Wordsworth.
Let me present to you, first, an early Victorian girl, born, indeed, about the Waterloo year; next, her granddaughter, born about 1875.
The young lady of 1837 has been to a fashionable school: she has learned accomplishments, deportment, and dress. She is full of sentiment: there was an amazing amount of sentiment in the air about that time—she loves to talk and read about gallant knights, crusaders, and troubadours; she gently touches the guitar—her sentiment, or her little affectation, has touched her with a graceful melancholy, a becoming stoop, a sweet pensiveness; she loves the aristocracy, even though her home is in that part of London called Bloomsbury, whither the belted earl cometh not, even though her papa goes into the City; she reads a deal of poetry, especially those poems which deal with the affections, of which there are many at this time; on Sunday she goes to church religiously and pensively, followed by a footman carrying her Prayer Book and a long stick; she can play on the guitar and the piano a few easy pieces which she has learned; she knows a few words of French, which she produces at frequent intervals; as to history, geography, science, the condition of the people, her mind is an entire blank; she knows nothing of these things. Her conversation is commonplace, as her ideas are limited; she cannot reason on any subject whatever because of her ignorance,—as she herself would say, because she is a woman. In her presence, and indeed in the presence of ladies generally, men talk trivialities. There was indeed a general belief that women were creatures incapable of argument, or of reason, or of connected thought. It was no use arguing about the matter. The Lord had made them so. Women, said the philosophers, cannot understand logic: they see things, if they do see them at all, by instinctive perception. This theory accounted for everything—for those cases when women undoubtedly did “see things.” Also, it fully justified people in withholding from women any kind of education worthy the name. A quite needless expense, you understand.
THE QUEEN RECEIVING THE CRIMEAN VETERANS AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE
The girl who lived in Bloomsbury Square, or in the suburbs—say Clapham Common—had, in those days, to make herself happy with slender and simple materials. There were very few concerts: I think the Philharmonic was already in existence; Oratorios were sometimes performed: it was not every girl who liked what was then called classical music; the general cultivation of music was poor and meagre, and within very narrow limits: people liked songs, it is true, especially pathetic songs. These, like the poetry of the Keepsake and Friendship’s Offering, mostly turned on the domestic affections. The young ladies recognised this sentiment, bought or copied those songs, and sang the most mournful of ditties. Everybody, in every class which respected itself and claimed gentility of any kind, talked about the opera, to which the well-to-do young lady was taken once a year, solemnly. This gave her the right for the rest of the year to talk about the repertoire, and to speak with disrespect of the leading singers.
The theatre was very seldom visited; indeed there were reasons why it was not desirable that young ladies should go to the theatre; if they did go it was an event very much discussed both before and after. There were only one or two theatres that respectable people could possibly attend, and the one part of the house where ladies could be seen was the dress circle. Now in the Thirties, if my information is correct, there were good actors, but the plays were monstrously bad. The Queen, however, used to like going to the theatre. If you walk down to those north of the Strand, you may see how the road was widened for her to go to the Adelphi melodramas. The reading of girls was carefully selected for them; in serious circles—there were many circles in 1840 privileged to be serious—fiction was absolutely forbidden; its place was taken by religious biography: wonderful to think how large a part was played by religious biography about that time. I do not know what books besides these biographies and records of “conversation” were allowed, but I imagine that there were not many. At all events, a young woman must not be allowed to read anything which would suggest to her the wickedness of the world, the realities of the world, the truth about men and women, or the meanings of humanity. She was to leave her mother’s nest not only innocent—girls do still leave their mothers in innocence—but also in a state of ignorance, which was then mistaken for a state of grace. How far she really was ignorant no one but herself could tell; one imagines that there may have been some knowledge behind that demure countenance that was not generally suspected.
Painting by Winterhalter