Work and Play in Girls' Schools / By Three Head Mistresses

by Dorothea Beale; J. F. Dove; Lucy Helen Muriel Soulsby

But even given the atlas, it remains for the teacher to find an unfailing receipt by which to ensure its use.

(b) BlackboardNot the least part of the value of a syllabus in the hands of a pupil, is the saving of time it makes in the lesson, otherwise the blackboard must be used for unfamiliar names and words. The merest glance through a pupil’s rough notes of French history will be a sufficient proof of this.

(c) First-hand acquaintance with authorities.Besides the text-book, which every pupil should possess, no teacher of older girls will be satisfied unless they read at least passages from the authorities on the period. The difficulty is to provide a sufficient number of copies for a large class, or any copies at all, beyond those possessed by the teacher or the school: this difficulty, however, may be met. There are always girls who are glad to have good books suggested for Christmas or birthday presents, and who begin a really nice library of their own in this way. But a class-library can be formed without much trouble. The nucleus of a class-library being made by the necessary books for one year’s work, the girls can be asked to leave a similar legacy for their successors. A list of books wanted, with their prices, can be prepared, and it will be found that several will combine to give really expensive books, and in this way the class can command the use of sets of Stubbs, Froude, Gardiner, Ranke, Lecky, etc., besides smaller books like the Great Statesmen Series.

Since it is impossible for girls with their limited time to read the whole of the big histories, the teacher will find it a valuable practice to dictate the numbers of the pages (in one or more volumes) bearing upon her lesson, which the girls should read. They are thus trained to use authorities, and this is being recognised more and more as of the first importance. There was a time when girls depended entirely upon their notes, and the misspelling of names of historians showed that their knowledge of great writers was second-hand. But when they get a first-hand acquaintance with historians like Froude, Gardiner, Seeley, Ranke, Lecky, they are insensibly being trained to be satisfied with nothing but the best.

(d) Contemporary writings: chronicles.The period should be studied by the teacher, and to a certain extent by the pupil, in contemporary writers. Chronicles are delightful reading. Who that has once learnt to know Saint Louis of France in the pages of his faithful seneschal, can fail to breathe the very atmosphere of the time? De Joinville shows him what a later preacher called him, “the most loyal spirit of his age”. Again no weighty dissertations on the small account in which human life was held in the Middle Ages would be so convincing as the incidental contemptuous remarks of the courtier-chronicler Froissart. The exquisite courtesy to a De Ribeaumont was quite compatible with the halters for the six citizens of Calais. And to take one more illustration quite late on in the centuries—what a gulf separates ante-Reform times from our own! How expressive of the haughty landed aristocrat are these words of the Duchess of Buckingham after condescending to listen to the Wesleyan preaching: “I thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers. Their doctrines are most repulsive and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks and to do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth. This is highly offensive, and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high birth and good breeding.”

Full lists of contemporary writers will be found in Traill’s volumes on Social England, which as “a record of the progress of the people in Religion, Laws, Learning, Arts, Industry, Commerce, Science, Literature and Manners, from the earliest times to the present day,” meets perhaps the greatest want of the ordinary teacher, to whom no one general history of social progress was before accessible.

(e) Historical pictures.As illustrations there are also historical portraits, contemporary pictures of historic scenes, and pictures of costumes. Most schools now subscribe to the “Art for Schools Association,” and can make a very good portrait gallery of their own. The splendid collection of historical costumes designed by Mr. Lewis Wingfield for the Healtheries can still be seen, I believe, and a few of them have been reproduced by him in a book with descriptive letterpress. Exhibitions, like the Tudor and Stuart, are most valuable to the realisation of history, and visits to historical buildings are within the possibilities of most, and add great zest to many a holiday both for teachers and girls. It is impossible to forget the circumstances of the Dauphin’s coronation at Rheims, after staying where Joan of Arc stayed and standing in the cathedral, where she witnessed the fulfilment of her mission.

(f) Historical poems, Shakspere’s plays, historical novels.Passages from historical poems or from a Shakspere play often add to the interest of a lesson; as the challenge-scene from Richard II., the trial-scene from Henry VIII., Milton’s sonnet on the massacre in Piedmont, Spenser’s Gloriana and the false Duessa for Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots. And in quite modern history Mrs. Hamilton King’s Disciples, Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise, Mrs. Browning’s Peace of Villafranca, all give expression to the passionate longing for freedom of Italy.

Perhaps nothing makes history more real than a good historical novel. Bulwer-Lytton’s Last of the Barons makes the figure of Warwick as lifelike as that of any minister of our own day. Edward IV., Clarence, Richard III. have each their individuality, and so has that shadowy prince who was killed at Tewkesbury, while Isabella Neville stands out for ever distinct from her gentle, timid sister Anne.

John Inglesant gives the very spirit of the Charles I. period—cavaliers and ladies coquetting with the classics in the learned Oxford halls, the devotion, even to the death, of the Jesuit-trained John Inglesant, and the midnight apparition of the murdered Strafford to the king, for whom he had laid down his life.