Introduction

Readers of Victorian and Regency novels are acquainted with the small, private, family-like schools attended by some of the daughters of the upper and middle classes in early 19th century England. Miss Pinkerton’s rather elegant establishment in Vanity Fair may come to mind, or the less fashionable school kept by Mrs. Goddard in Jane Austen’s Emma, where “a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.” ¹