The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 40, February, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 40, February, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
of the wisdom of the management lay in making the pupils pay. Of one
hundred pupils, half were boarders. They paid little more than half the
expense of their maintenance; and the day-scholars paid three-pence per
week. Of course, a large part of the expense was borne by Lady Byron,
besides the payments she made for children who could not otherwise have
entered the school. The establishment flourished steadily till 1852,
when the owner of the land required it back for building-purposes.
During the eighteen years that the Ealing schools were in action, they
did a world of good in the way of incitement and example. The Poor-Law
Commissioners pointed out their merits. Land-owners and other wealthy
persons visited them, and went home and set up similar establishments.
During those years, too, Lady Byron had herself been at work in various
directions, to the same purpose.
A more extensive industrial scheme was instituted on her Leicestershire
property; and not far off, she opened a girls' school, and an infant
school; and when a season of distress came, as such seasons are apt to
befall the poor Leicestershire stocking-weavers, Lady Byron fed the
children for months together, till they could resume their payments.
These schools were opened in 1840. The next year, she built a
school-house on her Warwickshire property; and five years later, she set
up an iron school-house on another Leicestershire estate. By this time,
her educational efforts were costing her several hundred pounds a year
in the mere maintenance of existing establishments; but this is the
smallest consideration in the case. She has sent out tribes of boys and
girls into life fit to do their part there with skill and credit and
comfort. Perhaps it is a still more important consideration, that scores
of teachers and trainers have been led into their vocation, and duly
prepared for it, by what they saw and learned in her schools. As for the
best and the worst of the Ealing boys,--the best have, in a few cases,
been received into the Battersea Training School, whence they could
enter on their career as teachers to the greatest advantage; and the
worst found their school a true reformatory, before reformatory schools
were heard of. At Bristol she bought a house for a reformatory
for girls; and there her friend, Miss Carpenter, faithfully and
energetically carries out her own and Lady Byron's aims, which were one
and the same.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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