Transgressions as a socialisation strategy in Samuel Richardson’s The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734)

Abstract

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.