By Alicia Svenson, Ph.D. Student, History

I was asked to finish encoding a text that had been languishing in the WWP’s “under construction” holding area since 2014. Opening the file up, it was clear that Clara Reeve’s Plans of Education; With Remarks on the System of Other Writers. In a Series of Letters between Mrs. Darnford and her Friends (1792) was not going to be like previous texts I had encoded, such as Lucretia Mott’s famous polemic about women’s rights, Discourse on Woman, or Lydia Maria Child’s biographies of notable French women—and not just because it was filled with long-s characters.

The text begins innocuously enough: Mrs. Darnford is asked to give her opinions on the best way to educate the young daughters of an acquaintance. In a series of letters, she proceeds to do a literature review of existing theories of education. She examines childrearing tips from the Bible. She expresses mixed feelings about Rousseau’s Emile, stating: “Rouſſeau has done much harm by encouraging a general relaxation of diſcipline, and he has uttered many falſe dogmas, that would have been laughed at from any other man” (40) but also agrees with him that children shouldn’t be forced to learn against their will. She is a fan of Locke’s system of education and considers the writings on education of Madame de Genlis “the moſt perfect of any” (50).

In Letter VIII and beyond, however, we get out of the literature review and into difficult territory for the modern reader. Mrs. Darnford is unapologetically classist. For her, the “degeneracy of manners” in the England of her time is caused by people educating their children “in a way above their ſituation and circumsſtances; they ſtep over their proper place, and ſeat themſelves upon a higher form” (60). She outlines at great length the orders of society that people should stay within and the appropriate roles of men within those orders. While she acknowledges this is unlikely to happen, she feels that civility could be restored through revival of sumptuary laws forcing people to dress according to their station. Class uniforms would serve as a “check…laid upon their attempts to imitate vanities and vices of the higher orders” (70). She also states that denying literacy to the lower classes would help keep them out of professions above their rank.

In her attempts to address poverty Mrs. Darnford reveals herself to be, if not actively pro-slavery, then at least completely uncaring about the rights of enslaved people. To solve the problem of the “numbers of poor children walking about half naked, hungry and wretched, without any visible means of ſupport” (84) in England who go on to be a menace to society, she appeals to abolitionists. She asks to them to “turn the current of their charity into another channel” (82) since enslaved people are happy under the care of their benevolent enslavers (a rationale that she offers among a host of equally horrific reasons). Instead of the “Quixottiſm” of opposing slavery (79) abolitionists should be funding “ſchools of induſtry, to promote a reformation of manners of the lower orders of men” (85). Apparently, this involves making poor children wear wooden shoes (the design of which is described in great detail), not teaching them to read, and training them to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water, and to be thankful for their deliverance” (87).

Most of Letter XIII and beyond move on to the matter of what is an appropriate education for women. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Darnford believes that “there is no kind of ſchool equal to that inſtruction which children receive at home, under a virtuous and well-informed mother” (112). However, she recognizes that sometimes necessity, or negligent parenting, requires girls be educated elsewhere. She has a low opinion of existing female boarding schools, stating: “How often do we ſee the young girls come from thoſe ſchools, full of pride, vanity, and ſelf-conſequence!―ignorant of the duties and virtues of a domeſtic life” (136). Instead, she proposes her own Plan of Female Education, modeled on convent life (but without the Roman Catholicism). The plan involves a community of unmarried women founding a Female Seminary in “a large and commodious houſe, in a convenient ſituation; at a limited diſtance from a market town, but not in it” (141). The proposed seminary would take in both paying pupils from the upper classes and “a certain number of young girls … whoſe parents have died in indigent circumſtances” to serve as unpaid indentured servants for terms of seven years (145). The pupils would be “taught every branch of uſeful knowledge in common life, to qualify them to govern and conduct a family” (144) with strict rules governing their every waking minute. The indigent girls made Seminary servants (distinguished from the pupils by their inferior uniforms, of course) would be taught a trade in addition to carrying out their daily duties.

Disliking Mrs. Darnford and her views so much while encoding all this awful material, I had to wonder what made it, in the early 2010s, worthy of selection for the WWP? Basic research on Clara Reeve helped reveal the book’s interesting narrative structure. Mrs. Darnford did not exist. She is a character (along with all the friends with whom she “corresponds” throughout the book) in another epistolary novel by Reeve, The School For Widows, which, as described in the press release for a re-issued version in 2002: “tells the stories of childhood friends Frances Darnford and Rachel Strictland, both of whom have lived hard lives as the virtuous wives of improvident and immoral husbands” and who “eventually become productive and beneficial members of society, thus serving as positive examples of the potential opportunity for widows in eighteenth-century England.” This put some of the strange “biographical” information and plot scattered throughout the letters in perspective. The work serves as both a treatise on education and as a sequel to The School For Widows. How much of the book is fantasy? How many of the educational views are the true thoughts of Clara Reeve and how much is translated through the voice of her character? At the end of the book Mrs. Darnford rides off into the sunset (metaphorically) having been given a large sum of money by the grateful father of one of her devoted pupils to cohabitate with another widow who is “ſo much attached to me, that ſhe and I have promiſed to live always together” (236) in the same village as her childhood friend Mrs. Strictland.

Despite its views on the purposes of female education, some portions of the text are noteworthy from a feminist perspective. There is something poignant in Reeve’s defense of “old maids” through Mrs. Darnford’s writing. In one letter, she examines contemporary literary tropes of ridiculous maiden-aunts: “The Aunt Deborah’s, and Mrs. Malaprop’s, [who] are the ſtanding jeſt of the modern writers” (123). She asks:

And why do you (I would ſay) take pleaſure in caſting reflections upon old maids?—that is, upon women who, not meeting with a ſuitable eſtablishment, from various cauſes and reaſons, have neither diſgraced themſelves nor their families? Every woman in this ſituation muſt be an old maid; or ſhe muſt be ſomething worſe. What then; do you think the latter ſtate the moſt honourable? (125).

While I may not agree with her assertion on the cause, she presents a vivid picture of the limited options for women that existed in her time, writing:

It is a melancholy consideration, to think of the numbers of young women who are turned looſe upon the world, over educated; without means to ſupport themſelves, and diſqualified to earn their living. There are very few trades for women; the men have uſurped two-thirds of thoſe that uſed to belong to them; the remainder are over-stocked, and there are few reſources for them. If they are handſome and amiable, their dangers are ſo much the more. (119-120)

While her Seminary, with its constant monitoring to promote virtue and morality in its charges, sounds dreadful to attend, it is also an attempt to envision a world of 1790s England entirely free of the influence of men. Mrs. Darnford’s community is self-sustaining—all textiles and food products would be produced in-house by and for women and all decisions would be made by a “Siſterhood” of women governors. She presents, for this sisterhood (so thus only a select few privileged upper-class women), an alternative to a world where marriage is the only option that does not make a woman ridiculous. In its description of this community, the book reveals a great deal about the lives of women through the eyes of someone who did not succeed at an idealized family life, but who, at least in fantasy, got a happy ending anyway.