Jeremiah Joyce (1763–1816)

Jeremiah Joyce (1763–1816)

English Unitarian minister and writer. Joyceʼs outspoken support of the French Revolution brought him under suspicion by the government, and in 1794 he was charged with treason and imprisoned for a few months. From 1790, he was appointed tutor to the sons of Charles Stanhope, third earl of Stanhope (1753–1816), an advocate in the House of Lords for radical causes who styled himself “Citizen Stanhope”, and also a significant inventor and man of science. In later years, while continuing to preach, Joyce supported himself mainly by his writing (Ditchfield, “Joyce, Jeremiah [1763–1816]”; Ditchfield, “Stanhope, Charles, third Earl Stanhope [1753–1816]”).
In spite of Joyceʼs radical past, his educational writing for children was popular, especially the Scientific Dialogues (6 vols., 1800–1805). As Marianne Thormählen remarks, in reference to one of Joyceʼs manuals, advice about child rearing and perceived duties of parents and children were uniform across a wide religious and political spectrum and over several decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Thormählen, Brontës and Education, 40–41, 230 n. 21). For example, a boy from a very different kind of household but a fellow fan with Ruskin of the Scientific Dialogues was the young John Stuart Mill (1806–73), who could “never remember being so wrapt up in any book” despite the disapproval by his father, James Mill, “of the bad reasoning respecting the first principles of physics which abounds in the early part of that work” (Mill, Autobiography, 21).
In Scientific Dialogues, Joyce adopted the dialogue form encouraged by progressive educationists such as Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) and Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744–1817) and Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849). Joyce applied the dialogue form to scientific experiments carried out by a family of children, their father, and their tutor.
Although detectable as an influence in several of Ruskinʼs juvenile works (e.g., “Harry and Lucy . . Vol 2”, Travel Itinerary and Tour Notes [1828])), the Scientific Dialogues are most heavily tapped in “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol I”.