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).