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DOROTHEA BEALE OF CHELTENHAM
[Illustration: _Photo. J. C. Hughes_
_Dorothea Beale_
_from the portrait by J. J. Shannon._]
DOROTHEA BEALE OF CHELTENHAM
by
ELIZABETH RAIKES
Illustrated
London
Archibald Constable
and Company Ltd.
1908
Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
TO ‘HER CHILDREN’
PREFACE
Miss Beale left ample materials for the history of her work. Not only
were all business documents, such as minutes of council meetings,
nomination papers, examination questions carefully preserved, she kept
also all letters which could be of any interest. She went further than
merely arranging materials for a future book. In 1900 she compiled a very
complete _History of the Ladies’ College_. Here she traced its origin,
growth, and expansion; here, too, she named most carefully all who by
earnest work and self-denial, by industry, talent, or generous gift, had
in any way contributed to its wellbeing and influence. She was anxious
that all faithful work should be known.
But Miss Beale recognised that after her death there would be a demand
for something more. She was earnestly desirous that in any account which
might appear of herself, the work for which she lived should have the
first place. With her innate sensitiveness, she shrank from the thought
of a Life. It would not indeed be possible to write a life of Dorothea
Beale which was not also, fully and intimately, a Life of the Ladies’
College, Cheltenham. Yet Miss Beale left some materials for the more
personal side of the book—many letters, diaries, and autobiographical
fragments. One paper opens thus:
‘In these days we all live in glass houses, and it seems
useless to say, Let nothing appear in print. The life of
the College, for which I have lived forty years, some
reminiscences of the state of things as regards education,
and some traces of the way in which the Potter has formed
the vessel for the service of the household, may perhaps be
allowed. It seems to me that the story of the inward life
may be helpful. I should relate only those things which, on
looking back over my long life, seem to have exercised a
formative influence upon my own character, and tended under
God’s Providence to fit me for the work which was given me to
do. The circumstances and ideals of my childhood, the family
influences, sometimes what seems a chance acquaintance, or even
a passing remark; these viewed from within might have had an
influence little dreamed of at the time.’
I have endeavoured in this book to follow Miss Beale’s own suggestions,
but also to give some faint idea of what she was to the many she inspired
and taught. In her _History of the Ladies’ College_ she left little
historical fact unmentioned: it is possible for another to show that she
was the real founder, the main builder.
Many thanks are owing to those who kindly furnished me with letters
from Miss Beale. It was difficult to select from the very large number
received, and it was with much regret that many had to be excluded, lest
the book should become unwieldy.
It remains but to add one word on my gratitude for the unfailing kindness
and generous help of those who have read this book in manuscript and
proof; to Mrs. Reynolds and Miss Bertha Synge; to Miss Helen Cunliffe who
undertook the somewhat wearisome task of deciphering the diaries, and,
lastly, to Miss Alice Andrews, whose name Miss Beale associated with mine
when she asked me to write a History of the College.
ELIZABETH RAIKES.
_June 2, 1908._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. CHILDHOOD 1
II. QUEEN’S COLLEGE 17
III. CASTERTON 36
IV. AN INTERVAL 60
V. CHELTENHAM 81
VI. EARLY HISTORY OF THE LADIES’ COLLEGE 108
VII. A ROYAL COMMISSION 134
VIII. ORGANISATION 158
IX. DE PROFUNDIS 179
X. THE GUILD 203
XI. ST. HILDA’S WORK 226
XII. TEACHER AND PRINCIPAL 254
XIII. PARERGA 286
XIV. HONOURS 312
XV. THE LAST TERM 349
XVI. LETTERS 371
INDEX 427
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
DOROTHEA BEALE. From the Portrait by J. J. Shannon,
A.R.A _Frontispiece_
CAROLINE FRANCES CORNWALLIS. From a Painting by
Herself _to face page_ 4
CAMBRAY HOUSE. From an Old Engraving ” 90
MISS DOROTHEA BEALE, 1859 ” 108
MR. T. HOUGHTON BRANCKER ” 120
THE LOWER HALL, LADIES’ COLLEGE, CHELTENHAM.
A Photograph by Miss Bertha Synge ” 216
S. HILDA’S HALL, OXFORD ” 238
LADIES’ COLLEGE AND GARDEN, 1908 ” 254
THE EMPRESS FREDERICK AT CHELTENHAM. From a
Photograph by Mr. Domenico Barnett ” 334
DOROTHEA BEALE, LL.D. ” 340
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
‘Wisdom goeth about seeking them that are worthy of her, and in
their paths she appeareth graciously, and in every purpose she
meeteth them.
‘For her true beginning is desire of discipline; and the care
for discipline is love of her; and love of her is observance of
laws.’
_Wisdom of Solomon_, vi. 16, 17, 18.
Dorothea Beale was born on March 21, 1831. The story of her childhood and
youth forms a good illustration of the best education that girls of the
early Victorian time could obtain. It gives also a glimpse of the fears
and hopes, the silent struggles, the disappointments of many a girl who
strove to wrest, as from a grudging Fate, the opportunity to inform and
use her mind. As far as possible this story is told autobiographically.
Miss Beale belonged to a Gloucestershire family. One ancestor, in the
early days of the manufacturing settlement in the Stroud Valley, married
a Miss Hyde, a relation of the Chancellor. She brought to her husband
Hyde Court, Chalford, where Miss Beale’s brother, Mr. Henry Beale,
now resides. Miss Beale’s own father, however, never lived there. His
parents, who married young, settled at Brownshill in Gloucestershire, and
here his father (Dorothea’s grandfather) died, leaving a widow aged only
twenty-four with three children, John, Miles, and Mary, to be brought
up on very slender means. Mrs. John Beale removed to Bath, where she
remained till the boys left school for Guy’s Hospital. Then she came to
live with them in Essex, where for a time they practised in partnership.
In 1824 Miles married Dorothea Margaret Complin, a lady of Huguenot
extraction; her grandfather had practised as a physician in Spital
Square, one of the original settlements of the French immigrants.
In 1830 the young couple with three children came to live in St. Helen’s
parish, Bishopsgate, where a year later Dorothea, their fourth child and
third daughter, was born. She was baptized in the ancient church of St.
Helen’s on June 10, 1831. ‘Awoke early. Baptism Day. Read the service,’
she wrote in her diary in 1891.
The Complins were a family of wide connections. Mrs. Beale’s aunt, Mrs.
Cornwallis, wife of the Rev. William Cornwallis, rector of Wittersham,
Kent, was an active, benevolent woman with literary tastes and
occupations. She took a great interest in her two young nieces, Elizabeth
and Dorothea Margaret Complin, who at an early age lost their own mother,
her sister. The two little girls were sent to school at Ealing, where the
elder, Elizabeth, gained many prizes or ‘Rewards of Merit,’ as school
prizes were then called. After her sister’s marriage to Mr. Miles Beale,
Elizabeth Complin lived for some time with her clever aunt and cousin,
Mrs. Cornwallis and her daughter Caroline, sharing their interests and
studies. On the death of her brother’s wife she came to live in London.
There she was brought into immediate touch with her nieces, Dorothea
Beale and her sisters, whom she delighted to help and advise in their
reading, and who by her means became familiar with the aims and ideals of
the Cornwallises. These more distant relations, whose intellectual aims
and work Miss Beale always reckoned among the influences of her early
life, were themselves authors of no mean merit. ‘Mrs. Cornwallis wrote
several devotional books, and is said to have learned Hebrew in the first
instance to teach her grandson, James Trimmer. She wrote also for him a
series of papers on the canonical Scriptures, in four volumes. This was
published by subscription, as was the custom with expensive works in
those days. The Queen and a number of great people entered their names,
and with the profits Mrs. Cornwallis was able to build schools in her
husband’s parish.’[1]
James Trimmer died when only twelve. His other grandmother was also
literary—Mrs. Sarah Trimmer, famous in her own day as the author of
nearly thirty volumes for the young. Her _Sacred History_ was the most
important of these, but perhaps the best known now is _The History of the
Robins_.
‘One story of his childhood,’ runs the autobiography, ‘was a
great favourite with us as children. His uncle had settled
to sell a pony of which James was very fond, and many were
the tears he shed. His grandmother (Mrs. Cornwallis) said, “I
think, James, that this life is a journey upwards; each time we
do right, or bear a sorrow patiently, we get up one step of the
ladder to Heaven.” So he dried his eyes and was quite cheerful
once more. Meanwhile, his uncle, seeing the boy’s sorrow,
cancelled the sale, and brought news to James that the pony was
his once more. Again to his surprise, James burst into tears,
and at length it was drawn from him that he feared now he would
have to come down from that step of the ladder. He was finally
consoled by some such doctrine as Browning has commended in the
words, “’Tis not what man does that exalts him, but what man
_would_ do.” All her pupils were not as responsive as James.
Once, after expending her eloquence on a plough-boy whom she
was preparing for confirmation, she said: “Now, are you not
glad that you have a soul?” to which she could only get the
reply, “I don’t care very little about it....”
‘Mr. Cornwallis was a scholar; he was a descendant of
Archbishop Cornwallis. I do not know any details of his
College career; but he taught his only unmarried daughter
Latin and Greek classics, and she gained such a rare facility
in understanding that he used to read the classics aloud to
her, and expect her to follow. He was a friend of Sismondi,
from whom Miss Cornwallis received an offer of marriage,
which she declined on the ground of great disparity of age.
Sismondi lent her afterwards his villa at Pisa, and my aunt,
her great friend, accompanied her there. A journey to Italy
for two ladies was a great undertaking, and many interesting
reminiscences used we to hear from my aunt. She there acquired
a good knowledge of Italian, by which we benefited later.’[2]
In after years Miss Caroline Cornwallis moved to Maidstone, where she
exercised her many talents and versatile mind in varied occupations.
Miss Cornwallis not only studied Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but such
questions of the day as criminal procedure; she also read philosophy.
She wrote besides articles for the _Westminster Review_ and _Fraser’s
Magazine_, several books in a series entitled ‘_Small Books on Great
Subjects_—edited by a few well-wishers to knowledge.’ The first was
_Philosophical Theories and Experience of a Pariah_. She said women were
regarded as pariahs, and were it known that the book was written by a
woman it would not be read.[3] Others of the series which she wrote
were some volumes entitled _A Brief View of Greek Philosophy_, and some
historical works, _The State of the World before the Introduction of
Christianity_. She also wrote a classical novel called _Pericles and
Aspasia_. Miss Cornwallis rejoiced in the fact that as a woman, though
unknown, she obtained for her writings the praise of ‘big-wigs.’
‘“I long,” she wrote to a friend after one of her works had
received flattering notices in the _British Medical Journal_,
“to knock all the big-wigs together and say it was a woman that
did all this—a woman that laughed at you all and despised your
praise. And if, like Caligula’s wish, I could put all mankind
into one and leave you to say that in its ears when I am gone
quietly to my grave, I think it would be glorious. It is as
a woman, and not as the individual C.F.C., that I enjoy my
triumph; for, as regards my own proper self, I like to creep in
a corner and be quiet; but to raise my whole sex and with it
the world is an object worth fagging for. Heart and hand to the
work.”’
[Illustration: _Caroline Frances Cornwallis_
_From a painting by herself_]
Miss Cornwallis reflects the thought of her day with regard to women’s
work. It was one of the tasks of her cousin, Dorothea Beale—whose
‘fagging’ in the next generation did so much for her own sex and the
world—to show that the best work is done when the question of what will
be said about it does not affect it one way or the other.[4]
The authorship of the _Small Books_ was a well-kept secret.
‘We did not know who wrote the books till after her death,
though my aunt, who gave them to us, often stayed with her as
her amanuensis. Miss Cornwallis was a skilled handworker, too.
Before the Society for Home Arts existed she learned to bind
books for her library. She was no mean artist, and her portrait
of herself in her library is considered very successful. I
have heard how she fitted up a marionette theatre for the
amusement of friends. I did not know her personally; she died
when I was young; but the talk of her ability and knowledge,
and the association with my aunt, Elizabeth Complin, who
was her friend, had much to do with calling out my literary
ambition.’[5]
The Beales were a very large family, with more than twenty years between
the eldest and youngest children; and all those things which make home
life at once precious in itself and valuable as a training for the
world’s work were theirs to a full extent: mutual love and toil and
suffering, the elder serving the younger, the little ones looking up to
the wise elder sisters, the constant practice of all those qualities
which are the law of a well-ordered religious home. Both parents from the
midst of their own absorbing personal occupations found time to lead out
the mental abilities of their children, by reading aloud to them, giving
verses of Scripture and poetry to be learned by heart, and finding time
to hear them repeated. The home atmosphere was serious and intellectual.
Dorothea said she owed much to the literary tastes of her parents. ‘I
shall never forget,’ she said, ‘how we learned to love Shakspere, through
my father’s reading to us, when we were quite young, selected portions. I
still remember the terror which, as a very small child, I felt as I heard
Portia pronounce the verdict. I thought Shylock had really gained the
day.[6]
‘History and general literature we would read with our mother, and listen
with delight to her stories of the eventful era she had lived through.’
Miles Beale, like his wife, belonged to a family with cultivated tastes
and interests. Among his relations he could reckon the eminent geologist
and archæologist, William Symonds,[7] rector of Pendock, Gloucestershire,
whose daughter married Sir Joseph Hooker. In connection with his friend
the Rev. Charles Mackenzie, vicar of St. Helen’s, and others, Mr. Beale
joined a committee known as the Literary Society, of which he became
honorary secretary, for the institution of lectures in Crosby Hall. A
library and evening classes were also formed, and these became in time
the basis of the present City of London College for young men. He was
much helped by Miss Maria Hackett, well known for her diligent efforts
to rescue old endowments which, granted for girls’ education, had been
alienated to boys. Mr. Beale, who was fond of music, was also a prime
mover in getting up concerts of sacred music. ‘This made us acquainted
with some musicians, and amongst others with Mrs. Bartholomew and her
husband, the friend of Mendelssohn, who translated many of the German
songs. He was a most interesting and cultivated man, an artist and
dramatist.’[8]
The growing children were often allowed to be present when their father’s
friends came, and thus silently heard much thoughtful and intellectual
conversation. They looked up to him as to one who expected them to care
for books and for matters of public moment, and he strove to interest
them in his own pursuits and reading, and to give them a taste for what
was really good. ‘“Blessed are the pure in heart”—poor Swift,’ he said
one day as he handled a volume of the great satirist. ‘That,’ said
Dorothea long after, ‘was the best literature lesson I ever received.’
The daughter must have resembled her father both in literary taste and
zeal. This busy man, who found time to pursue so many interests, would
accuse himself of being ‘naturally idle.’ It may come as a surprise to
many who knew the strenuous life at Cheltenham to find this was a fault
of which the Principal constantly accused herself.
One friend who was much with the Beales, often dining with them on
Sundays, was Charles Mackenzie, then headmaster of St. Olave’s Grammar
School, and successively vicar of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, and St.
Benet’s, Gracechurch Street, and prebendary of St. Paul’s. Dorothea felt
she owed much to his teaching; he prepared her for confirmation in 1847.
As children she and her brothers and sisters attended St. Helen’s. Again
to quote her autobiography:
‘To come to the nearer influences of my childhood. There was
the faith of my parents, the morning and evening prayer. There
was the Bible picture-book and the Sunday lessons. The church
we went to was an old one, St. Helen’s, and at the entrance
were the words, “This is none other than the House of God, and
this is the Gate of Heaven.” There were high pews, and the
service was almost a duet between clergyman and clerk, yet I
realised, even more than I ever have in the most beautiful
cathedral and perfect services, that the Lord was in that
place, even as Jacob realised in the desert what he had failed
to find at home. There was over the East window an oval coat
of arms with strange scrolls which seemed to have eyes, and
reclining on each side two life-sized golden angels. This thing
seemed to speak strangely to my spiritual consciousness. Our
clergyman must have read well. I remember how, as the story of
the Crucifixion was read, the church would grow dark, as it
seemed. There were no hymn-books, only a few hymns pasted on a
card, and generally we sang from Tate and Brady. I know nothing
of the substance of the sermons now, but I remember the emotion
they often called forth, and how I with difficulty restrained
my tears. There was a Tuesday evening service, at which I
suppose there were never a dozen present, but I found there
great help, and to be obliged to go elsewhere on that night was
a great privation. The hymns were a great power in my life. I
remember the joy with which I would sing, in my own room, Ken’s
Evening Hymn, and the awful joy of the Trinity hymn, “Holy,
holy, holy.”
‘The books that we read most on Sunday—for no secular book was
allowed—were Mant’s Bible with pictures, which were explained
by my mother, and a book of Martyrs with dreadful pictures;
Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_, with the outline drawings, and
a number of tracts, such as Parley the Porter, and stories of
good and bad children.
‘An aunt, my godmother, lived with us, and was often my
friend in my childish troubles. I shall not speak much of
the governesses we had in succession, because they left but
little impression on my inner life, nor need I speak of all my
brothers and sisters, except so far as they come into my inner
life. The strongest influence was that of my sister Eliza. We
were constantly together. She had a very lively imagination,
and on most nights would tell me stories that she had invented.
Early in the mornings she would transform our bedroom into some
wild magic scene, and we would play at Alexander the Great, and
ride Pegasus on the foot of our four-post bedstead. I remember
now how Mangnall furnished her with mental pictures of heathen
gods, which were cut out in paper and painted. London children
had no outdoor games.’[9]
The elder daughters were at first educated by daily governesses. Dorothea
said that among her earliest reminiscences about 1840 were those relating
to the choice of a governess.
‘My mother advertised and hundreds of answers were sent. She
began by eliminating all those in which bad spelling occurred
(a proceeding which as a spelling reformer I must now condemn),
next the wording and composition were criticised, and lastly a
few of the writers were interviewed and a selection was made.
But alas! an inspection of our exercise-books revealed so many
uncorrected faults, that a dismissal followed, and another
search resulted in the same way. I can remember only one really
clever and competent teacher; she had been educated in a good
French school and grounded us well in the language.’[10]
Memory preserves the name—Miss Wright—of the lady who earned this word of
praise. When she left, the girls were sent to school.
‘It was a school,’ again to quote Miss Beale’s own account
of her education, ‘considered much above the average for
sound instruction; our mistresses were women who had read and
thought; they had taken pains to arrange various schemes of
knowledge; yet what miserable teaching we had in many subjects;
history was learned by committing to memory little manuals;
rules of arithmetic were taught, but the principles were never
explained. Instead of reading and learning the masterpieces of
literature, we repeated week by week the Lamentations of King
Hezekiah, the pretty but somewhat weak “Mother’s Picture” of
Cowper, and worse doggrel verses on the solar system.’[11]
The arrangements were doubtless similar to those of the period in all
schools of the same kind, such as were described by Miss Beale in one of
her early articles on the Education of Girls.
‘I know one school,’ she wrote, ‘existing to the end of the
first half of the nineteenth century, in which the terms were
not less than £100 a year. The following was the arrangement of
hours: Rise at seven o’clock ... Lessons till eight; breakfast,
consisting of bread and butter, with extremely weak coffee;
lessons till twelve, luncheon, consisting of bread and butter,
or bread and jam, and “turns” till one o’clock. These “turns”
consisted in going thirty times post haste round and round the
garden; they could scarcely be accomplished unless the luncheon
were carried round in the hand and eaten _en route_. Lessons
from one o’clock until three forty-five. Dinner four o’clock,
and “turns” in fine weather immediately following, as after
luncheon. Lessons until eight, then tea, and bed at nine.’[12]
The school was at Stratford, and it lent perhaps a personal reminiscence
to a favourite line of Chaucer’s _Prologue_, on which, in the literature
lessons at Cheltenham, Miss Beale never failed to dwell.
‘After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frensch of Parys was to hire unknowe.’
She always had a horror of schoolgirl French, and the practice at one
time so common of permitting no talk except in French.
‘Our thinking power was hindered from developing by intercourse
with one another, because we were required to speak in a tongue
in which we could indeed talk, but in which conversation was
impossible; and the language we spoke was one peculiar to
English boarding schools.’[13]
Young as Dorothea was when she went to school, she was no doubt
distinguished there for her industry and ability, and certainly for her
conscientiousness. A little story of this remains. On one occasion she
fainted in church, and when some kindly hand removed her bonnet, she
revived, and clung to it desperately, because she would not have her
head uncovered in church. The weary rounds in the garden lingered in
the memory of those who performed them, and there were those who would
tell in after years how faithfully the little Dorothea would perform her
‘turns,’ while some girls were not above cheating a little.
The school-days were not prolonged, for ‘fortunately,’ she says,—
‘Ill-health compelled me to leave at thirteen, and then began
a valuable time of education under the direction of myself,
during which I expended a great deal of energy in useless
directions, but gained more than I should have probably done at
any existing school; dreaming much, and seeking for a fuller
realisation of the great spiritual realities, which make one
feel that all knowledge is sacred. We had access to two large
libraries; one that of the London Institution, the other that
of Crosby Hall; besides which the Medical Book Club circulated
many books of general interest, which were read by all and
talked over at meal-times and in the evening, when my father
used often to read aloud to us. Novels rarely came our way, but
we found pasturage enough. We read a great deal of history:
the works of Froissart, Thierry, Thiers, Alison, Miller’s
_Philosophy of History_, Sir James Stephen’s books, Prescott’s,
Creasy’s stand out very distinctly to memory.’[14]
The reading of a book named _Scientific Dialogues_ she counted also as
an era in her mental history. All the good reviews of the time, the
_Edinburgh_, _Quarterly_, and _Blackwood’s Magazine_, came in her way,
with books of travel and biographies. She made elaborate tables on all
sorts of subjects, some of which in neat handwriting may still be seen.
She had access to all Whately’s works, and worked up alone his _Logic and
Rhetoric_.
This unwearied study was no accumulation of knowledge for its own
sake, it was the outcome of a true if youthful admiration for what
was noble and good. ‘I worshipped for years Isabella of Castile. Sir
James Stephen’s essay on George the Third filled my imagination with
magnificent visions; his Port Royalists were my ideal characters;
especially was Pascal a hero, I read and re-read his _Life and Provincial
Letters_.’[15]
Pascal’s life perhaps breathed for her a spirit of emulation. ‘I borrowed
a Euclid, and without any help read the first six books, carefully
working through the whole of the fifth, as I did not know what was
usually done. It did not occur to me to ask my father for lessons in
such subjects.’[16] She also made some way with algebra, and calculated
for herself the distance to the moon. Much time, she owned, was wasted
by working alone. But the very difficulties proved a source of help,
showing her the value of knowledge acquired by effort and search, as
opposed to mere information received from another. In all her reading
she received both help and sympathy from her aunt, Elizabeth Complin,
who herself understood Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, had considerable taste
for mathematics, and was fond of philosophy. She was one of the first
subscribers to Mudie’s. The London Library was also a mine of wealth to
the young readers.
Outside her home, the chief educational influence for Dorothea at this
period must have been the lectures of the Literary Institution at Crosby
Hall, and more especially the Gresham Lectures. She attended some of
these in company with a younger sister, who often grew weary and
hungry when Dorothea, after a long morning’s work, would stay to talk
abstrusely with a professor, or linger over a bookstall on the way home
to dinner. The professor was probably Mr. Pullen, of whose lectures on
astronomy she wrote that they ‘inspired a passionate desire to know
more of mathematics, and to understand all the processes described. I
obtained books on mechanics and spelt them out as well as I was able, but
was often baffled. The mysteries of the Calculus I pored over in vain
... not knowing that I lacked the knowledge which alone could make it
intelligible.’[17]
Dorothea’s educational fortune proved itself to be better than that of
the Prioress, for in 1847 she was sent with two elder sisters, their
characters ‘ripe for observation,’ to Mrs. Bray’s fashionable school for
English girls in the Champs Elysées. This school, kept by English ladies,
was supposed to offer a good English education, as well as French.
‘Imagine our disgust,’ writes Miss Beale, ‘at being required
to read English history in Mrs. Trimmer, to learn by heart all
Murray’s grammar, to learn even lists of prepositions by heart,
in order that we might parse without the trouble of thinking.
I learned them with such anger that the list was burnt into
my brain, and I can say it now. The “Use of the Globes,” too,
we were taught, and very impertinent was I thought for asking
a reason for some of the tricks we were made to play with a
globe under the direction of Keith. We used indeed to read
collectively Robertson’s _Charles the Fifth_, i.e. it was read
aloud on dancing evenings. Each class went out in succession
for the dancing lesson; thus no one read the whole book, though
the school in its corporate capacity did. I felt oppressed with
the routine life; I, who had been able to moon, grub, alone for
hours, to live in a world of dreams and thoughts of my own,
was now put into a cage and had to walk round and round like a
squirrel. I felt thought was killed. Still, I know now that the
time was well spent. The mechanical order, the system of the
French school was worth seeing, worth living in, only not for
long.’[18]
One personal glimpse we have of the sisters at school in a letter of Mr.
Beale’s to Dorothea: ‘I thought your last letter very nicely written;
tell Eliza so, though it did not apply to hers. She does not write
much, though in the right spirit too: but a genteel hand is of great
importance. I am aware it requires much practice.’
The old-fashioned word exactly describes the neat, fine, pointed
handwriting, which is preserved for us in two or three French
exercise-books of the time. This writing soon after began to suffer
from too much of the German character, and later still more from unduly
ambitious haste. There is also in existence a thin book of _dictées_
signed _Dorothée_, belonging to this period. The teacher has written at
the foot of one or two of these, after the enumeration of a few omitted
commas and accents, a word surely inapt as bestowed on this pupil,
‘_Etourdie_.’
The school was brought to an untimely end by the Revolution of 1848, when
a mob surrounded the house demanding garden-tools as firearms. These were
not available, but Miss Bray faced the men and persuaded them to leave
quietly. Before this incident occurred Dorothea Beale and her sisters had
been fetched home by a brother, who did not, however, leave Paris without
taking them round the city to see as much as they could of the movements
of the Revolution.
This return from school may be considered the close of childhood; for
Dorothea was now seventeen. A grave and quiet girl, so we learn from
one or two friends of her youth, with a sweet, earnest expression, and
deliberate speech; also with a sunshiny smile and a merry laugh on
occasion. She was remarkable even in a studious, sedentary family for her
love of reading and study. For her the fields of literature had taken
the place of those other fields and gardens now held to be a necessity
for the best development of children’s bodies and minds. But her life
in the less favourable surroundings of a great city was made bright by
‘the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poet’s
dream.’ The joys of imagination and fancy, the delight of entering into
the thoughts of the great, were hers, and lifted her above what was small
and trivial. She knew also, and from babyhood seems to have known, a
stern side of life. An innate sense of duty, that guide she never failed
to observe, already hedged her steps, protecting her strong, eager spirit
from flights of ‘unchartered freedom,’ leading it through restraint and
self-denial towards a glorious liberty.
There was plenty to do at home; younger sisters to be taught and
schoolboys’ lessons to be superintended. The boys were at Merchant
Taylors’ School, where the education was neither better nor worse than
in other public schools of the day. Such as it was, it gave Dorothea
a horror of the old-fashioned methods by which boys were taught Latin
and Euclid, without intelligence and without sympathy. It was one of
her tasks at this time to aid in the daily grind of this uninteresting
work. Mrs. Frederick Sewell, an old friend of the family, remembers the
boys going off to their lessons under the supervision of the clever
elder sister. Uncongenial as must have been to her the work of directing
boys already wearied with a long day at school, it was evidently done
in a spirit of dutifulness and high endeavour. In 1876, a brother, the
Reverend Edward Beale of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, Cowley,
wrote to her after what proved to be a final parting: ‘Our lives seem
wonderfully linked together, and I am more conscious every year how much
my life has been influenced by your early teaching. If I had followed
that way of _Duty_ I should have found the entrance less rugged to the
more excellent way.’ Nor was the task a wasted one for Dorothea herself.
She determined, she tells us, to follow her brothers’ lessons on her
own account as well as theirs, and thus was enabled to gain a thorough
knowledge of Latin grammar.
The younger sisters remember the careful and regular teaching given them
by the elder ones, the quiet instructive games they were encouraged to
play with little pictures from Greek mythology, and the rewards bestowed
on industrious pupils. It is on record that Dorothea herself dressed a
doll for a little sister’s birthday.
For she was by no means unequal to feminine pursuits. She could be what
is called _useful_ at home; the inevitable sock-darning which falls to a
girl’s portion in a family of many boys was not neglected; though carried
on simultaneously with the mental exercise of learning German verbs.
An exquisitely fine piece of tatting remains to testify to skilfulness
of fingers, as well as to the perseverance she more gladly devoted to
intellectual efforts. Such was the interleaved New Testament, a monument
of patient toil, into which she copied in very small writing whole
passages of comment from the Fathers and other writers. So full of work
was the home life that there can have been scarcely any leisure; but a
few so-called holidays were spent in rubbing brasses in the ancient city
churches. There was full occupation even for the strenuous spirit of
Dorothea Beale, in the interests and affairs of home, but a wider field
for her energies was to open with the gates of Queen’s College in 1848.