XIII.
Female education—Women of quality taught at home—General illiteracy of the sex—Strong clerical control—Ignorance of the rudiments of knowledge among girls—Shakespear’s daughters—Goldsmith’s Poems for Young Ladies—Rise of the Ladies’ School—Political importance of the training of women.
I. The neglect of female education in the United Kingdom down to a recent date proceeded from an absence of any adequate or organisable machinery for the purpose, and from the complete monopoly of learning by men in early times. In Scotland this mischief was remedied to a certain extent much sooner than in England, owing to the institution of Academies, where both sexes received instruction under one roof from the same masters; and this circumstance may help to explain the general superiority of the Scots, within certain limits, to the Southern Britons in this respect, the better upbringing of the mother communicating itself to her children.
Common academies for boys and girls were not wholly unknown in England, however, but they were of very rare occurrence, and have now become still rarer, as they barely exist at all except as dame-schools.
Now-a-days, of course, the most elaborate and costly apparatus is provided for the mental cultivation and training of girls of all ranks; and the daughter of a citizen may acquire accomplishments which were long beyond the reach of daughters of kings. Formerly the lower classes of females remained as illiterate as the corresponding rank of men, and the studies of the gentlewoman were superintended by her parents and her tutor or her governess. But in the Middle Ages, and long after the revival of learning, the only persons capable of conducting the education of a lady who had emerged from the nursery and passed the rudimentary stage were ecclesiastics; and the laymen who gradually qualified themselves for the task, such as Ascham and Buchanan, were scholars of a scarce type, who had gained their proficiency in the gymnasia and universities of Italy, Germany, or France. The Italian influence was doubtless the earliest, but the German was the most powerful, and has proved the most lasting.
In France from a very remote period the dame-school appears to have existed in some measure and form, for a fourteenth-century sculpture, already mentioned in the remarks on scholastic discipline, depicts an establishment of this kind—a petty school for boys kept by a woman. If there was any such thing among us, I have met with no record of it; but the practice, from the early intimacy between those countries, would be more apt to find its way first of all from the French into Scotland.
To such as have had under their eyes the letters and other literary monuments which reveal to us the condition of the more cultivated section of the English female community in the old days, it seems superfluous to insist on the strange ignorance of the principia of knowledge, and on the fallow state of the intellectual faculties which these evidences establish. The Paston and Plumpton Correspondence, Mrs. Green’s Letters of Illustrious Ladies, and Sir Henry Ellis’s three Series of Original Letters, may perhaps be quoted as affording an insight into the present aspect of the question before us; and I think that the most striking proofs of the inattention to female culture in this country are to be found in documents previous to the Reformation, when the influence brought to bear on the sex was almost exclusively monastic or clerical.
The great political and religious movement which Henry VIII. was enabled by circumstances to carry through undoubtedly imparted a large share of lay feeling and prejudice to the educational system; and this tendency was promoted and strengthened during the short reign of Edward VI. by the foundation of chartered schools throughout the kingdom for the instruction of youth in grammar and other primordial matters.
II. But the progress thus made did not sensibly affect the other sex. Girls still depended, as a rule, on the old methods and channels of learning; the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic formed the ordinary routine and limit, unless an acquaintance with French, or even with Italian, happened to be added as a special accomplishment. Very occasionally a maiden of studious character was permitted to avail herself of the tutor maintained at home for her brothers, as was the case of the Honourable Mrs. North, a younger daughter of Lord North of Kirtling, who learned Latin and Greek in this manner; and from Margaret Roper to Mrs. Somerville, or indeed in the cases adduced by Ballard in his Memoirs of Learned Ladies, there were from time to time even in the old days splendid exceptions to the prevailing low level of female culture. But under any circumstances, until the period arrived when ladies were competent to undertake the tuition of ladies, all these matters necessarily devolved, in the first place, on the mother, and finally on a preceptor, who was necessarily a man, and most probably in holy orders. His contribution to the development of character was exceedingly preponderant, and was beyond doubt a most important factor in maintaining and extending the power of the Church, and indemnifying the clergy for the direct political influence of which the Reformation dispossessed them.
The Ladies’ School or College may be considered a product of the acute political distempers which accompanied the Civil War. Mistress Bathsua Makins, who had been governess to one of the daughters of Charles I.—the Princess Elizabeth—set up, after the fall of the King, an establishment at Putney, to which Evelyn mentions that he paid a visit in company with some ladies on the 17th May 1649; but I find no reference to this institution in Lysons. A similar case existed somewhat later at Highgate; and the admirers of Charles and Mary Lamb, at least, do not require to be told that in the little volume called “Mrs. Leicester’s School,” 1809, there are some interesting hints, both historical and autobiographical, in relation to the old-fashioned seminary at Amwell. But, as a rule, these agents in our later civilisation and social refinement, important as they were, have left behind them few, if any, traces of their existence and management. They bred those who were content to become, in course of time, the wives and mothers of England, and to study the arts of domestic life. In such are centred the strength and glory of the country; but their careers, like “the short and simple annals of the poor,” have escaped literary commemoration.
“A Gentleman of Cambridge,” as he styles himself on the title of an English adaptation of the Abbé d’Ancourt’s Lady’s Preceptor, 1743, defines the qualifications then thought necessary and adequate for a young gentlewoman. He does not go beyond a thorough knowledge of English, an acquaintance with French and Italian, a familiarity with arithmetic and accounts, and the mastery of a good handwriting; and yet how few probably reached this moderate standard a century and a half ago—nay, how few reach it now!
In the time of the early Stuarts, the training of girls in English country towns, if it is to be augured from that of the Shakespears at Stratford, even where the parents were in good circumstances and the father a man of literary tastes and occupations, was still extremely primitive and scanty. The poet’s elder daughter, Susanna, seems to have just contrived to write, or rather print, her name; but Judith used a mark, and Mrs. Quiney, whose son became Judith’s husband, did the same.
Both the Quineys and the Shakespears were persons of substance and of local consideration; and in this case, at any rate, the explanation seems to be that such ignorance was usual, and did not prejudicially affect the position and prospects of a gentlewoman.
The institution in England of elementary schools for girls only dates back to the neighbourhood of the Restoration; but the number of establishments long remained, doubtless, very limited, and the scheme of instruction equally narrow. The frontispiece to Anthony Huish’s Key to the Grammar School, 1670, presents us with an interesting interior in the shape of a girls’ school, where the mistress is seated at a desk surrounded by female pupils.
Goldsmith’s Poems for Young Ladies, “Devotional, Moral, and Entertaining,” 1767, partly arose out of Dr. Fordyce’s Sermons for Young Women. The editor assures his fair readers that the Muse in this case is not a syren, but a friend; and there is plenty of the religious element in the volume. But there are, on the other hand, extracts from Pope’s Homer, stories from Ovid and Virgil, Addison’s Letter from Italy, and a selection from Collins’s Oriental Eclogues. The source from which it came was a guarantee that its pages would be agreeably and sensibly leavened with matters not divine; it surpasses the average intellectual nutriment provided for women a century ago. Dr. Goldsmith was a decided improvement on Dr. Watts, and he could scarcely escape from being so, whether he offered them his own poetical compositions, or, as in the present case, merely exercised his judgment in selecting from the works of others. No one can object to Pope’s Messiah or his Universal Prayer, which constitute the prominent features in the devotional section, when they are in such excellent company as Gay, Swift, and Thomson. But there is nothing in this volume to have prevented the editor offering a copy to either of the vicar’s daughters.
The universal and unchanging aim of the ecclesiastical authority is manifestly temporal, and Henry VIII. and his coadjutors, and their immediate successors in the foundation of Protestantism, acted wisely in making it part of their scheme to furnish the realm with public seminaries based on an improved footing in the earliest endowed grammar schools, which set the example to private individuals and corporate bodies.
These schools, which, as we know, had been preceded—and doubtless suggested too—by that at Magdalen College, Oxford, and others framed on a humbler scale or (like the City of London and St. Paul’s) under different auspices, opened the way to a partial secularisation of teaching throughout England. The preceptors employed were more often than not academical, unbeneficed graduates with a certain clerical bent; but the Statutes laid down rules for the management of the Charity and for the limitation of the subjects to be taught; and the scheme was assuredly at the outset, and continued down to the last thirty or forty years—in fact, within the recollection of the present writer—so narrow and imperfect, that it supplied what would now be regarded as the mere groundwork of a genteel education.
III. But a farther and still more important step toward the emancipation of scholastic economy and discipline from Church control was taken when, first in Scotland, and subsequently, and also in a more limited degree, in England, after the union of the kingdoms, proprietary establishments were opened for boys or girls only, or for boys and girls, where the religious instruction, instead of being, as under the archaic conventual and Romish system, the primary feature, became a mere item on the prospectus, like Geography or History. This was the commencement of an entrance upon modern lines, and struck a fatal blow at the monastic and academical ideas of instruction, by widening the bias and range of studies, and liberating the intellect from religious trammels.
The success and multiplication of these new institutions obliged the old endowments to reform themselves, and to meet the demands of the age; and the pressure was augmented, of course, by the concurrent rise of large public gymnasia of a novel stamp, as well as by the development of some of the already existing institutions conformably to the great changes in political and social life.
The proprietary system, which had started by adopting, as a rule, the mixed method, or rather by the reception of pupils of both sexes under the same roof, was eventually, and, except so far as dame-schools were concerned, finally modified in favour of the dual plan, and independent colleges for young gentlemen and for young ladies were the result.
In these latter the drift is certainly more and more lay; and as knowledge and culture spread, and the influence and fruits of masculine thought make themselves more and more appreciable, the Church in England will gradually loosen its grasp of the national intellect, and will probably owe to the higher education of women its collapse and downfall.
The ladies of England have propped up the tottering edifice long enough, and no one whose opinion is worth entertaining will lament the inevitable issue. But whether the consequences of this vital movement will be otherwise beneficial, it has scarcely yet, perhaps, been in active operation a sufficient time to enable us to judge. If it involves the sacrifice in any important measure of feminine refinement and dependence, we shall be forced to confess that the help to be rendered by our daughters and grand-daughters to the cause of intellectual enfranchisement and victory will have been bought at a cruel price.
As the old foundations discovered it to be imperative to comply with the growing philosophical temper in order to enable them to exist side by side with the improved types of school and teacher, so the successful conduct of ladies’ colleges will become impossible in the future unless that liberality of doctrine and sentiment in all matters connected with theology which breathes around them and us is cordially recognised.
A spirit of disaffection to clerical guidance and clerical imposts has for some time shown itself in Great Britain among those who are becoming, in the natural course of events, husbands, fathers, and ratepayers; the revolt of the other sex has also commenced; and the wise initiative of the Board School in excluding the Bible and Catechism from their programme must be ultimately obeyed by every school in the three kingdoms.
The Bible is for scholars, not for school-folk; and, as Jeremy Bentham demonstrated nearly a century ago, the Catechism is trash.