depth treatment of transgressive acts we find evidence of
the existence of a coherent code of anti-normative behaviour.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Representation of transgressive acts in Richardson’s The
Apprentice’s Vade Mecum
- 3.Instructive language in The Apprentice’s Vade
Mecum
- 4.Concluding remarks
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Notes
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Sources
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References