I have already alluded to the change in the Code, which made the full grant for sewing depend chiefly on the merit of the work done before our eyes. There was a list of appropriate exercises, and to each girl was allotted one of these, to be completed in a given time. This was the death knell of the old sewing mistresses. They could not teach a class, though they were often very successful with individuals, and now grants were in danger. The exigency of the hour required new tricks to impose on the unsuspecting inspector. It happened one day that I had taken away with me the worked specimens—fragments of linen, calico, and flannel about three or four inches square, showing various stitches—and asked a skilled needlewoman to give me her opinion. She laughed me to scorn: it was machine work. I laughed her to scorn: I was not so easily taken in: I had seen the work done before my eyes in the Board School; there was no machine in the room. The reply was, that what I saw worked in school was not what I brought away. We differed, and the full grant was paid.
Some years afterwards my eyes were opened. A lady who took much interest in the girls’ sewing, and with whom I had annual and delightful encounters, taunted me and the male sex generally with our incapacity to judge of needlework, and also with our hopeless gullibility. There was a school, she said—but nothing should induce her to reveal the name—where the mistress did all the specimens which I thought were worked by the girls, and these were cleverly palmed off on me in substitution for the patches, &c., on which I had seen the children engaged. I asked no questions, but my colleague and I, as we went home, ran over in our minds the schools within a convenient radius. There was only one of doubtful character, and thither my colleague went next month in the ordinary course. The girls had their sewing given out, and the work was going on in the usual way, when suddenly he noticed that each girl had a work-bag tied round her waist, and his suspicions were aroused. “What is in the bags?” “Oh, nothing: just the usual sewing materials.” He examined several: Mary’s bag contained a flannel patch complete: Jane had a neat piece of back-stitching: Susan had a button-hole complete: Harriet had so many rows of knitting. He reported to me.
Then I saw it all. That old story of the Board School came back to mind: the work was machined, and the girls, or the teachers—let us hope that the teachers did not make the girls parties to the fraud—had “palmed it” with a little sleight of hand, and perhaps a little appropriate “patter.”
But such cases must have been rare; whereas in the days of exhibited garments, detection being almost impossible, anything may have been done. In one large town it was rumoured that there was a depôt which lent out on hire garments for the day of inspection. This may be regarded as evidence not so much of what was done, as of what was possible. It is certain that in some other schools the best girls made all the garments, and the work of the inefficient was suppressed.
When the Code made fraud too easy, I blamed the Code. In those days every pupil-teacher, and every woman sitting for a certificate, had to present to the Inspector a garment as evidence of her skill as a needlewoman: and on this she got marks which counted for the examination. There was nothing on earth to show that the presenter of the garment had made it, and of course one could not ask questions. “I am surprised that Mary Jane has failed,” said a schoolmistress of my acquaintance, “she wasn’t that bad at sums, and it wasn’t for her needlework, for I did that myself.”
Oh, Adam! When we remember that he had no one to associate with but Eve, we cease to wonder that his moral sense weakened. “She gave me of the tree.”
One more reminiscence. Lady managers often would say to me, “Why don’t the girls learn to sew? They come here as servants, after having been in the school for years, and they can’t do a thing?” I heard this repeated for years, and could not reply. Nor indeed did I pay much heed: lady managers were always on the warpath. But one day I mentioned the gravamen to a colleague, and asked how he explained this failure of our system of education.
“Pooh, pooh,” he replied, “did you ever hear of the monkeys on the West Coast of Africa, or somewhere, who, according to the natives, could talk if they liked, but they won’t, because, if they did, they would have to work? That is what is the matter with our girls. They go out to service, and if they confess that they can sew, they are put on to do all the household sewing, besides their regular work: so they pretend they are useless and the ‘missus’ gets a machine.”
It may be so: it is only married men who are in a position to reveal the secret workings of domestic life. “When you’re a married man,” said Mr. Weller, “you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now”—I commend the rest of his profound utterance to the attention of the reader. It occurs in Chapter XXVII. of Pickwick.[43]