Cowan Bridge School
Cowan Bridge School was a British boarding school for girls that mainly took in the daughters of pastor families and gave them an education there that should enable them to take up the profession of governess if necessary . The school was founded in the 1820s.
The school was initially located in the village of Cowan Bridge in Lancashire, England . There she was visited by the Brontë sisters, among others . Cowan Bridge School is considered to be the model of the Lowood School described by Charlotte Brontë in her novel Jane Eyre . Two of the Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died of tuberculosis shortly after the disease broke out at this school. In the 1830s the school was re-established a few miles further and merged with the local girls' school.
School conditions
Cowan Bridge School forced children enrolled into the school for charity to wear uniforms. This was particularly humiliating for the Brontë sisters, who were among the youngest boarding school students. Charlotte Brontë was specially teased because, due to her short-sightedness, she had to bring the surface of the paper close to her eyes when reading and writing.
Schoolgirls shared a bed in pairs. They only had cold water for washing, which they each had to share with six people. Since the rooms were hardly heated, the water was often frozen over in the morning. An hour and a half of prayer was held before breakfast, before an often burnt porridge was served. School hours started at 9:30 and ended for a short break at noon. In the afternoon the lessons continued until 5 p.m. During the half-hour break there was half a slice of bread and a cup of coffee. After that, lessons continued. The day ended with a glass of water, an oat biscuit and evening prayer.
Punishments included deprivation of meals and limited leisure time, corporal punishment and humiliation such as sitting in a chair for hours with the children wearing a fool's hat.
Sundays were no break from the rigorous style of parenting at this school. Whatever the weather, the girls had to walk around three kilometers through open terrain to attend the first mass in their parish church. After mass, they were given bread before attending the afternoon service. The long walk to church did not allow them to return to their school in the meantime. At their boarding school they received a slice of bread that was spread with butter. Sunday ended by reciting the catechism, reciting passages from the Bible, and listening to a sermon that often enough featured damnation. Reverend William Carus Wilson, who ran the school, was a Calvinist who believed that damnation awaited most souls.
School background
Girls' boarding schools in Great Britain were only considered a second-rate form of education. The daughters of middle-class families were raised in the household with the help of a governess. For a long time, the right of a governess to the guidance of her pupils was derived solely from the fact that she herself came from a middle-class family and had had a proper upbringing there. It was expected that she spoke one or more modern foreign languages, could play and draw a musical instrument, and had superficial knowledge of subjects such as botany or geography. It was accepted that governesses could at best acquire a half education in this way and not pass on more than one half education. A conscious pre-vocational acquisition of knowledge was viewed critically by contemporaries, as it contradicted the fiction that the daughters were raised by a woman of the same social class. Some commentators even warned that educational institutions would allow lower-middle-class women to deceive employers about their origins. An exception to this rule were daughters of pastor families, whose middle class was apparently so beyond question that they could attend boarding schools that specifically taught them the knowledge associated with the work of a governess. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë described the rigorous upbringing in such a school. For the historian Kathryn Hughes there is little doubt based on other testimonials that Brontë, who briefly studied at Cowan Bridge School with her sisters, described real conditions with her description of the teaching method in Lowood.
Single receipts
- ^ Karen Smith Kenyon: The Bronte Family: Passionate Literary Geniuses (2002), p. 23
- ↑ Juliet Barker : The Brontës (1995), pp. 120-123, pp. 125-130, p. 134, p: 136-138, pp. 140-141, p. 285
- ^ Juliet Barker: The Brontës (1995), pp. 136-137
- ↑ Ruth Brandon: Other People's Daughters - The Life and Times of the Governess , pp. 14-15
- ↑ Hughes: The Victorian Governess. 1993, p. 40.
- ↑ Hughes: The Victorian Governess. 1993, p. 39.