Джудит Фландерс – The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (страница 18)

Breakfast for children in prosperous middle-class houses was almost as Spartan as it was for their lower-middle-class coevals. Gwen Raverat, a granddaughter of Charles Darwin and the daughter of a Cambridge don, throughout her childhood ate toast and butter, and porridge with salt. Twice a week the toast was ‘spread with a thin layer of that dangerous luxury, Jam. But, of course, not butter, too. Butter and Jam on the same bit of bread would have been unheard-of indulgence – a disgraceful orgy.’ She first tasted bacon when she was ten years old and away from home on a visit.⁵³ Louise Creighton first tasted marmalade and jam only after her marriage, when she was in her twenties.⁵⁴ Compton Mackenzie, the novelist, had a similar prospect in his childhood:

Nor did the diet my old nurse believed to be good for children encourage biliousness, bread and heavily watered milk alternating with porridge and heavily watered milk. Eggs were rigorously forbidden, and the top of one’s father’s or mother’s boiled egg in which we were indulged when we were with them exceeded in luxurious tastiness any caviar or pate de foie gras of the future. No jam was allowed except raspberry and currant, and that was spread so thinly that it seemed merely to add sweetish seeds to the bread.⁵⁵

The bread and milk (or bread and milk and water) eaten by most lower-middle-class children was not substantially different from this upper-middle-class fare.

Mackenzie was a more rebellious child than Raverat or Creighton, and one day

I thought of a way to exasperate Nanny by telling her that I preferred my bread without butter. I was tired of the way she always transformed butter into scrape, of the way in which, if a dab of butter was happily caught in one of the holes of a slice of … bread … she would excavate it with the knife and turn it into another bit of scrape. I was tired of the way she would mutter that too much butter was not good for me and, as it seemed to me, obviously enjoyed depriving me of it. If I told her that I preferred my bread without butter she would be deprived the pleasure of depriving me.⁵⁶

No doubt his going without butter was a worry – he was removing the possibility of a lesson in the moral values implicit in food.

Morality was at the heart of home education. When Marianne Gaskell came back from her school in London, her mother was well pleased with what she had learned there: ‘It is delightful to see what good it had done [Marianne], sending her to school … She is such a “law unto herself” now, such a sense of duty, and obeys her sense. For instance, she invariably gave the little ones 2 hours of patient steady teaching in the holidays. If there was to be any long excursion for the day she got up earlier, that was all; & they did too, influenced by her example.’⁵⁷ The merit of her schooling was not the knowledge she had acquired, but that she had become dutiful.

Most children, boys and girls, were initially taught at home by their mothers. This might begin at a young age, although Mrs Gaskell was concerned not to start Marianne’s schooling too early – ‘We heard the opinion of a medical man latterly, who said that till the age of three years or thereabouts, the brain of an infant appeared constantly to be verging on inflammation, which any little excess of excitement might produce’ – so she waited until after the child’s second birthday. By her third birthday Marianne had begun to read and sew, ‘and makes pretty good progress … I am glad of something that will occupy her, for I have some difficulty in finding her occupation, and she does not set herself to any employment’.⁵⁸ The expectation that a three-year-old would set herself to specific tasks and that lessons could usefully be learned so young was not uncommon. By his third birthday Marian Jane Bradley’s son Wa was learning to read. Six months later his mother worried that he was very difficult to teach: one day he would read his lessons through with no problem, the next he could not. It took her six weeks to teach him to read ‘cab … which he can’t remember from one day to the next’. But she felt this was her fault – that she was a bad teacher, because ‘It requires more patience than I have’ – not that he was simply too young.⁵⁹

For, oddly enough, there were few instructions in how to teach small children, despite the preponderance of advice being given in all other areas of life. Mothers were supposed to know simply by virtue of being mothers. Mrs Warren was one of the small number who did discuss this subject. Her book How I Managed My Children on £200 a Year was precisely for mothers who could not expect to be able to afford any outside help. However, although it listed which subjects to teach, she never said how to teach most of these subjects: she assumed that all women knew.^*

They did not, of course. Molly Hughes (who later became a teacher) left an account of her education at home – intended to be comic, but hair-raising in the barrenness it revealed. Mid-morning her mother would ‘open an enormous Bible. It was invariably at the Old Testament, and I had to read aloud … No comments were ever made, religious or otherwise, my questions were fobbed off by references to those “old times” or to “bad translations”, and occasionally mother’s pencil, with which she guided me to the words, would travel rapidly over several verses, and I heard a muttered “never mind about that”.’^† Then Molly would parse a verse. Her mother painted in watercolour while Molly did ‘a little reading, sewing, writing, or learning by heart’. Geography consisted of looking at an atlas,

but all I can recall of my little geography book is the opening sentence. ‘The Earth is an oblate spheroid’, and the statement that there are seven, or five, oceans. I never could remember which … For scientific notions I had Dr. Brewer’s Guide to Science, in the form of a catechism … It opens firmly thus: ‘Q. What is heat?’ and the A. comes pat: ‘That which produces the sensation of warmth.’ … Some of the information is human and kindly. Thus we have: ‘Q. What should a fearful person do to be secure in a storm? A. Draw his bedstead into the middle of the room, commit himself to the care of God, and go to bed.’^* … Mother’s arithmetic was at the level of the White Queen’s, and I believe she was never quite sound about borrowing and paying back, especially if there was a nought or two in the top row … Often when sums were adumbrated I felt a little headachy, and thought I could manage a little drawing and painting instead.

If the weather was good, lessons were cancelled and mother and daughter went for a walk, to the West End to shop or to Hamp-stead to sketch. By the age of twelve Molly had never learned how to add currency – she had never even seen the symbols for pounds, shillings and pence.⁶²

Mothers were the teachers in most houses, of their daughters for their entire school career, and their sons usually to the age of seven. Only the most prosperous could afford governesses. Our impression today is that all middle-class households had governesses for their children, but his impression is based on the aspirational nature of so much writing of the time. There were over 30,000 upper-class families by mid-century, with 25,000 governesses listed in the census of 1851. If we assume only half of these families had young children, that leaves a mere 10,000 governesses to be spread among the families of the 250,000 professional men listed in the 1851 census. Again, assume only half had young children. That is still only one governess for every twelve families, and that is not counting the many tens of thousands of clergy, prosperous merchants, bankers, businessmen, factory-owners, all of whom would have had equal call on this precious commodity.

Even where governesses were employed, teaching was not necessary any better. As Gwen Raverat said of her governess: ‘They were all kind, good, dull women; but even interesting lessons can be made incredibly stupid, when they are taught by people who are bored to death with them, and who do not care for the art of teaching either.’⁶³ Charles Dickens’s portrait of Gradgrind, with his love of Facts, was not only a comic fiction: literature both high and low reflected this idea of education as chunks of information. Charlotte M. Yonge gave a vivid picture in The Daisy Chain (1856). There the children had a visiting French master who knew the language well and could tell Ethel, the clever child, when she had gone wrong, but he could not explain why. Ethel

did not like to … have no security against future errors; while he thought her a troublesome pupil, and was put out by her questions … Miss Winter [the governess] … summoned her to an examination such as the governess was very fond of and often practised. Ethel thought it useless … It was of this kind: –

What is the date of the invention of paper?

What is the latitude and longitude of Otaheite?

What are the component parts of brass?

Whence is cochineal imported?⁶⁴

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857) spoke the same language as Miss Winter: