Cowan Bridge School

Cowan Bridge School, a British boarding school for girls, the daughters of Rev. recorded mainly families there and let them training angediehen that they should empower, where appropriate, to take up the profession of governess. The school was founded in the 1820s.

The school was initially located in the village of Cowan Bridge in the English county of Lancashire. There she was visited, among others, the Brontë sisters. Cowan Bridge School is considered the model of the Lowood School, which described Charlotte Brontë in her novel Jane Eyre. Two of the Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis shortly after the disease had broken out at this school. In the 1830s the school was founded a few miles further new and merged there with the local girls' school.

School conditions

The Cowan Bridge School kids forcibly taken from Charity at the school to wear a uniform. This was for the Brontë sisters, who were among the youngest Pensionatsschülerinnen, particularly humiliating. Charlotte Brontë was particularly brought up because they had to carry the paper surface to the eye due to their short-sightedness when reading and writing tight.

Students were divided two by two a bed. Them was only cold water is available, they had to share each to sixth for washing. Since the rooms were barely heated, the water was frozen in the morning often. Before breakfast was prayed for one and a half hours before a frequently burnt porridge was served. The lessons began at half past nine, and ended on a short break for lunch. In the afternoon the school hours were continued to 17 clock. There was then in the half-hour break half a slice of bread and a cup of coffee. After the lesson was continued. The day ended with a glass of water, an oatcake and the evening prayer.

The penalties included the withdrawal of meals and the scarce free time, corporal punishment and humiliation as sitting for hours in a chair, in which the children had to wear a dunce cap.

Sundays meant no break from the rigorous style of education at this school. In any weather, the girls had about three kilometers to go through open terrain to take part in the first exhibition of its parish church. After Mass they received bread before they took part in the afternoon service. The long road to the church did not allow that they returned temporarily to their school. In their boarding school in the evening they received a slice of bread that was buttered. Sunday ended with recitation from the Catechism, reciting scriptures and listening to a sermon, whose theme was the dam often enough. Reverend William Carus Wilson, who led the school, was convinced a Calvinist believe that most souls awaited the dam.

Background of the school

Mädchenpensionate were in the UK only as second-class form of education. The daughters of bourgeois families were brought up in the household with the aid of a governess. The right of a governess to guide their pupils headed for a long time only conclude from this that they came from even a middle-class family, where he had enjoyed a befitting education. It was expected that they spoke one or more modern foreign languages ​​, could play a musical instrument and draw as well as a smattering possessed in fields such as botany or geography. That governesses in this way, at best, acquired a half-educated and could not pass more than half of education, was accepted. A conscious preparatory vocational acquisition of knowledge was seen, however, critical of his contemporaries, since it contradicted the fiction that the education of the daughters was made by a woman of the same social category. Some commentators warned even before that appropriate training facilities that would enable women of the lower middle class to deceive their employers about their origin. An exception to this rule constitute daughters of Rev. families whose Gutbürgerlichkeit apparently so there was no question that they could attend boarding schools that specifically taught them the skills that have been associated with the activities of a governess. Charlotte Brontë described in Jane Eyre rigorous education in such a school. For the historian Kathryn Hughes is due to other testimonies little doubt that Brontë, the short-term student of Cowan Bridge School was with her sisters, with their description of the way of teaching in Lowood described real conditions.

Single Documents

• English History
• Boarding school in the UK
• School in England
• Landerziehungsheim