Abstract
Netta Syrett, schoolgirl, and later novelist and playwright, entered the North London Collegiate School for Girls in the 1880s, when the vanguard institution had been running for just over three decades. Her experiences there were to haunt her. In her semi-autobiographical novel, The Victorians (1915), Syrett voiced the dislike and fear that she still carried, emotions triggered by interiors that reminded her of school. ‘From that moment which she entered it, Rose [Syrett] never lost her detestation of plain, distempered walls, cold stone staircases, dadoes of pitch pine and of a certain yellow, painful in its crudeness, henceforth always connected in her mind with Swedish desks.’1 Syrett found life at the North London Collegiate painful, as she struggled to cope with the institution’s multifarious spatial and material rules. The school’s distance from her home compounded her problems, as it meant that she dwelt in Myra Lodge, a boarding house run by headmistress Frances Mary Buss, who clashed with the untidy and chaotic Syrett. While most NLCS pupils had a better time, many remarked on the school’s complex rules and regulations. The system at this institution, and at its sister schools founded later in the century, aimed to deal with a new problem. Buss, and the other headmistresses, faced a completely new task, establishing institutions to educate girls to the same standard as boys. For the first time, hundreds of female pupils were to be taught together, and discipline, to be achieved without corporal punishment, was a challenge. This chapter explores the material world that these headmistresses created. While this was an important part of a new disciplinary system, the decoration of these places often had strong links with domesticity, creating a feminine institutional space.
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Notes
N. Syrett, The Victorians: A Novel (London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd, 1915), p. 113.
C. de Bellaigue, Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and France 1800–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
S. Skedd, ‘Women Teachers and the Expansion of Girls’ Schooling in England, c.1760–1820’, in H. Barker and E. Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London: Longman, 1997), pp. 101–125.
J. N. Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 26.
A. Digby and P. Searby, Children, School and Society in Nineteenth-Century England (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), p. 52.
N. Watson, And Their Works Do Follow Them: The Story of North London Collegiate School (London: James & James, 2000), p. 14
J. Senders Pedersen, The Reform of Girls’ Secondary and Higher Education in Victorian England: A Study of Elites and Educational Change (London: Garland Publishing, 1987), p. 300.
P. Bain, St Swithun’s: A Centenary History (Chichester: Phillimore, 1984), p. 1.
E. Jarvis, The History of St Margaret’s School Bushey 1749–2009 (Middlesex: St Margaret’s Guild, 2009), p. 7.
In the early years the school inhabited a rented house called Bedales, near Haywards Heath. When these buildings became inadequate, Badley purchased a 10-acre site in the village of Steep near Petersfield in Hampshire, where a purpose-built school was erected, R. Wake and P. Denton, Bedales School: The First Hundred Years (London: Haggerston Press, 1993), pp. 29
GPDST, Girls’ Public Day School Trust, p. 12; V.E. Stack (ed.), Oxford High School: Girl’s Public Day School Trust 1875–1960 (Berkshire: The Abbey Press, 1963), p. 11
J. Whitcut, Edgbaston High School 1876–1976 (Warwick: Roundwood Press, 1976), pp. 60
S.A. Burstall, Frances Mary Buss: An Educational Pioneer (London: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1938), p. 42.
J. Kamm, How Different from Us: A Biography of Miss Buss and Miss Beale (London: The Bodley Head, 1958), p. 104.
D.E. de Zouche, Roedean School 1885–1955 (Brighton: Printed for Private Circulation, The Dolphin Press, 1955), p. 25.
F. Clay, Modern School Buildings Elementary and Secondary: A Treatise on the Planning, Arrangement, and Fitting of Day and Boarding Schools (London: B.T. Batsford, 1902), p. 217.
J. Rothenstein, Summer’s Lease: Autobiography 1902–1938 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965), p. 20.
G. Avery, The Best Type of Girl: A History of Girls’ Independent Schools (London: André Deutsche, 1991), p. 67.
D. Beale (ed.), Reports Issued by the Schools’ Inquiry Commission on the Education of Girls (London: David Nutt, 1869), p. 5.
S.A. Burstall, English High Schools for Girls: Their Aims, Organisation, and Management (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), p. 129.
Whitcut, Edgbaston High School, p. 99; De Zouche, Roedean, p. 77. Queenwood alone (a small school in Eastbourne with no more than 200 pupils) is thought to have produced thousands of comforters for the troops. D. Petrie Carew, Many Years, Many Girls: The History of a School, 1862–1942 (Dublin: Browne and Nolan Ltd., 1967), p. 92.
Reminiscences of A.M. Stoneman (left in 1890), in E. Cross (ed.) ‘Reminiscences of the School in its Early Years’, in R. M. Scrimegour (ed.), The North London Collegiate School 1850–1950: A Hundred Years of Girls’ Education: Essays in Honour of the Centenary of Frances Mary Buss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 59–60.
E.M. Hill BA, ‘The Frances Mary Buss Schools’, The Girl’s Realm, April 1900, Vol. 2, No. 18, Bousfield & Co., p. 591.
H. Ellis, ‘Corporal Punishment in English Public Schools in the Nineteenth Century’, in L. Brockliss and H. Montgomery, Childhood and Violence in the Western Tradition (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), pp. 141–151.
The only reference I have found to physical chastisement being used in a school for middle-class girls occurs in Anne Ridler’s account of Miss Carver, a teacher at Downe House in the early twentieth century, and this instance is based on purely anecdotal evidence. A. Ridler, Olive Willis and Downe House: An Adventure in Education (London: John Murray, 1967), p. 105.
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (London: Penguin, 1991, first translation published by Allen Lane 1977), p. 201.
For a useful comparison with reformatory schools see T. Ploszajska, ‘Moral Landscapes and Manipulated Spaces: Gender, Class and Space in Victorian Reformatory Schools’, Journal of Historical Geography, 20 (1994), p. 413.
M.V. Hughes, A London Girl of the 1880s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 21–22.
N. Syrett, The Sheltering Tree (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1939), p. 18.
F. Schmalz, ‘Reminiscences’, NLCS School Magazine, July 1891, Vol. 16, No. 48, p. 49.
A. Carpenter, The Principles and Practice of School Hygiene (London: Abbott, Jones & Co., Limited, 1895), p. 106.
F. Partridge, interviewed in A. Hardie (ed.) Boys and Girls: A Celebration of the First One Hundred Years of Co-Education at Bedales (Petersfield: Bedales School, 1998), p. 14.
M. Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp.187-199.
M. Linford, Broken Bridges (Tonbridge: Leonard Parsons Ltd, 1923), pp. 19–20.
M. Allen and M. Nicholson, Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady: Lady Allen of Hurtwood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), p. 38.
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© 2015 Jane Hamlett
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Hamlett, J. (2015). Schools for Girls. In: At Home in the Institution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322395_5
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