Any fears Patrick might have had about the Clergy Daughters’ School must have vanished when he saw the list of patrons annexed to the advertisement. This was no cheap Yorkshire school of the Dotheboys Hall15 variety: the list included some of the most eminent people in the land as well as a number of names well known to Patrick himself. There was Mrs Powley of Ossett, daughter of the poet William Cowper’s great friend, Mary Unwin, and widow of the Reverend Matthew Powley, John Buckworth’s predecessor at Dewsbury; Mrs Hannah More, the famous moralist whose exemplary works were the staple diet of female education; Joshua Fawcett of Leeds, whom Patrick had known since at least his visits to Woodhouse Grove, if not before; the Reverend Charles Simeon, the Evangelical who had been an inspiration to Patrick at Cambridge. There were even two of Patrick’s own patrons on the list: William Wilberforce, who had enabled him to finish his education at St John’s, and Miss Currer of Eshton Hall, who had sent him money to pay his debts when his wife had died.16 With the backing of such a host of the great and good, Patrick could not doubt the quality of the school. He even had personal knowledge of the founder, the Reverend William Carus Wilson, a renowned missionary preacher who had espoused the same Evangelical causes as Patrick himself and who regularly preached in the Bradford area.17 If Patrick had not met him in December 1822, then he would at least have had a personal recommendation of him from their mutual friend, Theodore Dury, who was also one of the early trustees of the school.18 There was, therefore, no question of Patrick hastily packing off his daughters to some terrible institution simply because it was cheap and he wanted them out from under his feet at home.
The story of the young Brontës at the Clergy Daughters’ School has become inextricably entwined with that of the young Jane Eyre at Lowood School. Charlotte’s account of the sufferings of Helen Burns and Jane at the hands of Mr Brocklehurst and Miss Scatcherd is written with such raw passion and such a burning sense of injustice that it is impossible not to identify with the girls against their persecutors. There is also no doubt that the novel was based upon Charlotte’s real experiences at the Clergy Daughters’ School, so it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that the fictional characters and place are accurate representations of the people at Cowan Bridge and the school itself.19 This is to do less than justice to both the much-maligned Wilson, who is seen as the villain of the piece, and Charlotte herself, who, while protesting the truth of her account, also clearly recognized that it was not impartial. As she told Mrs Gaskell several times,
she had not considered it necessary, in a work of fiction, to state every particular with the impartiality that might be required in a court of justice, nor to seek out motives, and make allowances for human feelings, as she might have done, if dispassionately analysing the conduct of those who had the superintendence of the institution.20
Lowood is seen through the eyes of the child suffering there, not the dispassionate adult. On the other hand, the novel clearly struck a chord in those who knew the Clergy Daughters’ School. Charlotte herself wrote to William Smith Williams, her editor, less than three months after the novel had been published:
‘Jane Eyre’ has got down into Yorkshire; a copy has even penetrated into this neighbourhood: I saw an elderly clergyman reading it the other day, and had the satisfaction of hearing him exclaim ‘Why – they have got — school, and Mr — here, I declare! and Miss — (naming the originals of Lowood, Mr. Brocklehurst and Miss Temple) He had known them all: I wondered whether he would recognize the portraits, and was gratified to find that he did and that moreover he pronounced them faithful and just – he said too that Mr — (Brocklehurst) ‘deserved the chastisement he had got’.21
The unidentified clergyman was not alone in recognizing the school and Charlotte later confessed
she should not have written what she did of Lowood in ‘Jane Eyre,’ if she had thought the place would have been so immediately identified with Cowan Bridge, although there was not a word in her account of the institution but what was true at the time when she knew it …22
Those who did not recognize the school from the novel were left in no doubt of its identity by Mrs Gaskell, who named names and laid the blame for Charlotte’s future ill health and the deaths of her sisters squarely on the institution and its founder.23 The Life of Charlotte Brontë therefore caused a furore, provoking not only legal action from Revd Wilson but also a flood of letters to the newspapers from former pupils. Their accounts, some supporting Mrs Gaskell, some emphatically contradicting her, help to build up a picture of what life was really like at the Clergy Daughters’ School.
The school itself was a row of low stone cottages, built at right angles to and adjoining the main turnpike road which ran high over the fells of the Yorkshire Dales from Kendal, in the Lake District, to Leeds in the West Riding of Yorkshire. These cottages, which are still standing, were the teachers’ quarters, the kitchen and dining room and some small bedrooms. At right angles to the cottages, facing the road, was an old bobbin mill which Wilson had had converted into the schoolroom, with the main dormitory above. Opposite this wing of the school and backing on to the road, was a long, covered walkway where the girls could exercise in bad weather. The schoolroom, cottages and walkway formed three sides of a square; in the middle, stretching down to the river, were the small plots of garden which were tended by the pupils themselves.24
Although only the cottages now remain and the hamlet of Cowan Bridge has been engulfed by a modern industrial estate, it is still possible to feel the isolation of the school’s position. It stands on the lower slopes of Leck Fell, from which vantage point it looks out over an immense vista of low-lying wooded hills and lush green river valleys. In the distance lies the rough moorland terrain of the fells, rising to the mountains of the southern Lake District to the west and Ingleborough, Whernside and Penyghent to the east. There are a few scattered sheep farms, the houses built like the Cowan Bridge cottages, with stone walls several feet thick and tiny windows to withstand the excesses of the weather. When it is not hidden in low-lying cloud and mist, pulverized by torrential rain or lost in the white-out of snow blizzards, the situation is magnificent. Its dramatic beauty could not have been lost on the young Brontës.
The regime at Cowan Bridge was undoubtedly strict and austere, but this was by no means unusual at the time. Woodhouse Grove, the academy founded in 1812 to provide a free education for the sons of Methodist ministers, is especially relevant as a comparison. It was founded for similar reasons and had the same aims in mind as the Clergy Daughters’ School. Patrick had a thorough working knowledge of its arrangements, having served twice as an examiner and stayed there several times during his courtship of Maria.25 Unlike the Clergy Daughters’ School, however, Woodhouse Grove never produced a pupil who wrote a blazing indictment of the regime in one of the most popular novels of the day. Woodhouse Grove therefore maintained its reputation as an excellent academic institution providing a charitable service to the Methodist Church. It is a typical example of the better boarding schools of the day, including places as famous as Dr Arnold’s Rugby or as ancient as Oundle.
The girls at Cowan Bridge had to wear a distinctive uniform, which Charlotte undoubtedly resented because it labelled them ‘charity-children’.26 On the other hand, they were required to be equipped with a plentiful supply of clothing: four day shifts (shirts) and three night shifts, three night caps, two pairs of stays, two flannel, one grey stuff (wool) and three white upper petticoats, two pairs of pockets, four pairs of white cotton stockings and three of black worsted, one nankeen spencer (a short jacket), four brown and two white holland pinafores, one short coloured dressing-gown and two pairs of shoes. In addition they had to bring gloves and a pair of pattens, which were wood and metal overshoes for outdoor wear. Their frocks, bonnets and cloaks were provided by the school at the cost of three pounds per child. In summer they wore plain straw cottage bonnets with white frocks on Sundays and nankeen (buff-coloured cotton) frocks on other days; in winter they h
ad purple stuff frocks and purple cloaks.27 The simple fact that they had to bring so many duplicate items suggests that the school was concerned about cleanliness, enabling them to have regular laundry days without depriving the girls of their clothing. This is not so ridiculous as it sounds. The boys at the ‘cheap’ Bowes school sometimes went four or five days without jackets or trousers when these were taken away to be mended, and even at Woodhouse Grove School, which was a model of its kind, the boys were only provided with one suit of clothes a year.28
Cowan Bridge was capable of taking up to seventy-two pupils, but when the Brontës arrived the school had only been open a few months and there was never anything like this number in their time. Maria and Elizabeth were only the seventeenth and eighteenth pupils to enter the school, and by the time Charlotte and Emily left on 1 June 1825, there were still only fifty-three pupils on the register. The ages of the pupils varied widely, the youngest on entry being six, the oldest twenty-two. Thirty of the forty-four pupils at the school when Emily came on 25 November 1824 were in the eight to fourteen bracket, including her own sisters. Emily, at nearly six and a half, was one of only three six-year-olds, who were clearly the babies of the school since there were no seven-year-olds; they appear to have been treated quite differently from the older pupils.29 At eight, Charlotte would have been one of the youngest and smallest girls in the mainstream of the school – an obvious disadvantage in terms of the daily scramble for food and places next to the fire. Like Jane Eyre, however, Charlotte was fortunate in finding an older girl who took her under her wing. Perhaps surprisingly, given their closeness at home, this was not either of her elder sisters, but a seventeen-year-old named Mellany Hane. She came from Bedfordshire and, with her twenty-two-year-old sister, had entered the school exactly seven weeks after Charlotte; her fees were paid by the Clergy Orphan’s Society. Charlotte later told her father that Mellany had frequently defended her against the encroachments of the older girls.30
As was the normal practice at boarding schools, most of the girls slept two to a bed in the single large dormitory which ran the length of the upper floor over the schoolroom. If Jane Eyre is an accurate description of life at Cowan Bridge, the girls rose before dawn, dressed by rush-light, washed each morning in basins shared between six girls (when the water in the pitchers had not frozen overnight) and went downstairs to an hour and a half of prayers before being allowed to eat breakfast.31 To young children straight from a loving home, where they had had a nursemaid to wait on them, this must have been a great hardship. However, it was not unusual – indeed, it was actually an improvement on common practice in many schools at this time. At one of the ‘cheap’ schools near Richmond in Yorkshire, there were at least three boys to one bed, and often as many as eight. Their sheets remained unchanged for two months, their under-blankets were never washed and the straw mattresses were ridden with fleas. Even at Woodhouse Grove in 1822 there were forty-eight beds in one dormitory, twenty in another and twelve in the third. The boys had to go down into the basement to wash in three long wooden troughs filled with clean water; there was always a scramble to get there as the first boys got the cleanest water and the first use of the towels.32 The insistence on personal cleanliness at Cowan Bridge, which may have seemed onerous to the girls at the time, was actually prompted by a desire to safeguard their health.
The strictness of the daily regime ax Jane Eyre’s Lowood has been called cruel in the extreme. After their dawn rising and prayers the girls had a quarter of an hour for a breakfast of porridge before lessons from nine till twelve. They then had a period of recreation and exercise in the garden before dinner. Lessons then recommenced and went on till five, when there was a short break for half a slice of bread and a small mug of coffee, followed by half an hour’s recreation then study. The evening ended with a glass of water and a piece of oatcake before prayers and bed. On Sundays there was a variation in the routine. The girls had to walk two miles across the fields to their patron’s church for the morning service. It was too far to return to school for a meal, so the girls had to eat a cold packed lunch in the church before enduring the afternoon service and the walk back again. Their reward was a whole – instead of the usual half – slice of bread with a scraping of butter on their return. The remainder of the evening was spent in repeating by heart the catechism and biblical texts and listening to a sermon read aloud by one of the teachers.33
This fictional account seems to be rooted in fact. For the first year or so of the school’s existence, the girls attended Sunday services at Tunstall Church, where Wilson was vicar. The church is two miles across the fields from Cowan Bridge and still has a room over the porch which is pointed out as the place where the girls ate their food between the services. The church is even now dark and gloomy inside and bone-chillingly cold as only damp, fifteenth-century churches can be.34
Remarking on the Cowan Bridge method of instilling religion into its girls, one of the Brontës’ fellow pupils later wrote:
I trust I have ever been a firm advocate for making religion the groundwork of all education but the hours devoted to sermons, lectures, scripture lessons &c &c were so unreasonably long at Cowan Bridge, that I fear they were calculated to hinder not promote the salvation of immortal souls.35
Certainly the young Jane Eyre seems to have spent more time thinking about her frozen limbs and her empty stomach than in learning the lessons of the Scriptures. Another Cowan Bridge pupil, who later died of consumption, was a more apt pupil and turned the religious tables on her teachers:
It was usual for each pupil to repeat on Sunday morning a text of her own choice; and one who had, I believe, been punished for stealing bread, repeated in her turn, the verse which declares that men do not despise a thief who steals bread to satisfy his hunger.36
Again, however, the regime at Cowan Bridge was no worse, and in some respects more lenient, than at other comparable schools. At Woodhouse Grove – and this in the days of John Fennell’s headmastership – the boys rose daily at six, had a public prayer meeting from six-thirty to seven, then spent an hour in school at reading and exercises. This was followed by family prayer and breakfast, after which lessons began at nine and continued till twelve, or half past if music lessons were on the child’s syllabus. An hour was then given over to dinner and exercise, followed by lessons from one-thirty to four-thirty. The next hour and a half was spent in preaching and reading, followed by two hours, from six till eight, of public prayer, ending with supper and family prayer before bed. At Woodhouse Grove there was a chapel on site, converted from the stables of the old house, so there was no long walk to worship on a Sunday. Instead, the boys spent virtually all day at their bibles. Private prayer, reading the Scriptures and preaching replaced their usual lessons and were simply added to the normal daily diet of prayer meetings.37
Nor was the discipline at the Clergy Daughters’ School out of the ordinary. In Jane Eyre’s Lowood, the punishments range from wearing badges for being untidy to beatings in front of the whole school. Seen through the eyes of the passionate Jane, these are terrible injustices and unwarranted cruelty, especially when inflicted on the gentle and patient Helen Burns. Once more, we find that these were standard practices in even the best schools. At Woodhouse Grove, one early governor would beat offenders on the bare flesh with a birch rod in front of the assembled pupils, having first ensured that he could not run away by ‘horsing’ him, putting him on the back of one of the biggest boys who held him firmly by the hands. Another slightly late, governor would indiscriminately cane twenty or thirty boys every Monday, without enquiring if they were guilty of any misdemeanour. Delinquents were forced to wear boards on their backs for several days at a time, which were printed in large letters with legends such as ‘Guilty of lying’ or ‘Guilty of going out of bounds’. Even at Crofton Hall, the select academy for young ladies, offences as minor as impertinence or accidental breakages were punished with the public labelling of offenders and whipping.38
More tha
n anything else, however, it was the account of the food in Jane Eyre and subsequently in The Life of Charlotte Brontë which roused most passion, largely because Mrs Gaskell blamed it for Charlotte’s ‘stunted’ growth and the ill health which eventually killed her sisters. In Jane Eyre, the housekeeper was ‘a woman after Mr Brocklehurst’s own heart, made up of equal parts of whalebone and iron’. The breakfast porridge was regularly served up so burnt that it was inedible and dinner, ‘redolent of rancid fat’, was a mess of ‘indifferent potatoes and strange shreds of rusty meat, mixed and cooked together’.39 Unable to eat these disgusting main meals, the girls became so weak that half the school fell victim to a fever.
This account seems to reflect the genuine state of affairs. Charlotte herself told Mrs Gaskell that the food at Cowan Bridge was ‘spoilt by the dirty carelessness of the cook, so that she and her sisters disliked their meals exceedingly’. She was so hungry, she said, that she would have been thankful for even a piece of bread, though unlike some of her contemporaries, Charlotte did not resort to stealing.40 Another pupil and her sister, Elizabeth and Maria Gauntlett, who came from the south of England, were unable to stomach the north-country diet of oatmeal porridge and therefore went without breakfast for six months. When forced to eat it on one occasion, Elizabeth vomited – and was promptly dosed with an emetic. The dinner Maria Gauntlett described as ‘sufficient, but not good’.
Three days in the week it consisted of what the girls called Hot-pot or potato pie – pieces of meat, fat &c cut up & baked or boiled with potatoes – the only vegetable ever seen – on two days there was salt beef, often ill-cured, on the other two days, fresh beef or veal – rarely if ever, mutton.41
Brontës Page 20
