The great Bloomsbury school, however, passed away at length, good Mrs. Devis having departed to the land where I trust the Rivers of Paradise formed part of her new study of Geography. Nearly half-a-century later, when it came to my turn to receive education, it was not in London but in Brighton that the ladies’ schools most in estimation were to be found. There were even then (about 1836) not less than a hundred such establishments in the town, but that at No. 32, Brunswick Terrace, of which Miss Runciman and Miss Roberts were mistresses, and which had been founded some time before by a celebrated Miss Poggi, was supposed to be nec pluribus impar. It was, at all events, the most outrageously expensive, the nominal tariff of £120 or £130 per annum representing scarcely a fourth of the charges for “extras” which actually appeared in the bills of many of the pupils. My own, I know, amounted to £1,000 for two years’ schooling.
I shall write of this school quite frankly, since the two poor ladies, well-meaning but very unwise, to whom it belonged have been dead for nearly thirty years, and it can hurt nobody to record my conviction that a better system than theirs could scarcely have been devised had it been designed to attain the maximum of cost and labour and the minimum of solid results. It was the typical Higher Education of the period, carried out to the extreme of expenditure and high pressure.
Profane persons were apt to describe our school as a Convent, and to refer to the back door of our garden, whence we issued on our dismal diurnal walks, as the “postern.” If we in any degree resembled nuns, however, it was assuredly not those of either a Contemplative or Silent Order. The din of our large double schoolrooms was something frightful. Sitting in either of them, four pianos might be heard going at once in rooms above and around us, while at numerous tables scattered about the rooms there were girls reading aloud to the governesses and reciting lessons in English, French, German, and Italian. This hideous clatter continued the entire day till we went to bed at night, there being no time whatever allowed for recreation, unless the dreary hour of walking with our teachers (when we recited our verbs), could so be described by a fantastic imagination. In the midst of the uproar we were obliged to write our exercises, to compose our themes, and to commit to memory whole pages of prose. On Saturday afternoons, instead of play, there was a terrible ordeal generally known as the “Judgment Day.” The two schoolmistresses sat side by side, solemn and stern, at the head of the long table. Behind them sat all the governesses as Assessors. On the table were the books wherein our evil deeds of the week were recorded; and round the room against the wall, seated on stools of penitential discomfort, we sat, five-and-twenty “damosels,” anything but “Blessed,” expecting our sentences according to our ill-deserts. It must be explained that the fiendish ingenuity of some teacher had invented for our torment a system of imaginary “cards,” which we were supposed to “lose” (though we never gained any) whenever we had not finished all our various lessons and practisings every night before bed-time, or whenever we had been given the mark for “stooping,” or had been impertinent, or had been “turned” in our lessons, or had been marked “P” by the music master, or had been convicted of “disorder” (e.g., having our long shoe-strings untied), or, lastly, had told lies! Any one crime in this heterogeneous list entailed the same penalty, namely, the sentence, “You have lost your card, Miss So and so, for such and such a thing;” and when Saturday came round, if three cards had been lost in the week, the law wreaked its justice on the unhappy sinner’s head! Her confession having been wrung from her at the awful judgment-seat above described, and the books having been consulted, she was solemnly scolded and told to sit in the corner for the rest of the evening! Anything more ridiculous than the scene which followed can hardly be conceived. I have seen (after a week in which a sort of feminine barring-out had taken place) no less than nine young ladies obliged to sit for hours in the angles of the three rooms, like naughty babies, with their faces to the wall; half of them being quite of marriageable age, and all dressed, as was de rigueur with us every day, in full evening attire of silk or muslin, with gloves and kid slippers. Naturally, Saturday evenings, instead of affording some relief to the incessant overstrain of the week, were looked upon with terror as the worst time of all. Those who escaped the fell destiny of the corner were allowed, if they chose to write to their parents, but our letters were perforce committed at night to the schoolmistress to seal, and were not as may be imagined, exactly the natural outpouring of our sentiments as regarded those ladies and their school.
Our household was a large one. It consisted of the two schoolmistresses and joint proprietors, of the sister of one of them and another English governess; of a French, an Italian, and a German lady teacher; of a considerable staff of respectable servants; and finally of twenty-five or twenty-six pupils, varying in age from nine to nineteen. All the pupils were daughters of men of some standing, mostly country gentlemen, members of Parliament, and offshoots of the peerage. There were several heiresses amongst us, and one girl whom we all liked and recognised as the beauty of the school, the daughter of Horace Smith, author of Rejected Addresses. On the whole, looking back after the long interval, it seems to me that the young creatures there assembled were full of capabilities for widely extended usefulness and influence. Many were decidedly clever and nearly all were well disposed. There was very little malice or any other vicious ideas or feelings, and no worldliness at all amongst us. I make this last remark because the novel of Rose, Blanche and Violet, by the late Mr. G. H. Lewes, is evidently intended in sundry details to describe this particular school, and yet most falsely represents the girls as thinking a great deal of each other’s wealth or comparative poverty. Nothing was further from the fact. One of our heiresses, I well remember, and another damsel of high degree, the granddaughter of a duke, were our constant butts for their ignorance and stupidity, rather than the objects of any preferential flattery. Of vulgarity of feeling of the kind imagined by Mr. Lewes, I cannot recall a trace.
But all this fine human material was deplorably wasted. Nobody dreamed that any one of us could in later life be more or less than an “Ornament of Society.” That a pupil in that school should ever become an artist, or authoress, would have been looked upon by both Miss Runciman and Miss Roberts as a deplorable dereliction. 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 acquirement. Everything was taught us 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. I can recall an amusing instance in which the order of precedence above described was naïvely betrayed by one of our schoolmistresses when she was admonishing one of the girls who had been detected in a lie. “Don’t you know, you naughty girl,” said Miss R. impressively, before the whole school: “don’t you know we had almost rather find you have a P——” (the mark of Pretty Well) “in your music, than tell such falsehoods?”
It mattered nothing whether we had any “music in our souls” or any voices in our throats, equally we were driven through the dreary course of practising daily for a couple of hours under a German teacher, and then receiving lessons twice or three times a week from a music master (Griesbach by name) and a singing master. Many of us, myself in particular, in addition to these had a harp master, a Frenchman named Labarre, who gave us lessons at a guinea apiece, while we could only play with one hand at a time. Lastly there were a few young ladies who took instructions in the new instruments, the concertina and the accordion!
The waste of money involved in all this, the piles of useless music, and songs never to be sung, for which our parents had to pay, and the loss of priceless time for ourselves, were truly deplorable; and the result of course in many cases (as in my own) complete failure. One day I said to the good little German teacher, who nourished a hopeless attachment for Schiller’s Marquis Posa, and was altogether a sympathetic person, “My dear Fraulein, I mean to practise this piece of Beethoven’s till I conquer it.” “My dear,” responded the honest Fraulein, “you do practice that piece for seex hours a day, and you do live till you are seexty, at the end you will not play it!” Yet so hopeless a pupil was compelled to learn for years, not only the piano, but the harp and singing!
Next to music in importance in our curriculum came dancing. The famous old Madame Michaud and her husband both attended us constantly, and we danced to their direction in our large play-room (lucus a non lucendo), till we had learned not only all the dances in use in England in that ante-polka epoch, but almost every national dance in Europe, the Minuet, the Gavotte, the Cachucha, the Bolero, the Mazurka, and the Tarantella. To see the stout old lady in her heavy green velvet dress, with furbelow a foot deep of sable, going through the latter cheerful performance for our ensample, was a sight not to be forgotten. Beside the dancing we had “calisthenic” lessons every week from a “Capitaine” Somebody, who put us through manifold exercises with poles and dumbbells. How much better a few good country scrambles would have been than all these calisthenics it is needless to say, but our dismal walks were confined to parading the esplanade and neighbouring terraces. Our parties never exceeded six, a governess being one of the number, and we looked down from an immeasurable height of superiority on the processions of twenty and thirty girls belonging to other schools. The governess who accompanied us had enough to do with her small party, for it was her duty to utilise these brief hours of bodily exercise by hearing us repeat our French, Italian or German verbs, according to her own nationality.
Next to Music and Dancing and Deportment, came Drawing, but that was not a sufficiently voyant accomplishment, and no great attention was paid to it; the instruction also being of a second-rate kind, except that it included lessons in perspective which have been useful to me ever since. Then followed Modern Languages. No Greek or Latin were heard of at the school, but French, Italian and German were chattered all day long, our tongues being only set at liberty at six o’clock to speak English. Such French, such Italian, and such German as we actually spoke may be more easily imagined than described. We had bad “Marks” for speaking wrong languages, e.g., French when we bound to speak Italian or German, and a dreadful mark for bad French, which was transferred from one to another all day long, and was a fertile source of tears and quarrels, involving as it did a heavy lesson out of Noel et Chapsal’s Grammar on the last holder at night. We also read in each language every day to the French, Italian and German ladies, recited lessons to them, and wrote exercises for the respective masters who attended every week. One of these foreign masters, by the way, was the patriot Berchet; a sad, grim-looking man of whom I am afraid we rather made fun; and on one occasion, when he had gone back to Italy, a compatriot, whom we were told was a very great personage indeed, took his classes to prevent them from being transferred to any other of the Brighton teachers of Italian. If my memory have not played me a trick, this illustrious substitute for Berchet was Manzoni, the author of the Promessi Sposi; a distinguished-looking middle-aged man, who won all our hearts by pronouncing everything we did admirable, even, I think, on the occasion when one young lady freely translated Tasso,—
“Fama e terre acquistasse,”