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The life of a governess, Part 2
Oct. 17th, 2010 09:43 pmTitle: Other People's Daughters, The life and times of the governess
Author: Ruth Brandon
Year published: 2008
That men and women should be equally educated
(p 74) One was a Frenchman, the Marquis de Condorcet (with whom Mary would soon find herself working on a 'Plan of Education' for the Committee of Public Instruction, of which he was a member before committing suicide during the Terror). In his essay Sur l'Instruction publique, published in 1791-2, he pointed out, with irrefutable French logic, that it would be 'absurd' to exclude girls from a public education system. Not only should women oversee their own children's education, but uneducated women made for inequality within the family, which militated against happiness. In any case, he pointed out, women had the same right to education as men. The main reason for not educating the sexes together, he concluded, was greed and pride.
Money earned, money borrowed
(p 86) It is noticeable how often these women, living as they did on the edge of absolute poverty, nevertheless contrived to help needy friends and relatives - and it is noticeable , too, that if they were helped in return, it was always by sisters, never brothers. Men, who legally owned anything their wives might earn, seem to have felt themselves entitled to their sisters' earning as well.
What men write in their journals...
(p 95) On 13 July 1801, two months after their first meeting, his journal shows that he made love to her.
...and letters
'The Professor [Gowdin] is COURTING,' Charles Lamb wrote unenthusiastically.'The Lady is a Widow with green spectacles and one child [in fact she had two], and the Professor is grown quite juvenile.' In a footnote he added: 'A very disgusting woman.'
An add in the papers
(p 102) TO GOVERNESSES OF SCHOOLS, OR LADIES. - An English young LADY, who is now in France, is desirous of obtaining a SITUATION in a respectable SCHOOL, or in a private family, to instruct one Lady; she speaks the French language fluently, and with a good accent; understands the rudiments of Italian, and plays well on the piano forte; she does not require a large salary, but hopes to meet friendly treatment from the family with whom she may engage.
Byron, women, a woman and love
(p 105) ' I never loved or pretended to love her, but a man is a man, and if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours, there is but one way.'
[...]Most annoying of all (and much against his will), he found her sexually alluring.
[...]One of the things that he afterwards held most violently against her, and for which he punished her so bitterly, was his own weakness in succumbing however slightly and momentarily, to her charms.
(p 107) 'The (carnal) connection had commenced previously to my setting out,' he explained to his friend Douglas Kinnaird. '... The next question is, is the brat mine? I have reasons to think so, for I know as much as one can know such a thing - that she had not lived with S. during the time of our acquaintance - and that she had had a good deal of that same with me.'
How a lady and how a governess travels to the foreign lands
(p 127) Miss Lyons did not admit in so many words that she would accompany them as a governess, but there was no other way a young Englishwoman could have travelled to Russia without chaperones, companions or letters of introduction. Only as a governess could an English young lady hope to experience such exotica as a ride in a vostok, the supremely uncomfortable, cushioned and enclosed Russian sled, in which the unfortunate passengers spent the journey tossed from side to padded side as their conveyance, pulled by a team of horses, bounced from rut to rut on the appalling Russian roads.
As for her worries that it would not be respectable for a young woman to journey from Pisa to Vienna all alone, and that she should wait for a family or elderly lady to chaperone her, they could be dismissed; the Viennese would only admire her courage. Viennese society might have its own rigid rules and class distinctions, but they were not English rules.
Life in Russia, as described by the governess
(p 132) And at night 'they move their beds almost perpetually, roving up and down all the rooms; be it drawing room or cabinet, it is all one to them, the morning is a curious picture - You meet a hundred beds, (that is to say, mattresses, pillows, sheets &c) born [sic] upon so many heads, and returning like sheep to the fold, to their respective rooms. Yet although these beds migbht look comfortable, appearances could be deceptive. More than once Claire was driven out of her bed by 'Bugs the torment of Russia' and 'escaped only from them by sitting up the whole night in an armchair.
Bedbugs, invisible but disgusting, could be seen as a sort of metaphor for Russian life. Both Claire and Amelia Lyons remarked on the contrast between its public elegance and private sluttishness. Although they bathed once a week, Russian ladies saw no need to wash between times and 'will sometimes wear during the whole day a loose dressing gown in which they have passed the night, their hair in curlpapers'.
Food in Russia
(p 132) Meals were copious: soup, then hors d'oevres - caviar. picled herring, radishes - then meat, vegetables, poultry with salted cucumbers, salad, pastry, ices. But as the kitchens were a verst from the house, the dinner, on horseback or in a couch, might be espied from afar, trotting towards the drawing-room windows: 'I shall never forget a plumb-pudding they made in my honour, at a country house, coming along in the rain, on an old blind stumbling mare, shaking to pieces, tumbling into bits, into the mud, at every step and two ragged, dirty boys carrying boats of the sauce... Naturally, only half the pudding and the sauce arrived.'
The people in the household - solitude is not a Russian way for a governess
(p 133) Russian households, however, with their constant press and turbulence, were very different from the cold rigidities of English middle-class life. As well as her official charges, there were 'no less than twenty young girls, or children in our house that I have something to do with - Some of them protégés, others relations, some the daughters of some favourite washer-woman, others foundlings - so you may imagine what fights, what quarrels, what disputes go on - they are merciless to you if you are anything less than savage with them.'
The only people who are not whipped in a Russian house are the Master and Mistress and the foreigners - for the slightest fault whipping is always threatened, and the same with the children - It is a very lucky day, when boxes on the ear are only given .. I may safely say the Russians and I are always at cross purposes - they pull one way, and I another - they educate a child by making the external work upon the internal, which is, in fact, nothing but an education fit for monkies [sic].
This violence was the normal custom of the country. Sufferers, both serfs and children, seem generally to have accepted it, albeit gloomily.
(p 134) A Swiss governess, looking for her charges' parents when they failed to appear one morning, found them almost beheaded in their bedroom, a revenge silently executed during the ngiht by some serfs who had been maltreated once too often.
(p 135) It was not that Russian employers saw governesses as equals. But - like serfs, for that matter - they were always fellow human beings, with personal lives and opinions and, as such, worthy of interest.
The Prince Alexander and the Count Rastopchin said my dislike to men was affected, that they were sure I was always falling in love, and that either one or the other had only to make love to me for a day or two and I should become amoureuse folle'.
Author: Ruth Brandon
Year published: 2008
That men and women should be equally educated
(p 74) One was a Frenchman, the Marquis de Condorcet (with whom Mary would soon find herself working on a 'Plan of Education' for the Committee of Public Instruction, of which he was a member before committing suicide during the Terror). In his essay Sur l'Instruction publique, published in 1791-2, he pointed out, with irrefutable French logic, that it would be 'absurd' to exclude girls from a public education system. Not only should women oversee their own children's education, but uneducated women made for inequality within the family, which militated against happiness. In any case, he pointed out, women had the same right to education as men. The main reason for not educating the sexes together, he concluded, was greed and pride.
Money earned, money borrowed
(p 86) It is noticeable how often these women, living as they did on the edge of absolute poverty, nevertheless contrived to help needy friends and relatives - and it is noticeable , too, that if they were helped in return, it was always by sisters, never brothers. Men, who legally owned anything their wives might earn, seem to have felt themselves entitled to their sisters' earning as well.
What men write in their journals...
(p 95) On 13 July 1801, two months after their first meeting, his journal shows that he made love to her.
...and letters
'The Professor [Gowdin] is COURTING,' Charles Lamb wrote unenthusiastically.'The Lady is a Widow with green spectacles and one child [in fact she had two], and the Professor is grown quite juvenile.' In a footnote he added: 'A very disgusting woman.'
An add in the papers
(p 102) TO GOVERNESSES OF SCHOOLS, OR LADIES. - An English young LADY, who is now in France, is desirous of obtaining a SITUATION in a respectable SCHOOL, or in a private family, to instruct one Lady; she speaks the French language fluently, and with a good accent; understands the rudiments of Italian, and plays well on the piano forte; she does not require a large salary, but hopes to meet friendly treatment from the family with whom she may engage.
Byron, women, a woman and love
(p 105) ' I never loved or pretended to love her, but a man is a man, and if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours, there is but one way.'
[...]Most annoying of all (and much against his will), he found her sexually alluring.
[...]One of the things that he afterwards held most violently against her, and for which he punished her so bitterly, was his own weakness in succumbing however slightly and momentarily, to her charms.
(p 107) 'The (carnal) connection had commenced previously to my setting out,' he explained to his friend Douglas Kinnaird. '... The next question is, is the brat mine? I have reasons to think so, for I know as much as one can know such a thing - that she had not lived with S. during the time of our acquaintance - and that she had had a good deal of that same with me.'
How a lady and how a governess travels to the foreign lands
(p 127) Miss Lyons did not admit in so many words that she would accompany them as a governess, but there was no other way a young Englishwoman could have travelled to Russia without chaperones, companions or letters of introduction. Only as a governess could an English young lady hope to experience such exotica as a ride in a vostok, the supremely uncomfortable, cushioned and enclosed Russian sled, in which the unfortunate passengers spent the journey tossed from side to padded side as their conveyance, pulled by a team of horses, bounced from rut to rut on the appalling Russian roads.
As for her worries that it would not be respectable for a young woman to journey from Pisa to Vienna all alone, and that she should wait for a family or elderly lady to chaperone her, they could be dismissed; the Viennese would only admire her courage. Viennese society might have its own rigid rules and class distinctions, but they were not English rules.
Life in Russia, as described by the governess
(p 132) And at night 'they move their beds almost perpetually, roving up and down all the rooms; be it drawing room or cabinet, it is all one to them, the morning is a curious picture - You meet a hundred beds, (that is to say, mattresses, pillows, sheets &c) born [sic] upon so many heads, and returning like sheep to the fold, to their respective rooms. Yet although these beds migbht look comfortable, appearances could be deceptive. More than once Claire was driven out of her bed by 'Bugs the torment of Russia' and 'escaped only from them by sitting up the whole night in an armchair.
Bedbugs, invisible but disgusting, could be seen as a sort of metaphor for Russian life. Both Claire and Amelia Lyons remarked on the contrast between its public elegance and private sluttishness. Although they bathed once a week, Russian ladies saw no need to wash between times and 'will sometimes wear during the whole day a loose dressing gown in which they have passed the night, their hair in curlpapers'.
Food in Russia
(p 132) Meals were copious: soup, then hors d'oevres - caviar. picled herring, radishes - then meat, vegetables, poultry with salted cucumbers, salad, pastry, ices. But as the kitchens were a verst from the house, the dinner, on horseback or in a couch, might be espied from afar, trotting towards the drawing-room windows: 'I shall never forget a plumb-pudding they made in my honour, at a country house, coming along in the rain, on an old blind stumbling mare, shaking to pieces, tumbling into bits, into the mud, at every step and two ragged, dirty boys carrying boats of the sauce... Naturally, only half the pudding and the sauce arrived.'
The people in the household - solitude is not a Russian way for a governess
(p 133) Russian households, however, with their constant press and turbulence, were very different from the cold rigidities of English middle-class life. As well as her official charges, there were 'no less than twenty young girls, or children in our house that I have something to do with - Some of them protégés, others relations, some the daughters of some favourite washer-woman, others foundlings - so you may imagine what fights, what quarrels, what disputes go on - they are merciless to you if you are anything less than savage with them.'
The only people who are not whipped in a Russian house are the Master and Mistress and the foreigners - for the slightest fault whipping is always threatened, and the same with the children - It is a very lucky day, when boxes on the ear are only given .. I may safely say the Russians and I are always at cross purposes - they pull one way, and I another - they educate a child by making the external work upon the internal, which is, in fact, nothing but an education fit for monkies [sic].
This violence was the normal custom of the country. Sufferers, both serfs and children, seem generally to have accepted it, albeit gloomily.
(p 134) A Swiss governess, looking for her charges' parents when they failed to appear one morning, found them almost beheaded in their bedroom, a revenge silently executed during the ngiht by some serfs who had been maltreated once too often.
(p 135) It was not that Russian employers saw governesses as equals. But - like serfs, for that matter - they were always fellow human beings, with personal lives and opinions and, as such, worthy of interest.
The Prince Alexander and the Count Rastopchin said my dislike to men was affected, that they were sure I was always falling in love, and that either one or the other had only to make love to me for a day or two and I should become amoureuse folle'.
