ABSTRACT
MRS. ANNA JAMESON, herself a governess long before she became famous as an author, and, therefore, not entirely without authority, traced the genealogy of the governess back to Minerva. But if the stern-eyed Roman goddess was the tutelary spirit of those who instructed the young, her worship had degenerated on English soil. The meek young woman who served the intellectual needs of a Victorian household was the direct descendant of an almost unbroken line of ignorant servants who began as nurses to the girls in the household and then advanced to the responsibility of adviser and confidential friend, like the nurse in Romeo and Juliet. In Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633) and in Fletcher's Humorous Lieutenant (I 6z 5?), such an attendant is called a governess. It is a safe conjecture that the mass of women who had the responsibility of moulding the young female mind were not superior to these famous representatives of the profession in drama. In the eighteenth century the intellectual demands upon the governess seem to have advanced little beyond those of the sixteenth. Of the pious old person who taught Lady Mary Montagu to read and write, her pupil wrote: "She took so much pains from my infancy to fill my head with superstitious tales and false notions, it was none of her fault I am not at this day afraid of witches and hobgoblins, or turned methodist."I But among all these governesses there were, no doubt, women of learning exceptional for their day. From Tudor times a few highly educated men and women had been engaged to teach the daughters in noble families. In the seventeenth century Bathsua Makin, who carried out ambitious educational schemes for the girls in her school at Putney, was governess to a
daughter of Charles 1. In the eighteenth century Elizabeth Elstob, an Anglo-Saxon scholar, taught the children of the Duchess of Portland. The Puritan governess in Jasper Mayne's The City Match (1639), who "works Hebrew samplers", and teaches her pupil Dorcas to "knit in Chaldee" and to make "religious petticoats", may have been introduced not as a comic figure ridiculed for intellectual pretension and religious bigotry, but as an alarmingly learned lady inspired by the dramatist's acquaintance with a prototype of Mrs. Makin. Mrs. Teachem in Sarah Fielding's Little Female Academy (1745), and possibly Mrs. Norton in Clarissa Harlowe, also belong to the class of superior governesses.
