Brontës (28 page)

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 than 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

The Wilson lobby, led by Miss Andrews, a teacher who had also temporarily been superintendent of the school during the Brontë period, denied there had ever been a scarcity of food. ‘The daily dinner consisted of meat, vegetables, and pudding, in abundance; the children were permitted and expected to ask for whatever they desired, and they were never limited.'
⁴²
As Charlotte's husband and staunch defender pointed out, however,

what about the
cooking
that spoiled these provisions; boiled the puddings in unclean water; compounded the Saturday's nauseous mess from the fragments accumulated in a dirty larder during the week; and too often sent up the porridge, not merely burnt, but with offensive fragments of other substances discoverable in it!
⁴³

Yet another Cowan Bridge girl of the Brontë period sent a horrific account to substantiate the accusations, pointing out that ‘on first reading “Jane
Eyre” several years ago I recognized immediately the picture there drawn and was far from considering it in any way exaggerated, in fact I thought at the time, and still think, the matter rather understated than otherwise'. She then went on to say:

The housekeeper was very dirty with the cooking and very unkind to the girls generally. I have frequently seen grease swim [m] ing on the milk and water we had for breakfast, in consequence of its having been boiled in a greasy copper and I perfectly remember having once been sent for a cup of tea for a teacher who was ill in bed, and no teaspoon being at hand the housekeeper stirred the tea with her finger she being engaged in cutting raw meat at the time. If space would allow I could give you scores of such instances as these which fell under my own observation and which after nearly twenty five years have elapsed dwell unpleasantly in my memory. Our food was almost always badly cooked, and besides that we certainly had not enough of it whatever may be said to the contrary.
⁴⁴

Charlotte herself had seen the doctor, who was soon to become Wilson's brother-in-law, actually spit out a portion of food he had tasted. Even Miss Andrews had to confess that when the doctor was called in during the spring of 1825 to attend the girls smitten with ‘low fever', he had spoken ‘rather scornfully' of a baked rice pudding. Her protest that ‘as the ingredients of this dish were chiefly rice, sugar, and milk, its effects could hardly have been so serious as have been affirmed' suggests that the teachers may not have been sympathetic to the girls' complaints about the food.
⁴⁵

If the skimmed milk used at the school was sour, it would have been difficult to detect until tasted, because it does not curdle or smell bad. There was no excuse for the dirty cooking utensils, however, or the slovenliness of the housekeeper. Unfortunately, Cowan Bridge does not appear to have been an isolated case; complaints about the food at Woodhouse Grove have a familiar ring about them. As late as the 1850s, one schoolboy complained:

Breakfast consisted of a thick slice of dry bread and about half a pint of skimmed milk, occasionally sour, and sometimes slightly warmed in winter. At dinner we generally had two courses; and supper, at six o'clock, was an exact repetition of breakfast … my stomach rebels at this moment at the thought of the rice, it was either boiled very dry (into ‘snowballs') and then anointed with a thin unguent composed of treacle and warm water, or else baked in huge black tins in which
it looked as if it had been ‘trodden under foot of men'. You had to eat it all up, or Mrs Farrar would probably give you a box on the ear, and stand over you till you did. I have many a time gone away from the table with food in my handkerchief to throw away, because, had I been forced to eat it, I should have been ill.
⁴⁶

As everyone, including Charlotte and Mrs Gaskell, was careful to point out, the filthy cook at Cowan Bridge was eventually dismissed and replaced by a clean and efficient woman, who produced a marked improvement in the food.

The school register supports Mrs Gaskell's claim that ill health was commonplace among the girls during the early years of the school, resulting in many being sent home. Of the fifty-three pupils there at the same time as the Brontës, one died at Cowan Bridge and eleven left school in ill health; six of them died soon after reaching home. There clearly was a particular problem in the first nine months of 1825, when twenty girls (including the four Brontës) were withdrawn from the school, nine of them in ill health.
⁴⁷
Wilson therefore lost more than a third of his pupils in only the second year of the Clergy Daughters' School's existence. Nor did the general state of health even start to improve until 1832 – the year the school relocated to Casterton – by which time another two, if not three girls had actually died at Cowan Bridge and a further fifteen had left school in ill health, six of them to die.
⁴⁸
Though it may seem horrendous today that any child should die of fever at school, in defence of Cowan Bridge it should be noted that epidemics and consequent fatalities were an unfortunate but ordinary fact of nineteenth-century boarding school life. Woodhouse Grove lost eleven boys in a period of about ten years and there were similarly fatal epidemics at Rugby, Rossall and other public schools of the day.
⁴⁹

All in all, therefore, the Brontës were unfortunate to be at the Clergy Daughters' School during its difficult early years. On the other hand, even then the school was no worse than many of its renowned and much-praised contemporaries and in certain instances it was actually better. Apart from the significant problem of the dirty housekeeper, there was an insistence on personal cleanliness, neatness and discipline which was not only necessary for the smooth and healthy running of the school but also inculcated the sort of personal habits that would commend themselves to the Brontës in later years.
⁵⁰
There is no doubt that Charlotte endured great hardship there: her fastidious nature was revolted by the unavoidable evils of communal
school life, she rebelled against the loss of freedom and she resented the feeling that she was a ‘charity-child'. What she could not forgive, however, was the fact that her two older sisters died as a direct result, as she saw it, of their own experience at the school.

Maria and Elizabeth Brontë arrived at the Clergy Daughters' School on 21 July 1824. They should have gone earlier, but because they were still delicate from having had whooping cough and measles in the spring, their entry was delayed. Patrick himself escorted his daughters the forty-five miles from Haworth to Cowan Bridge; they travelled by the daily coach from Leeds, which conveniently stopped at Keighley. He stayed overnight and dined at the same table as his children so that he was able to see for himself how the school was run; he was evidently satisfied as he returned home without comment.
⁵¹
Had there been the slightest hint of anything unusual or wrong he would undoubtedly have complained, as he was not the sort of person to allow such things to pass.

The girls were assessed by the superintendent, Miss Andrews, and their details entered into the school register. It was noted, for instance, that both were being paid for by Patrick himself, not by one of the charitable societies or by their godmothers. They had both been vaccinated and Maria had also had chicken pox. Their ‘Acquirements on Entering' seem unimpressive. (It should be explained that ‘ciphering' meant arithmetic, ‘working' meant plain sewing and ‘accomplishments' meant French, music and drawing.) Against Maria, aged ten, it was recorded: