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Education at Home and at School

The Garretts, like many middle-class parents in mid-Victorian Britain, found it a challenge to find ways to provide educational opportunities for their daughters. Tutors were hired to teach the sons before they were sent off to board at boys' public schools, which were being founded from the middle of the nineteenth century. For girls, the solution in most cases was to find a governess. They were women drawn from the unfortunate circumstances of genteel poverty combined with few or no prospects of marriage. They needed a home and they moved in with the strangers who hired them. They were tolerated but rarely appreciated. Their skills as teachers were usually limited, as they had inadequate preparation for the all-purpose educators they were expected to be. They had little or no privacy and rare opportunities for broadening their own experience or for making friends outside the families with whom they lived. They had little leisure and no one to share it with other than the children they tried to befriend as well as to teach.

Amelia Edgeworth was a typical example. Poor and pious, she was hired by the Garretts in 1846 initially to teach Louie and Elizabeth, aged eleven and a half and ten. By then, Louisa also had four younger children and a fifth was born the following year, so she had little time to give further lessons to the older children. Where Miss Edgeworth came from and how she was recruited is not recorded, but it would have been easy for the family to find and to hire her. The supply of potential governesses easily exceeded the demand. In 1851, there were approximately 25,000 of them. When posts were advertised, there were sometimes several hundred applicants. Most young women stayed at home until they married if their families could afford to support them. If they could not, there were few alternatives to becoming a governess. Higher education for women did not exist and the professions were closed to them. Even school teaching was an unlikely option, as there were so few schools before the 1870 Education Act, which established elementary education, and attendance at school was not compulsory until 1880.

Few young women became governesses because they positively wanted this role. It was forced on them because they had no alternative; more often than not it was a joyless existence but one from which it was rarely possible to escape. Amelia Edgeworth's experience was typical. She slept in a curtained bed in the same room as Louie and Elizabeth, undressing at night and dressing in the morning behind the curtains. Presumably, she found some way of washing, although access to a bath was unlikely. She had her meals with the family and was never able to escape for a holiday. Her routine consisted of spending all morning in the school room, then taking the same walk along the road towards Leiston for a mile, then going back for a mile each afternoon. She was self-effacing and servile and it appears from Elizabeth's comments that her lessons were as dull as her life. At the dining table, she strove to agree with everything Louisa said, on one occasion provoking an irritable response from Newson, 'Miss Edgeworth, you just said the opposite a minute ago.' She replied that the last time she spoke was before she had had 'the pleasure of hearing dear Mrs Garrett's opinion'.

The main content of Miss Edgeworth's lessons was drawn from a book entitled Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the Use of Young People, from which she took a new section each day. It is easy to criticise these governesses, although it is also unfair. They had virtually no teaching materials and few other sources from which to draw on and usually no training whatsoever on how to teach. Unsurprisingly, her instruction was not going to engage a girl as high-spirited and intelligent as Elizabeth, who made the lessons more entertaining by finding ways to trip up Miss Edgeworth. She encouraged her gentler, older sister to do the same. They asked Miss Edgeworth questions she could not answer and poked fun at her when she failed. Like other children of this age whose teachers lacked the skills and the personality to motivate them and were unable to provide material to interest them, they took pleasure in humiliating her.

Attempts were made by the girls' parents to reason with them; and when that failed, to punish them. They were of no avail. The school room was a battleground and the war needed to be ended. Some Victorian parents might have decided that as the girls were by then thirteen and nearly fifteen, their formal education could come to an end. The Garretts took a different view. Just as their younger brothers were sent away to school, so should the girls continue their education. Newson had acquired enough money to afford to give his daughters a secondary education away from home and, unlike many wealthy fathers, he was determined to use his wealth to do so. How he selected the school they eventually went to is not clear, nor can we be sure that Louisa played an equal part in choosing the school. We do know that he began with a choice that was quickly regretted. Louie, not with Elizabeth but with her cousin Betsy Marion Garrett, who was a similar age, was sent to a school in Hampstead. It was an appalling experience. There was not enough to eat and a hamper of good food sent from Suffolk was confiscated; the accommodation was wholly inadequate and the teaching was of poor quality. Fortunately, their grandfather (Louisa's father) visited them and was shocked by what he saw. They were removed indefinitely after only four months there.

The next school was chosen with more care. The Boarding School for Ladies was one of a number of small private schools in Blackheath. It had thirty-seven pupils, according to the 1851 census. It was owned and run by the Misses Browning, who were the step-aunts of the poet Robert Browning. Another of their relatives was Samuel Browning, who was a minister at a chapel in Framlingham in Suffolk, and the owner of a small day school for boys. He may have recommended the Blackheath school to Newson Garrett. By whatever means Newson alighted on it, it was to change the course of his daughters' lives, probably more through the other pupils they met there than through what they were taught. In 1851, about half the pupils came from London, the rest from far and wide across the country. The girls with whom the Garrett sisters became friends were from middle-class families with money from the successful businesses they owned. Louie and Elizabeth were invited to stay with them in the holidays and after they had left the school. These invitations gave them the chance to broaden their experience beyond their home in Suffolk.

Miss Louisa Browning, their headmistress, was eccentric but amiable. More important, she was convinced that the education of girls should not be confined to accomplishments but should embrace a curriculum, in which they would learn to read widely and to write well. Modern languages were deemed to be important and pupils were required to speak French all the time, although it is doubtful whether that could be effectively imposed outside the classroom. They were introduced to German and Italian literature as well as to French writing. What the Garrett parents made of this is not known. We do know that when visiting the school to decide on whether to select it, Newson made only one request after the extras on the curriculum had been described. He said they would take them all but insisted that his daughters should be able to have another extra: a hot bath once a week. However surprised she was by this unusual request since few houses had baths at the time, Miss Browning organised a washtub in front of the kitchen range on Saturday nights where the girls could wash in hot water, screened by a towel horse. They became known as the 'bathing Garretts'.

It is unlikely that Louie and Elizabeth had read many of the classics before attending school. Their father would have had little inclination to read them; their mother little time; and their governess too little imagination to include them in the school room. In Blackheath, by contrast, they read widely and learnt to enjoy books. In her biography of Elizabeth, Jo Manton said she read poetry as well as prose, including 'not only the fashionable Tennyson but Wordsworth, Milton and Coleridge as well. She read Gibbon and Motley for pleasure, and for relaxation Trollope, Thackeray or her favourite, George Eliot.' This focus not only established the habit of reading, which was to remain an important part of the sisters' lives, it also taught them how to write with confidence and clarity. It was an invaluable skill in the campaigns they pursued later.

Their parents must have been satisfied with the school for they sent Alice, Agnes and Millicent there when they reached their teens. Only Josephine, the youngest daughter, was not exposed to the little Blackheath school. Had she been sent there too, perhaps she might have made her mark in some sphere or other, but unlike her older sisters, she failed to do so. Millicent formed a close bond with Agnes, just as Elizabeth did with Louie. Each pair of sisters had the advantage of their sibling's company at school. This must have lessened homesickness and the misery so many children suffered when sent...