The Works of Miss Thackeray

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Contents

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toilebs akd spinsters 1

Maids op all Work and Blue Books 36

II

We should be indeed ungrateful to the work of those wise and far-seeing people who first turned their attention to the crying evils which existed in workhouse schools, and who first insisted upon separate schools for the children, if we did not begin by acknowledging that whatever is done now, and whatever further improvement may be found possible, theirs was the first and decisive step in the abolition of a great abuse. The workhouses are necessarily refuges for every species of failure in life, in conduct, in mind, in body. Sush depressing and contaminating influence is the very last to which young children ^hould ever be subjected. States of mind are as catching, especially at an early age, as some states of body. To see people who have neglected their opportunities, deserted their duties, succumbed to every sort of temptation, provided for by the state in a sort of semi- Hades of apathetic discontent, must certainly have no good effect upon the younger generation, already inheriting, perhaps, many of the proclivities that have brought this dismal fate upon their seniors.

The children, seeing their father a willing prisoner in fustian, their mother plodding doggedly along the ward in her blue-striped livery, come to look upon this unsatisfying place as a future to look to. Apathy seems to them a natural condition, low talk and common ways will be familiar sounds, they insensibly imbibe the fetid influence of the condition to which all these people have been brought ; by misfortune was it ? — or by wrong-doing ? — who shall say, or whose the wrong-doing that has doomed these poor souls.

. ' The atmosphere of a workhouse that contains adult paupers is tainted with vice,' says Mr. Tufnell, in his Eeport on the training of pauper children. ' No one who regards the future happiness of the children would ever wish them to be educated within its precincts.'

A matron of thirty years' experience to whom I once spoke, shook her head and said that she foimd it practically impossible to prevent ill eflfects from the contact of children and adults in the workhouse under her care.

Miss Cobbe says, speaking of the state of workhouses so lately as 1861 — ' Whatever maybe our judgment of the treatment of the male able-bodied paupers, very decidedly condemnatory must be our conclusion as regards the management of female adults, for whom it may be said that a residence in the workhouse is commonly moral niin. The last rags and shreds of modesty which the poor creature may have brought in from the outer world, are ruthlessly torn away by the hideous gossip over the labour of oakum picking, or in the idle lounging about the women's yard.' And in a note we read — 'In one' metropolitan union it was found on enquiry, that of eighty girls who had left the workhouse and gone to service, not one had continued in a respectable condition ofUfe.'!

The commissioners appointed to enquire into the

system felt that nothing but evil could come to the

children if things were allowed to continue in the state in

which they foimd them. They worked with uninter-

> This statement applies to twelve years ago.

MAIDSrOF'ALL'lVORK. AND BLUE BOOKS. 43

mitting energy and decision, and it was at their suggestion that separate and district schools were first instituted; separate schools being schools attached to one workhouse only, and built at a distance from the house ; district schools being peopled by the children firom three or four different workhouses, all brought together for greater convenience in teaching and organising.

G-reat sums of money have been spent. Fine buildings have been erected. Hujidreds and hundreds of little paupers are now being struck off, taught, drilled, and educated by good teachers, with careful superintendents, in large houses, costing large sums of money. There can be no comparison between the present and the past, and there is not one of these children that does not owe gratitude to those who first laboured to deliver them firom the house of bondage to which they seemed condenmed. But it does not follow that because money has been spent, no further improvement is possible; and because some people have been wise and devoted, that no further good is to be done.

It seems as if every feict and theory of life had to be rediscovered by each of us practitioners of life in turn. We read about things, see them happen, listen to advice, give it more or less intelligently; but we each have to find out for ourselves what relations such things bear to our-* selves — what is human in all this printers' ink, which of the figures come to life in our own case, instead of being imits or statistics — which among our fellow-creatures are actually living persons for us ; duties and claims, wants, necessities, possibilities.

The writer happened to come across a living statistic on the side of good and hopeful things, a bright-faced little creature in a Simday bonnet, who gave her some account of her experience in her first place. She had been brought up in a separate school and had gone out about thirteen*

' Oh, I've been a servant for years ! ' said the little thing, who was ready enough to tell us aU about herself. *I learnt ironing off the lady; I didn't know nothing about it. I didn't know nothing about anything. I didn't know where to buy the wood for the fire,' exploding with laughter at the idea. ' I run along the street and asked the first person I sor where the wood-shop was. I was frightened — oh, I was. They wasn't particular kind in my first place. I had plenty to eat — it wasn't anything of that. They jest give me an egg, and they says, *^ There, get your dinner," but not anything more. I had to do all the work. I'd no one to go to : oh 1 I cried the first night. I used to cry so,' exploding again with laughter. ' I had always slep in a ward full of other girls, and there I was all alone, and this was a great big house — oh, so big ! and they told me to go down stairs, in a room by the kitchen all alone, with a long black passage. I might have screamed, but nobody would have heard. An archytec the gen'lman was. I got to break everything, I was so frightened ; things tumbled down I

shook so, and they sent me back to Mrs. , at the

schools. They said I was no good, as I broke everything ; and so I did — oh, I was frightened ! . . . . Then I got a place in a family where there was nine children. I was about fourteen then. I earned two shillings a week. I used to get up and light the fire, bath them and dress them, and git their breakfasts, and the lady sometimes would go up to London on business, and then I had the baby too, and it couldn't be left, and had to be fed. I'd take them all out for a walk on the common. There was one a cripple. She couldn't walk about. She was about nine year old. I used to carry her on my back. Then there was dinner, and to wash up after ; and then by that time it would be tea-time agin. And then I had to put the nine children to bed and bath them, and clean up the rooms and the fires at night ; there was no time in the morning. And then there would be the genlman's «upper to get. Oh ! that was a hard place. I wasn't in bed till twelve, and I'd be up by six. I stopped there nine months. I hadtft no one to help me. Oh, yes, I had ; the baker, he told me of another place. I've been there three year. I'm cook, and they are very kind ; but I tell the girls there's none 'on 'em had such work as me. Fm very fond of reading; but I 'aint no time for reading.' ....

She was a neat, bright, clever, stumpy little thing, with a sweet sort of merry voice.

' You would think Susy a giant if you could see some of them ; you have no notion what little creatures they all are,' said Mrs. - — -, when I made some remarks about the child's size — and almost immediately came another visitor, smaller, shorter, paler than the first. This little maid had com6 to talk over the chances of a friend, to whom she seemed much attached.

' There is one thing about her,' said this mite, with some dignity ; ' she don't come up to my shoulder. It's aginst her getting a good place.'

This little woman had been single-handed in a school where there were 50 pupils to let in twice a-day, as well as two sets of lodgers to attend to. The owners of the house were very kind, but too busy themselves to help, and the poor pixie had struggled until her health had broken down. Her feet were swelled ; she could no longer hold out when Mrs. found her. It is a terrific battle if one comes to think of it. One little soldier single-handed against a house and its wants, and the dust and the smuts, and the food and the inmates, and the bells, ■and the beds, and the fire and water to be served up in <?ans and stoves and plates. Atlas could carry the world on his shoulder, but what was his task compared to poor little Betty's ?

III

The writer has a friend among District Schools, who lias more than once admitted her into the wards under his direction. At the time when he and his wife were appointed to their present position, the schools were in a bad and unsatisfactory state; notwithstanding all advantage of situation and arrangement, and liberal support, the health of the school-children was not what it should have l)een ! Eegularity, economy, uniformity— all these things fieem desirable enough; but there is a point where we must all acknowledge that such things are intended for mien's use, and not for their constraint alone, and my friends have made it their business to find out where that point exists.

Mrs. Senior suggests, among other things, some sort of home life in the schools : wards broken up, if possible, into divisions, which might rectify their weary uniformity — some system of home government ; the nurse, perhaps, acting as mother, and the elder girk attending to the little ones and babies* ' The children want wjothervagi says the Blue Book, in the natural tones of a woman's voice.

About some necessities there can be but one opinion — ^ air, water, room, change, well-cooked food, ease, backs to the forms — all these things our Blue Book recommends, not in official language, but in a voice that speaks far more truly the real feeling which is now abroad. Judging from signs we see daily (perhaps even more among the rulers than among the ruled), the great age of red tape seems coming to a close. The good goddess Hygeia must be smiling as she sees her temples rising, her votaries assembling, singing her praises in public and in private, and worshipping her with many ablutions and ceremonies of mighty import !

My friends, Mr. and Mrs. , who have partially

tried one of Mrs. Senior's plans in the establishment imder their direction, say that their experiment has had a most excellent result. They began of their own accord by creating a nursery, without any idea of the good effects, which were to follow, but they very soon found that the girls allowed to attend to the children delighted in the work, softened to the little ones, and the children themselves got on better than when they were lost in the great body of the house. The nursery is detached &om the main building, and when we walked in, it was broad daylight—eight o'clock — Jime bed-time. The little paupers were going to bed in the great bright wards. All the windows were open ; the children were taking oflf their blue stockings aud heavy little boots. We met one threeyear-old pattering adventurously down a passage, and carrying its shift in its hand. There were about a dozen little creatures in one room, where an elder girl was undressing them. They could take oflf their thick boots for themselves ; one ambitious Jenny was tugging at a string with a serious flushed face ; a friend about her own size was looking on with deep interest. We said ' Good-night ' to Jenny, who was too much absorbed to respond, but the little Mend stuffed her hand into mine. It was a pretty sight in the next room to come upon aU the babies toddling round their tub and plashing the water with their hands. They were plump, comfortable little bodies, waiting their tiun to be scrubbed, and they certainly did credit

to kind Mrs. 's efforts for their comfort.

I don't think they spoke, these small nymphs in blue stockings and unbleached calico ; they looked up at us with sweet, innocent faces; one said * Coo-bye;' one

s

50 MAWS'OF'ALL'WORK AND BLUE BOOKS.

laughed and showed us her bed behind the door ; another, a little baby boy, toddled forward half naked from the group — ^he was the youngest, and accustomed to be noticed ; and so the kindly waters of the tub — ^that tepid evening stream that floats so many babes, that sparkles to so many little plashing hands — came flowing with its kind, refreshing depths into the workhouse nursery. The setting sim was shining through the tall open windows, and soft June breaths were blowing in.

For many years all these windows had been carefully filled in, the master told us ; but now at last they have removed the ground glass, and let in the sight of the green, and the sunset and the summer-time. In the schoolroom especially the difference was very noticeable.

It was a Sunday evening, and while I was talking to

Mrs. I had heard a distant sort of hymn in the air*

The girls were singing as we came into the great schoolroom, about fifty girls were sitting upon the benches, and a music-master was at a harmonium playing and beating time.

They sang very sweetly, with very shrill and touching voices, one little class apart chaunted the hymn, and the others joined in. It was something about soldiers of the <jross, with a sort of chorus.

As I stood by the superintendent he pointed to the window, through which we could see a dazzle of June and green and distant hills, and a great field, across which a long procession of these young soldiers went winding and rewinding in the sweet basking evening. One thought of the battle before them — all the hard work, the troubles, and ftiendlessness of their poor little lives. They were not abashed, and chaunted on with all the might of their young throats, an unconscious prayer for safety, for help, for courage, and defence. While the hymn lasts they are safe enough. Then one day it breaks off for each of them. * At sixteen,' says the Board, they are free, and the little soldiers struggle off to meet the world. They can cater for themselves ; come, go, loiter as they will ; they have had experience enough, advice enough ; or, for a change, there is the workhouse, where they will fiiid a new teaching, and a new code of morality.

IV

. Perhaps to the general reader it may not be the details, or the classifications, or the results of the enquiries contained in this Blue Book, that will seem. most interesting, but the feeling which is unconsciously shown by its very

b2 statistics — ^the unaffected goodness of heart and womanly mothership for all that is young, childish, foolish, and suffering. No one can deny facts and the inevitable fatality of causes, of which the effects are, in this instance, the little stunted beings that crowd our schools and educational establishments. But such Beports as these do at least suggest a sort of law leading both to good and to evil — ^a fatality of good as well as of wrong doing — and make one believe that the genuine interest which some people are feeling, a^d which has already shown itself in such satisfactory and practical details, may reach many a pocnr child, by signs more and more comfortable, and tangible, and cheerful.

Where a book ends and the reader begins is as hard to determine as any other of those objective and subjective problems which are sometimes set. Here, as we read, the paragraphs turn into every day ; into the writer, into the children, into one's own conscience, into other people's — into work, trouble, necessity, into the influences by which people affect one another. Books teach us to think ; then comes action to interpret thinking into signs and ceremonies ; then come human beings who enact the signs, who are our consciences, revealed, perhaps, our thoughts, responsive, who are in themselves hope fulfilled, who combine in some strange way all the moods, questions, &cts.

that we see tangibly spread out before us. It is almost as if one could look round at times and see the whole secret history of conscience mapped out in actual things, and doings; some of them stupid, jealous, shamefully incomplete; others gentle, and generous, and effective.

Two fiewts Mrs. Senior wishes us to bear in mind, if we try to draw some conclusion from that view of life which her report presents to us. One is, that the schools have to deal with bad material. The poor little heroines of this epic are stunted, stupid, unreceptive for the most part, though some people may well ask, Why should they be clever? How can they grow tall? and What is it that they have to receive ? They come to the schools because there is no home in the world outside for them, because their parents have come to grief, or to trouble of some sort. They have to go out into the world again with their unsatisfactory little bodies and minds, because the schools can keep them no longer, at an age when other more fortunate children are shielded and loved and cared for, to struggle for themselves with difficulties, mistresses, incapacities, and dangers of every description. So much for the second division of Mrs. Senior's report. As regards that which applies to the changes she would wish to see in the schools, she says these apply to the system itself, and not to the working of it. She says, 'I believe that, as a class, there are few people so painstaking, kind-hearted, and indefatigable, as the present lot of officials connected with pauper and district schools.' It is, perhaps, because of this that, for some years past, some of these officials and managers have been dissatisfied with the results of their hard and constant work-— of all this money and trouble given. In district schools, as elsewhere, experience had to be i^aid for; and when such vast numbers are collected together, every trifling experiment must necessarily count a thousand-fold, and be multiplied again and again. The evil is gigantic, and almost impossible to grapple with.

V

At present, one great difficulty consists in the classification of the children to be provided for. There are the orphans, whose only home is the parish and the school ^ the deserted children, whose parents may reappear to claim th^m, as well as those whose parents are incapacitated temporarily or otherwise; and there are, thirdly, the casuals, who are sometimes taken in and out by their parents as often as eUght times in a year, and for whom, under existing circumstances, any legislation must be very indefinite.

The real body of the school consists of the children who have no other home to turn to, and no personal ties to lean upon, and whose wel&re, as Mrs. Senior says, should, in any doubtful question, be made the main consideration.

Some masters say that, were the classes divided, and, the good influence of the permanent scholars removed from the casuals, these poor little creatures would become so demoralised that they would not have a chance for improvement. Speaking in a general way, Mrs. Senior says that in large schools the officers hold that more good than harm is done by mixing the children ; while the' officers in smaller schools (who have perhaps better means of judging of individual cases) hold the contrary.

She goes on to say — ' The difficidties of managing the pauper schools, even under the present system, are so great that one can heartily sympathise with the dread expressed by some officers of a change which, it appears to them, would add to their difficulties. We are none the less bound, however, to look simply at the question whether the presence of the casual children does or does not cause any moral deterioration to the permanent children, whose interests are chiefly at stake.'

Here is a picture of the - state of things that might occur, with every careful endeavour for right doing. ' To the eye of the visitor the outward order of the schools is in most respects perfect, and it seems generally agreed that the presence of a mass of children already drilled into order has the best eflFect on new comers. We cannot,, however, judge by external order of the real eflFect of the presence of the casuals. Whatever evil they may have learnt during their vagrant life, they know that it is for their interest to submit to discipline while at school, to conceal what could bring them into discredit with their superiors, and to avoid conduct and language that would entail punishment. Whatever discipline may exist in the school, the children in the playground and dormitories are under little supervision.'

' In one school I saw a child of six years old whose language was so horrible that the matron was obliged to send her, as soon as lessons were over, to one of the dormitories in order to get her away from the other children^ She was probably too young to know that it was to her interest to hold her tongue in the presence of ofl&cers. In a few years she would be more cunning, and keep her bad language for the playground and dormitories. Another matron told me of a family of sisters who used to go in and out and return each time more and more versed in sin. From another I heard, among many examples, of a family of children who were constantly on the tramp, sleeping

MAIDS-OF-ALL-WORK AND BLUE BOOKS. S7

like animals in sheds, wandering about the country; children who were at first good and tractable, but who returned each time with more and more knowledge of evil/

^ Among many officers I found one who spoke even more strongly than the rest, and whose opinion I consider of great value. She fully recognised the large amount of mischief which can be done in a school even by one child, and felt that the least important duty of a mistress is the supervision of children during school hours.'

Many of the changes Mrs. Senior recommends are simple, feasible, and will apply to our own children in our own homes as well as to those in this strange cosmopolitan refuge which the necessity of the times has imposed upon our citizens.

If our children have round shoulders, shorn heads, weak eyes — if a certain number of them seem dull, stupid, and incapable of the common duties of life — if their nurses and teachers complain of their bad temper, untruthfulness, apathy, we must feel that for these special children, much as we have done already, we have not yet done enough.

Suppose they are ill, with long and chronic ailments, if we leave them for hours and hours unoccupied in a bare room learning a habit of idleness and dullness only too easy to acquire, and sometimes impossible to forget, we must feel that in one sense only we are doing our duty. You cannot inculcate moral qualitieg by word of command ; intelligence, self-reliance, trust, sympathy — ^these things can't be dealt out in copy-books or written upon a slate.

Teachers and managers of schools have themselves raised the standard of that which is expected ; and as the standard is raised, there will be less and less machinery, and more and more of natural feeling introduced, if it pleases Heaven to give us all more wisdom and knowledge of the laws which govern life and human beings, — ^&om members of the Cabinet down to little pauper children.

A wise and experienced person writes : — '^We teach them indeed to read and write, and read and sing hymns. All that part of their education is probably quite as good as what is given in the day-schools of the ordinary poor. Also we teach them that part of religion which may be conveyed in the form of question and answer. But it is only the sum of all that makes human nature, more emphatically woman's nature, beautiful, useful, or happy. Her moral being is left wholly uncultivated. She possesses nothing of her own, not even her clothes or the hair on her head. ' How is she to go out inspired with respect for the rights of property, and accustomed to control the natural impulses of childish covetousness ? Worse than all, the human affections of the girl are all checked, and with them, almost inevitably, those religious ones which natmrally rise through the earthly parents' love to the Father in Heaven. The workhouse girl is the child of an institution. She is driven about with the rest of the flock, from dormitory to schoolroom, and from schoolroom to workhouse yard, not harshly or unkindly, but always as one of a herd, whether well or ill cared for. jShe is nobody's Mary or Kate, to be individually thought of.'

VI

Having gone carefully into the details of the manage-^ ment of these school?, Mrs. Senior, as I have said, proceeded to follow up the results of this management ; and her figures, as compared to those in the note of Miss Cobbe's article, are less discouraging than they might seem at a first glance.

* Following out the scheme already stated, we took some trouble to trace out the careers of the girls brought up in the great amalgamated schools and in the separate schools, and, with the help of some experienced persons, to compare them together and divide them into classes. The result was as follows : —

6o MAIDS-OF-ALL'WORK AND BLUE BOOKS.

GlriB brought up in Girls brought up in IMstrict Schools. Separate Schools.

XJnsatisfactorj . . 106 . . 78

245 246

Some idea may be formed of the diflSculty and trouble which these few numbers have given to those who compiled thcoxi, and who have tried to add up this sum in human nature, by a glance at the Appendix, where will be found a history of each one of these cases traced out from records in school books, to the endless streets, suburban roads, lines of brick and rail, and humanity along which these little entries drift to their fate. The girls themselves have been produced from their back kitchens, and the mistresses encountered in their parlours. Out of complaints and cross-complaints, and good sense and moderate judgment, the daily story becomes a figure again counting in its place.

It is not long ago since I heard someone ^with a right than which there is none greater) speaking of the force of contained power and of simple statement as compared to that of vehemence and picturesqueness of language. Here, in the Appendix of Mrs. Senior's Eeport, are histories, of which I have selected two or three at random. They are not very eventful, and their force most

MAIDS'OF-ALI^WORK AND BLUE BOOKS. 6i

assuredly consists in this power of facts, tending towards the same results ; uneventful units, whose histories count in the great sum just as surely as those of the others for whom they rub and scrub and toil.

I might multiply examples, but they are but repetitions of one another and all in the same way seem to point more or less to two necessities — ^that of some greater individuality of training when in the schools, and of more complete system of supervision when the school has become daily life.