The Victorian Governess

by Kathryn Hughes

The figure of the governess is very familiar from nineteenth-century literature. Much less is known about the governess in reality. This book is the first rounded exploration of what the life of the home schoolroom was actually like. Drawing on original diaries and a variety of previously undiscovered sources, Kathryn Hughes describes why the period 1840-80 was the classic age of governesses. She examines their numbers, recruitment, teaching methods, social position and prospects.

The governess provides a key to the central Victorian concept of the lady. Her education consisted of a series of accomplishments designed to attract a husband able to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed from birth. Becoming a governess was the only acceptable way of earning money open to a lady whose family could not support her in leisure.

Being paid to educate another woman's children set in play a series of social and emotional tensions. The governess was a surrogate mother, who was herself childless, a young woman whose marriage prospects were restricted, and a family member who was sometimes mistaken for a servant.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Victorian, British Literature, European History

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1993

About the author

Kathryn Hughes is a British journalist and biographer. She holds a PhD in Victorian History. She is a contributing editor to Prospect magazine as well as a book reviewer and commentator for the Guardian and BBC Radio. Hughes also teaches biographical studies at University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K.

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Americans reading 19th century English novels, or modern historical novels set in that place and time, there are three British institutions that are very foreign to one’s experiences and which often produce puzzlement: The public school, the gentleman’s club, and the governess. In the centuries before the reign of Queen Victoria, the upper classes in Britain fostered the notion of home education for the daughters of the family, and the person who oversaw that education was the governess. With the coming of the Industrial Age and the rise of the (mostly) mercantile middle class, the use of governesses spread. There was no lack of supply, since the shift from family-operated business within the home to outside business operations (with the family dwelling elsewhere) also led to frequent financial failure, and often early death, on the part of a gentleman with a family to support. The boys could be articled or otherwise enter the business world or the professions, but the girls -- being ladies -- could not work out in the world. It simply wasn’t allowed. It wasn’t the way God had meant things to be. But a “distressed lady” could always be a governess, at least in theory. The governess market was therefore decidedly one-sided; throughout the 19th century, there were always several times more young women searching for employment as governesses as there were situations available.

There was also a good deal of equivocation regarding the governess’s status, both in the household and in society at large. By definition, she was a gentlewoman -- the children of a genteel family could be entrusted to no one less, when her overriding function was to prepare them for entry into their parents’ society. She ordinarily ate with the family and was addressed as “Miss So-and-So.” (The servants, being of a lower class, were addressed only by their surnames -- though they often were loathe to treat the governess as significantly better than themselves.) Yet the governess was also an employee. There was also a feeling among employers that while a governess must be knowledgeable about everything (something they would not expect of a man working as a specialized “master” in music or art or Italian language), she must not be a “professional” who had deliberately prepared for such a career. She ought to know, really, only those subjects which she had been taught by her own governess. She was more a moral guide (and guard) than teacher. A pretense was often made, therefore, that she was a “volunteer,” merely helping out. The result was minuscule wages (plus room and board) and a great reluctance on her part to advertise when looking for a position.

And, in fact, many young women got into the governess trade by being taken on by a distant family member, or by friends of friends. In theory, there were several levels of governesses as the children got older. A “nursery governess” taught basic reading and writing to boys as well as girls, up to the age of eight, after which the boys were packed off to boarding school; after that, her responsibility was confined to the girls of the household as a “preparatory governess.” The last two or three years of a teenage girl’s education was seen to by a “finishing governess,” who refined her charges’ social skills instead of further their academic accomplishments, and might also accompany her on trips to the Continent. In practice, however, a governess in a household with a number of children over a range of ages found herself having to fill all those roles for all of them -- often all in the same schoolroom at the same time. And when the girls were all grown and about to enter society, the governess -- whose paltry wages really had not allowed her to save up anything -- was given the family’s best wishes and shown the door.

And that’s just the tip of the social iceberg as Hughes describes it. I discovered this book through having read her excellent biography of Isabella Beeton. Like that more recent book, this is a very academic study, crammed with insights and observations, but written in a perfectly comprehensible manner for the non-scholar, referring often to the published and unpublished memoirs and biographies of a number of governesses from the 1830s to the turn of the 20th century. This includes Charlotte Bronte, who worked for a number of years as a governess and whose experiences turn up in Jane Eyre. I found it all fascinating and the detailed bibliography provided a number of other works which I shall be seeking out.

[G. Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of the Victorian governess and her place in society. Compares the reality of real governesses to their fictional counterparts. Very interesting.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished reading a very interesting book called The Victorian Governess by Kathryn Hughes. These poor women were ousted out of service at the age of between 35 and 55 and some were not paid very well so could not save much at all ended up as prostitutes or the work house. Also a Governess Asylum was set up to take in infirm Governesses. There was no pension back in the early 1800's. Toward the end of the 1800's they introduced a policy where Governesses could pay into a saving pot which would sustain them in later years. They were not given any clothing alllowance and had to pay for their own clothes with the pittance they were paid by their employers so sad. They were invisible in most households and were surrogate Mums to their employer's children as well as Governess. Some were fortunate to attend college or university and studied for 6 years in order to gain a certificate to become a Governess. Some uneducated young ladies who were from genteel families would get taken on because they could be put onto a lower wage than those who had certificates in education how bad was that. I really enjoyed reading this book as it opened up my eyes to the World these young ladies entered.

[غبار · Rating 4 out of 5]

this informative and lucid study takes as its starting point the abundance of literary representations of governesses during the victorian era, and goes beyond that to draw on real-life accounts of educating children (mostly middle-class and upper-class girls) in their own homes, and how governesses struggled with their indeterminate position in the social hierarchy. neither "low enough" to establish close ties with the rest of the servants, maids and footmen in the household nor on par with her genteel employers, the governess was perceived as a sort of outsider, and in certain cases even a kind of moral threat. the post was also often emotionally fraught and unsatisfying, as the governess spent nearly all her waking hours with her charges, but could not solicit any love from them, or grow too close and displace the mother as the central figure in her pupils' affections. kathryn hughes does a great job connecting these discussions of the governess's quotidian difficulties with her construction as an archetype invested with the epoch's many gendered and class-bound anxieties.

[Maria Rosanna Ioannou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read!

[Katharine Holden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-done. Hughes briefly summarizes literature featuring governesses, but primary sources are the focus of the book, including diaries, letters, and statistical reports from the era. Topics range from a Victorian-era report that offers a breakdown of the numbers of female lunatics by their former professions - former governesses form the highest percentage of female lunatics - to why a governess in a middle-class household was much more likely to be subjected to abuse and unfair treatment than a governess in an aristocratic household.

Hughes is never maudlin but it's a sad piece of history: thousands of Victorian governesses, competing for comparatively few jobs, having no union representation, needing to maintain the semblance and outward appearance of gentility (and femininity) on inadequate wages, not necessarily treated as part of the family but not able to share the comradeship of the servants' quarters, either, often inadequately educated and trained for the role they were supposed to play, and completely dependent on the whims of the family they served.

One paragraph tugged at me: "Rarely venturing outside her employers' house, talking freely only to another governess, Edith Gates had, in a sense, become hidden from view. Deprived of the human contacts that would have given her a sense of mattering in the world, she began to wonder whether she had become invisible, whether, indeed, she existed at all."

[Jamie Clegg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned more about the governess than I ever knew or really wanted to know. It was incredible to learn that the “governess trope” is not just a fascination for Brontë fan-girls or Victorian-era scholars—she was the subject of interest for a much wider audience. She was written about in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and, as Kathryn Hughes points out in her book, many pornographic novels by men. Can you believe that?! There’s so much more to this “governess trope” than just the idea that a girl can pull herself up by her bootstraps—or completely undo herself, in the case of Ms. Becky Sharp—and remove herself from her current situation. It’s more a question of how the governess ought to behave, and where her place is in society. She was an anomaly in her own time, and no one knew exactly what to do with her, so they tried everything: they gave her morals; they made her immoral; they made her smart; they made her silly—the governess was represented by so many characters and poems and texts and reports, yet she cannot answer to a single one. The accurate and complete history of the governess is yet to be written. The current body of literature and accounts on governesses has been too candied and manipulated, even by those who experienced the woes of governess life. No governess’ journal is reliable enough. No account perfectly matches that of another. The most we can do is acknowledge the common denominators and take pleasure in reading about the outliers.