Bluestockings by Jane Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

Whitelands College opened. There had been a Mutual Assurance Society for governesses for some time, but the GBI offered more to the estimated 25,000 of them working in England during the mid-nineteenth century. It gave annuities, operated a savings bank, and ran an employment registry, as well as providing accommodation for those temporarily ‘disengaged’, and a longer-term home, or asylum, for those described in popular literature as ‘distressed’ or, worse still, ‘decayed’. The high profile of the GBI (Charles Dickens was an early supporter) ensured plenty of attention for the plight of the over-worked, under-trained, and poorly paid governess. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847, with its eponymous heroine, as did Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair , two of English fiction’s most memorable governesses, and sketches emerged in comfortable periodicals of wan-looking damsels gazing over their charges’ heads into a middle-distance of frustration, regret, and scarcely quelled emotion.
    Behind the scenes, meanwhile, a dedicated group of agitators was working hard to make the governess extinct. TheSecretary of the GBI’s Committee of Education was among them. Frederick Denison Maurice, himself the brother of a governess, was Professor of English History and Literature at King’s College in London, and it was his radical idea in 1847 to institute a series of evening lectures for governesses to improve their teaching repertoire. They were to be called ‘Lectures to Ladies’, delivered by the professor himself, and were to include ‘all branches of female knowledge’.
    There had been open lectures before, to which women could go if so moved. The Mechanics’ Institute in London, later Birkbeck College, was opened in 1823 to provide outof-hours education to working men; in 1830, it admitted women (rather by default, when it was discovered that they weren’t not allowed to go), and having got over the delicate matter of whether those females who did choose to attend should be allowed through the front door (it was decided that they were), it offered them an eclectic choice of electricity, optics, geology, chemistry, phrenology, political economy, and various arts courses. Not many went.
    There is a record of two women attending lectures at University College in London in 1832. They were a Mrs Potter and a Miss Rogers, and they share the distinction of being the first women in England to be entered on to the student roll of a university. It is rather disappointing to find that their brief studies comprised attending the ‘Juvenile Course in Natural Philosophy’, along with Mrs Potter’s fourteen-year-old son. Still, it was a precedent, and precedent is a great thing in progress.
    The popularity of Professor Maurice’s Lectures to Ladies tempted him to put into practice an idea he and his sympathizers had been pondering for some time. In the spring of 1848, he announced the opening of what he proudly called a ‘College for the Education of Young Ladies’ – Queen’s College – in London. Its purpose was to produce a newgeneration of students: girls who enjoyed high academic achievement and who appreciated the value of high expectation, in themselves and of others in them. Many would inevitably go on to become teachers themselves, which was all part of Maurice’s grand plan. He was one of the first academics to acknowledge school-teaching as a responsible and admirable vocation for women. Its practitioners should be properly prepared and worthy of intellectual respect.
    While a good education was essential to an effective teacher, Maurice insisted, rather radically, that teaching should not be considered the only end of such an education. This was a crucial statement, sounding the death-knell of the traditional governess. Maurice suggested that it was the right of every intelligent thirteen-year-old (if her family could afford it) to be offered access to a professionally taught, wide-ranging curriculum.