[In the following excerpt, Renton contends that regardless of the qualifications of the governess, most employers treated her with disrespect and considered her simply a “superior servant.”]

All things considered, in the nineteenth century an expensive education for a daughter was not a sound investment for a middle-class father. Even in statistical terms it was a risky one. Supposing he had five girls out of, say ten children: it was quite possible that during their childhood or adolescence he would lose one or two from measles, whooping cough, dyptheria, smallpox, scarlet fever, consumption or one of the other hazards that they might encounter before they reached adulthood. Even if they survived all these, the conditions of childbirth were such that it was likely that at least one of them would die while giving birth, a risk each young woman would be expected to run for as long as her strength would bear it, and often longer, even in the most affectionate families. Supposing, once educated, she lived to a good age; after marriage there was nothing she could do to capitalise on it, so there was little gain for either the family that gave the daughter or the family that received her in marriage. Thus there was no point in spending more money than was absolutely necessary to improve a girl's mind when what guaranteed her chances of a good marriage were primarily her personal fortune and, less importantly, her outward appearance and genteel behaviour.

What she actually knew was of no moment, and excess intelligence could even be detrimental. All a girl needed to learn could be easily taught by decent spinster women with a little learning and a knowledge of genteel behaviour who were grateful for employment and a roof over their heads, and who, above all, came cheap. This left funds available for the much more essential education of the boys, who must in time provide for families of their own.

What cost little was, as so often, little valued, and a governess was treated as a superior servant, with some variation according to the family who employed her. There was nothing new in this. For a long time disrespect for governesses had been the norm, whether they were scholars or ignorant.

Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters which was published in 1787, was one of the first to point out how shameful it was that governesses should be shabbily treated by their employers. She devoted a chapter to their problems, entitling it ‘Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably educated, and left without a Fortune’. Such women, she said,

if not entirely devoid of delicacy, must frequently remain single. Few are the modes of earning a substance, and those are very humiliating. Perhaps to be a humble companion to some rich old cousin, or what is still worse, to live with strangers, who are so intolerably tyranical, that none of their own relatives can bear to live with them … it is impossible, the many hours of anguish such a person must spend. Above the servants, yet considered by them as a spy, and ever reminded of her inferiority when in conversation with the superiors … should any of the visitors take notice of her, and she for a moment forget her subordinate state, she is sure to be reminded of it … the concealed anxiety impairs her constitution; for she must wear a cheerful face or be dismissed. A teacher in a school is only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than the menial ones.

A governess to young ladies is equal disagreeable. It is ten to one if they meet with a reasonable mother, and if she is not so, she will be continually finding fault to prove she is not ignorant, and be displeased if her pupils do not improve, but angry if the proper methods are taken to make them do so. The children treat them with disrespect and often with insolence. In the meantime, life glides away, and the spirits with it, ‘and when youth and genial years are flown’ they have nothing to subsist on, or perhaps, on some extraordinary occasion, some small allowance may be made for them, which is thought a great charity.¹

Mary Wollstonecraft knew well that she was talking about. She had done her time both as a governess and as companion to a Mrs Dawson in Bath, a woman of unreliable temper who had used and discarded many other women in the post before Mary.

An excellent example of the type of woman who had to suffer the indignities of working as a governess is Ellen Weeton, letter writer and keeper of a remarkable journal. She wrote for posterity and so that her daughter should know the details of her life, keeping a copy of virtually every letter she wrote. Her correspondence was immense. Her journal, in which she chronicles a life of hardship and sorrow, served as a safety valve for the emotions of a frustrated woman of some intellect; it is written in an unrepetitive and readable style. Put with her letters, we have a vivid account of provincial life in the early 1800s with all the petty spites and jealousies of the striving and rising lower middle class. [Both the journal and the letters were written in a firm and always legible hand with a quill pen, though steel pens had been introduced in 1803. Prepared quills were bought by the score, and her friends appreciated her skill at mending them. She wrote to one in 1825, ‘Why did you not remind me, when I was at Wigan at Christmas, to mend or make you some pens? I am sure I am as willing, as able; don't forget the next feathery opportunity. Bring some quills with you, or old pens to ‘renovate.’]

Ellen Weeton was born in 1776, the daughter of a ship's captain, a slave trader who died in 1782 while harrying an American man o' war. His widow failed to establish her right to the prize money due to him and, with two young children to keep, found herself facing penury. So, as women suddenly thrust on their own resources had done for two hundred years, she turned to teaching. She opened a small village school in Upholland, in Lancashire. She had enough education to have taught her own children to read and write, but the school was not a great success, her income from it never exceeding ten or twelve shillings a week.

From the age of twelve her daughter Ellen, always known as Nellie, taught in this dame school and did the family housework as well, a life of drudgery which in time made her ill. On her mother's death, Nellie, then twenty one, took over the school; she also took in lodgers, to supplement her income which had fallen to seven shillings weekly, barely enough to feed her. By digging into her own small inheritance she managed to provide for herself and for her younger brother until he had completed his education and clerkship and had become an attorney.

From then on, Nellie's life became typical of an impecunious spinster of that date. She was alternately neglected and spurned by her relations, including her ungrateful brother and his vindictive wife, and wooed by them when they thought her small savings might become available. Her life became a sad struggle for survival and maintenance of her self-respect, during which she held two positions as a governess. The first she found in 1809, having answered an advertisement in Gore's General Advertiser:

Wanted: in the neighbourhood of Kendal, a governess to superintend the education of a Young Lady. None need apply but such as can give good references as to ability and character.

She was engaged at 30 guineas a year, a rather generous salary for that time, but it was not easily earned. She was employed by the wealthy son of a Preston banker. She travelled by mail-coach and post-chaise to take up her position in his very attractive house three hundred yards from the wooded shore of Lake Windermere. Alas, Mr Pedder was a man of exceptional meanness whose preferred occupations were drinking, wife-beating and being offensive to the governess. He had married his seventeen-year-old dairymaid after an elopement to Gretna Green, and Nellie's job was to teach the daughter of an earlier marriage. After her epileptic pupil died accidently in a fire, Nellie stayed on for some time as companion to the young wife rather than face the hostile world again.

In 1812 she took a situation as governess to the four elder children of Joseph Armitage, a wool trader who had retreated to a country house four miles from Huddersfield because of a Luddite attack on his previous, more accessible home where he and his wife had been fired upon and had stones thrown through their bedroom window. Nellie's experiences at High Royd present a detailed picture of a governess's life with a middle class family at that period.

Again she found herself in a fine house, where there were four indoor servants. It was set in ‘pretty and romantic country’, but she seldom had a moment to explore it, though she loved walking. She was intensely lonely. Her mistress was pleasant and communicative to her only when not pregnant, and as she ultimately had fifteen children this was seldom. Nellie was a chatty and gregarious person, and letter writing was the only outlet for her volubility as she sat alone in her room. But her duties were so many that she had little time even for this.

My time is totally taken up with the children; from 7 o'clock in the morning, till half past 7 or 8 at night. I cannot lie any longer than 6 o'clock in a morning; and if I have anything to do for myself, in sewing, writing &c., I must rise sooner.

The children, when Nellie took her position,

seemed to have been allowed full liberty to a riotous degree; yet Mrs A. seems to expect that I shall now, speedily, bring them to the exactest order, the task is a most arduous one!

They were, she said, ‘well ordered’ in front of their parents,

but out of their sight are as unruly, noisy, insolent, quarrelsome and illtempered a set, as I ever met with … The eldest girl for some weeks would not study a single lesson. She sat with book or slate before her, doing nothing … I requested, persuaded, insisted; but she would only smile carelessly in my face, and toss her head.

Mr and Mrs Armitage had given her full authority to discipline the children, in which Nellie was unusually lucky. She had on occasion to ‘resort to the rod’, but clearly hated doing it. In time they became more tractable and she even became quite fond of them. Much later, when she told them how difficult she had found them all at the start, they told her that they had used to call her ‘Uglyface’ behind her back.

Nellie was not averse to telling such stories or being funny at her own expense. Once, when returning from a walk, she met a fortune-telling pedlar woman, but refused to sample her wares, ‘for she could only tell me that I must die a miserable old maid’. Regretting this later, and knowing her gaunt and angular figure not to be particularly attractive, she wrote,

Alas, I cast the silver opportunity away and … may live in sorrow that I did so all my days. Foolish creature that I was! when the hope of a husband, and a fine coach, might have cheered me even to my last moments, thus ridiculously to have lost all chances of the wretch's last resource! Goosecap! noodle! ninny hammer! no name is too bad for me!

She records, also, that during one of the happier moments between herself and Mrs Armitage, when the latter ‘being freed of her burden’ was for a short period in good humour,

I wrote a message on a slate and sent it by one of my youngest pupils. She wrote underneath it, that she would comply with my request as soon as she returned from my Lady Kitty's (the necessary) [the lavatory] but having received a very pressing invitation, she was under immediate engagement, and could not then stay a moment!

But such moments of levity were few; far more often Nellie was sadly lamenting her lot, the long hours, the lack of time to keep her clothes in repair or to read a newspaper (which she had to order and pay for herself),

as I am never for a moment free of the children … I don't complain of this; it is no more than my duty; but certainly a governess is more a prisoner than any servant in the house.

She was obliged to supervise the children's play even when they were safely in a enclosed yard when, as she observed, the nursery maid could have done her turn.

Nellie would not have resented the exorbitant demands made on her time and energy if only her employers had been more appreciative of what she did for their offspring. Three months after taking up her post she wrote,

The children ‘have really made great progress, since my arrival, in their books; but as Mr A leaves all domestic management to his wife, and she never examines the children, I sometimes feel myself suspected of neglect … of which I never can, or will be guilty.

And, three months later,

I have never, since I came her, received the slightest acknowledgement of the improvement of my pupils. It appears like a tacit degree of dissatisfaction with me; and when I do labour hard indeed till my spirits sink with the daily anxiety and exertion of mind, and the excessive confinement I am kept in injures my health, it is really mortifying to be left to suppose that my services are considered as inadequate to the situation I hold.

Her weekly account of the children's education was listened to with indifference, and her request for particular books with which to teach them was turned down.

The expense seems to be an object, and I am surprised at it; for those who choose to keep a governess should not be afraid of a few shillings in books, and I did not exceed in my proposal ten or twelve shillings.

She had determined to buy some on her own account and lend them to her pupils, when Mr Armitage partially relented, to the extent of ordering some books himself, but of his own choice.

For the governess's own use, the only book offered by her employers was ‘an Encylopaedia, which is not an everyday kind of reading,’ she said sadly. ‘There are some people,’ she concluded

with whom we cannot soon become acquainted … and others who are like old friends at the first interview. The former seems to be the case with Mrs Armitage and me. The idea of receiving wages and being, in truth, a servant, keeps my spirits down, and throws a degree of reserve over me, which I sometimes think has a correspondent effect on Mrs A …

Nellie suffered sadly in her longing for congenial company in her isolated life. Too ‘jaded’ often at night, when the children were gone to bed, even to take up her pen, she sat alone in the schoolroom, stitching and mending by the light of a single candle. ‘I really think my neck is grown longer with trying to get near enough to the light to see to thread my needles.’ She longed ‘for some society’; but she felt that among family and servants there was nobody in the house with whom she could be on equal terms and she knew nobody in the surrounding neighbourhood, so had to put up with it. She wrote to a friend,

I can give you nothing entertaining here in regard to myself; were I to tell you how I live, it would be a dullest account of the dullest life ever dragged on by mortal. I want for nothing, in the common acceptance of the word, but I go on in that monstrous tenor, in which there is no enjoyment; happily, however, for me, I can derive amusement from the oddity of my own thoughts, and have many a hearty solo laugh … as to plain every-day chit-chat, I was never in the way of it, and am unacquainted even with the theory. I know nothing of my neighbours, good or bad—as to fashion, I might as well be blind or deaf for what I can either see or hear. Visits, balls, plays, concerts, card-parties, equipages, scandal, tempest, war, trade, and all the other epithets of busy, bustling life, are to me words without meaning; my own ideas must either entertain my correspondents or not.

Luckily they did. Her letters were so full of humour and charm that they must have given great pleasure. But she often reminded her friends that she had long awaited a reply.

I am writing to you upon paper which I bought in London at 5d a Quire, so don't be saucy and call it shabby. I shall inclose yours in one to Miss Braithwaite on a sister sheet; and sure it was bought in Lunnon too, for did I not buy it there my own sel; and if I could have known how long I should live, I would have bought as much as would have lasted my life; and, alack a day, I did but buy one Quire, and sorrow to me, I may happen to outlive it, and then what will I do? …

Have the literati of Wigan commenced a Newspaper yet? I apprehend they have not, as I have seen no announcement. Perhaps if they knew—the learned ones of Wigan—that so able a pen as mine might be engaged in their service, they would proceed; tell 'em, will you?

When, after two years, Nellie left High Royd of her own accord, and with no apparent rancour on the Armitages' side, there was still little evidence of any recognition of what she had done for their family. The parents do not come well out of the story of her departure. Only the children cared.

I could weep when I think of our parting the night before I left. I had seen them all put to bed, when, hearing some noise, I thought they were quarreling, and went to see. I found them all weeping at the idea that that was the last night I should be with them; the next morning they rose at five, and walked me part of the way (I had to walk four miles to the coach) and when they left me went weeping home; the servants were very angry that I was not sent in the car.

Always generous with her time in writing letters, Nellie was careful in her use of paper. The recipient of a letter had to pay the postage at that time, and two sheets cost more than one. She would ‘cross’ her pages, writing diagonally over the original lines—‘I can seldom find it in my heart to leave a shred of unscrawled paper’—and resented having to leave the necessary space to address the sheet after folding it. (Envelopes were not introduced until 1840.)

She received many letters in reply to hers, which must have been some consolation in her dreary life. But if an intelligent and literate woman of thirty seven found the loneliness of being a governess almost intolerable, how much more agonising it must have been for a young girl. It was not unusual for governesses as young as sixteen or seventeen to be engaged. Although Nellie Weeton, at a particularly low moment, felt that she was ‘a tenfold closer prisoner than any other governess in this neighbourhood’, she was probably only giving vent to her frustration, for her situation was typical rather than unusual.² [Nellie Weeton was never again employed as a governess, for she was shortly afterwards encouraged by her odious brother Tom, whose iniquities she always forgave, into a disastrous marriage. By the terms of their mother's will, Tom could claim £100 of his sister's tiny fortune when she either married or died, and this seems to have been his callous motive. After seven years of misery, Nellie left her brutal husband and spent the next few years desperately trying to obtain access to their only child, a daughter. He had dictated the terms of their Deed of Separation, to which in physical fear and under duress she had agreed. It was not until 1839 that the Custody of Infants Act was passed, whereby a mother might gain access to her infant children, and even the right to care for them, if they were under seven years of age. There is evidence in church records that Nellie Weeton ultimately succeeded, but no letters are available after 1825.]

Even where governesses were treated with respect, simple disregard for their emotional needs was widespread. Mrs Jamieson appealed in 1846 to women's better nature, pointing out that it was

a great mistake to regard the human being who dwells beneath your roof, and in the shadow of your protection, merely as an instrument to be used for your own purposes. She also has a life to be worked out … You may help the working out of this life, or you may put an extinguisher on it.

Few regarded her words. ‘You should cultivate cheerfulness,’ said one lady to her pale governess, irritated by her appearance.³

Anne Brontë was nineteen when she took her first governess position. In her novel Agnes Grey her picture of the life of a young governess in two families, is based largely on her own unpleasant experiences. The Bloomfield family, with its odious and ungovernable children, whose parents refuse to allow the governess to discipline them while blaming her for their excesses, is said to be based on the Ingham family of Blake Hall, near Mirfield in Yorkshire. Anne's first post as governess was with the two elder children of their large family for two rather unhappy terms in 1839, and she found her charges, as her sister Charlotte noted in a letter, ‘unruly and violent’. Direct descendants of Mr and Mrs Joshua Ingham claim that, though some incidents in the fictional story may have been exaggerated, the reality of Anne's life was not dissimilar to Agnes Grey's experiences. A younger sister of Anne's pupils told her granddaughter that she remembered all the children on one occasion running screaming round the garden and refusing to obey their governess's calls to come to their lessons, a scene that has a close parallel in an incident in the book, when the father's wrath falls upon the governess. More than once the Ingham children are said to have reduced Anne to tears, but family tradition suggests another side to these stories: Mrs Ingham, who died in 1899, told one of her grandchildren that she had once ‘employed a very unsuitable governess called Miss Brontë, who had actually tied the two children to a table leg in order to keep them quiet while she got on with her writing’.⁴ Anne herself in a letter said that though she was not empowered to inflict any punishment on her ‘excessively indulged’ pupils, their mother was extremely kind, and Charlotte described Mrs Ingham as ‘a placid, mild woman’. So the reality at Blake Hall may not have been as horrific as the fictional account. But it would be a mistake to suppose Anne's description of the life of a governess in this or in her next position to have been based on anything but truth. Within her own family she had ample experience to draw upon of how governesses were treated. Charlotte Brontë worked as a private governess and resented it even more than her sister. She complained in a letter to a friend in 1839 of her then employer's callous treatment:

I said in my last letter that Mrs Sidgewick did not know me. I now begin to find that she does not intend to know me; that she cares nothing in the world about me, except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me with occeans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslim nightcaps to make, and, above all things, dolls to dress. I do not think she likes me at all … I can see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being, except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil … One of the pleasantest afternoons I have spent here—indeed, the only one at all pleasant—was when Mr Sidgewick walked out with his children, and I had orders to follow a little behind …

When Charlotte came ‘to the lowest state of exhaustion’ and showed her depression, she was taken to task ‘with a stress of manner and a harshness of language scarcely credible’.

On the other hand, a cousin of the Sidgewicks considered Charlotte to be far too touchy. Urged to hurry up when the party was waiting for her to accompany them to church, she took offence; and on not being invited to go with them on another Sunday, she became deeply depressed at being unwanted. She may have been over-sensitive, but there is no doubt that her sense of natural justice rebelled at the distance that convention put between her and her employers.

In her biography of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell relates an incident in which one of her small charges ‘said, putting his hand in hers, “I love 'ou, Miss Brontë,” whereupon the mother exclaimed, before all the children. “Love the governess, my dear!”’⁵

Children emulated their elders in looking down on the women who taught them. Many people deplored the disrespect which they showed to their governesses and attached the blame firmly to the parents who were setting them a bad example. In ‘The Young Lady's Friend’ a writer drew attention to ‘the instinctive homage’ that should be due to ‘mental culture and refined manners’, and conjured up a picture of a governess humiliated by the young:

Can there be any sense in the half-educated daughter of a lawyer or merchant treating her more mature and more accomplished teacher as an inferior? … Nothing can be meaner than the false pride exhibited by some girls towards the ladies who give them lessons in music, drawing or languages: some have even been known to pass their instructress in the street without acknowledging the acquaintance.

One can almost feel the heat of the affront burning in the cheeks of the snubbed governess as she turns aside to hide her humiliation, gazing blindly into a shop window. The writer had perhaps some personal experience of being cut dead in such circumstances.

Charlotte M. Yonge, in Womankind, says ‘Insolence to a governess is a stock complaint’, and she does not mean insolence from children in this case, for she goes on, ‘In real life I never heard it from anyone by birth and breeding a lady.’

Notes

1. Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, (1787), Cadell 2nd edn.

2. Ellen Weeton, Miss Weeton—Journal of a governess, 1807-1811, ed. Edward Hall, 1936

3. Jameson, p 271, 272

4. Mrs Fresson to author, April 1990, and from Anne Brontë at Blake Hall by Susan Brooke, Brontë Society Transactions 1958, Vol 13, part 68, pp 239-250

5. Margaret Lane, The Brontë Story, 1953, pp 122, 123

Works Cited

Jameson, Mrs Anna, Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature and Social Morals, 1846, (Essay No VI on the Relative Social Position of Mothers and Governesses)

Lane, Margaret, The Brontë Story, Heinemann, 1953

Weeton, Ellen, Miss Weeton—Journal of a Governess, edited by Edward Hall, OUP, 1936

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. 1787. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792