Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [85]
The governess, another female figure associated with the nursery, especially for the education of girls, was made familiar by nineteenth-century writers. Jane Austen is sympathetic to the plight of the governess in Emma, whilst Charlotte Brontë created the plucky but sensitive figure of Jane Eyre in her eponymous novel. (Jane’s unexpected legacy and subsequent marriage with her former employer would in real life have been a very great rarity.) The governess was in a delicate position, as well as an awkward one, being expected to come from a ‘genteel’ background yet to be in need of a paid job in a stranger’s family. As the Adamses wrote in 1825 – in what reads like a job description for Jane Eyre’s fictional post at Thornfield Hall – ‘there is a constant demand for females of genteel manners, and finished education, at salaries which vary according to qualifications and duties between 25 and 120 pounds per annum.’56 As they observed:
Teachers in seminaries, half-boarders, educated for the purpose, and the unsettled daughters of respectable families of moderate fortune, who have received a finished education are usually selected for this important duty . . . Good temper, and good manners, with a genteel exterior, are indispensable: for more is learnt by example than precept. Besides the governess who desires to be on a footing with the family, ought to be able to conduct herself in such manner, as never to render an apology necessary for her presence at family parties.
Governesses would be required to teach English, French and Italian, arithemetic, geography and the popular sciences.57
Their situation was often made worse by the remoteness of many country houses. Mrs Smith, an archly aristocratic Scot, recalled in Memoirs of a Highland Lady her disdain for her own governess, Miss Elphick, in the early nineteenth century: ‘I was pert enough, I daresay, for the education we had received had given us an extreme contempt for such ignorance, but what girl of fifteen, brought up as I had been, could be expected to show respect for an illiterate woman of very ungovernable temper, whose ideas had been gathered from a class lower than we could have possible been acquainted with, and whose habits were those of a servant.’58
Charlotte Brontë wrote bitingly of a profession she loathed: ‘A private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living rational being, except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil,’ a sentiment that must have been shared by countless other servants of all ranks over the ages. Her own experiences had disillusioned her: ‘I used to think I should like to be in the stir of grand folks’ society; but I have had enough of it – it is dreary work to look on and listen.’59
However, there were many aristocrats who looked back on those who taught them with affection and gratitude. Lady Dorothy Nevill recalled her governess, Elizabeth Redgrave, the sister of the famous painter Richard Redgrave, as having ‘great cultivation, besides being possessed of a certain distinction of mind . . . Her tender care and companionship – in childhood a preceptress, in after-life a much-loved friend – I have always felt to have been an inestimable boon, for thus was implanted in my mind the love of the artistic and the beautiful which during my life has proved a certain and ever-present source of delight.’60
Male tutors might be resident or brought in as required. The Hon. Grantley Berkeley in his Life and Recollections (1865) reflected on his patchy education, and that of his siblings:
The arrangements made for our education did not promise much – a very gentleman like young man, a Mr Benson, came to us from a school near Brentford three times a week to hear us boys repeat our lessons; and an absurd, fat old fellow, named Second, possessing