educating women: the preceptress and her pen, 1780-1820

350 Pages·2008·15.48 MB·English

Conclusion: "Having Made Education My More Particular Study" 284
Appendices 293
Bibliography 308
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LIST OF APPENDICES
Appendix A: Elizabeth Hamilton. Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education,
5th edition. Bath, R. Cruthwell, 1816. 12-21.
Appendix B: Charlotte Smith. "Preface" to Conversations Introducing Poetry on the
Subjects of Natural History for The Use of Children and the Young. London, T. Nelson
and Sons, 1804.
Appendix C: The Grasshopper
i) Cowley's Translation of Anacreon's The Grasshopper (translation made between
1638 and 1652). In J. F. Taafe, Abraham Cowley. New York: Twayne Publishers Inc.,
1974. 45.
ii) Charlotte Smith's .Version of The Grasshopper in Conversations Introducing
Poetry: Chiefly on the Subjects of Natural History for the Use of Children and Young
People. London, T. Nelson and Sons, 1804. 116-117.
Appendix D: Maria Edgeworth. "The Good French Governess" in Moral Tales for
Young People. London: J. Johnson, 1801. 112-113.
Appendix E: Clara Reeve. "To my Friend Mrs X. On her Holding an Argument in
Favour of the Natural Equality of Both of the Sexes." In Original Poems on Several
Occasions. London: T. and J. W. Pasham, 1756. 4-11.
Appendix F: Clara Reeve. The Progress of Romance Through Times, Countries and
Manners, with Remarks on the Good and Bad Effects of it on Them Respectively in A
Course of Evening Conversations, 2nd vol.. Colchester: W. Keymer, 1785. 102-104.
Appendix G: Catharine Cappe. "Introduction" to Memoir of the Life of the Late Mrs
Catharine Cappe Written by Herself. 2nd ed.. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and
Brown, Paternoster Row, 1823. 2-4.
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My chief delight is to learn and to be with those who know how to teach. It is not
often my lot to meet with living instructors, but there are plenty of the dead and
I am satisfied.
Ellen Weeton, Nov. 15th 1809. The Journals of Ellen Weeton 1807-1822, ed.
Edward Hall with a new intoduction by J.J. Bagley (Newton Abbot: David and
Charles Reprints, 1969).
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank the British Academy for funding my research and especially for allowing
me to make several research trips to London and Cambridge. Thanks to the staff of
Wigan Record Office, Leigh; Suffolk County Archives, Ipswich; York University
Library; Leeds Brotherton Library; the British Library, Boston Spa; the John Rylands
Library, Manchester; the British Library, London; the Borthwick Institute, York; and
Cambridge University Library.
My chief thanks go to my two female mentors, Treva Broughton and Jane Rendall
whose unfailing enthusiasm, interest and criticism of my work have been the mainstay
of my time at York. Thanks to them also for showing me the borders between
"literature" and "history" and for helping me in the attempt to cross them. Thanks also
to all the staff and students of the Centre for Women's Studies at York who gave me
the space and encouragement to teach, to learn, and to write. Thanks to the Women's
History Research Group at York for many stimulating discussions over the years.
Thanks also to the organisers of the Erasmus Student Exchange on both sides of the
Channel who allowed me to participate in a fascinating course entitled Fact and Fiction
in a Feminist Perspective held at the University of Utrecht in the summer of 1992.
Thanks to all those teachers from Warrington, Cambridge, and London who have
encouraged my enthusiasm for literature. These were particularly: John Brown, John
Nutter, lain Wright, Julia Swindells and Yvonne Browne. Thanks also to all my fellow
teachers in Warrington, London, Cambridge, Leeds and York whose line of work
provides the inspiration for this thesis. I am grateful too to all my own students who
have given me the opportunity to play the role of preceptress!
Thanks to old friends for their sound advice at times of stress, particularly Anne
Sheinfield, Susan Harkness and Cathy Ward. Thanks to my parents for their support and
particularly to my father and sister, Naomi, for their patient proofreading. Final and
especial thanks to Zainul Sachak for the years of reassurance and belief: without him
this project would never have been completed.
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Introduction
Educating Women, 1780-1820
[To Miss C. Armitage, Upholland, Wigan, July 1823].
My heart ached to discover a very wrong system of education pursued for my
child; but I must submit to it in silence. No father is fit to educate a daughter and
Mary is only preparing for a sickly life, filled with vanity, pride and trifles -- and
a premature death. Poor, poor Mary, thy lot and mine is very sad... [emphasis
mine]
[To Mr Stock, Upholland, Wigan, July 1st 1823].
Do you not love my Mary? Why then deprive her of the comfort of a mother? If
you sincerely loved her, you would study her comfort and satisfaction. When in
your house, what comfort and satisfaction has she, capable of giving her proper
instruction? -- none. Too ignorant are they, and of language and manners not for
her to copy; and when she leaves school, she must come home to be the
companion of servants. Do not educate her thus, I earnestly urge, but let her have
the advantages of a mother's solicitude... [emphasis Weeton's]
Ellen Weeton, The Journals of Ellen Weeton, 1807-1825 1
In July 1823, the Lancashire governess and schoolteacher, Ellen Weeton, wrote
passionately to her friend, Miss Armitage, and to her estranged husband, Aaron Stock,
on the subject of the education of her daughter. Mary had been removed from Weeton's
care by Stock and placed in a boarding school: in the holidays she lived with her father
and his servants. The letters describing Weeton's enforced separation from her daughter
are some of the most melodramatic in her Journal (1807-1825) and support Julia
Swindells's view that Ellen Weeton "idealizes motherhood, with herself as the mother,
1 Ellen Weeton, The Journals of Ellen Weeton, 1807-1825, ed. Edward Hall with a new introduction
by J.J. Bagley, 2 vols. (Newton Abbot: David and Charles Reprints, 1969), 2:228-230. Weeton's journals
were discovered on a bookstall on Wigan Market in 1925 by Edward Hall who first published them as
Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936).
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through the literary."2 Swindells argues persuasively that writers such as Weeton have
recourse to "literary" methods of expression at the moment at which they deal with the
most intimate aspects of their lives as women.
Seen through the lens of contemporary feminist aesthetics, Weeton's loss of her
daughter, and the fervent expressions of desire to which it gives rise, might well be
regarded as fundamental to the literary value and interest of her writing. Certainly such
passages recall the preoccupations and language of early nineteenth-century fiction. But
Weeton's outburst also draws on the pedagogical discourse current at the turn of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - a discourse perhaps even more familiar to Ellen
Weeton than the conventions of the sentimental novel. The discourse of pedagogy,
deployed by Weeton throughout the Journal, included, as a basic principle, the
importance of mother/daughter relationships. Weeton's separation from her daughter thus
constitutes, I would suggest, first and foremost, the contravention of a well-recognised
educational ideal. That it makes for compelling reading and contributes to the "literary"
value of her Journal should perhaps be seen as a secondary, though evidently an
important, consideration. Indeed it is clear that Weeton was exploiting, to its full
dramatic potential, the moral weight attached to notions of good pedagogy in countless
works of autobiography, literary criticism, advice, and novels in the period 1780-1820.
This is not to argue that pedagogical discourse was somehow exempt from
considerations of literary style. Weeton's idea of pedagogy, for example, included both
rational and sentimental elements and accordingly influenced her writing style. Her
Journal reveals her as a participant in the developing field of teaching, but also as a
2 Julia Swindells, Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence (Oxford: Polity
Press, 1985), 141-142.
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writer at a moment when pedagogical ideas came to influence literary change. Rather
than dismiss her passages on education as "slabs of didactics," as did her first editor, I
suggest we must analyse Weeton's writings and the writings of many others like her in
the light of contemporary pedagogical theory.
The passages above suggest one kind of connection between writing and educating in
the period. Weeton's dramatic literary presence is generated in part from her play on the
discrepancies between her own life and the life recommended by educational texts. Her
recourse to the commonplaces of pedagogical discourse - its slights against fathers and
against servants as instructors, for example - supports her dramatic intentions. 3 This
thesis will, however, offer further connections between the fields of education and of
authorship. I establish and explore the importance of "educating women" to the history
of writing in the period 1780-1820 and suggest that the middle-class woman
writer/mentor intervened in some of the most pressing cultural debates of the age. In her
use of educational themes and educational discourse to tell the story of her life, Weeton
stands as a symbol for the principal argument of this thesis: that the period 1780-1820
saw the emergence of a new educational mode of writing, a mode that turned on the
notion of rational British femininity.
Ellen Weeton's Journal is a rich source for the history of "educating women" in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I coin this phrase to encapsulate the related
roles of women as the objects of education and as educators themselves in this period.
3 As Chapter 2 will show, there was a vigorous late eighteenth-century debate about the role of fathers
in the education of their daughters. Though some educational texts advocated greater responsibility for
fathers, others pointed out that men were inappropriate instructors of young girls. Weeton's outburst that
"no father is fit to educate a daughter" may therefore be seen as a heated expression of a commonly-held
prejudice in this period.
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Weeton's Journal, which records her own paltry education in her mother's school, her
employment as schoolmistress, as governess first to a wealthy farmer in the Lake
District and later to a manufacturer in Yorkshire, and finally as mother, is a rare piece
of primary historical evidence on the underresearched subject of women's experiences
of education. It is also evidence of the ways in which middle-class women were fusing
their real or imagined roles as educators with their desire to write. Weeton is one of a
number of preceptresses who picked up their pens and turned to literary production in
this period. This thesis will suggest that, though they emanate from a number of
different social backgrounds, including the gentry, the intellectual elite and the liberal
middle-classes, these women were connected by their espousal of an enlightened view
of pedagogy in which women played a central role.
In this thesis, I shall refer to the educating woman by a number of different names
consistent with contemporary usage. Most commonly, I shall refer to her as
"preceptress" or "mentor", though the terms "tutoress", "instructress", "mistress" and
"governess" were also familiar in the period. Given the practical and ideological overlap
between motherhood and education which I discuss later in this Introduction, the term
"mother" will, in certain contexts, be called upon as a metonym for female educator.4
Ellen Weeton's life history points to the importance of women in the education of both
4 "Pedagogue" and "preceptor" appear in Dr Johnson's Dictionary with no feminine form, though
"preceptress" does appear in the literature of the period. "Governess" is a more expansive term in the
eighteenth century than it was to become in the nineteenth and refers to unpaid female educators in the
home as well as those employed in the homes of others. For clarity's sake, however, I use governess in
its later nineteenth-century sense throughout this thesis." "Instructress", "tutoress" and "governaut" also
appear in the Dictionary. "Mentor" does not appear but was increasingly popular in the period. Dr Samuel
Johnson, ed., A Dictionary of the English Language in which Words are Deduced from their Originals and
Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers to which are Prefixed a
History of the English Language and an English Grammar (London: W. Strahan, 1773).
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lower-class and middle-class children in the early nineteenth-century period. A scholarly
examination of her Journal suggests the need for a social history of such women. I have
not, however, set out to write this neglected history; my materials, and my inclination,
have led me in a different direction. As the result of research based on primary
published texts, I have identified a set of issues which, in some ways, diverge from the
concerns of social historians, but which will, I hope, throw light on them. 5 Natalie
Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge have affirmed the significance to women's history of
the position of women in discourse and representation. 6 I join them in focusing on the
way in which women as educators and writers were represented in the period 1780-1820.
The pedagogue, in the shape of the Victorian governess, has been the subject of a
number of feminist literary-critical and historical accounts, but there has been a tendency
to consider her as having emerged spontaneously in the mid-nineteenth century and to
attribute her appearance to the growth of mid-nineteenth-century industrial society.'
5 The questions asked by social historians might include the number and variety of different kinds of
educational establishment for the education of girls with information on how they were attended, staffed
and funded, and what exactly they taught. It might also involve an analysis of the economic situation of
those families employing governesses, with some indication of the economic situation of governesses, their
qualifications, their length of employment, how itinerant they were and what fate usually befell them at
the end of their period of governessing.
6 Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge, eds., "Women as Historical Actors," chap. in A History of
Woman in the West, vol. 3, Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes (London: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1993), 1-7, here 1-2. There is, of course, some danger here that my study of
the educating woman might, itself, misrepresent the lives of women, since textual evidence is never a
guarantee of what actually took place in the past. In the subject of women's education the gap between
representation and "reality" may be particularly great for, as Martine Sonnet has recently commented, "in
education, practice always lags prudently behind theory, and this truism is even truer when it comes to
the education of women," Martine Sonnet, "A Daughter to Educate" in Ibid., eds. Natalie Zemon Davis
and Arlette Farge, 101-131, 102. Nevertheless, I hope to provide some clues to the mentality of educating
women through their representational strategies.
7 This chronology and approach is adopted by M. Jeanne Peterson, "The Victorian Governess: Status
Incongruence in Family and Society," in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha
Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 3-19; Bea Howe, A Galaxy of Governesses
(London: Batsford Press, 1954); Katharine West, A Chapter of Governesses: A Study of the Governess
in English Fiction, 1800-1949 (London: Cohen and West, 1949; Alice Renton, Tyrant or Victim? A
History of the British Governess (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1991); Patricia Clarke, The
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Weeton's autobiographical account attests, however, both to the real presence and to the
representational dimension of a female mentor much earlier, at the end of the eighteenth
and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Following Nancy Armstrong's suggestions
about the rise of the domestic woman, I would suggest that the appearance of the
"educating woman" was as much the result of changing cultural and literary ideas as of
more recognisable socio-economic developments.' My research will argue, therefore,
that the figure of the preceptress may be as productively investigated through an
examination of the intricacies of texts and language as through a study of employment
patterns and statistics.
To analyse the educating woman, we must first understand the importance of education
and its meanings in eighteenth-century society. The late eighteenth century, in particular,
was an era preoccupied with ideas about education, both of the individual and of society
as a whole.9 Education was seen to encompass what we now think of as social skills
and manners and it implied something different from mere academic achievement.
"Education", unlike "learning", was not seen as the prerogative of male academic
establishments, but could be achieved equally well, if not better, within the confines of
Governesses: Letters from the Colonies, 1862-1882 (London: Hutchinson, 1985); Mary Poovey, The
Anathematised Race: The Governess and Jane Eyre," chap. in Uneven Developments: The Ideological
Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (London: Virago Press, 1989) and Kathryn Hughes, The
Victorian Governess (London: The Hambledon Press, 1993). Hughes suggests that whilst the aristocracy
had been "using the services of the governess since medieval days, her employment by middle-class
families dated back only to the end of the eighteenth century," 11. For a psychoanalytical examination of
the nineteenth-century governess, see Shoshana Felman, "Turning the Screw of Interpretation," Yale
French Studies 55:56 (1977): 94-207. A monograph devoted entirely to the eighteenth-century governess
has yet to appear.
8 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987). I return to Armstrong's work later in this Introduction.
Dr Johnson's Dictionary (1773) defines education as the formation of manners in youth; the manner
of breeding youth, nurture." See also Raymond Williams's Keywords (Glasgow: Croom Helm, 1976).
Williams suggests that "education" came to refer to organised teaching and instruction from the
seventeenth century onwards and was used more prolifically in the eighteenth century than before.
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