The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

Even for girls who knew their place, social life imposed requirements which they could not fulfil while undergoing full-time education. Molly Hughes, aware that she was going to have to support herself, rushed with her friend to tell her parents that they had matriculated. She found the friend’s sister had brought her new baby for a visit, and ‘When we burst out with “We’ve passed the matriculation … we’re members of the University,” we received the response, “Yes, dears? … and did it love its granny den!”’ Molly’s brother grudgingly admitted that, as Molly’s fiance was not earning enough for them to marry on, she might as well work for a degree, adding, ‘Don’t work too hard.’

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That was the key. Girls and young women must not give their undivided attention to anything. Florence Nightingale, who certainly broke out of her family’s expectations, wrote an impassioned essay on the subject in 1852, when she was thirty-two. She thought it important enough to revise it seven years later, on her return from the Crimea. On the advice of her friend John Stuart Mill she did not attempt to publish it. A great advocate of women’s equality, he was none the less probably right: the anguish she felt was so nakedly apparent that she might have subsequently found it difficult to get men in power to take her health-care concerns seriously. She wrote:

How should we learn a language if we were to give it an hour a week? A fortnight’s steady application would make more way in it than a year of such patch-work. A ‘lady’ can hardly go to ‘her school’ two days running. She cannot leave the breakfast-table – or she must be fulfilling some little frivolous ‘duty’, which others ought not to exact, or which might just as well be done some other time …

If a man were to follow up his profession or occupation at odd times, how would he do it? Would he become skilful in that profession? It is acknowledged by women themselves that they are inferior in every occupation to men. Is it wonderful? They do everything at ‘odd times’ …

We can never pursue any object for a single two hours, for we can never command any regular leisure or solitude …

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All study had to give way to other members of the family – Maud Berkeley and her friends found that even practising the piano, that ladylike occupation par excellence, was difficult to achieve: ‘[My father] came in while I was hard at work on my arpeggios, to say he had just started a course of reading Plato and found he was vastly distracted by my music. Very difficult, attempting to be studious when each attempt brings only reproach … Heard from Lillian later that Mr Barnes made a similar protest.’

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Sarah Stickney Ellis, in The Daughters of England, was very firm. There was no point in educating women, because men had done everything before, and done it better. ‘What possible use’, she asked rhetorically, ‘can be the learning of dead languages?’ There were already translations available of all the major works, from which girls would ‘become more intimately acquainted with the spirit of the writer, and the customs of the time’ than they ever could by attempting to read works in the originals. Likewise, a girl need not study science more than superficially. A mere acquaintanceship would render her ‘more companionable to men’, because luckily ‘it should not be necessary for her to talk much, even on his favourite topics, in order to obtain his favour’. Knowledge was important only for a girl to be able ‘to listen attentively’, otherwise she would ‘destroy the satisfaction which most men feel in conversing with really intelligent women’.

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The Daisy Chain was enormously successful, and considered a very sound moral tale, helpful to young girls. Ethel, a bookish, hoydenish girl, is gradually brought to understand that the pinnacle of womanhood is in the renunciation of the use of her intelligence. At first she studies with her brother. He attends school, and passes on to her the gist of his lessons, which she is permitted to indulge herself with after she has performed such essentials as mending her frocks. However, by being clever and untidy and having no aptitude for household work, she will. Miss Winter fears, grow up ‘odd, eccentric and blue’. Soon her family decides that the time has come for her to stop studying Latin and Greek. Her brother, who has been her champion, agrees: ‘I assure you, Ethel, it is really time for you to stop, or you would get into a regular learned lady, and be good for nothing.’ So Ethel gives up all her aspirations, and crowns the sacrifice (which she now thinks of as a triumph) by finding pleasure instead in stitching up her brother’s Newdigate Prize submission in Balliol colours.

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Girls who were not prepared to give up all personal aspirations, as Ethel had done so cheerfully, had other reasons to desist from serious study. Education for adolescent girls was a serious health risk, they were warned. The educator Elizabeth Missing Sewell’s Principles of Education, Drawn from Nature and Revelation was concerned with the upper classes, but she pointed out universal truths:

[A boy] has been riding, and boating, and playing cricket, and both body and mind have been roused to energy; and so, when he comes to study, he has a sense of power, which acts mentally as well as physically, and enables him to grasp difficulties, and master them. The girl, on the contrary, has been guarded from over fatigue, subject to restrictions with regard to cold and heat, and hours of study, seldom trusted away from home, allowed only a small share of responsibility; – not willingly, with any wish to thwart her inclinations – but simply because, if she is not thus guarded, if she is allowed to run the risks, which, to the boy, are a matter of indifference, she will probably develop some disease, which, if not fatal, will, at any rate, be an injury to her for life.

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Dr James Burnett, in Delicate, Backward, Puny and Stunted Children (1895), assured his readers that a girl would, at puberty, always fall behind her brothers in academic achievement: her ‘disordered pelvic life’ guaranteed that she ‘must necessarily be in ill-health more or less [ever after] … Not one exception to this have I ever seen.’

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Despite this consensus, many popular novelists deplored the lack of female education: Dickens, Thackeray and also Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot painted vivid pictures of the resulting misery of ignorance, for both sexes. Jeannette Marshall’s father, a surgeon and Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy, encouraged his daughters to attend lectures at University College. He even hoped they would sit exams. They refused to do the latter, and attended few lectures. It was not surprising. From the schoolroom onwards, girls were never tested, never matched against others, never socialized in any form. Jeannette and her sister Ada managed one term before the requirements of their social life supervened: they had made no friends with any of the other women attending the college; from Jeannette’s diary, it is not clear that they ever learned any of their names. For Jeannette, education was a matter of passing the time – she studied algebra in late adolescence as ‘a cure for boredom’ – or, more importantly, of prestige. She had piano lessons with the well-known pianist (and founder of the English Wagner Society) Edward Dannreuther, and noted of some new acquaintances, ‘I went up 100 per cent in their estimation when they heard Mr. Dannreuther was my [music] master. A good card to play!’

(#litres_trial_promo) Jeannette enjoyed her music, and intermittently worked hard at it, while she never became one of those women condemned by the author of Maternal Counsels to a Daughter. ‘Who would wish a wife or a daughter, moving in private society, to have attained such excellence in music as involves a life’s devotion to it?’

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Ignorance was, in many ways, a desirable state. Knowledge was burdensome, and could overwhelm those unable to bear its weight. Mrs Gaskell worried about sending the toddler Marianne to school, where ‘she may meet with children who may teach her the meaning of things of which at present we desire to keep her ignorant’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This need to protect girls from knowledge did not grow less when they became adult. Half a century after Mrs Gaskell expressed her anxiety, Gissing depicted his characters arguing about the same subject. Monica, a woman who had been forced to marry for economic security, disagreed with her new husband on whether or not a mutual friend was ‘nice’ for her to know. He responded:

‘… In your ignorance of the world’ –

‘Which you think very proper in a woman,’ she interrupted caustically.

‘Yes, I do! That kind of knowledge is harmful to a woman.’

‘Then, please, how is she to judge her acquaintances?’

‘A married woman must accept her husband’s opinion, at all events about men.’ He plunged on into the ancient quagmire. ‘A man may know with impunity what is injurious if it enters a woman’s mind.’

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Knowledge of a fact could corrupt not because of the fact itself, but because of the gender of the mind it resided in. This was not to say that girls and women were expected to know nothing. It was just that their accomplishments and abilities were important in reactive ways: as Mrs Ellis said earlier, girls needed to know enough about science so that they could look intelligent while men talked. Equally, girls should be able to play the piano, not for the pleasure derived from music, but because it was useful. Mrs Panton thought that girls’ natural reason for learning to play the piano was ‘because they can be useful either to accompany songs and glees or to play dance-music’,

(#litres_trial_promo) not love of music. Nearly half a century later the function of a daughter had not altered: ‘it is the daughter’s privilege … to act the part of sympathiser and interested listener in the home circle. No other claim is greater.’

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Girls were only to respond to others, not have thoughts of their own. It took Molly Hughes some time before her place as a reactive rather than an active family member became clear to her:

the family pooled what gossip they had got from school … discussing future plans and telling the latest jokes … I, as the youngest, seldom got a word in and was often snubbed when I did. Thus, after venturing, ‘I did well in French today’, I had the chilling reminder from [her brother] Charles, ‘Self-praise is no recommendation.’ If I related a joke, ‘We’ve heard that before’ would come as a chorus. Once when I confided to Dym [another brother] that we had begun America, he called out, ‘I say, boys, at Molly’s school they’ve just discovered America.’

That kidnap victims take on the ideology of their captors in order to survive is a well-known psychological effect, called the Stockholm Syndrome. Molly Hughes was a prime example. She used the word ‘chilling’ for her brother’s crushing retort, but she little appeared to recognize quite how chilling the scene related above was. She ended, ‘In short, I was wisely neglected’, and confided that ‘I tried to carry out the wishes of these my household gods by being as ordinary and as little conspicuous as I could.’

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Felix and Henrietta Carbury, the brother and sister in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, showed similar characteristics, albeit heightened for fictional purposes. Felix Carbury was a wastrel who had run through his inheritance and was now battening on his mother, who could ill afford to support herself and her daughter. Henrietta, however,

had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter. The lesson had come to her so early in life that she had learned it without the feeling of any grievance … That all her interests in life should be made subservient to him was natural to her; and when she found that her little comforts were discontinued, and her moderate expenses were curtailed because he, having eaten up all that was his own, was now eating up also all that was her mother’s, she never complained.

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This deference to men was not a single hierarchical one: fathers at the top of the family pyramid, mothers next by virtue of authority vested in them by their husbands, and children at the bottom. The children were in their own little pyramid too, with boys, of whatever age, above girls. Eleanor Farjeon spelled it out:

Whatever pains and penalties, whatever joys and pleasures, were dispensed to us by the parental powers in the Dining-room and Drawing-room … in the Nursery there was one Law-Giver who made the Laws: our eldest brother Harry.

… he invented rules and codes with Spartan strictness; if they were to be enforced, he enforced them; if relaxed, only he might relax them …

In our Nursery he exemplified Plato’s ‘benevolent despotism’ with so much benignity, entertainment, and impartiality, that we began life by accepting it without question.

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The last sentence implied that Farjeon grew out of her deference. Molly Hughes, when she came to write her autobiography nearly half a century after the events described, still thought her family’s viewpoint was reasonable: ‘I suppose there was a fear on my mother’s part that I should be spoilt, for I was two years younger than the youngest boy. To prevent this danger she proclaimed the rule “Boys first”. I came last in all distribution of food at table, treats of sweets, and so on. I was expected to wait on the boys, run messages, fetch things left upstairs, and never grumble, let alone refuse.’ Yet even after all those years she tried to rationalize their behaviour. ‘All this I thoroughly enjoyed, because I loved running about.’ And surely it must have been all right, because, after all, ‘The boys never failed to smile their thanks, call me “good girl” …’ She was unable to distinguish between herself and her captors: ‘We were given a room to ourselves – all to ourselves.’ In it ‘there were four shelves, and … each [of the four boys] had one to himself.’ It did not even cross her mind that she alone had not got a shelf. Furthermore she was allowed to enter this room that was ‘ours’ only with the permission of her brothers, and for the most part she spent her afternoons alone in her bedroom.

(#litres_trial_promo) Laura Forster noted the same isolation: ‘The boys could and did come into the nursery when they liked, but they never played there or stayed long, whilst I had no other room open to me, except by special invitation [from them], until the evening, when we all went down to my parents.’

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The responsibilities for a girl were more onerous too. Laura, as the oldest girl, looked after the younger children in the nursery, staying there longer than was customary because the nursemaid ‘said I could not be spared, and Miss Maber, who taught my three eldest brothers, avowedly cared only for boys and would not accept me in the school-room’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a given that girls waited on their brothers: Louise Creighton, as a younger sister, only once had the ‘privilege usually reserved to the elder ones of getting up early on the Monday to give the boys their breakfast before they went back to school’.