The eighteenth century, too, had its distinguished women; indeed, the Blue-Stocking Club, so called, it seems, from the dress of one of its masculine habitués, is regarded as the representative group of learned ladies. But Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Chapone, and Hannah More were exceptions, and themselves only too conscious of their opposition to the rest of their sex. There was a touch of the précieuse about some of them which exposed them to a good deal of cheap satire, and they were keenly alive to the antagonism with which the other sex regarded them. Mrs. Chapone even advises her niece to avoid the study of classics and science, for fear of ‘exciting envy in one sex and jealousy in the other.’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu complains bitterly that ‘there is hardly a creature in the world more despicable and more liable to universal ridicule than that of a learned woman,’ while ‘folly is reckoned so much our proper sphere, we are sooner pardoned any excesses of that than the least pretensions to reading and good sense.’

Some of these last century women were practical reformers, who realised the pernicious results of this false opinion about their sex. Among these was Hannah More, who entered a most earnest protest against the excessive accomplishment craze. The lower middle class were emulating the upper in their endeavour to make their daughters ‘accomplished young ladies,’ while they quite forgot that ‘the profession of ladies to which the best of their education should be turned is that of daughters, wives, mothers, and mistresses of families.’[[8]] She even ventured to fly in the face of public opinion by asserting that ‘a young lady may excel in speaking French and Italian, may repeat a few passages from a volume of extracts, play like a professor, and sing like a siren,’ and yet be very badly educated, if her mind remains untrained. ‘The kind of knowledge that they commonly do acquire is easily attained,’ they learn everything in a superficial question-and-answer way, or through abridgments, beauties, and compendiums, instead of reading books that require thought and attention. As we read her Strictures on Female Education we rub our eyes and look at the date once more. Is this, indeed, Hannah More writing a hundred years ago, or have we stumbled upon a stray extract from Mr. Bryce’s report to the Schools’ Inquiry Commission in 1867? ‘She should pursue every kind of study which will teach her to elicit truth, which will lead her to be intent upon realities; will give precision to her ideas; will make an exact mind.’ She quotes Dr. Johnson’s opinion that ‘a woman cannot have too much arithmetic.’ Had the worthy doctor a prevision of a High School time-table?

Hannah More’s influence does not seem to have been very lasting. Her contemptuous remark, that we might as well talk about the rights of children as the rights of women, shows that she had not much real grasp of the educational problem. Both should, in her opinion, be relegated to their proper subordinate places. She was right in despising the frivolity of her day, and condemning the constant round of pleasure in which fashionable women spent their lives, but she was almost too severe to be helpful. Far more valuable was Miss Edgeworth’s work, which was constructive as well as critical. Her educational romances, in which she contrasts the good and bad governess, the sensible and frivolous girl, are thoroughly readable even at the present day, and must have proved useful to many readers who lighted unawares on the powder in the jam. Practical Education, written in conjunction with her father, throws valuable light on contemporary conditions, and advances theories that are still worthy of our notice. The ‘practical toy shop,’ provided with all manner of carpenter’s tools, with wood properly prepared for the young workman, and with screws, nails, glue, emery-paper, etc., is still to seek; her remarks on the two schools, the one teaching ‘by dint of reiterated pain and terror,’ the other ‘with the help of counters and coaxing and gingerbread,’ are not altogether out of date. Nor have we yet learned to pay a good governess £300 a year, on the ground that her working days are few, and she ought to lay by for a comfortable old age. Her severest strictures, like Hannah More’s, are reserved for ‘female accomplishments.’ Their chief use is that ‘they are supposed to increase a young lady’s chance of a prize in the matrimonial lottery.’ Hence, when the end is achieved, they are thrown aside. ‘As soon as a young lady is married, does she not frequently discover that she really has no leisure to cultivate talents which take up so much time?’ Nor is it quite certain that they are as efficacious as is generally supposed. The market is becoming overstocked, for ‘every young lady, and every young woman is now a young lady, has some pretension to accomplishments. She draws a little; or she plays a little; or she speaks French a little.’ Accomplishments are becoming so general ‘that they cannot be considered as the distinguishing characteristics of even a gentlewoman’s education.’ Since they are no longer ‘exclusive,’ she hopes they may be cast aside for something better. Her indictment against the female education of her day is that ‘sentiment and ridicule have conspired to represent reason, knowledge, and science as unsuitable and dangerous to women; yet, at the same time, wit and superficial acquirements in literature have been the object of admiration in society; so that this dangerous inference has been drawn, almost without our perceiving its fallacy, that superficial knowledge is more desirable in women than accurate knowledge.’ It is interesting to find this complaint repeated in 1826 by an anonymous writer,[[9]] who maintains the old dictum that ‘females are not behind males in capacity, and excel them in diligence and docility,’ but they are handicapped by ‘an education of mere externals and of show.’ There is a want of stamina in girls’ education, and as for their school-books, they are mere combinations of words used as ‘substitutes or apologies for ideas.’

Maria Edgeworth’s influence should have been considerable, but turning from her works to her contemporaries and immediate successors, it seems doubtful whether they even understood her. Her stories, whose most useful lessons were addressed to parents, were turned into children’s books; and the demand for a more solid education simply led to an increase of the memory and book-work in schools. In spite of her strictures on the uselessness of a knowledge of isolated facts, and the attempts of Mrs. Barbauld and others to supply something better, the catechism system continued to grow and flourish. Large amounts of memory work were added to the piano and drawing, which still held their own, and the results were not merely negative as regards intellectual value, but positive in their injurious effects on health. Miss Frances Power Cobbe in her description of the fashionable boarding-school to which she was sent in 1836, speaks of the pages of prose the girls were expected to learn by heart, amid the din of constant practising. ‘Not that which was good in itself or useful to the community, or even that which would be delightful to ourselves, but that which would make us admired in society was the raison-d’être of each requirement. Everything was taught in the inverse ratio of its true importance. At the bottom of the scale were Morals and Religion, and at the top were Music and Dancing, miserably poor music too, of the Italian school then in vogue, and generally performed in a showy and tasteless manner on harp or piano.’[[10]] Miss Cobbe thinks this education far worse than that received by her mother in 1790, when much less was attempted, and there was no ‘packing the brains of girls with facts.’ Besides ‘grammar and geography, and a very fair share of history’ (ancient from Rollin, and sacred from Mrs. Trimmer), they ‘learned to speak and read French with a very good accent, and to play the harpsichord with taste.’ Clearly things were on the downward course, and in the first half of this century the education of both sexes was in some respects in a worse condition in England than at any time before or since. Mere ignorance would have been comparatively harmless, but there never was a time when educational theories were more fashionable or more perverse. Miss Catherine Sinclair, who wrote in the forties and fifties, lifted up her voice, in Modern Accomplishments, against the system of cram and display then prevailing. ‘Lady Howard’s utmost ingenuity was exercised in devising plans of study for her daughter, each of which required to be tried under the dynasty of a different governess, so that by the time Matilda Howard attained the age of sixteen, she had been successively taught by eight, all of whom were instructed in the last method that had been invented for making young ladies accomplished on the newest pattern.’ All these governesses were foreign, according to the fashion of the day; at last an English lady of Edgworthian type was discovered, who trained the mind instead of overloading the memory, and all ended happily. Precocity and display were what parents demanded, and schools and governesses contrived to supply the requirements. Miss Sinclair’s accounts of premature death and lifelong ill-health may have been overdrawn, but doubtless she put her finger on the weak spot when she wrote: ‘Nothing is popular now that requires thought in young people, who are constantly devouring books, but never digesting them, and are allowed no time to think.’

The better the school, in the acceptation of that day, the worse probably the result; and those girls whose parents could not afford the expensive governess or the ‘finishing-school,’ often had the best of it, so long as they were not sent to one of the cheap and inefficient imitations. By a curious irony the one attempt made early in the century to give a good education at a small expense, was that which through Charlotte Brontë’s genius has been held up to everlasting contumely. The Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowen Bridge undertook, for the small sum of £14 a year, to clothe, feed, lodge, and educate the daughters of clergymen. In 1825, the year when Charlotte Brontë was there, the Rev. W. Carus Wilson (too well known as Mr. Brocklehurst), appealing for additional funds, stated that an annual income of £250, together with the fees, would be sufficient to meet current expenses. A comparison of this modest demand with the sums raised in our own day for women’s colleges, helps us to realise the revolution that has taken place in public opinion. Even so most of the subscribers seem to have been Mr. Wilson’s relations, and it was only as a charity for the poor clergy, with a side-thought of getting better governesses at low terms, that it awakened any interest at all. Still it was considered a remarkable achievement. In 1833, Mr. Venn Elliott, who had visited the school in its new premises at Casterton, and been present at the consecration of the church built in its neighbourhood, wrote: ‘I would rather have built this school and church than Blenheim and Burleigh. So Dr. Watts said he would rather have written Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted than Milton’s Paradise Lost.’ The result of this visit was the foundation of St. Mary’s Hall at Brighton. It still exists, and gives a really first-class education at a low fee. Other schools were founded in imitation; and in spite of the sordid economy of those early days, and the suffering it entailed on the weakly, they deserve full recognition as almost the only institutions which attempted in the early part of the century to provide a good and cheap education for girls. The tradition of sound study survived, and in 1867 the Casterton institution came in for a word of praise from the Royal Commissioners, amid their almost universal condemnation of existing girls’ schools.

The benefits which a woman’s reign always confers on women have been experienced to the full during the long and peaceful reign of our present Queen. The interest taken by her and the Prince Consort in arts and letters, and in the general improvement of the people, set an example that was readily followed. Ladies of the upper and middle classes began to take a keener interest in the lives of the poor, and in dealing with the problems they thus encountered were often brought to realise their own want of education. There was a stir and a movement towards something better. The views of men were gradually changing, as the ideal of womanhood set by a purer Court became more elevated. Sixty years of a woman’s wise and beneficent rule have done much to restore the glories of Elizabeth’s day. Like the revival of letters, which communicated to the whole world the learning which had once belonged to one small people, this other renaissance brought knowledge, not only to the convent pupil and the lady of leisure, but to all the daughters of the nation. This widening has helped to fix the roots more firmly, and we may hope and believe that the gains of this century are not to be lost, but, enriched by all the wealth of the future, to continue for many a generation to come.

CHAPTER II
THE FIRST COLLEGES

The revival of women’s education in England has now a record of fifty years behind it. On the 1st of May this year Queen’s College in Harley Street celebrated its Jubilee with manifold rejoicings, a celebration in which all Englishwomen may claim the right to join. Though Girton and Holloway and other newer institutions have arisen since to throw the glories of Queen’s into the shade, none can deprive it of its proud title—the first women’s college in England.

An occasion of this kind provokes reminiscence and the drawing of contrasts between 1848 and 1898; while the question that naturally occurs to us is: How did it all begin? Many answers have been suggested. Some have pressed the significance of 1848 as the year of Revolution, and hinted that the women’s share in revolt was an attempt to throw off the shackles of ignorance. This may not be altogether fanciful. Such social upheavals symbolise the workings of intellectual forces, nor can we doubt that the attempt to win for women privileges from which they had hitherto been jealously excluded is a part of the democratic demand for universal equal opportunity.

Along with the general ferment of ideas and the cry for reform must be counted the growing influence on the lives of the upper classes exercised by the Queen and Prince Consort. Following the lead of the Court the ideals of the nation were changing. A more serious view of life and its responsibilities was developing, and the time seemed a propitious one for organised effort. But though various schemes had been discussed, the immediate impetus to action was an actual and crying need. In those days girls of the upper classes were, for the most part, educated at home by governesses, usually foreigners, because Englishwomen, though glad enough to obtain such posts, when suddenly thrown upon the world by the death of a parent or other untoward circumstance, were seldom properly qualified to fill them. Some of course there were who, by foreign travel or private study, had reached a fair standard of attainment; but how distinguish these from the herd, when they lacked even the teacher’s diploma with which their Swiss or German rivals were equipped? In this dilemma the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution came to the rescue.