ABSTRACT
At least eighty-three dame preparatory schools are listed in county trade and commercial directories for Worcestershire and Warwickshire in the nineteenth century. Later in the century Brighton became a fashionable town for dame preparatory schools for the upper middle and upper classes. Eastbourne, where Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, the biochemist, attended a dame school before going on to the City of London School, was another favourite resort for late Victorian dame preparatory schools. Even in the 1890s dame preparatory schools were being created by enterprising women despite the fierce competition from Oxford and Cambridge graduates who were turning to preparatory schooling as being a relatively prosperous form of enterprise. The reluctance of the orthodox school to accept the preparatory school dames was epitomized by their exclusion from the IAPS till the early 1970s. Faced with both competition and neglect, dame preparatory schools were forced into the backwaters of private educational provision.
