Dorothea Beale

British educator

• Born: March 21, 1831
• Birthplace: Bishopsgate, London, England
• Died: November 9, 1906
• Place of death: Cheltenham, England

Combining business acumen, enthusiasm for reform, and mystical idealism, Beale shaped an educational breakthrough with her advocacy of intellectual training for girls.

Early Life

Born on March 21, 1831, in Bishopsgate, London, England, one of eleven children, Dorothea Beale owed some of her success as a pioneer in the field of women’s education to familial tradition. Her mother, Dorothea Margaret Complin, came from a family of literary women who included feminist writer Caroline Francis Cornwallis. Her father, Miles Beale, a surgeon, displayed a keen interest in contemporary social and educational issues and believed that his daughters should have every opportunity to cultivate their minds and to pursue whatever vocation they chose. In addition, Dorothea Beale possessed the traits of severe self-discipline, a driving desire to succeed, and a sense of divinely directed destiny. Religion was a potent factor in the Beale household, and Dorothea felt the pull of mysticism, expressing a strong affinity with St. Hilda of Whitby, an erudite seventh century abbess.

From early childhood, Beale wanted to be an educator, and while still small, she often created an imaginary world in which she would preside over a girls’ school. Grave, quiet, and slight of stature, she did not care for outdoor activities and spent her leisure hours studying, believing that teaching carried a sacred trust. Despite this dedication, her early education was disjointed and incomplete, a result of a succession of incompetent governesses and brief stays at an English boarding school and at a Parisian finishing school. Nurturing an aptitude for mathematics, she attended lectures at London’s Gresham College and Crosby Hall Institution.

In 1848, Beale and her sisters began classes at the newly established Queen’s College, Harley Street. The institution’s roster also included another student, Frances Mary Buss, although the two women did not meet at this time. Subsequently Beale and Buss became warm personal and professional friends, and their names and unmarried status were frozen together in time because of the rhyme, “Miss Buss and Miss Beale/ Cupid’s darts do not feel;/ How different from us,/ Miss Beale and Miss Buss.”

In 1849, Queen’s College awarded eighteen-year-old Dorothea Beale certificates in six subjects—mathematics, geography, English, Latin, French, and German—and offered her a position on the staff. She accepted and became the college’s first woman faculty member. Appointed mathematics tutor, then Latin tutor, and finally head teacher in the school connected to the college, she remained on the staff for seven years. Long chafing at the limited authority given to women faculty and the lowering of standards for student admission, Beale resigned in 1856.

In January, 1857, Beale accepted the position of head teacher in the Clergy Daughters School at Casterton. This institution, immortalized as Lowood by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), proved to be ugly and rigid in architecture as well as philosophy and demanded that Beale teach Scripture; ancient, modern, and Church history; physical and political geography; English literature; grammar and composition; and Latin, French, German, and Italian. Beale disliked the school and requested reforms, suggesting that unless changes occurred she would resign. The school authorities accepted the challenge and dismissed her. After this humiliating blow to her pride, she returned home, did some part-time teaching, and wrote two books, The Student’s Text-Book of English and General History from B.C. 100 to the Present Time (1858) and Self-Examination (1858). This period also offered Beale time for introspection. She had failed in her chosen profession not once but twice. Never again, she determined, would she accept a post that did not provide her the measure of authority she desired.

Life’s Work

In the summer of 1858, after the series of unhappy teaching interludes, the twenty-seven-year-old Beale, attired in a borrowed blue silk dress instead of her usual black wool, sought a position at England’s oldest proprietary girls’ school. Defeating fifty other candidates, she became the principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where she reigned for nearly fifty years. Her initial task was to ensure the school’s survival, for students numbered only sixty-nine and total capital came to a mere four hundred pounds. Within four years she reversed the decline, almost doubled enrollment, and placed the institution on firm financial footing.

Equally important she began a slow but steady crusade for public acceptance of intellectual training for young ladies from upper- and upper-middle-class homes. Guided by what she thought female students needed, she curtailed the emphasis on needlework and piano exercises and encouraged greater attention to English history and the German language. Because contemporaries considered even simple arithmetic useless for women, Beale ignored her personal preference for geometry and introduced scientific reasoning in the guise of physical geography. The inclusion of an earth science in the curriculum of a girls’ school did not attract attention as few males studied geography. Beale also experimented with the school day and introduced a nine to one o’clock schedule, keeping afternoons free for individual music, drawing, and needlework lessons.

At the national level, the status of girls’ education gained attention when the government’s School Inquiry Commission included it as part of a mid-1860’s investigation. Asked to testify, Beale provided a vivid picture of the abysmal ignorance of England’s upper- and middle-class young women. An examination of the entrance tests of one hundred fifteen-year-olds revealed that not one of the students understood fractions, only four could conjugate the French verb “to be,” and one girl insisted that Geoffrey Chaucer lived during the reign of George III. Beale refused to make any comparisons between the mental abilities of boys and girls and insisted that she desired to educate young marriageable ladies for their subordinate role in society. She argued that well-educated women became better wives and mothers than those who were poorly educated. Her testimony, along with that of other female educators, gave impetus to much-needed improvements in education. In 1869, Beale published, with a personal introduction, an edited version of the Commission’s findings, entitled Reports on the Education of Girls, with Extracts from the Evidence (1869).

The next three decades saw Beale’s Ladies’ College make great strides. Curriculum offerings expanded and the school’s physical plant grew. By the turn of the century, there were more than one thousand students, fourteen boardinghouses, a secondary and kindergarten department called St. Hilda’s College, a library of seven thousand volumes, and fifteen acres of grounds. In order to provide a link between alumni and students, Beale founded The Cheltenham Ladies’ College Magazine in 1882 and the Guild of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College in 1884.

In addition to her administrative and teaching duties at Ladies’ College, Beale maintained an active professional career with close ties to other female educators, especially Frances Mary Buss of the North London Collegiate School. She held life membership in the Head Mistress Association and served as president from 1895 to 1897, she testified frequently on educational issues to various royal commissions, and she introduced the concept of an annual teachers’ retreat, Quiet Days. She also wrote a number of educational treatises: Home-Life in Relation to Day Schools (1879); A Few Words to Those Who Are Leaving (1881); Work and Play in Girls Schools(1898; with Lucy H. M. Soulsby and Jane F. Dove); Literary Studies of Poems, New and Old (1902); Addresses to Teachers (1909); and her labor of love, History of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College, 1853-1901 (1904).

With the advent of the new century more accolades came Beale’s way. In 1901, the freedom of the borough of Cheltenham was conferred upon her and in 1902 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. Despite deafness and infirmity, she continued to work until a few weeks before her death from cancer on November 9, 1906. After cremation, her ashes were placed in Gloucester Cathedral’s Lady Chapel. A week later in memorial services at St. Paul’s Cathedral, an honor accorded to very few women, the future archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang detailed her successes and piety, calling her “great.”

Significance

For most of her seventy-five years, Dorothea Beale devoted her energy to the cause of girls’ education. In maturity the robust spinster, dressed always in black with a white fichu, appeared aloof and unapproachable, yet she had a disarming sense of humor and often teased visitors by referring to Cheltenham Ladies’ College as her husband. As a teacher, she tried to instill a hunger for knowledge rather than simply to impart information, and she proved equally adept at providing instruction in the humanities and the sciences. She also believed that a teacher’s personality and mental outlook, including religious devotion, contribute greatly to the overall education process. As a school administrator, her innovations included direct supervision of the institution’s boardinghouses, the inception of a rule of silence among pupils, the absence of competition and prizes, and the weekly evaluation of every student by the principal. Open-minded and willing to experiment, Beale successfully combined business acumen, reform enthusiasm, and mystical idealism.

Beale ruled Cheltenham Ladies’ College as a benevolent despot and expected her own energy and sense of duty to be mirrored in her staff and students. Her associates accepted and propagated her intense belief that the education of women was a holy gift. However, Beale was a product of her times, and her educational horizons, unlike those of Buss and other contemporary female educators, were bound by conventional notions concerning gender roles. She did not insist that girls’ and boys’ education programs be the same but accepted the prevailing view of alternate preparation for different roles. Very much an elitist, she had no interest in universal education for all girls.

Although England’s evolving system of girls’ public schools did not model itself after Cheltenham Ladies’ College, the staffs of the various institutions were often graduates of the Cheltenham establishment, and thus the influence continued. Through her dedication, insight, and hard work, Dorothea Beale opened the portals of education to future generations of women.

Bibliography

Digby, Anne, and Peter Searby. Children, School, and Society in Nineteenth Century England. London: Macmillan, 1981. A pertinent analysis of the problems and perspectives of schools and schooling in nineteenth century England. Contains approximately two hundred pages of contemporary documents and includes an extract of Beale’s “Girls’ Schools Past and Present,” which appeared in the journal Nineteenth Century (1888).

Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan. The Old School Tie: The Phenomenon of the English Public School. New York: Viking Press, 1978. A comprehensive yet readable account of all facets of the English public school system. Author acknowledges limits of materials on girls’ schools, but work contains a sparkling examination of Beale’s character and work. Follows the development of Cheltenham Ladies’ College from its founding to the 1970’s.

Gorham, Deborah. The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. A thoughtful and thought-provoking examination of the place of women and girls in Victorian England. Uses biographical evidence to examine the childhood and adolescence of a number of Victorian women. Although there are few references to Beale, the milieu in which she lived and worked is thoroughly explored.

Kamm, Josephine. Hope Deferred: Girls’ Education in English History. London: Methuen, 1965. A general survey of the status of girls’ education in England from the Anglo-Saxon period to the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Contains a comprehensive overview of Beale’s career and a critical evaluation of her impact upon nineteenth century educational reforms. Title indicates author’s viewpoint.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. How Different from Us: A Biography of Miss Buss and Miss Beale. London: Bodley Head, 1958. Definitive biography of two of England’s most noted female education pioneers. Cleverly written and objective in analysis of motivations, successes, and failures of both Beale and Buss. For Beale study, Kamm relies heavily upon source material found in Raikes (see below).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Indicative Past: A Hundred Years of the Girls’ Public School Trust. London: Allen & Unwin, 1971. Seminal study of the growth of educational opportunities for English girls, set against a background of changing social attitudes and ideas; contains photographs of Trust’s founders and cooperating institutions. Comprehensive, balanced material on Beale is well researched and drawn from author’s biographical study.

Raikes, Elizabeth. Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham. London: Archibald Constable, 1909. Official biography and intimate portrait by a colleague, with extracts from correspondence, manuscript autobiography, and private diary. Stilted in style, not objective, long out of print and difficult to find, the work remains an indispensable source because primary materials have been destroyed. All subsequent biographies draw upon it.

Sanderson, Michael. Education, Economic Change, and Society in England, 1780-1870. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A more recent overview of the history of education in nineteenth century England and the debates surrounding it. Beale is briefly mentioned in the chapter about feminism and the education of women. The short (92-page) book is good for understanding Beale’s place within the educational system of her day.

Steadham, Florence Cecily. Miss Beale: A Study of Her Work and Influence. London: E. J. Burrow, 1931. Greatly dependent upon Raikes (see above). Pedantic in style and far from objective, it should be used with caution and only if Raikes’s work cannot be obtained.