The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

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СКАЧАТЬ counting the many tens of thousands of clergy, prosperous merchants, bankers, businessmen, factory-owners, all of whom would have had equal call on this precious commodity.

      Even where governesses were employed, teaching was not necessary any better. As Gwen Raverat said of her governess: ‘They were all kind, good, dull women; but even interesting lessons can be made incredibly stupid, when they are taught by people who are bored to death with them, and who do not care for the art of teaching either.’⁶³ Charles Dickens’s portrait of Gradgrind, with his love of Facts, was not only a comic fiction: literature both high and low reflected this idea of education as chunks of information. Charlotte M. Yonge gave a vivid picture in The Daisy Chain (1856). There the children had a visiting French master who knew the language well and could tell Ethel, the clever child, when she had gone wrong, but he could not explain why. Ethel

      did not like to … have no security against future errors; while he thought her a troublesome pupil, and was put out by her questions … Miss Winter [the governess] … summoned her to an examination such as the governess was very fond of and often practised. Ethel thought it useless … It was of this kind: –

      What is the date of the invention of paper?

      What is the latitude and longitude of Otaheite?

      What are the component parts of brass?

      Whence is cochineal imported?⁶⁴

      Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857) spoke the same language as Miss Winter:

      I learnt a little algebra, a little

      Of the mathematics, – brushed with extreme flounce

      The circle of the sciences …

      I learnt the royal genealogies

      Of Oviedo, the internal laws

      Of the Burmese empire, – by how many feet

      Mount Chimaborazo outsoars Teneriffe.

      What navigable river joins itself

      To Lara, and what census of the year five

      Was taken at Klagenfurt, – because she liked

      A general insight into useful facts.⁶⁵

      The Daisy Chain and Aurora Leigh both appeared in the mid-1850s. Many girls were still being taught the same things in the same way at the end of the century. Eleanor Farjeon, the children’s writer, remembered her schoolroom days in the 1890s:

      Miss Milton taught us Spelling … and the Capitals of Europe, and Tables, and Dates. There was no magic in these things as she taught them …

      ‘What is the date of the Constitutions of Clarendon?’

      ‘Eleven-hundred-and-sixty-four.’

      ‘Quite right. You know that now.’

      ‘Yes, Miss Milton.’

      But what exactly did I know, when I knew that? … I didn’t know what ‘Constitutions of Clarendon’ was. Was it to do with somebody’s health? Who was Clarendon? Or perhaps with the way red wine was made … What was Clarendon? Miss Milton never told me, and I never asked.⁶⁶

      Eleanor Farjeon did not come from a philistine background: her father was a successful author. His sons went to school, while his daughter was doomed to Miss Milton not because he was unkind, but because, as Louise Creighton said a quarter of a century before, ‘I do not think that such an idea was ever entertained.’⁶⁷

      Girls and boys, once past infancy and early childhood, received gender-based conditioning. An advertisement in the back of The Busy Hives All Around Us, a book for children, gave a list of some ‘Popular Illustrated Books’. Their titles are revealing. Girls got The Star of Hope and the Staff of Duty: Tales of Women’s Trials and Victories; Women of Worth; Friendly Hands and Kindly Words: Stories Illustrative of the Law of Kindness, the Power of Perseverance, and the Advantages of Little Helps. Boys got Men Who Have Risen; Noble Tales of Kingly Men; Small Beginnings: or, The Way to Get On.⁶⁸ Even more startlingly at variance, since they were by the same author, Louisa Tuthill, were two books called I Will be a Lady: A Book for Girls and Get Money: A Book for Boys.⁶⁹ Girls were to read of ‘duty’, ‘trials’, ‘perseverance’, which would make them ‘Women of Worth’. Boys read of ambition, achievement, success – their ‘nobility’ would be in accomplishment, not abnegation.

      Boys left home early – they were mostly at school by the age of seven, if school could be afforded. Even a day school ensured that boys spent much of their time with other boys: they became socialized early. The reverse was true of girls: the more prosperous the family, the less likely girls were to leave its shelter. Instead they were encouraged to remain children as long as possible. Boys had their first emotional rupture, their first taste of the outside world, when they went to school, then a bigger rupture if they went to university or when they started work, by which time they were considered adult. Girls who did not need to go out to work had no break to mark their passing from childhood to adolescence: they were often children up until they married. Louise Creighton had barely been out for a walk alone until her marriage in her twenties – if she wanted to go anywhere she had to be accompanied by her governess; if the governess was not available she bribed her young brothers with sweets to go with her.⁷⁰ In The Way We Live Now (1875) Trollope notes that ‘The young male bird is supposed to fly away from the paternal nest. But the daughter of a house is compelled to adhere to her father till she shall get a husband.’⁷¹

      Yet women could not be sheltered for ever, although they remained hampered long into adult life by their home-made educations. Gwen Raverat’s mother plagued her family with her dim grip on basic numeracy:

      My mother … insisted on keeping accounts down to every halfpenny; but no one, least of all herself, ever understood them … [A]fter my father’s death The Accounts became a constant menace to everyone in the family … It was so hopeless and so useless. It was impossible to add up one page without being dragged into the complications of all the other pages of all the other account books, which were used indiscriminately for everything. The only system was that every item had to be written down somewhere – on any scrap of paper, or any page of any account book; and then, from time to time, everything must be rounded up and added together in one enormous sum. Fortunately no odious deductions were drawn from the resulting total, as quite often the Credits had got mixed up with the Debits, and they had all been added up together.⁷²

      Fortunately for Mrs Darwin, she had married into a wealthy family, and the accounts were more form than content. For the much larger number of women who needed to work, a similar lack of basic education meant blighted lives. A pamphlet called A Choice of a Business for Girls, published in 1864, warned:

      The power of making out a bill with great rapidity and perfect СКАЧАТЬ