Roe Head School in Mirfield, Yorkshire. Charlotte Brontë attended as a pupil in 1831, and returned as a teacher in 1835-38. Her headmistress was Miss Wooler, “Good, kind Miss W---!” as Elizabeth Gaskell called her, “a genial and thoughtful friend watching over her,” who gave Charlotte away at her wedding in 1854. It was a far cry from the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire that ruined her own health and, Charlotte firmly believed, claimed the life of her sisters Mary and Elizabeth in 1825. Roe Head is now owned by the Hollybank Trust and used as a Special School.
THERE is a visible improvement in the character of private schools. Bad as many of them are, charlatanry is on the decline.
For example, I have wholly failed to discover any examples of the typical Yorkshire boarding-school with which Nicholas Nickleby has made us familiar.* I have seen schools in which board and education were furnished for 20l, and even 18l per annum,* but have been unable to find evidences of bad feeding or physical neglect.
As a rule, the children in the cheap boarding-schools are in good health, and are sufficiently though coarsely fed.* The accommodations in the houses are mean, and the sleeping arrangements often bad; but the domestic comfort obtainable is little, if at all, inferior to that which the boys would probably enjoy in the homes from which they come.
See Brimstone and Treacle. Fitch proposed many changes to the way schools were run, but had no enthusiasm for one-size-fits-all State intervention. “Nothing has become clearer to me during this investigation,” he wrote, “than the fact that any sweeping or Procrustean measure will do great injustice.” On Procrustes, see .
According to the calculators used at Measuring Worth, the equivalent value today in terms of income or wealth would be £1,839 and £1,655 respectively. Fitch wrote that “it is in the education that the pinching is felt. The starvation of the mind is less likely to be detected at home than that of the body, and good food is often paid for at the price of insufficient teaching.”
Fitch described the meals as “monotonous and unsavoury, and yet wasteful”, a criticism later made of Government workhouses by Emmeline Pankhurst: see A Woman’s Logic. He also added that the survey forms asking teachers about school meals too often came back blank or with evasive replies like “Good Yorkshire cheer” scrawled into the box.
