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© F.Coakley , 2026
[from A.M Harrision's Descriptive List of Insular Societies]
The launch of this society, reported in the Manx Advertiser of 22 November, 1821, was directly inspired by the work of two Irish associations, the Society for the support of Gaelic Schools and the Irish Society for promoting the education of the native Irish through the medium of their own language. Taking as their basis the Protestant obligation that all people must be given the opportunity to read the Scriptures in the language that they best understood, the Church of Ireland also accepted the need to teach them how to read and understand them, and proved how this could be achieved in an illiterate community by the establishment of circulating schools.
The Manx Anglicans recognised both their own problems and their solution in the Irish initiative. |n a population of some 40,000 provided in 1819 with 5,000 copies of a 'beautiful and accurate edition of the Bible', published by the British and Foreign Bible Society, 'fifteen to twenty thousand of the inhabitants incapable of receiving religious instruction in any other language than the Manx and with a large proportion of them unable to read' had, for spiritual reasons, to be taught to study the Bible in Manx.
The Manx society apologised for teaching the vernacular,vowing that it was no means its desire 'to perpetuate the the Manx language or in the smallest degree to impede the progress of the English tongue amongst the inhabitants of the Island, an attitude held from the mid-eighteenth century by most educated and upwardly mobile Manxmen and, among the clergy, in particular, many Methodist ministers, but simply the only way to the native Manx-speaking people's religious education.
The cause, requiring the 'contributions of the rich, and the concurrence of the poor' quickly gained momentum in a community of serious evangelical commitment. Managed by a committee of twelve members of the Church of England, which met monthly in Douglas, the Society, reporting in the Manx Advertiser of 9 January 1823, had met with 'a considerable degree of encouragement during the past year.' They had distributed 428 Manx spelling books and 189 copies of Isaac Watts' 'Divine and Moral Songs for the use of Children', translated into Manx by a Manx Methodist, printed 7,500 religious tracts in Manx and established nine evening schools 'wherein 490 persons have been instructed, and assisted ten Sunday Schools.' They announced the receipt of subscriptions from a wide range of supporters lay and clerical, from the Island, Wicklow, Dublin and London, and from other Anglican societies in England, the Sunday School Society of London, Bristol Church of England Tract Society and the Religious Tract Society, help which enabled it to pursue its mission with admirable vigour.
Copies of some of the Society's textbooks, the Divine Songs and possibly the Spelling Book are known to have survived with several of the tracts printed for the Society, and are held in the Manx National Heritage Library collections. The large scale and the careful organisation of the teaching campaign described in the Society's reports and the evidence of the up-to-date teaching material indicate a major initiative to promote vernacular literacy throughout the Island. The movement, born out of the obligations of the Churches pastoral duties focused attention on the pragmatic needs for the use of the Manx language in both town and country, a matter frequently aired in the newspapers until the 1860s.
Attitudes changed, however, by the early seventies. Henry Jenner's census of the clergy in 1874, published in J.J.Kneen's Grammar of the Manx Language (Oxford, 1931) shows that only the Vicar of Rushen thought that services in Manx were vital for his congregation. In all other churches they were rated as unnecessary, though sometimes useful. The Church thus had played a significant, though involuntary role in the preservation of the language in the pre-Gaelic Revival period. After 1823 the Society no longer reports in the newspapers and it is difficult to establish when its formal teaching work ends. It is not mentioned in A.W.Moore's Diocesan History of the Isle of Man.
M.N.H.L., Isle of Man newspapers, ut supra
W.Cubbon, Bibliography, vol.ii, 1939., Manx Language and Literature, pp. 749-763
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Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received
The Editor |
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