SOURCE: An introduction to A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen: The Journals and Letters of Agnes Porter, The Hambledon Press, 1998, pp. 1-74.

[In the following excerpt, the journals and letters of late eighteenth-century governess Agnes Porter are discussed. Comparisons are made between Porter's experiences and those portrayed in Jane Austen's fiction.]

Ann Agnes Porter was born in Edinburgh, a few years after the Jacobite rising of 1745.¹ For twenty years between 1784 and 1806, living in Somerset, Dorset and then South Wales, she was governess to the children and grandchildren of the second Earl of Ilchester. Agnes's first surviving journal was written in 1788, four years after she had joined Lord Ilchester's family, and a little over a year before the fall of the Bastille. Her last letter was written in January 1814. She died at Bruton in Somerset in the following month, just as twenty years of war between Britain and France were drawing to a close.

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was published a year before Agnes Porter's death. There is no indication that Agnes ever read the novel, nor does she mention Sense and Sensibility, which was published two years earlier. But the society depicted in Jane Austen's novels was very much Agnes Porter's own world: a world of country houses and vicarages, of balls and card parties, and of visits to London and popular resort towns such as Bath and Malvern. It was a world that was peopled by gentlemen and aristocrats, by members of the clergy, army and navy officers and professional men, and by their wives, sisters and daughters. It is tantalising to realise that Jane Austen could even have met Agnes or her sister Fanny, as they had acquaintances in common.²

Agnes was an acute observer of the activities of the occupants of the great houses in which she lived. She also spent time in London, Edinburgh, Great Yarmouth, Swindon, Fairford and Bruton, and she wrote about her life there and the people she met. Of particular interest are her accounts of the day to day lives and education of the daughters of the gentry and aristocracy in two very different households. Agnes also enjoyed travelling. Like Jane Austen, she was more interested in people than in places, and she has left entertaining descriptions of many of her fellow travellers. Her journeys included one from South Wales to Edinburgh and back, undertaken by stagecoach, without a companion, when she was in her early fifties. There are also vivid accounts of visits to the theatre and other sights in London.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Agnes Porter's own writings, however, is the insight that they give into the life and thoughts of an unmarried but employed gentlewoman in the late Georgian period. Agnes was, in many ways, the archetypal governess: the daughter of a clergyman who had no private income, she had to support herself and help her mother and sisters after her father's death. Her letters and diaries describe her own feelings of insecurity and worries about her possible fate if she could no longer work, and they also tell us a great deal about the ambiguity of her position within the society in which she lived, and her determination to defend and maintain her own status. In addition, she was a great self-improver, and her accounts of the books that she read, and her efforts to explore new subjects, give the reader an invaluable overview of the intellectual life of a well-read woman in the age of Jane Austen. She was interested in contemporary educational theories, and she read, and tried to put into practice, the precepts of some of the most widely-read educational writers of the day, including Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More. It must be admitted that Agnes's own occasional attempts at literary composition are pedestrian, but she certainly had a sense of humour and, even when life was difficult, she showed a determination to make the best of things, a lack of self-pity, and a genuine interest in and affection for the people with whom she lived.

Although Victorian governesses have been studied in some detail, much less attention has been paid to their predecessors in the eighteenth century and earlier.³ It is, however, clear that female tutors had occasionally been employed since the middle ages, to educate the daughters of royal and noble families, and of the wealthiest members of the gentry. These governesses were often poor relations, who had themselves received little formal education, and whose main value was as chaperons, rather than as teachers. This was true of one of the best-documented Tudor governesses, Mrs Hamblyn, who was employed to teach the daughters of Henry Sharington at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire in the 1560s.⁴ Nearly a century and a half later, around 1700, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu received ‘the worst education in the world’ from ‘a good homespun governess’ but was in fact largely self-educated, having taught herself from the books in her father's library.⁵ The quality of governesses employed in even the greatest families improved little in the first half of the eighteenth century: in the 1730s George II installed Lady Deloraine as governess to his two daughters. She had evidently been chosen for her looks rather than her learning, as she soon became the King's mistress. There were a few exceptions: Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756), who knew eight languages and became a renowned Anglo-Saxon scholar, avoided destitution by taking up a position as governess to the children of the Duke of Portland in the early 1740s. She remained with the family for the rest of her life, but was expected to teach her pupils little more than reading and writing, together with the basic principles of the Christian religion.

It was in the second half of the eighteenth century that private governesses gradually became more common, first in aristocratic households and then lower down the social scale until, in the nineteenth century, a governess became an essential status symbol in every genteel household. Agnes Porter is of particular interest because she was working at a time when only the wealthiest families employed private governesses. The only remotely comparable journal of a governess that has been published to date is that of Ellen Weeton (1776 to c. 1844) who worked mainly as a schoolmistress and was a private governess only for five years.⁶

THE SINGLE WOMAN IN GEORGIAN BRITAIN

The story of Agnes Porter's life illustrates many of the problems experienced by spinsters in the Georgian period—problems on which Agnes comments directly in her letters and journals. Few women in Georgian Britain chose to remain unmarried, at least if they belonged to the upper levels of society. Marriage enhanced a woman's status, as is underlined in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, when Lydia Bennet asserts her right to take precedence over her elder, but unmarried, sisters, following her marriage to Mr Wickham.⁷ She might not get on well with her husband, but a married woman would have a degree of independence: she could manage her own household, and if her husband died her marriage settlement would, in most cases, ensure that she had some control over her own money. A woman who never married would have to fend for herself, or remain dependent on the charity of her family. Whilst a husband could insist that his wife's marriage portion was handed over, an unmarried daughter or sister might find it difficult to persuade her family to give her anything more than a modest, and irregular, allowance. Agnes describes one such household in Great Yarmouth: ‘We have an old lady who is quite extravagant and luxurious with regard to herself, yet refuses a grown-up daughter a little pocket-money, or the least independence in any[thing]’.⁸

Laurence Stone has shown that between 20 and 25 per cent of upper-class girls in the eighteenth century never married, compared with under 5 per cent in the Tudor period.⁹ For Agnes Porter's generation, the proportion was roughly 25 per cent. It has been suggested that the daughters of parsons were particularly likely to remain spinsters: ‘Anglican clergymen's families … were large, and it would appear to have been normal to marry no more than a couple of daughters per generation (usually to other clergymen), leaving the rest to serve as housekeepers, governesses, ladies' companions or simply to stay at home to tend aged parents’.¹⁰ In a period when there was a shortage of marriageable men, many a woman of Agnes's generation was condemned to spend her life like Miss Bates in Jane Austen's Emma. Miss Bates

Enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich nor married. [Miss Bates] had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible.¹¹

Whilst a woman with either beauty or a large fortune could be reasonably certain of finding a husband at this period, and a woman who had both would be hotly pursued, one who, like Agnes, had neither, was likely to remain an old maid. Few women were as fortunate as Emma's former governess, ‘poor Miss Taylor’, whose husband had made enough money for him to be happy to marry a portionless woman.¹² Agnes did not, however, entirely give up hope. In 1792, a year after Malcolm Macqueen had disappointed her by marrying an heiress, she wrote to Lady Mary Fox Strangways, asking her to address her letters to Mrs, rather than Miss Porter, with the words: ‘I know, my love, I am not yet an old woman, though I begin to be rather advanced in life for a Miss. Do not suppose that being styled Mrs will spoil my marriage—on the contrary, I may be mistaken for a little jolly widow and pop off when you least expect it’.¹³ Four years later, Agnes enjoyed the company of a clergyman, Joseph Griffith, who was employed as a tutor for a few weeks before Lord Stavordale went away to school for the first time. Mr Griffith stayed at Melbury, and Agnes ‘thought his conversation both sensible and agreeable’. Agnes was, however, worried when Lord and Lady Ilchester met her walking with Mr Griffith in the gardens, and she ‘resolved to change my hours of walking, as it particularly behoved me to avoid any particularity or the least seeming indecorum’.¹⁴ If there had been any hint of impropriety, she would have been out of a job immediately. Mr Griffith's name has been partly erased in some places, and a number of entries in the journal for 1796 have been cut out, so it does seem probable that Agnes's feelings towards him were more than those of a casual acquaintance. But Mr Griffith was to prove a sad disappointment, since it turned out that he was married—a fact that he had concealed from Lord Ilchester and everyone else at Melbury. Agnes continued to visit the Griffiths when she was in London, and in 1797 noted in her journal, with a certain degree of satisfaction, that ‘Mrs Griffith seems sweet-tempered, but odd and nervous to a degree—at times almost to imbecility’.¹⁵

If, as in Agnes Porter's case, her family resources were insufficient, there were only a few ways in which she could support herself and remain a lady at the same time. Some girls became housekeepers or paid companions, and a few earned a living as artists or writers, but many turned to governessing. This was an occupation that could be followed by a lady without a total loss of status, and which would also give her a home. In such a situation a plain appearance was a positive advantage—especially if the lady of the house was responsible for choosing her children's instructress.

In the Porter family, all three daughters were involved in teaching to some extent. We know nothing about the girls' own education, but it seems unlikely, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, that they had been educated specifically to become governesses. This certainly happened later on and there were many girls, like Jane Fairfax in Jane Austen's Emma, orphaned at an early age with a fortune of only ‘a very few hundred pounds’, who were ‘brought up for educating others’ so that they would be able to earn ‘a respectable subsistence’ for themselves when they grew up.¹⁶ Entering a family as a governess did, at least, give a girl or woman a roof over her head and a modest income, though there was always the fear of what would happen if she lost her position or became too old or ill to work. Few, if any governesses, however, could hope to emulate Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and marry their employer—though many, no doubt, dreamed of doing so. They were far more likely to be seduced by their employer, or by another male inhabitant of the household, and then to be dismissed. The lack of provision for aged and infirm ex-governesses became acute in the first half of the nineteenth century, and this led to the foundation of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution in 1843.

Agnes Porter was only too conscious of the insecurity of her position—the prospect of a poverty-stricken old age clearly worried her. In 1791 she was upset by reports that Lord Ilchester's former housekeeper Mrs Hayes, whose death had just been reported, had been badly treated by some ‘unworthy relations’. Agnes noted in her journal that ‘I could not forbear partially and deeply reflecting on the ills that single women are exposed to, even at the hour of death, from being the property of no-one. My will is long since made, of what little I possess, and I hope it will please Infinite Goodness that my last breath shall be received by a tender and humane person, if not a friend’.¹⁷ In her later years Agnes wrote and rewrote her will several times, to take account of changing circumstances and ensure that her savings were divided as she wished. She was particularly concerned to ensure that Fanny would keep control over her legacy if she predeceased her husband, for if Mr Richards died intestate ‘all he has would go to his sister's children, and what I left might accidentally go from my own sister’.¹⁸ It was with a trace of wistfulness that Agnes wrote in her journal during her visit to Edinburgh: ‘In Scotland an old relation is seldom ever left solitary, whether rich or poor—a sense of domestic duty is very prevalent’.¹⁹

When compared with many of her contemporaries, Agnes was fortunate, for she was always able to maintain a reasonably comfortable standard of living. Whilst she was employed, she would have received her board and lodging in addition to her annual salary. During her final years with Lord Ilchester's family she was probably earning a hundred guineas (£105) a year. Mrs Upcher offered Agnes £100 a year, and she also had an annuity of £30 a year from Lord Ilchester after she left his household. However, problems arose after Lord Ilchester's death in 1802. His will, which was proved at the end of 1802, had actually been written in 1778, before the death of his first wife.²⁰ Lord Ilchester had subsequently added numerous codicils over the years, with many generous bequests to servants and former servants. One of these codicils, dated 1791, mentioned Agnes, who was to receive her salary for the rest of her life, if she ‘continues in my family many years longer with equal credit to herself (of which I do not doubt)’. Unfortunately for Agnes, it soon became clear that Lord Ilchester had left personal debts which totalled almost £38,000, exceeding the value of his personal estate by £6000.²¹ There was, therefore, no money available to pay the legacies mentioned in his will, and Agnes could not hope to receive anything until the new, young Lord Ilchester came of age in 1808. Agnes was so concerned by this state of affairs that she abandoned her usual deferential approach to members of the family and tackled her late employer's brother: ‘I asked the Colonel what I was to do in the interval, and added that should I from ill health be obliged to give up my profession and be reduced to want, I thought it would be a reflection on his noble family’. She added, darkly: ‘He seemed to think what I said was une façon de parler—but he knows not me’.²²

Fortunately for Agnes, she did not have to depend on the pension from Lord Ilchester alone. The Talbots paid her £100 a year from 1799 to 1806, whilst she was at Penrice Castle. This was comparatively generous: although the Edgeworths recommended that a governess in a wealthy family should have £300 a year,²³ the usual salary was much lower. Miss Elborough, governess at Penrice from 1806-7, was paid £50 a year, but another governess was employed at the same time. In Westmorland in 1809 Ellen Weeton was paid thirty guineas a year,²⁴ and it has been estimated that in the mid-nineteenth century the average salary for a governess was between £20 and £45 a year, with an annual salary of as much as £100 being paid only to ‘the “highly educated lady” who could find a position in a very well-to-do family’.²⁵

When Agnes had to give up full-time work in 1806, the Talbots continued to pay her £30 a year. At this time her sister and brother-in-law were able to give her a home with them in Fairford. Payment of her annuity from Lord Ilchester began again in 1808, and this meant that she was at least adequately provided for. When she eventually left her sister and brother-in-law's house in Fairford 1812, she was able to live fairly comfortably in lodgings in Bruton—helped, from time to time, by gifts of money from the Talbots. When Agnes died in 1814 she left a total of approximately £2000.²⁶ Most of this was invested in 5 per cent Navy Stock, and would have produced a little under £100 a year. Towards the end of her life her annual income from all sources would therefore have been about £150.

AGNES PORTER'S PLACE IN GEORGIAN SOCIETY

In the autumn of 1799, when Agnes was living with the Talbots, the Revd Sydney Smith visited Penrice Castle. Smith, who was later to achieve fame as a preacher and essayist, and as the wittiest conversationalist of his day, was at this time an almost unknown curate and tutor. He came to Penrice with his pupil Michael Hicks Beach, a cousin of Thomas Mansel Talbot, during a somewhat circuitous journey from the West Country to Edinburgh.²⁷ It is quite clear that Sydney Smith did not take to Agnes. The twenty-eight-year-old clergyman's description of her tells us at least as much about Smith's attitude to women as it does about Agnes herself, but his impressions are nevertheless illuminating.

Smith refers to Agnes in two letters, one to Mrs Hicks Beach and the other to her husband. In the first letter, written on 17 September 1799, he tells his employer:

Miss Porter perhaps ought not exactly to be set up as a model of good breeding, judgment, beauty or talents. She is I daresay a very respectable woman, and may be a much more sensible woman than I think her, but I confess in my eyes she is a very ordinary article.²⁸

In another letter, written a fortnight later, presumably in response to one disagreeing with his description of Agnes, Smith adds: ‘I will not give up an atom of Miss Porter; instructed in books she may be, but infinitely vulgar she certainly is’.²⁹

Sydney Smith may have thought that Agnes was vulgar, but few of her contemporaries would have doubted that she was entitled to call herself a lady. Her education, dress and manners indicated her social status even to those who knew nothing about her life and background: in 1789, when she was travelling by stagecoach from Wincanton to London, one of her travelling companions apparently referred to her as a ‘gentlewoman’, who ‘seems a quiet, steady person’.³⁰ Gentility was, moreover, an indispensable qualification for her employment as a governess in the first place.

Agnes Porter's own relations, in both Norfolk and Scotland, belonged to a group of people, often referred to as the ‘middling sort’, that became increasingly numerous and influential in the course of the eighteenth century. They were moving from trade into the professions, and some of them were purchasing landed estates or marrying the sons and daughters of members of the lower levels of the landed gentry. The acquisition of wealth and leisure gave them importance as consumers: they joined libraries and purchased books; they patronised the theatres, concert-halls and art galleries; and they met together at balls and assemblies in London and the country towns.

Agnes's own paternal grandfather and great-grandfather had been brewers in Yarmouth; her father began life as a woollen-draper and then entered the church. One of Francis Porter's aunts married a woollen-draper, and his sister married a hot-presser. Other Porter connections went into the church, whilst Thomas Amyot, Agnes's cousin, became a wealthy man as a result of his work as a civil servant. On her mother's side, Agnes's Scottish relations seem to have belonged to a slightly higher social level than that occupied by the Porters in Norfolk. Although it is not clear exactly where Elizabeth Porter fits in, she was related to the Elliotts of Wolfelee in Roxburghshire. William Elliott, a lawyer, had bought the estate of Wolfelee in 1730. Other close relatives included the Ogilvies of Hartwoodmyres, Selkirkshire: Thomas Elliott Ogilvie, Agnes's mother's ‘nearest relation’, made enough money out of his employment in the Madras Civil Service to buy the Chesters estate in 1782. Elliott and Ogilvie relatives also included doctors, lawyers and army officers. In addition, there were connections with aristocratic families such as the Elphinstones and Carmichaels. When Agnes visited her relations in Edinburgh in 1805, she found it ‘gratifying to my pride to see them move in so respectable a sphere’,³¹ though her mother's sister had come down in the world through ‘her husband's carelessness and pride’, which had been ‘the cause of alienating both from their respective and respectable relations’.³²

By moving from trade into the church, and by marrying a woman from a professional and landed background, Francis Porter had raised his own social status, together with that of his immediate family. He and his daughters used the status symbol of a coat of arms, though it is not clear if they were, strictly speaking, entitled to do so.³³ In a rural parish in particular, where members of the gentry and aristocracy were thin on the ground and it was often difficult to arrange social events, the clergy of the Church of England were, with the officers of the army and navy, ‘considered eligible for neighbourhood society by virtue of their profession’.³⁴ So, when their father was vicar of Wroughton, Agnes and her sisters were invited to balls and parties by Mrs Calley of Burderop Park. It was probably through these Wiltshire connections that Agnes obtained her first position as a governess, with the Goddards of Swindon House.

Socialising with the landed gentry on long winter evenings in the country and making up sets for country dancing was one thing. Matrimony was quite another matter, and here the Porter sisters' lack of fortunes effectively eliminated them from competition in the higher levels of the marriage market. Neither Agnes nor her sister Betsey married: Agnes had hopes of Malcolm Macqueen, but he chose to marry an heiress instead. Fanny had at one time been ‘tenderly loved’, but her suitor had made ‘a more worldly marriage’ under the influence of ‘interest, or prudence it is called’.³⁵ Fanny did marry, though not until she was thirty years old. Although her husband, the Revd Thomas Richards, had a small estate of his own in Wales, he and Fanny never seem to have been very well off—he never rose above being a curate, supplementing his salary by working as a schoolmaster, whilst Fanny took in female pupils.

A number of authors have drawn attention to the problems arising from a governess's ambiguous position within the household of her employers.³⁶ In order to be considered suitable as a companion and tutor to well-born young ladies, a governess had herself to be a lady, but she was also an employee. Since she was neither a servant nor a member of the family, her happiness depended to a large extent on the goodwill—or otherwise—of the parents of the children entrusted to her care. In order to maintain her position within the household, the governess had also to keep her distance from even the upper servants.

During the period covered by the journals and letters, Agnes Porter was employed in two closely-related households. Her position within these two households was quite different. An examination of her experiences underlines the extent to which a governess's situation varied according to the circumstances of the family with which she lived.

We know little of Agnes's relationship with the second Countess of Ilchester, who died in 1790, six years after Agnes joined the family at Redlynch. Lord Ilchester appears in the journals and diaries as a somewhat distant figure, who seems to have allowed Agnes a good deal of independence. She had a room of her own at Redlynch (nineteenth-century governesses often had to sleep with their pupils), and also expected to have a bedroom to herself, with the use of a parlour where she could entertain friends, during the family's visits to London. Although most of the day was spent with her pupils, maids were available to dress them, give them their meals, and put them to bed—and also to wait on Agnes herself. She had a certain amount of free time, usually in the evenings, and could receive visitors such as her sister Fanny, who spent six days at Redlynch in September 1790. Occasional trips away, especially visits to her mother, were also permitted. If Lord Ilchester was away, friends and relatives often dined with Agnes and her pupils. When the master of the household was at home, however, the governess's position was more clearly defined. As Agnes wrote in her journal: ‘When Lord Ilchester is from home I spend the evenings with his daughters; when he is at home I pass them alone’.³⁷ Life in the depths of the country was, indeed, often lonely. Agnes occasionally felt the lack of a ‘rational companion’ and regretted ‘the unavoidable lack of society in my situation’.³⁸ In the absence of adult members of the family, the only other occupants of Redlynch were the servants, and of these the housekeeper was the only one whose social status even approached that of the governess.

Agnes Porter's situation at Penrice Castle was rather different from that at Redlynch and Melbury. She had known Lady Mary Talbot since the latter was seven years old; she had ‘tried to supply … a mother's love’ to Mary and her brother and sisters, and had acted as their companion and confidante. Although Agnes always refers to Lord Ilchester's daughters as Lady Mary or Lady Elizabeth, her relationship with them was on a more equal level than had been possible with Lord and Lady Ilchester. Penrice Castle was much smaller than Melbury or Redlynch, and life there, with a house full of children, was much less formal. In 1804 the traveller Benjamin Malkin noted that Penrice was ‘scarcely large enough’ for the Talbot family;³⁹ and when John Llewelyn of Penllergaer paid a visit in February 1806 he had to sleep in a bed in the housekeeper's room ‘for want of a better’.⁴⁰ Although Agnes had her own room, it would have been difficult for her to spend as much time apart from her employers as she had done in Lord and Lady Ilchester's household, and it is clear that she lived with the family for most of the time. In 1806 Mary Talbot told Mrs Beach that Agnes ‘always breakfast, dines and sups with us and is our companion in the evening, but in the mornings we of course follow our different avocations’.⁴¹

Penrice was geographically isolated, and a long way from Mary's family and the friends and acquaintances of her youth. Henry Skrine, who toured Wales in 1798, wondered why Thomas Talbot had deserted ‘the noble seat of Margam, in the midst of a populous and plentiful country’ to ‘form a fairy palace in a dreary and desolate wild, far from the usual haunts of man, and near the extremity of a bleak peninsula’.⁴² A year later, Sydney Smith commented ‘Penrice is a pretty place enough in a wretched country—the flower garden is delightful, but for any communication with the human species a man may as well live on Lundy Island as at Penrice’.⁴³ So, in addition her role as governess to the Talbot children, Agnes was valued as a companion for their mother, one who knew most of the same people, and shared many of the same interests.

Thomas Mansel Talbot was the greatest resident landowner in the western half of Glamorgan at the end of the eighteenth century. His gross annual income of approximately £8000 to £10,000 was probably rivalled only by that of the industrialist John Morris of Clasemont and Sketty Park.⁴⁴ Talbot and Morris knew each other, but they never seem to have been particularly friendly. If they had socialised only with families from the same level of society, the Talbots' life at Penrice would have been very lonely indeed. In fact, neither Thomas nor Mary Talbot was interested in moving in the grandest social circles, and both disliked London intensely. Thomas had never taken much part in public life and, unlike most of his predecessors as owners of the Penrice and Margam estates (and also his son), had never been Member of Parliament for Glamorgan. As early as 1787, he had written that ‘the very retir'd life I have for some years past led, has made it somewhat disagreeable to me to wait on great people, and I feel it's a thing that gains on a man most incredibly’.⁴⁵ Most of his closest friends before his marriage were clergymen or, in Glamorgan, local gentlemen whose estates were considerably smaller than his own.

Amongst the Glamorgan friends who are mentioned most frequently by Agnes, and also by Thomas and Mary Talbot, were the incumbents at Margam and Oxwich. Dr John Hunt, whom Thomas presented to the living of Margam in 1794, had been a contemporary at Oxford and a hunting companion in the West Country before moving to Glamorgan. Hunt and his wife were regular visitors to Penrice. In return, the Talbots often stayed with them at Tynycaeau near Margam, where Thomas had built a new rectory for his friend. He had also built a rectory for another old friend, the Revd John Collins, whom he had presented to the living of Oxwich in 1772. Collins had married in 1781, and the youngest of his ten children were the same age as the eldest Talbot daughters. The rectory at Oxwich was within easy walking distance of Penrice Castle, and visits from one house to the other were made on an almost daily basis when the Talbots were at home. Also nearby were the Revd James Edwards of Reynoldston and his wife who, like the Hunts, had no children of their own, but enjoyed the company of the young Talbots. Swansea friends included Edward King of Marino, a Customs official, whom Thomas Talbot had known since the 1780s. Amongst the local gentry families who visited Penrice, and upon whom the Talbots called from time to time, were the Lucases at Stouthall and the Llewelyns of Penllergaer, neither of whose wealth or standing rivalled that of the Talbots.

Many members of the Talbots' circle thus belonged to the same level of society as Agnes and her own relations and friends. This could cause problems, and some embarrassment, as acquaintances did not always know how to treat a governess. Agnes describes one particularly revealing episode, which took place at Margam in 1802: when she rose to leave, at the end of a visit to Dr and Mrs Hunt, another visitor, Mrs Pryce, offered to help Agnes with her cloak.⁴⁶ Mr Pryce, however, ‘made her a sign of disapprobation’. This incident, according to Agnes ‘dwelt on my mind more, perhaps, than it merited’. The next day Mr Pryce was more polite, but Agnes responded with ‘a very reserved, silent curtesy’. She then helped Mrs Pryce with her cloak, with a quotation from Laurence Sterne: ‘Hail the small courtesies of life, for smooth do they make the road of it’. Then, ‘I looked up at Mr Pryce—he cast his eyes down—I had my revenge’.⁴⁷ This may seem petty, until one remembers how important the maintenance of her status as a gentlewoman was to Agnes Porter.

Occasionally, the behaviour of the Talbots' friends and acquaintances gave Agnes reason to feel superior to them. After her visit to Edinburgh in 1805 she stayed for a few nights with Mr and Mrs Joseph Green, whom she had met at Penrice as they had rented Fairyhill, a house in Gower, for a few years. Mr Green's occupation is unknown; he may have been in business, and he certainly does not seem to have owned a substantial estate of his own. At dinner with the Greens, Agnes's fellow guests took pleasure in making fun of the Scots. Agnes noted in her journal, ‘Mr Green himself a pleasing man, but his rich visiters intolerably vulgar’.⁴⁸ From time to time, too, she commented somewhat disparagingly on the Collinses of Oxwich rectory and their attitude towards the education of their children.⁴⁹

WOMEN AND EDUCATION IN THE GEORGIAN PERIOD

Sydney Smith's description of Agnes Porter as ‘infinitely vulgar’ tells us a good deal more about contemporary attitudes to educated women than it does about Agnes's own appearance or behaviour. Learned women were, as a rule, mocked or despised, rather than admired. Ideas of gentility and propriety dictated that girls should, first and foremost, be brought up to be good wives and mothers. If they were intelligent and enjoyed reading and studying, this might be permitted, but only if there was enough time left over from their household duties. What was absolutely not the ‘done thing’ in polite society was for women to show off their learning and suggest that they might be more knowledgeable than their male companions. This is where Agnes offended against contemporary ideas of how a gentlewoman should behave, as is indicated (unconsciously) by her own description of a gathering in the London house of her friends Mr and Mrs Williams: ‘I was in great spirits and enjoyed the evening very much. A Miss D-s seemed to envy me a little for engrossing a good deal of the gentlemen's attention. She, pretty and insipid, was but little noticed—myself, plain, but chatty and tolerably agreeable in conversation had in fact all the beaux present about me’.⁵⁰ The men might have enjoyed an evening in Agnes's company, but they were more likely to propose marriage to the insipid Miss D-s. Agnes could rarely resist showing off her extensive reading or correcting her companions—male or female—if she disagreed with them. In her defence, it must be said that any addition to the limited social circle at Penrice would have been welcome, and Agnes must have enjoyed the chance to discuss books and the outside world with a well-educated man such as Sydney Smith.

Throughout the Georgian period girls were brought up, above all, to be good wives and mothers. In an era when the schooling of boys was firmly grounded in the teaching of Greek and Latin, many commentators doubted that women could be educated in the same way: ‘The female mind, being deficient in rational powers, was unfit for the necessary mental effort required to study the classics’.⁵¹ Girls' minds were too weak to stand up to hours of concentrated study, and too much learning would make them unfeminine—and unmarriageable. Nor was a rigorous academic training necessary for girls, ‘since their sphere of activity was firmly circumscribed within the kitchen, sickroom and nursery, where skills of a manual and practical nature were all that was required’.⁵²

Attitudes to female education were changing during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but writers in the late Georgian age were, in general, no more sympathetic towards blue-stockings than their predecessors had been. Before the beginning of the eighteenth century, the emphasis was on moral and religious instruction, and the acquisition of the practical skills that would be needed by the mistress of a household: some cookery, the making of simple medicines and, above all, needlework. Reading and writing were also useful, together with simple arithmetic and the keeping of household accounts. In farming households, and the families of merchants and tradesmen, wives and daughters might still be expected to take an active part in looking after the dairy and poultry, or running the shop or business. Girls should be brought up to be ‘humble, modest, moderate, good housewives, discreetly frugal, without high expectations which will otherwise render them discontented’.⁵³ The girls of aristocratic and gentry families, who had more free time, would also be expected to acquire some of the less obviously useful accomplishments, such as singing, playing a musical instrument and dancing, together with a brief acquaintance with a foreign language—usually French.

Girls were often educated at home, by older members of their family, perhaps with the help of masters to teach music, dancing or French. From the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, however, many girls, of both the middle and upper classes, were sent to school, either as boarders or as day-girls. The standard of teaching at these schools was often abysmal, but at least the girls were kept busy and—it was hoped—out of the way of unwelcome suitors. Social education was more important than academic training—but neither was provided very effectively in the majority of girls' schools.

The main development in female education during the first half of the eighteenth century seems to have been an growing emphasis on ornamental accomplishments, and a neglect of practical instruction. Women spent less and less time working in the family business, sewing and embroidering, or taking an active part in the management of their household, and more time learning how to walk and dance elegantly, and how to sing, draw, play the harpsichord and read and write French. They also had more time to read books and write letters, but many seem to have spent a large part of their leisure time chatting and playing cards. As more and more girls learned French and had lessons in music and drawing, however, the social value of these accomplishments decreased. As the Edgeworths wrote in 1798: ‘[Accomplishments] are now so common that they cannot be considered as the distinguishing characteristic of even a gentlewoman's education’.⁵⁴

At the end of the eighteenth century there was a discernible movement against the overemphasis on accomplishments, and towards the provision of more in the way of moral education and intellectual stimulation for girls—even though the aim was to produce well-mannered, lively and intelligent companions for their husbands and children, rather than women who enjoyed learning for its own sake. The opinion of the middle-aged hatter, whom Agnes met during her journey by stagecoach from the West Country to London in 1789, was probably fairly typical of the period: ‘He thought women could never be taught too much, as knowledge would qualify them to be proper companions for their husbands and, at the same time, would, by teaching them their duty, make them humble’. Perhaps surprisingly, the young glover who took part in the same conversation expressed a more old-fashioned point of view: ‘Provided a women can make a good pudding, cast an account, and keep her house neat, I think she may make a wife to please any reasonable man’. In her account of this journey, Agnes mocks the ‘Miss from Sherbourne school’ who provides a classic example of a girl who had received a fashionable education and was, in theory, accomplished, but had acquired little in the way of common sense or useful knowledge—the girl claimed that she would not give up the accomplishment of speaking French ‘for the world’, but soon showed herself to be unable to understand a simple French phrase.⁵⁵

THE EDUCATION OF THE DAUGHTERS OF THE FOX STRANGWAYS AND TALBOT FAMILIES

The educational experiences of successive generations of the Fox Strangways and Talbot families underline the changes that were taking place during the Georgian period. In the middle of the eighteenth century it was still quite usual for the daughters of aristocratic families to be sent away to school. The daughters and granddaughters of these women were, however, much more likely to be educated privately, at home. Boarding schools became less exclusive, and fell increasingly out of favour with the higher levels of society.

The first Countess of Ilchester, Elizabeth Strangways Horner, who was born in 1723, apparently received little in the way of a formal education. Her parents separated when she was a child and during her early years she was dragged around the fashionable towns and cities of Europe by her mother, who was by this time the mistress of Henry Fox (who became the first Lord Holland in 1763). According to one of her own daughters, Elizabeth received ‘the education usual at that time—reading, writing and the principles of religion’.⁵⁶ In 1736, at the age of thirteen, she was married to Stephen Fox, the elder brother of her mother's lover, though Elizabeth and her husband did not live together until 1739, when she was sixteen. The first Countess does not appear to have paid a great deal of attention to the education of her own daughters, of whom four survived to adulthood. Lady Ilchester spent a good deal of her time in London. As a result ‘the daughters were great part of their time with the housekeeper, and went to visit their mother at her toilet in a formal sort of way’.⁵⁷ Moreover, though education was by this time ‘much advanced’, ‘she thought the same she had received was sufficient for them’. The eldest daughter, Lady Susan, who was born in 1743, was often with her mother in London. Whilst she was there she does seem to have had some lessons with the authoress Madame Le Prince de Beaumont, a French refugee who spent many years as a governess in private families.⁵⁸ Her published works included Le magasin des enfants, which was ‘practically a treatise on education, perhaps the first of such modern treatises’,⁵⁹ and included a character (Lady Sincère), who was supposedly based on Lady Susan Fox Strangways herself. As a result of these lessons, Lady Susan became ‘a very good French scholar, and a most agreeable converser’. It is clear from her later letters and journals that she was highly intelligent, though (in the words of a younger relative) ‘her principles and education … had been neglected’.⁶⁰ Lady Susan seems to have read a good deal, though much of her education was gained when she was an adult. Lady Ilchester does not seem to have been particularly good at watching over her strong-willed eldest daughter, who eloped in 1764 with William O'Brien, an actor whom she had met when they both took part in amateur theatricals at Holland House. At least two of Lady Susan's younger sisters, Lucy (born 1748), and Frances (Fanny) (born 1755), were sent to Mrs Shields's fashionable boarding school in Queen Square, Bath, where they were contemporaries of Fanny Burney, whose father, Charles Burney, taught there in the 1760s.⁶¹ It seems likely that the other daughter, Harriot (born 1750), was there too. Nothing is known of the education that they received, but the emphasis is likely to have been on the acquisition of social skills rather than intellectual attainment.

In the next generation, the two eldest daughters of the second Earl and Countess of Ilchester never went away to school. In 1787 Harriot, the third daughter, was sent, at the age of about nine, to a school in Weymouth, apparently because she had an injured or deformed knee and it was hoped that sea-bathing would be beneficial. She remained in Weymouth, on and off, for about six years. At first she was at a school run by ‘poor dear gouty Mrs Morris’,⁶² but in 1791 she was moved to Mrs Hepburn's school. Harriot's letters from Weymouth indicate that contemporary doubts about girls' schools were only too well-founded—the girls had lessons in French, music and drawing, but much of their time seems to have been spent gossiping and playing games. The teachers did not always set a very good example: in an undated letter Harriot reported that Mrs Hepburn's husband ‘has gone so far as even to have beat (in a slight degree) his wife in one of his passions’.⁶³ Her sisters' governess clearly had a low opinion of the standard of Harriot's schooling. In December 1790, when Harriot was at Redlynch for a while, Agnes noted in her journal ‘My dear Lady Harriot good and amiable. I hope I shall enable her to make up for her school-days' indolence, and consequently small progress’.⁶⁴

When Agnes Porter left Melbury in 1797 she was not immediately replaced. Harriot's younger sister, Charlotte (aged thirteen or fourteen) was sent to Mrs Devis's fashionable girls' school in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, which was known as the ‘Young Ladies' Eton’. Although the girls were taught French, history, geography and other academic subjects, the main emphasis at the school was on manners and deportment.⁶⁵ It is not clear what arrangements were made for the further schooling of the youngest surviving daughter, Louisa, and she may also have been sent away to school for a while, to be ‘finished’.

By the early nineteenth century, the situation was rather different. None of the Talbot girls was sent away to school—in spite of the difficulty of finding suitable governesses, and of persuading them to stay in such a remote place as Penrice. The Talbots doted on their children and wanted to have them with them as much as possible. Thomas Talbot also clearly had a low opinion of girls' schools, as he indicated in 1796 in a letter to Mrs Hicks Beach, who had asked if Lady Mary knew of a suitable governess for her daughters:

I can't here refrain from giving my opinion that they [the Hicks Beach girls] should not go to any school: the sweet engaging and delicate manner they have been hitherto bred up in might possibly suffer from bad example … As to schools for girls, it is as unserviceable and dangerous as keeping boys at home: the one is liable to be run away with by the dancing master, and the other fall in love with the kitchen maid etc.⁶⁶

GOVERNESSES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

As girls' boarding schools fell out of favour in the second half of the eighteenth century, the number of governesses in private households increased. Mary Wollstonecraft, the writer, became a private governess in 1778, and Selina Trimmer was engaged to teach the daughters of the Duchess of Devonshire in 1786. Agnes Porter and her sister Fanny both started teaching in the 1780s. Agnes's first employers, the Goddards in Swindon, were untitled, but they belonged to the higher ranks of the gentry, as did Thomas Mansel Talbot's cousins, the Hicks Beaches, who were employing governesses from the 1790s.

The change came about in part as a result of an alteration in parents' attitudes towards their children. A greater concern for their daughters' religious and moral welfare, combined with a newly-found delight in domesticity and the company of children demonstrated by some members of the aristocracy (most famously, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire), was to make many parents wary of sending their daughters away to boarding-school. Ideas about girls' education were, moreover, changing again in the last decades of the eighteenth century, with a reaction against ornamental accomplishments and more emphasis on moral training and useful learning—though the intellectual content was still somewhat limited. For most parents employing a governess, a ladylike manner was more important than obvious intelligence. Agnes was probably unusual in that she actually enjoyed teaching, and she was certainly better educated than many of her contemporaries, whose function might still be closer to that of child-minder than that of tutor.

The rising demand for private governesses towards the end of the eighteenth century coincided with an increase in the numbers of girls and women who, for various reasons, needed to find employment. To some extent, as has already been indicated, this resulted from the fact that many girls from respectable backgrounds could not hope to inherit enough money to live on, and were never able to find a husband who could support them. At the same time, one consequence of the French Revolution in 1789 was the presence in Britain in the 1790s and early 1800s of numerous well-born and educated, but indigent, French ladies. Since a knowledge of French was essential for a sophisticated young lady at this period, many of these émigrées found positions as governesses. In a letter written in 1796, Thomas Mansel Talbot commented: ‘I suppose that at this time there is a greater choice of French governesses than ever was known, and possibly of the highest rank, good sense and respectability’.⁶⁷

The latter part of the eighteenth century should, perhaps, be seen as a transitional phase, during which the wealthiest families resorted to private governesses or boarding schools, or a combination of both, for the education of their daughters. Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent away to school (in the 1780s): the Austens were Anglican clergy, who ‘hovered at the gentry's lower fringes’,⁶⁸ though they had some grand relations. Jane Austen was well acquainted with both governesses and their employers, and it is possible to detect some traces of contemporary developments in her work. She does not give a governess to the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice (first published in 1813, but partly written in the 1790s)—but their father, with £2000 a year, belongs only to the middling ranks of the gentry. At the same time, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who is much richer and grander than the Bennets, employs a governess to teach her sickly daughter. Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park, who is a baronet, with ‘a handsome house and large income’, also employs ‘a governess, with proper masters’ to educate his daughters.⁶⁹Mansfield Park and Emma were both written in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and governesses also feature in the latter book. Miss Taylor had become governess to Emma Woodhouse and her sister when Emma was five years old. The Woodhouses, were ‘first in consequence’ in Hartfield,⁷⁰ and were thus precisely the kind of family that might have been expected to engage a governess at this date, especially as Mrs Woodhouse had died when Emma was a small child.

AGNES PORTER AND HER PUPILS

The changing attitude to girls' education in the latter part of the eighteenth century may be seen in the Fox Strangways family. The second Countess of Ilchester, Mary Theresa Grady, took a great deal more interest in her children and their upbringing than her mother-in-law had done. Because of her dislike of fashionable London society, she and her children spent much of their time in the 1770s and 1780s in the country, at Redlynch in Somerset. For families living in the depths of the countryside, there was only a limited amount of scope for supplementing the education that could be provided by friends and relations with lessons from specialist masters, as the latter were mainly to be found in London and the larger provincial towns. Mary Theresa may also have felt that her own education was deficient—her father was a gentleman, but not a particularly wealthy one, and she had been ‘educated in another Kingdom [Ireland], and not with all the high accomplishments beginning to be common in this’.⁷¹ Unlike the first Countess, she was religious, and had ‘a heart stored with good principles, and an understanding to direct the use of them’. Pregnant and in poor health, as she was for much of her married life, she felt the need for an experienced and sympathetic teacher to supervise and educate her children whilst they were at home.

Agnes Porter was not the first governess to be employed to teach the children of the second Earl and Countess of Ilchester. Little is known of her predecessor, apart from the fact that she had proved to be ‘very untrustworthy’. In later years Lady Mary Talbot (née Fox Strangways) remembered little of this woman, apart from the fact that she had taken Lady Mary to see the glassworks in Bristol without permission, when Lady Ilchester was ill at Clifton.⁷² From the beginning, it was clear that Agnes was different: according to Charlotte Traherne ‘my mother [Lady Mary Talbot] used to described herself as a very naughty, sulky child when Miss Porter came, and with her sweet good sense and discernment of character used to charm her out of her obstinacy’.⁷³ Her pupils gave Agnes the affectionate nickname ‘Po’ and she was ‘Po’ to the children of the next generation as well.

Whilst Agnes was with Lord Ilchester's family, at Redlynch and later at Melbury, the composition of the group of pupils in the schoolroom altered from time to time, as the older girls ‘came out’ and entered society, whilst the younger ones started their first lessons. In March 1788, when the first, fragmentary, journal opens, Agnes had two pupils for most of the time: the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, aged fourteen, and her sister Mary, who was twelve. Their sister Harriot spent most of the year at her boarding-school in Weymouth, though she joined her elder sisters for lessons from time to time when she was at home. By 1790 much of Agnes's time was spent with the younger girls, Charlotte and Louisa (aged six and five), whilst Elizabeth and Mary were spending less and less time in the school-room, as they were often away on visits, with their father or with other members of the family. Lessons finally came to an end for the older girls when they were presented at Court: Elizabeth in 1792 and Mary in 1793, followed by Harriot in 1797.

Agnes taught her younger pupils to read and write. The girls also studied history, geography, classics (in translation), the French language, and French and English literature. In August 1790 one morning was spent ‘Relating passages from ancient and modern history’, and in the afternoon of the same day ‘We entertained ourselves with a play of Shakespeare's: Richard II’.⁷⁴ Shakespeare was very popular, though Agnes would probably have used Thomas Bowdler's Family Shakespeare had it been available at this date.⁷⁵ In 1790 she noted: ‘In the afternoon read King Lear to Lady Mary. N.B. never to read that play any more, it is absolutely too much’.⁷⁶ Moral education was not neglected: the children read the Bible and other improving works, and on Sundays Agnes listened to her pupils as they said their prayers and recited the catechism. Although needlework was less important than it had been fifty or a hundred years earlier, the girls were still taught sewing and embroidery. Agnes was with the younger girls for much of the day, even after their lessons had finished: on one afternoon ‘we made a party to the lodge, where we drank tea with much glee’;⁷⁷ whilst on another day, when the weather was bad, Agnes ‘made a party’ with her pupils at the game ‘puss in the corner’.⁷⁸

The girls' academic education was usually Agnes's responsibility, but specialist, invariably male, masters were employed from time to time, especially when the family was in London. In 1791, when Agnes was with Lord Ilchester's daughters in London, she noted: ‘At home all day with my pupils and their various masters. What a pleasure it is to me to see them daily improve in person, manners and elegant accomplishments’.⁷⁹ A writing-master is mentioned in 1791, but most of the masters instructed the girls in the social skills that they would need when they entered adult society. Every well-born girl at this period was expected to play a musical instrument: Agnes was at least able to supervise the girls while they practised, but in 1788 Elizabeth also had music lessons in London from M. ‘Helmandel’. Dancing and deportment were equally important, and in 1788 a Frenchman, M. Chapui, was employed as a dancing-master. During a stay in London, in March and April 1796, Lord Ilchester's younger daughters ‘made great progress with their masters in music, drawing and dancing’. Agnes, in the meantime, ‘supervised as well as I was able, and made them practise in the intervals’. At the same time Lord Stavordale, the only boy, spent two hours a day learning Latin. Agnes, showing her usual desire for self-improvement, was able to sit in on some of the lessons, and ‘got all the declensions pretty perfect’.⁸⁰

No specific training was available for governesses before the end of the eighteenth century, though Agnes had no doubt gained some experience from helping to teach her younger brother and sisters. To a considerable extent, she must have developed her teaching methods through practice, but she was also interested in contemporary educational theories. In 1791 Mrs Digby gave Agnes a copy of Leçons d'une gouvernante à ses élèves by the well-known and prolific French authoress Madame de Genlis, whom her oldest two pupils met at Stourhead at this time. Madame de Genlis had been influenced by her fellow-countryman Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had emphasised the necessity of devising a plan of education which would suit each individual child, and which would bring out its own innate talents and abilities. Despite the radicalism of his ideas on education and society, Rousseau was deeply traditional in his attitude to women, believing that they were naturally inferior, and that girls should be educated only to be useful and pleasing companions for members of the opposite sex. Madame de Genlis therefore laid great emphasis on accomplishments, particularly those connected with the performance of music.

The writings of Madame de Genlis were still extremely popular at the end of the eighteenth century, and many of her books are in the library at Penrice. Yet her ideas on education were beginning to look somewhat old-fashioned by this time. Agnes and Mary Talbot also read and discussed the works of other, more up-to-date theorists, most of whom expressed their doubts concerning the value of ornamental accomplishments. They also questioned the usefulness of learning, by heart, lessons which often consisted mainly of long lists. In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park Maria and Julia Bertram could ‘repeat the chronological order of the kings of England, with the dates of their accession, and most of the principal events of their reigns’, together with ‘the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of the Heathen Mythology, and all the Metals, Semi-Metals, Plantes, and distinguished philosophers’.⁸¹ Jane Austen evidently did not feel that the two Bertram girls could be described as well-educated. Agnes would no doubt have agreed.

One of the most influential of the writers on education in the latter part of the eighteenth century was the Evangelical Hannah More who, though deeply conservative in her emphasis on propriety, did at least believe that women should be given a more rigorous academic education. As early as 1786 Agnes copied the following paragraph from Hannah More's writings into her extract book:

A lady may speak a little French and Italian, repeat passages in a theatrical tone, play and sing, have her dressing room hung with her own drawings, her person covered with her own tambour work, and may notwithstanding have been very badly educated. Though well-bred women should learn these, yet the end of a good education is not that they may become dancers, singers, players or painters, but to make them good daughters, good wives, good Christians.⁸²

Hannah More's book Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education was first published in 1779; Lady Mary Talbot acquired a copy of the fourth edition in 1799. More's popularity continued: in November 1809 Agnes was reading Hints for the Education of a Princess, and she had also read, and liked, Coelebs in Search of a Wife by the same author. Hannah More was in favour of an improved system of education for women, as they would then be better equipped to influence the people around them—including their husbands and children—and make them better people. Together with her contemporary, the poet William Cowper,⁸³ she advocated a life of quiet domesticity, preferably in the countryside, where it was easier for the individual to concentrate on the development of his or her relationship with God. The sentiments of William Cowper and Hannah More were echoed by both Agnes and Lady Mary Talbot—and no doubt helped to reinforce the latter's natural reluctance to involve herself in smart society life in London, and her preference for spending her time with her husband and children in the house and garden at Penrice. Mary's own letters and diaries show an enduring search for self-improvement, combined with frequent self-examination with regard to her own feelings and dealings with other people.

Another extremely popular author at this time was Maria Edgeworth. In June 1802 Agnes noted in her journal that she was reading Practical Education by Maria and her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth, published four years earlier,⁸⁴ She comments that ‘Between theory at night and practice all day, I should do something’.⁸⁵ The Edgeworths were also influenced by Rousseau, in that they believed that children were reasonable human beings, whose natural gifts might be brought out by education, but they were rather more interested in the needs of girls than Rousseau had been. Both boys and girls should be taught by example, and should be reasoned with, rather than punished. Girls should, however, be taught to be more restrained than boys, ‘because they are likely to meet with more restraint in society’, and because ‘much of the effect of their [girls'] powers of reasoning, and of their wit, when they grow up will depend on the gentleness and good-humour with which they conduct themselves’.⁸⁶

For both boys and girls, the Edgeworths stressed the importance of fresh air and exercise, and practical work. Children were to be encouraged to use their hands, and to play with toys that ‘afford trials of dexterity and activity’, such as ‘tops, kites, hoops, balls, battledores and shuttlecocks, nine-pins and cup and ball’. They could be taught chemistry and mineralogy, and they might also study living plants and fossils. Gardening was a particularly suitable occupation for children, as it combined academic study with fresh air and exercise. In later years the Edgeworths were criticised for their emphasis on practical education at the expense of the cultivation of a child's mind and imagination, but they did give female pupils an alternative to endless hours of sewing or practising the harpsichord.

The Edgeworths laid great emphasis on the importance of setting good examples for children, and of avoiding bad company. In particular, they stressed the undesirability of leaving children too much in the company of servants, from whom they would pick up ‘vulgar’ manners. ‘If children pass one hour in a day with servants’, they wrote, ‘it will be vain to attempt their education’.⁸⁷ The children's mother, or a governess, should be present whilst the children were being dressed, and children should never be sent out to walk with servants. This was an additional reason for a family to employ a governess, who would be expected to supervise the daughters for much of the day, not only at lesson time.

In 1807 Agnes recommended the educational writings of Elizabeth Hamilton to her former pupil Lady Harriot Frampton, commenting that Miss Hamilton ‘shews a method of bringing the faculties to perfection’, and that ‘I think Lady Mary's practice keeps pace with Miss Hamilton's theory’.⁸⁸ Miss Hamilton followed Hannah More in stressing the importance of moral education, although she admitted that it was unrealistic to expect that children should be totally isolated from servants. Although she was hostile to ideas about the equality of the sexes, believing that women should be taught to value virtue above all, and should not try to emulate men in public life or educational attainments, she believed that boys and girls should be educated together during their earliest years, in order to avoid ‘the pride and arrogance which boys acquire from early ideas of inherent superiority’ due to ‘the trifling accomplishments to which the girls are devoted [which] they despise as irrational’.⁸⁹ From a later letter it is clear that Henrietta Maria Hicks Beach was also an admirer of Miss Hamilton's works.⁹⁰

Henrietta Maria, the mother of Sydney Smith's pupils Michael and William Hicks Beach, had three daughters who were older than the Talbot children; Lady Mary Talbot consulted her regularly on educational matters. In the late 1790s the Beaches employed a Mrs (or Miss) Williams as a governess for their daughters. She must be the Mrs Williams who was recommended by Sydney Smith in a letter written in 1797 as being ‘extreemly good tempered and perfectly well bred’.⁹¹ Henrietta Maria Hicks Beach gave a copy of Mrs Williams's manuscript ‘Plan on which I should wish my daughters to be educated’ to the Talbots. This is interesting, as it summarises contemporary ideas on how girls should be educated within these wealthy households, which were comparatively enlightened, though still essentially conservative. As might be expected, Mrs Williams laid particular emphasis on religious and moral training. She believed that girls should have religion ‘so interwoven in their hearts and souls as to prevent their ever being contaminated by any bad examples they may meet with, or led astray by any of the prevailing errors or follies of the times’. Their minds should be well-informed: they should learn history, geography, botany, natural history and astronomy, as well as being ‘perfectly mistresses of … the historical and natural history of their own country and its antiquities’. They should be well acquainted with the best authors in the English and French languages; they should be excellent accountants, should be able to organise their own household, and should have ‘some notion of the value of landed or funded property, repairs of estates and expences of building’. They should also be able to manage without servants and make their own clothes if necessary. Such a programme could have left little time for other occupations, but the girls were also to be ‘well acquainted with the rudiments of drawing and musick’, and they should be able to sing and dance. To this catalogue of the qualities of the ideal woman, Lady Mary Talbot added a few words of her own: ‘God, hear the prayer of an anxious mother: “Let my children be perfect Christians”’.

Theories about the aims and practice of female education were certainly plentiful at this period. Even Sydney Smith wrote an article on the subject, published in the Edinburgh Review a decade after his meeting with Agnes Porter.⁹² In this, he showed himself to be more enlightened than many of his contemporaries. He refuted the commonly-held theory that men had a greater capacity for learning than women and recommended that more attention should be paid to the education of girls. In particular, he noted that ‘It is said, that the effect of knowledge is to make women pedantic and affected; and that nothing can be more offensive than to see a woman stepping out of the natural modesty of her sex, to make an ostentatious display of her literary attainments’—as Agnes had no doubt tried to do, when they met at Penrice. But in the Edinburgh Review Smith argued that learned women would cease to appear affected if there were more of them: ‘Diffuse knowledge generally among women, and you will at once cure the conceit which knowledge occasions while it is rare’. Sentiments such as these alone did not, however, bring better schooling for girls, and there was little change until the latter part of the nineteenth century.

It is interesting to note that neither Agnes nor Lady Mary Talbot ever appears to have read anything written by Mary Wollstonecraft, whose radical Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and Vindication of the Rights of Women were published in 1787 and 1792 respectively. Both Agnes and Lady Mary would doubtless have been shocked by Wollstonecraft's belief that girls could, and indeed should, be educated to the same level as boys. They may have regretted the fact that so little importance was attached to the education of girls beyond the most basic level, and wished that they had more opportunities for self-improvement, but neither expressed any doubts that the main aim of educating girls was that they should become dutiful Christian daughters and mothers. The books that they read—by conservative authors such as Hannah More, John Moir and Thomas Gisborne—reinforced this attitude, which was shared by the vast majority of their friends and relations.⁹³

What was the practical effect of this intensive study of educational manuals by Agnes Porter and Lady Mary Talbot? How did the education of the Talbot girls differ from that of their mother and her sisters? The Talbots spent most of their time in the country at Penrice, where life was much more informal than it had been at Redlynch and Melbury. They rarely went to London, so the scope for employing specialist masters to give an extra gloss of sophistication to the girls' various accomplishments was limited, though dancing and music masters did travel out from Swansea to Penrice in the early years of the nineteenth century. The children at Penrice benefited greatly, however, from the fact that their mother was able and willing to give them a good deal of her time—and she, like Agnes, continued to educate herself in a wide variety of subjects long after she had left the school-room. Learning lists of words does not appear to have been an important part of the curriculum: the children were encouraged to ask questions and discuss the subjects that they were studying. An indication of Agnes's teaching methods is given in a letter written in 1810, when she says that ‘Miss Jane finds herself forced to lend her attention, as I frequently ask her the impertinent questions of “Who was this person? What was his motive? How did it succeed?” And so on’.⁹⁴

Agnes was mainly interested in literature, history and languages. With her, the Talbot children learned reading, writing and arithmetic, with some French and a little Italian, and they also studied stories from the classical authors, together with history and geography. When Agnes left Penrice in 1806, Lady Mary asked Mrs Hicks Beach to enquire for a replacement governess, who should be ‘a religious and well-educated woman’ and should be able to teach ‘French and English grammatically and the fundamental part of musick’.⁹⁵ To these traditional areas of study, Lady Mary Talbot, in common with many women of her generation, added a wide range of scientific subjects, including natural philosophy, geometry, chemistry and natural history. In 1794 her wedding presents from her husband had included books on birds, fish, insects, butterflies, fish, shells, ferns, grasses and flowers. Many of these books were beautifully illustrated and must have helped to stimulate the interests of the Talbot children. Lady Mary was devoted to her garden, spending many hours studying horticultural books and plant catalogues, and also doing much practical work in the gardens herself. The Talbot children helped their mother in the garden and collected wild flowers, fungi and mosses, which they then tried to find in the books in the library at Penrice. They made frequent expeditions to the Gower beaches, from which they returned loaded with shells and pebbles, to be sorted, washed, drawn and identified. They also began to collect geological specimens, fossils and flints, some of which were found on Chesil Beach during visits to Lord Ilchester's house at Abbotsbury in Dorset. They studied astronomy too, and their letters include many references to their sightings of comets and eclipses of the sun and moon. William Henry Fox Talbot, the first cousin of the Penrice Talbots, often joined them during their lessons and expeditions. It seems probable that the foundations for his life-long passion for botany and horticulture—with his interest in astronomy, chemistry and other scientific subjects—were laid during his long holidays in Gower.⁹⁶

It is clear from Agnes Porter's writings, and also from other contemporary letters and diaries, that the Edgeworths' strictures about keeping children away from servants could not always be followed in real life. Although the children spent a great deal of time with Agnes or with their mother, there are frequent references to them being dressed and put to bed, given their meals and taken for walks by their maids. Indeed, C. R. M. Talbot recalled, in later years, that he had been afraid of his mother when he was a child, and had looked upon his nurse as ‘my only friend in the world’.⁹⁷ The memorial inscription in Penrice churchyard to Sukey, the children's nurse for nearly thirty years, bears witness to the affection that the Talbots felt for several of their servants. Nevertheless, the Talbots obviously did worry about leaving their children with servants: in 1806, when Agnes had said that she wished to leave Penrice, Lady Mary told Mrs Hicks Beach that she was considering engaging two governesses, so that the sub-governess could supervise the children when the superior governess was otherwise occupied ‘to prevent their ever being with servants’.⁹⁸

The Talbot girls were better educated than many of their contemporaries. By no means all mothers were as intelligent or as diligent as Mary Talbot, and many governesses showed little aptitude or enthusiasm for teaching. There were, limits, however, and too great a devotion to learning was still not encouraged. Charlotte, the fourth daughter, seems to have been the cleverest, and in later life she studied heraldry, genealogy, architecture and local history, but as a child she was discouraged from being too bookish. In 1809, when Charlotte was nine, Agnes commented ‘I hope [she] makes merry at dancing, playing, dolls etc. If she reads too much she will be called a book-worm—that will never do’.⁹⁹ It must have been galling for girls such as Charlotte when their younger brothers, whom they had helped to educate during their earliest years, returned from boarding-school to patronise them and show off their knowledge of Greek and Latin, which were not generally thought to be suitable subjects for girls, and which few governesses were able to teach.

Living in the countryside for most of the time as they did, the Talbot girls would have appeared unsophisticated to many contemporaries of the same social class. People who met them commented on their naturalness, which their mother and Agnes encouraged: in a letter to Lady Mary Talbot, written in 1810 Agnes wrote, ‘You know how much I prefer, in children's culture, the want of a pruning knife to the barrenness of fruits’.¹⁰⁰ In the same year George Eden (later Earl of Auckland), a friend of the Talbots, wrote from London to say that he had seen Lady Mary's sister, Lady Elizabeth Feilding, together with the oldest of the Talbot children, Mary, who was also staying in London. Lady Elizabeth had asked George Eden if he knew of a dancing master who would ‘teach Miss Talbot how to enter a room in the most graceful manner’. Eden commented ‘I am sadly afraid that they are going to spoil all that you, nature and Penrice had between you brought to great perfection’.¹⁰¹

It may have been partly as a result of their rural upbringing, combined with their mother's reluctance to attend society gatherings in London, that none of the girls made a spectacularly good marriage. The four who found husbands married into local gentry families in Glamorgan: Nicholl of Merthyr Mawr, Traherne of Coedarhydyglyn, Franklen of Clemenstone and Dillwyn Llewelyn of Penllergaer. All were perfectly respectable, and some gained titles during the course of the nineteenth century, but none was as wealthy or as well connected as the Talbots. Only one of Thomas and Mary Talbot's children married into the aristocracy: the son, Christopher, married Lady Charlotte Butler, daughter of an Irish peer, the first Earl of Glengall. The origins of Lady Charlotte's father were, however, somewhat unusual: it was said that his mother had been a beggar-woman in the town of Cahir in County Tipperary, who been deserted by her husband. The husband had eventually died in the East Indies in 1788, unaware that he had just succeeded a distant cousin to become the eleventh Baron Cahir.

FREE TIME

Agnes was a sociable woman. Many of her happiest hours were spent paying visits, chatting with friends and playing cards. She was a pious Christian and went to church regularly, but—in common with most other members of ‘polite society’ at the time—she was also a keen theatre-goer.¹⁰² Agnes was fortunate enough to be able to visit the London theatres reasonably frequently during one of the golden ages of their history. She saw actors and actresses whose names are still remembered, including John Kemble, Dora Jordan and Sarah Siddons, and she probably also saw David Garrick. Her vivid descriptions of her theatre visits are among the most enjoyable passages in her journals. But these visits to London, and occasional weeks spent with friends and relatives in other parts of the country were the exceptions: infrequent interruptions in an otherwise lonely existence. It is not surprising that Agnes included several quotations from Alexander Pope's ‘Ode on Solitude’ in her letters and journals—she must have known the poem by heart.

It is difficult for us, living at the end of the twentieth century, with all the wonders of modern travel and telecommunications at our disposal, to imagine what it must have been like to live in an isolated country house in Britain in the decades before and after 1800, with only children and servants for company. But this is how Agnes spent much of her life. Her only communications with the outside world were through letters, occasional newspapers and conversation with visitors. During the long hours that she spent alone in her room, her entertainments were writing letters, reading and other solitary occupations, such as sewing and playing the harpsichord. Nevertheless, she was more fortunate than many of her contemporaries: visitors did come fairly frequently to both Redlynch and Penrice; she was able to go away from time to time, either to visit her own family or to accompany her pupils when they went to London or elsewhere; and she usually had a well-stocked country-house library at her disposal. At Redlynch there was even a ‘servants' library’, to which Agnes decided to give a copy of the improving text The Whole Duty of Man in 1790. Agnes could afford to buy books from time to time, though the choice of books to purchase was limited outside London—she records her dismay in 1809 at being unable to find any French or Italian books in Great Yarmouth.¹⁰³ Agnes was also given books by her friends and former pupils. Many of her contemporaries, who had to rely on the provincial circulating and subscription libraries for their books, were much less well provided with reading material. Agnes did not need to make use of the libraries in Swansea, but she does record the gift of her copy of Walker's Dictionary to the new Glamorgan subscription library there in 1804.¹⁰⁴

Reading was a means both of passing the time and of self-instruction. Like her contemporary Anna Larpent, Agnes clearly aspired to ‘a refinement which can only be felt in the pure pleasure of intellectual pursuits’.¹⁰⁵ Agnes occasionally makes a distinction between books read for pleasure and for educational reasons. In 1790 she was reading The Whole Duty of Man ‘a most excellent instruction’, but she also describes how ‘I treated myself with Tasso and an hour of Ormond's Life’. She also read Gaudentio di Lucca ‘to amuse me’. Later in the same year she was still reading The Whole Duty of Man, for improvement, together with Gil Blas for entertainment. In 1794 she enjoyed the works of Marie Jeanne Riccoboni and, for her ‘more serious reading’, the Life of Gustavus Adolphus by Walter Harte. In 1804, when staying with Fanny and Thomas Richards in Swindon, Agnes noted in her journal, ‘I have read since I was here Dr Lyttleton On the Articles and the Bishop of London's lectures. Our amusing reading was The Infernal Quixote’. Agnes and her friends and correspondents enjoyed discussing the books that they had read, and reading aloud was also popular: it was a more sociable occupation than solitary study, and meant that the listeners could get on with other work, such as sewing. In 1804, at Penrice, Agnes noted that Thomas Talbot had read Carl Philipp Moritz's Travels in England to the company one evening, and later in the same year he read ‘an act of a new play called Almahide’.¹⁰⁶

Agnes Porter's choice of reading material was varied, but probably quite typical for her time. She read sermons—both those of her father (apparently unpublished) and those of well-known preachers, including Hugh Blair and John Moir. Improving works, apart from The Whole Duty of Man, included Luigi Cornaro's Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life. As has already been seen, Agnes was interested in educational theories: she read books by the Edgeworths, Elizabeth Hamilton, Hannah More and Sarah Trimmer. She also tried to study Italian, German, and geometry. For pleasure she read historical works, particularly the lives of famous men such as Gustavus Adolphus, the Duke of Ormond, and Frederick the Great. She also read periodicals, including the Spectator and Annual Register. Travel literature is only occasionally mentioned, and she does not seem to have read many books on geography or natural history—unlike a number of her pupils, especially Lady Mary Talbot, for whom botany and horticulture became a life-long passion.

Works of fiction, both prose and verse, make up at least 50 per cent of the list of books owned or mentioned by Agnes. Although contemporary commentators condemned novel-reading as frivolous and uninstructive,¹⁰⁷ Agnes enjoyed a large number of such books, in addition to more elevated works. She knew Evelina by Fanny Burney and she owned a copy of The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe. She read novels by female authors such as Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Hamilton and Jane West, also enjoying French authors, including Claris de Florian, Le Sage, Marivaux and de Genlis. Agnes also liked poetry. Amongst the poems she mentions as having read are The Village by George Crabbe, The Farmer's Boy by Robert Bloomfield and Marmion by Sir Walter Scott. She was fond of Petrarch, Tasso and Ossian. Her favourite poets included Alexander Pope, William Shenstone and, in particular, William Cowper—‘the most beloved writer of the period’, reputed to be Jane Austen's favourite author.¹⁰⁸

In addition to reading, Agnes also enjoyed writing. For a gentlewoman of her day, letter-writing was an important occupation: it helped to fill in the long hours spent alone in her room, and receiving letters reduced the inevitable feelings of isolation. Exchanging letters was an essential means of maintaining and reinforcing friendships, of discussing and passing on gossip about mutual acquaintances, and of finding out what was going on in the outside world. Agnes corresponded regularly with several relations, old friends and, in later years, her former pupils. She had very definite ideas on the purpose of letter-writing and tried to convey these to her pupils: ‘A letter to a friend seems to me simply this: giving them an hour of your company, notwithstanding whatever distance separates you. To do this is to convey your thoughts to them while you are writing …’¹⁰⁹ Sending letters was expensive in the days before the penny post: the cost was usually paid by the recipient, but letters sent to or by peers and Members of Parliament went free under certain conditions. Whilst she was in Lord Ilchester's household Agnes would have been able to obtain from her employer franked, post-dated covers for her letters, which meant that she did not have to worry that she might be imposing an unwelcome expense on her many correspondents. In later years Agnes was sometimes able to obtain covers from acquaintances: two letters sent from Fairford in 1806 and 1807 are endorsed ‘Free, W. Windham’,¹¹⁰ and a letter from Malvern in 1810 has a cover signed by Charles Lemon.¹¹¹

Agnes was familiar with the works of Joseph Addison, who recommended the keeping of a journal as a means of self-examination, through which the writer might achieve good taste and refinement.¹¹² Writing her own journal was certainly important to Agnes. In it she recorded day to day events, and also her thoughts and hopes, together with details of the plays that she had seen, her journeys—often by stagecoach—and the books she was reading. Although she cannot have expected that her journals would ever be published, they were read by the families of her pupils during her lifetime. In 1812 she sent Lady Mary Talbot a parcel of letters, together with two volumes of her own journals, with the comment that they ‘will perhaps amuse you, and are peculiar in the circumstance of adverting to the education of both the mother and her children’.¹¹³ Unfortunately, the expectation that her journals would be read by other people led Agnes to delete some words (though some of these deletions can be deciphered), and to cut out some sections or whole pages. The entries which have been lost seem to have included material that Agnes felt to be too personal, painful or revealing: it is interesting that the name of the Revd Joseph Griffith has been crossed out (presumably after Agnes discovered that he was married). It seems likely that some entries relating to her sister Betsey have also been removed.

Writing, both in poetry and prose, was a popular occupation among educated women at this time, when an increasing amount of their work was being published. Agnes certainly had some literary pretensions too. The journals include a number of poems written by her, and there are also some references to a children's book that she wrote, which was published in 1791 with the help of her friend Valentine Green. This book, Triumphs of Reason Examplified in Seven Tales, and Affectionately Dedicated to the Juvenile Part of the Fair Sex by the Author, was published anonymously, and probably in a fairly small edition: I have so far been unable to locate a copy. The exact basis on which it was published is unclear: Agnes appears to have contributed something towards the costs and it seems most unlikely that she actually made a profit from the publication.

THE WIDER WORLD: COURT CONNECTIONS, POLITICS AND PATRONAGE

Outside the largely domestic world inhabited by Agnes Porter and portrayed in the novels of Jane Austen, the decades on either side of the turn of the eighteenth century were also the age of the French Revolution and wars against Napoleon; of rebellion in Ireland; of Fox and Pitt; of the Prince of Wales and the madness of King George III. Many of these aspects of contemporary society are touched on, if only in passing, in Agnes Porter's letters and journals.

Lord Ilchester's main interests were hunting and gambling. He took little part in public life, though he did attend the House of Lords from time to time. He held no post in the royal household, unlike his Digby relatives. His cousin and brother-in-law Colonel Stephen Digby was a vice-chamberlain to Queen Charlotte from 1783 to 1792—it was probably because of this that the King and Queen, with three of the Princesses, visited Redlynch on their way from Weymouth to Longleat in 1789. The visit was not a total success: it rained all morning, so the royal family was unable to see the gardens and park, though they ‘showed themselves very graciously at the windows’ to the crowds of local people waiting outside.¹¹⁴ Agnes was presumably at Redlynch during this visit, though she does not refer to this occasion. Colonel Digby was also Deputy Ranger, and then Ranger and Keeper, of Richmond Park from 1792 to 1800. Other members of the Digby family also had positions at Court: Julia, daughter of William Digby, Dean of Durham, was a maid of honour to Queen Charlotte from 1789 until she married in 1794, and was a woman of the bedchamber to the Queen from 1805; Admiral Robert Digby was a groom of the bedchamber in 1792; and Lord Ilchester's second wife, Maria Digby, was a favourite lady of the bedchamber to Queen Charlotte from 1804 until the Queen's death in 1818, apart from a period from 1814 to 1816 during which she was ‘lent’ to Princess Charlotte. Alicia Campbell, an old friend of Lord Ilchester and his family, was another friend at Court. She was appointed sub-governess to Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince of Wales, in 1805, and became Keeper of the Privy Purse to the Princess when she married in 1816. Mrs Campbell was still with the Princess when she died in childbirth in the following year.

There were connections with the House of Commons too, most notably with Lord Ilchester's much more famous cousin, the Whig leader Charles James Fox. Fox spent three days at Redlynch in January 1791. Agnes does not say what she thought about him, but it is clear, from a letter written shortly after the visit by Lady Susan O'Brien, that the inhabitants of Redlynch were all Foxites: when a visiting footman declared, when drinking a toast, ‘May the Fox fall into a Pitt’, the servants of Lord Ilchester ‘exclaim'd “You had better hold your tongue, we are every one Foxes and we won't have such things said here”’.¹¹⁵

At a time when advancement in the church, the army and in the other professions depended to a great extent on knowing the right people, families such as the Foxes and the Talbots were important sources of patronage for their relations, friends and acquaintances. Both Lord Ilchester and Thomas Mansel Talbot were patrons of several church livings, and both would have received a constant stream of letters from men looking for advancement or employment. In South Wales, John Hunt and John Collins held the livings of Margam and Oxwich as a result of the patronage of their old friend. As a favoured member of a wealthy household, Agnes was expected to play her part in promoting the interests of her own friends and family. The letters and journals include several references to her attempts to fulfil these obligations: in 1790 she wrote to her cousin Mrs Amyot ‘concerning a young woman whom I hope to place in a comfortable situation through my sister’;¹¹⁶ and eight years later she was hoping to obtain a position for Mrs Amyot's sister Ann Garritt as governess to one of the Digby girls. Agnes's greatest achievement came when she asked Lady Ilchester to use her influence to help Dr James Keir, the son of her old friend Elizabeth Keir: this seems to have been accomplished with the assistance of Sir Walter Farquhar, a fashionable doctor who was consulted both by the Fox Strangways family and by the Prince of Wales. Probably less successful was Agnes's request, in 1802, again through Lady Ilchester, that she herself should be considered as a recipient of St Catharine's Bounty. Later, in 1810, Agnes hoped that two of her former pupils, Lady Mary Talbot and Lady Harriot Frampton, would help to find new pupils for her sister Fanny.¹¹⁷

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The fall of the Bastille in July 1789, with the years of revolution and European war which followed, formed a background to the lives of Agnes and the people among whom she lived during the period covered by the journals and letters. In common with most other members of the Whig Opposition, who felt that the overthrow of the excessive and arbitrary power of the ancien régime was justified, Charles James Fox welcomed the French Revolution to begin with, calling it ‘The greatest event … that ever happened in the world’.¹¹⁸ This initial euphoria turned to dismay and then horror as the full implications of events taking place in France became apparent.

It has been observed that Jane Austen rarely comments directly on the Revolution and its after effects.¹¹⁹ While this also applies to Agnes Porter, Agnes had friends in France, and she describes several encounters with émigrés who were living in Great Britain. The most notable of these was the famous authoress Madame de Genlis, whom Agnes's pupils met at Stourhead. Agnes encountered several French priests, including M. Panyer, the chaplain to the nuns at Amesbury, with M. Marêt and M. Boisvy, whom she met in Salisbury. Agnes was clearly fascinated by these men, whom she described as ‘as agreeable men as I ever knew—all of them insinuating to a degree’.¹²⁰ As the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, and a pious churchwoman herself, she was somewhat suspicious of Roman Catholics. Agnes also met other refugees from France in her sister's house in 1798, including M. de Vevrotte, the former President of the Parlement of Dijon, who was accompanied by ‘a female Laplander’. The precise status of the Laplander within the Vevrotte household was the subject of much contemporary speculation.

After 1793, when the French king, Louis XVI was executed and Britain entered the European war against France, the inhabitants of the coastal counties of southern England were in constant fear of invasion by French troops. A noticeable feature of the period during which Agnes wrote her journal and letters was the presence, particularly along the south coast, and in ports such as Great Yarmouth and Swansea, of large numbers of men connected with the army and navy. Two of Jane Austen's brothers were naval officers, and she used her knowledge of their world to develop characters such as Fanny Price's brother William in Mansfield Park, and Admiral Croft and Captains Wentworth, Harville and Benwick in Persuasion. Several of Agnes's friends and acquaintances were in the regular army or navy, and others were involved with one or other of the numerous Volunteer regiments which were raised at this time. Lord Ilchester's daughters were by no means immune to the charms of such men. William Davenport Talbot, the first husband of Agnes's oldest pupil Elizabeth, was a junior officer in the regular army before his marriage, and then served in the Wiltshire Supplementary Militia until 1799. Elizabeth's second husband, Charles Feilding, was a Captain in the Royal Navy, who retired from active service in 1809, though he was still on half pay when he died (as a Rear-Admiral) in 1837. Lady Mary Talbot also chose a naval officer as her second husband: in 1815, two years after Thomas Talbot's death, she married the recently-retired hero of the capture of the Banda Islands, Captain Sir Christopher Cole. A Cornishman of comparatively humble origins, he was quite clearly the real love of her life.

In February 1794 Lady Susan O'Brien wrote from Melbury to tell Lady Mary Talbot that ‘An invasion is really so much and so universally talk'd of that one hardly knows what to think’, and said that she might flee to Wales ‘on a poney’ if the French landed at Weymouth.¹²¹ In January 1797, when she was with the Digbys at Minterne, Lady Susan noted in her journal: ‘Nothing talk'd of but military preparations, invasion and deffence. The situation of the country but too alarming’.¹²² Shortly after this, in February 1797, a French force numbering 1400 did indeed land near Fishguard, just fifty miles from Penrice Castle. Agnes was not there at the time, but Thomas and Mary Talbot were at home with their two small daughters. The French ships had been seen from Gower before they reached Pembrokeshire: as Mary wrote to her sister Harriot, ‘We had reason to be in a fright, for tho' they landed in Fiscard Bay in Pembrokeshire, as we did not know how many there were of them we thought we should have their company’.¹²³ Thomas Mansel Talbot was offered the command of the Glamorganshire Provisional Cavalry in 1798, but refused it. How useful they would have been if the French had landed again is debatable: in March 1798 Talbot described a muster, at which:

The horses, from being weak, and many only just taken up after so wet a winter as we have had, made a most wretched appearance, and … the troopers from this part of the county run races over Britton Ferry sands, lam'd or threw down most of their horses, and are return'd home quite unfit for service … I hear the people about Cowbridge and Cardiff sent poneys; one man had a mangy horse and was not suffer'd to come near the others.¹²⁴

Thomas Mansel Talbot nevertheless held the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel of the voluntary Glamorganshire Rangers; he also contributed £500 a year to a local fund for the defence of Swansea and Gower during the period of the war.

There were further worries, resulting from disturbances in Ireland as well as France. In 1798, during Wolfe Tone's rebellion, Agnes's friends Mr and Mrs Simpson, fled from Dublin to North Wales, and from time to time she also heard news of her former pupils' Grady relatives in County Limerick and other parts of southern Ireland. In the summer of 1803 Fanny asked Agnes to leave Penrice immediately, and come to live in Swindon, as she was afraid that the French might land in Wales again. Agnes was, however, sanguine. She told Fanny, ‘When I leave my dear Lady Mary I would not do it at a time of apprehended calamity—having shared in her good things, I would not leave her in trouble’.¹²⁵

Two years later, after the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, fears that Britain would be invaded again could be laid aside, at least for the time being. Agnes did not live to hear of the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, but by the time of her death, early in 1814, the French forces were in retreat throughout Europe and peace negotiations had begun.

Agnes was not forgotten by her pupils and their descendants, who continued to read and enjoy her letters and journals—a letter written in 1921, and tucked into one of the journals, shows that they were still being passed around the family over a century after Agnes's death. Though it has proved impossible to find a copy of Agnes's book of children's stories, there can be little doubt that she would have been delighted to think that her thoughts and recollections, written down during long hours spent alone in her chamber, might eventually reach a wider audience.

Notes

1. Her own family knew her as ‘Nanny’ or ‘Nancy’, but to everyone else she was Miss (or Mrs) Porter. Her pupils called her ‘Po’. I shall refer to her as Agnes or Agnes Porter.

2. Especially the Beaches of Netheravon, Wiltshire, and Williamstrip, Gloucestershire. See below pp. 30, 334 for the Porter-Beach connection. Jane Austen refers to the death of one of the Beach daughters in a letter dated 9 January 1796. See Deirdre Le Faye (ed.), Jane Austen's Letters (paperback edn, Oxford, 1997), p. 2. This must be Jane Hicks Beach, buried at Leyton, Essex, 7 January 1796.

3. For the nineteenth century, see Kathryn Hughes, The Victorian Governess (London and Rio Grande, Ohio, 1993). For earlier governesses, see Alice Renton, Tyrant or Victim? (London, 1991); and Bea Howe, A Galaxy of Governesses (London, 1954).

4. Coincidentally, Henry Sharington was an ancestor of Agnes's employer Thomas Mansel Talbot.

5. Renton, Tyrant or Victim?, p. 23.

6. Edward Hall (ed.), Miss Weeton's Journal of a Governess (new edn, Newton Abbot, Devon, 1969).

7. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics, 1972), p. 329.

8. Letter, 20 December [1797].

9. Laurence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London, 1977), p. 380.

10. Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her (London, 1995), p. 253.

11. Jane Austen, Emma (Penguin Popular Classics, 1994), p. 17.

12. Ibid., p. 13.

13. Letter, 7 April 1792.

14. Journal, 17-18 June 1796.

15. Journal, 13 May 1797.

16. Jane Austen, Emma, p. 123.

17. Journal, 26 May 1791.

18. Journal, 16 November 1802.

19. Journal, 16 March 1805.

20. PRO, PROB 11/1384/908.

21. Dorset RO, Fox Strangways, D124, box 241, ‘Statement of the Late Earl of Ilchester's Concerns’.

22. Journal, 26 August 1803.

23. M. and R. L. Edgeworth, Practical Education (London, 1798), p. 549.

24. Hall (ed.), Miss Weeton's Journal of a Governess, p. 205.

25. M. Jean Peterson, ‘The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society’, in M. Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and Be Still (Bloomington, Indiana, 1972), p. 8.

26. PRO, PROB 11/1560/530.

27. It is not clear where their journey started: Smith was curate at Netheravon, Wiltshire, where the Beaches had a house, but they also had a house at Williamstrip, Gloucestershire.

28. NLW [The National Library of Wales], MS 11,981E, Letter from Sydney Smith to Mrs Hicks Beach, 17 September 1799. I am most grateful to Alan Bell for his help in locating this letter.

29. Nowell C. Smith (ed.), The Letters of Sydney Smith (Oxford, 1953), i, pp. 47-48, Sydney Smith to Michael Hicks Beach, 2 October 1799.

30. Letter, 21 December 1789.

31. Journal, 13 March 1805.

32. Journal, 12 March 1805.

33. In 1796 Agnes noted in her journal that she had lost a seal with her father's arms on it (Journal, 13 October 1796). She later used a seal with the Porter arms of three bells on some of her letters, and silver with this crest has been handed down in the family. Similar arms were used by a number of different, and probably unrelated, families called Porter.

34. [Irene Collins, Jane Austen and the Clergy (London and Rio Grande) Ohio, 1993], p. 108.

35. Journal, 17 January 1791. Agnes refers only to ‘my sister’, but Fanny seems to be the more likely of the two.

36. See, in particular, Peterson in Vicinus, Suffer and Be Still, pp. 3-19; and Hughes, The Victorian Governess, especially pp. 85-116.

37. Journal, 2 December 1790.

38. Journal, 4 August 1791.

39. B. H. Malkin, The Scenery, Antiquities and Biography of South Wales (London, 1807), ii, pp. 491-92.

40. Pocket book of T. M. Talbot, 18 February 1806. Talbot does not say where the housekeeper slept.

41. Letter, Lady Mary Talbot to Mrs Hicks Beach, 24 June?1806. See also Agnes's Journal, 24 March 1804, for details of how she spent her time at Penrice.

42. [Henry Skrine, Two Successive Tours Throughout the Whole of Wales (London, 1798)], pp. 69-70.

43. NLW, MS 11981E.

44. From 1806 he was Sir John Morris. The Morrises moved from Clasemont to Sketty Park in 1806 to escape the pollution from their own copper-works.

45. [Joanna Martin, The Penrice Letters, 1768-1795 (Cardiff and Swansea, 1993)], p. 100.

46. Probably Jane (née Birt), wife of John Price (q.v.).

47. Journal, 21 October 1802.

48. Journal, 5 April 1805.

49. Letters, 20-22 May and 6 June 1811.

50. Journal, 25 October 1796.

51. Patricia Phillips, The Scientific Lady: A Social History of Women's Scientific Interests, 1520-1918 (London, 1990), p. 12.

52. Ibid.

53. John Evelyn to his grandson, 1704, quoted in L. A. Pollock, ‘Teach Her to Live under Obedience: The Making of Women in the Upper Ranks of Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change, 4 (1989), p. 242.

54. Edgeworth, Practical Education, p. 529.

55. Letter, 21 December 1789.

56. Account of ‘The Four Countesses of Ilchester’, written 1817 by Lady Susan O'Brien and included in Charlotte Traherne's ‘Family Recollections’.

57. Charlotte Traherne, ‘Family Recollections’.

58. She was in England c. 1750 to 1762.

59. Charlotte Traherne, ‘Family Recollections’.

60. Harriot Georgiana Mundy (ed.), The Journal of Mary Frampton (London, 1885), pp. 18-20.

61. Joyce Hemlow et al. (eds), The Journal and Letters of Fanny Burney (Oxford, 1972-84), iv, p. 254.

62. Letter, Lady Susan O'Brien to Lady Mary Fox Strangways, 21 March 1791.

63. Letter, Lady Harriot Fox Strangways to Lady Mary Fox Strangways, c. 1791.

64. Journal, 16 December 1790.

65. Mary Catchart Borer, Willingly to School (London, 1976), pp. 185-88.

66. Letter, T. M. Talbot to Henrietta Maria Hicks Beach, 7 February 1796.

67. Letter, T. M. Talbot to Michael Hicks Beach, 7 February 1796.

68. Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (London, 1987), pp. 29-30.

69. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 41, 56.

70. Jane Austen, Emma, p. 7.

71. Lady Susan O'Brien in Charlotte Traherne, ‘Family Recollections’.

72. Charlotte Traherne, ‘Family Recollections’.

73. Ibid.

74. Journal, 21 August 1790.

75. Thomas Bowdler's expurgated (or ‘bowdlerised’) edition of Shakespeare's plays was first published in 1818.

76. Journal, 19 November 1790.

77. Journal, 7 September 1790.

78. Journal, 30 July 1791.

79. Journal, 5 February 1791.

80. Journal, 24 April 1796.

81. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 54-55.

82. From Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects, Principally Designed for Young Ladies (Cork, 1778), pp. 84-85.

83. Cowper was one of Agnes Porter's favourite poets. See below, p. 69. See also Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes (London, 1987), pp. 162-72, for the influence of Cowper and More at this time.

84. The book is still at Penrice.

85. Journal, 7 June 1802.

86. Edgeworth, Practical Education, pp. 167-68.

87. Edgeworth, Practical Education, p. 126.

88. Letter, 24 August 1807.

89. Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on Education (Dublin, 1801), pp. 190-91.

90. Letter, 13 August [1810].

91. Smith, The Letters of Sydney Smith, i, pp. 8-9.

92. Sydney Smith's article on female education was first published in the Edinburgh Review in 1810. See The Works of the Revd Sydney Smith (3 vols, 2nd edn, London, 1840), i, pp. 200-20.

93. In addition to the works of Hannah More, the library at Penrice includes Female Education: or An Address to Mothers on the Education of Daughters by John Moir (London, new edition, n.d. but with inscription ‘Mary L. Talbot 1799’); and An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex by Thomas Gisborne (7th edn, London, 1806, with bookplate Thomas Mansel Talbot).

94. Letter, 4 September 1810.

95. Letter, Lady Mary Talbot to Henrietta Maria Hicks Beach, n.d. [probably early 1806].

96. For further information on Fox Talbot's connections with Penrice, see Joanna Martin, Henry and the Fairy Palace: Fox Talbot and Glamorgan (Aberystwyth, 1993).

97. C. R. M. Talbot, ‘Characters of Some Members of My Family’.

98. Letter, Lady Mary Talbot to Mrs Hicks Beach, 24 June [1806].

99. Letter, 17 September 1809.

100. Letter, 13 August 1810.

101. Letter, George Eden to Lady Mary Talbot, 12 March 1810.

102. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 71.

103. Letter, 25 November 1809.

104. Journal, 18 April 1804.

105. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 57.

106. See pp. 353-58 for full details of these and other books mentioned by Agnes.

107. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 193-94.

108. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 157-58.

109. Letter, 12 March 1793.

110. Agnes's cousin Thomas Amyot was private secretary to William Windham, the war and colonial minister.

111. Charles Lemon was MP for Penryn in Cornwall, 1807-12 and 1830-31 (he also held other Cornish seats, 1831-57). He married Agnes's former pupil Charlotte Fox Strangways in 1810.

112. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, pp. 107-8.

113. Letter, 7 November 1812.

114. Charlotte Traherne, ‘Family Recollections’.

115. Lady Susan O'Brien to Lady Mary Fox Strangways, 15 February 1791.

116. Journal, 25 December 1790.

117. Journal, 23 May 1802, 7 November 1802, and Letter, 12 June 1810. I have been unable to identify St Catharine's Bounty, but it may have been a charity which helped unmarried women.

118. Quoted in Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State (London, 1996), p. 61.

119. R. W. Chapman in Le Faye (ed.), Jane Austen's Letters, p. ix.

120. Journal, 7 November 1796.

121. Letter, Lady Susan O'Brien to Lady Mary Talbot, 18 February 1794.

122. BL, Add. MS 51359, ‘Journal of Lady Susan O'Brien’, 1770-1813.

123. Letter, Lady Mary Talbot to Lady Harriot Fox Strangways, 26 February 1797.

124. Letter, T. M. Talbot to Michael Hicks Beach, 19 March 1798.

125. Journal, 14 August 1803.

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