I: Status and Struggle in the Victorian Home
In nineteenth-century Britain, working as a governess was one of few occupations considered appropriate for single, middle-class women who lacked financial security and needed to seek an independent income. Working as a governess allowed women to retain their social status under the pretence that they were not servants, but instead ‘genteel volunteers’ in the homes of their employers.¹ In reality though, governesses functionally served the class that they claimed to belong to and received low pay for unstable work. These contradictions made governesses a focal point of Victorian anxieties about social class and the welfare of single, middle-class women in an era of social and economic transformation.
Embroidery sampler stitched by nine-year-old Eliza Allin.
Eliza Allin, Sampler, 1827, wool and silk, Wellington, Te Papa Tongarewa, (PC003724).
A governess, unlike a nurse or a nanny, was expected to be ‘genteel’ or of equal social status to the family she worked for.² Beyond teaching basic literacy to young women and children as a live-in tutor, governesses taught etiquette and ‘accomplishments’ like drawing, music, and decorative needlework.
This sampler, made by nine-year-old Eliza Allin under the guidance of her governess C. Melligan in 1827 shows the type of intricate needlework techniques that governesses taught young women and girls. The sampler includes verses from Hymns for Infant Minds—a popular children’s book of simple, moralistic poems. As this example hints, governesses were also responsible for providing their pupils with a moral education that reinforced religious tenets.
Rebecca Solomon (1832-1886), The Governess — "Ye too, the friendless, yet dependent, that find nor home nor lover. Sad imprisoned hearts, captive to the net of circumstance." — Martin Tupper (Exhibited: Royal Academy 1854. No. 425).
In Britian, governesses were spared from having to perform domestic duties like cooking, cleaning, or sewing, but they were also excluded from fully participating in the social world of their employers and often found themselves confined to the schoolroom.³ The image of the isolated, intelligent, and morally upright governess doomed to live a life of drudgery and hardship captured the Victorian imagination. The governess a became prominent figure in public discourse and a heroine in popular novels like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey.
In her 1854 painting The Governess, Rebecca Solomon depicts a young governess (right) dressed in black and looking on as a young woman presumed to be an older pupil or visitor (left), holds the attention of a potential suiter. Solomon (1832-1886) was a pre-Raphaelite artist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice. In this painting, she presents the governess as a lonely and overlooked figure who is relegated to the shadows.
"I went to the house and found it a filthy coffee-house, frequented by unwashed customers. The mistress, though likewise unwashed, was obviously what is termed ‘respectable’. She told me that her unhappy lodger was a woman of 40 or 50, perfectly sober and well conducted in every way. She had been a governess in very good families, but had remained unemployed till her clothes grew shabby. She walked all day long over London for many weeks, seeking any kind of work of means of support, and selling by degrees everything she possessed for food. At last she returned to her wretched room in that house into which it was a pain for any lady to enter, - and having begged a last cup of tea from her landlady, telling her she could not pay for it, she locked her door, and was heard of no more.”
— Frances Power Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe, By Herself, 1894, pp. 69-70.
Governesses frequently appeared as the subject of sensationalised news articles and other forms of reporting, where they were depicted as vulnerable figures who were easily taken advantage of and destined for destitution.
In her 1894 autobiography, the writer, social reformer, and women’s suffrage campaigner Frances Power Cobbe vividly captured this reality with the story of an unemployed governess who was discovered dead in her lodgings in London’s Drury Lane after a period of living in poverty.
¹ Katherine Hughes, The Victorian Govereness (London: The Hambledon Press, 1993), p.43.
²Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny (Hodder and Stoughton: 1972), pp. 71-72.
³ Ruth Brandon, Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres (New York: Walker Publishing Company, 2008), p.16.