The teaching of bookkeeping in nineteenth-century Ireland

A pioneering paper by Ó hÓgartaigh, C. and Ó hÓgartaigh, M. (2006) ‘Sophisters, economists and calculators’: pre-professional accounting education in eighteenth-century Ireland, Irish Accounting Review 13, no. 2: 63–74, suggests that the teaching of bookkeeping in hedge schools in Ireland during the eighteenth century is indicative of a pre-professional period of accounting education. The objective of this paper is to extend the time period and to investigate, using a combination of primary and secondary sources, the teaching of bookkeeping during the nineteenth century and primarily within the national schools that were established in 1831. This paper argues that a knowledge of bookkeeping was an important attribute for gaining employment and therefore an important source of social mobility for Irish Catholics during this period. Also, the knowledge of bookkeeping (together with a familiarity with the English language, on which this teaching was based) would have been a valuable resource for some of the five million people who emigrated to England and America during the nineteenth century.