ABSTRACT
Throughout the eighteenth century the education of the daughters of the upper and middle classes followed the example set the previous century. For the children of parents who could afford to pay a few pence a week there were dame schools which, with very few exceptions, gave them only the most rudimentary form of education. Older children might attend a private-or ‘common’—day school, at which their sole teacher would probably be a man who had failed to make his way in some other profession, or one who, in order to live, combined teaching with some form of trade. In any event the standard and the conditions were generally deplorable; and in very many villages there was neither dame nor common school.
