Women -- Biography; Women -- Social and moral questions
When about ten years of age, she got an appointment to Queen
Charlotte’s school, at Ampthill, in Bedfordshire, a small town
pleasantly situated, partly upon, and partly between two gentle
acclivities, forty miles from London. The establishment being very
select, and the other girls much older, she became a great favourite
with them, and learned much from them. When the very plain, but rigidly
virtuous queen, died at Kew, on the 17th of November, 1818, Miss Jonn,
was sent by her father to a boarding-school conducted by Mr. and Mrs.
Stables, at Hendon, near the village of Hampstead, Middlesex. Here she
assisted in teaching, as well as received lessons from various masters;
and whilst a certain amount of seclusion was secured by a suburban
residence, London was close at hand: the working London with its
inspiring life.
However well this boarding-school was carried on, we have no reason to
believe that it made Miss Jonn a learned woman. Female education then,
and sometimes even now, is simply a little outside polish. It does not
teach to think; it does not develope mind; it does not confer power; it
does not form character; it does not do anything to mould girls into
the noblest types of womanhood.
After leaving the quiet retreat at Hendon, she was many years a
governess in the family of the Rev. Mr. Huntly, of Kimbolton, in
Huntingdonshire. This employment no doubt has recommendations, it
certainly has serious drawbacks; among those that are inevitable is the
effect of a lonely life on the governess. A great effort may be made to
treat her as one of the family, but she does not really belong to it;
and must spend the greater part of her time with young and immature
minds, only varied by unequal association with the parents or grown-up
brothers and sisters of her pupils. The society of her equals in age
and position is entirely wanting, and the natural tendency of such
mental solitude is to produce childishness, angularity, and
narrow-mindedness. It must be a strong character indeed which can do
without such wholesome trituration and the expansive influence of equal
companionship, and this is just what a governess cannot have. She is
moreover, always a bird of passage, and in this respect her position is
worse than that of a domestic servant, who, besides being better
remunerated and having the companionship of fellow-servants, may look
forward to remaining in one family for life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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