Schools, School-Books and Schoolmasters / A Contribution to the History of Educational Development in Great Britain

by William Carew Hazlitt

I. The neglect of female education in the United Kingdom down to a recent date proceeded from an absence of any adequate or organisable machinery for the purpose, and from the complete monopoly of learning by men in early times. In Scotland this mischief was remedied to a certain extent much sooner than in England, owing to the institution of Academies, where both sexes received instruction under one roof from the same masters; and this circumstance may help to explain the general superiority of the Scots, within certain limits, to the Southern Britons in this respect, the better upbringing of the mother communicating itself to her children.

Common academies for boys and girls were not wholly unknown in England, however, but they were of very rare occurrence, and have now become still rarer, as they barely exist at all except as dame-schools.

Now-a-days, of course, the most elaborate and costly apparatus is provided for the mental cultivation and training of girls of all ranks; and the daughter of a citizen may acquire accomplishments which were long beyond the reach of daughters of kings. Formerly the lower classes of females remained as illiterate as the corresponding rank of men, and the studies of the gentlewoman were superintended by her parents and her tutor or her governess. But in the Middle Ages, and long after the revival of learning, the only persons capable of conducting the education of a lady who had emerged from the nursery and passed the rudimentary stage were ecclesiastics; and the laymen who gradually qualified themselves for the task, such as Ascham and Buchanan, were scholars of a scarce type, who had gained their proficiency in the gymnasia and universities of Italy, Germany, or France. The Italian influence was doubtless the earliest, but the German was the most powerful, and has proved the most lasting.

In France from a very remote period the dame-school appears to have existed in some measure and form, for a fourteenth-century sculpture, already mentioned in the remarks on scholastic discipline, depicts an establishment of this kind—a petty school for boys kept by a woman. If there was any such thing among us, I have met with no record of it; but the practice, from the early intimacy between those countries, would be more apt to find its way first of all from the French into Scotland.

To such as have had under their eyes the letters and other literary monuments which reveal to us the condition of the more cultivated section of the English female community in the old days, it seems superfluous to insist on the strange ignorance of the principia of knowledge, and on the fallow state of the intellectual faculties which these evidences establish. The Paston and Plumpton Correspondence, Mrs. Green’s Letters of Illustrious Ladies, and Sir Henry Ellis’s three Series of Original Letters, may perhaps be quoted as affording an insight into the present aspect of the question before us; and I think that the most striking proofs of the inattention to female culture in this country are to be found in documents previous to the Reformation, when the influence brought to bear on the sex was almost exclusively monastic or clerical.

The great political and religious movement which Henry VIII. was enabled by circumstances to carry through undoubtedly imparted a large share of lay feeling and prejudice to the educational system; and this tendency was promoted and strengthened during the short reign of Edward VI. by the foundation of chartered schools throughout the kingdom for the instruction of youth in grammar and other primordial matters.

II. But the progress thus made did not sensibly affect the other sex. Girls still depended, as a rule, on the old methods and channels of learning; the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic formed the ordinary routine and limit, unless an acquaintance with French, or even with Italian, happened to be added as a special accomplishment. Very occasionally a maiden of studious character was permitted to avail herself of the tutor maintained at home for her brothers, as was the case of the Honourable Mrs. North, a younger daughter of Lord North of Kirtling, who learned Latin and Greek in this manner; and from Margaret Roper to Mrs. Somerville, or indeed in the cases adduced by Ballard in his Memoirs of Learned Ladies, there were from time to time even in the old days splendid exceptions to the prevailing low level of female culture. But under any circumstances, until the period arrived when ladies were competent to undertake the tuition of ladies, all these matters necessarily devolved, in the first place, on the mother, and finally on a preceptor, who was necessarily a man, and most probably in holy orders. His contribution to the development of character was exceedingly preponderant, and was beyond doubt a most important factor in maintaining and extending the power of the Church, and indemnifying the clergy for the direct political influence of which the Reformation dispossessed them.

The Ladies’ School or College may be considered a product of the acute political distempers which accompanied the Civil War. Mistress Bathsua Makins, who had been governess to one of the daughters of Charles I.—the Princess Elizabeth—set up, after the fall of the King, an establishment at Putney, to which Evelyn mentions that he paid a visit in company with some ladies on the 17th May 1649; but I find no reference to this institution in Lysons. A similar case existed somewhat later at Highgate; and the admirers of Charles and Mary Lamb, at least, do not require to be told that in the little volume called “Mrs. Leicester’s School,” 1809, there are some interesting hints, both historical and autobiographical, in relation to the old-fashioned seminary at Amwell. But, as a rule, these agents in our later civilisation and social refinement, important as they were, have left behind them few, if any, traces of their existence and management. They bred those who were content to become, in course of time, the wives and mothers of England, and to study the arts of domestic life. In such are centred the strength and glory of the country; but their careers, like “the short and simple annals of the poor,” have escaped literary commemoration.

“A Gentleman of Cambridge,” as he styles himself on the title of an English adaptation of the Abbé d’Ancourt’s Lady’s Preceptor, 1743, defines the qualifications then thought necessary and adequate for a young gentlewoman. He does not go beyond a thorough knowledge of English, an acquaintance with French and Italian, a familiarity with arithmetic and accounts, and the mastery of a good handwriting; and yet how few probably reached this moderate standard a century and a half ago—nay, how few reach it now!

In the time of the early Stuarts, the training of girls in English country towns, if it is to be augured from that of the Shakespears at Stratford, even where the parents were in good circumstances and the father a man of literary tastes and occupations, was still extremely primitive and scanty. The poet’s elder daughter, Susanna, seems to have just contrived to write, or rather print, her name; but Judith used a mark, and Mrs. Quiney, whose son became Judith’s husband, did the same.