4. On the education of young women ...
The schooling of Eliza Ogilvy, her daughters & granddaughter encompassed 80 years of change in the education of young women, following a trajectory from feminine accomplishment to self-actualisation.
Eliza first met Margaret Aytoun five days before her twelfth birthday; it was New Year’s Day in 1834 and they were dining in Edinburgh as guests of Sir Walter Scott’s great aunt, Mrs Keith of Ravelstone. Margaret Aytoun was described by Eliza as “a tall and beautiful young lady … we had many friends in common, and after that first meeting, my sister and I were made welcome at most of the pleasant gatherings at 21 Abercromby Place”.1
These gatherings at the Aytoun’s home involved all of the family and friends and “dramatic scenes in the corner of the drawing-room”, recreating Queen Victoria’s court, Athenian glades, or the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet as performed by a group of boy-men around the stripling poet William Aytoun who, like his own father, were from families well connected with the law and Edinburgh University; this became Eliza’s world, to the degree to which a young woman might be drawn in.
The young men all died young, except William. There was Henry Jardine — he died in Rome in 1840 — the son of Sir Henry Jardine, a prominent lawyer who, with his friend Sir Walter Scott, was present at the curious ‘rediscovery’ of the Honours of Scotland;2 Joseph Bell, the son of Professor George Joseph Bell, died in Asia of fever; Bassett Tytler drowned: he was one of ‘a brilliant family’ that spawned the historian Patrick Fraser Tytler, his sister the novelist Ann Fraser Tytler and their brother Alexander, an East India Company judge and dissenting voice who in 1816 published an instruction manual for novice Company servants that included an extensive critique of the causes of ‘delinquency’ amongst the Bengal peasantry (the principle one of which was the Zamindary system of landownership imposed by the East India Company’s ‘Permanent Settlement’, which had made landless tenants of the vast majority of Bengali farmers). Alexander Tytler would have been well-known to Eliza’s grandfather, Dr William Dick, and to her father in turn; as a graduate of the Company college at Fort William in Calcutta he would have been typical of the intended audience for Tytler’s book.
The young Eliza became a regular visitor at the Aytoun’s house. Having come down from the Highlands of Atholl into a city at the centre of the European Enlightenment, Eliza and her sisters were to attend school in Edinburgh and lived in New Town with their great aunt, Elizabeth Hunter (née Jennings). Elizabeth was the much younger sister of Eliza’s grandmother, Sarah, but 18 years her junior and a close contemporary of Eliza’s mother. Louisa Dick would have given Elizabeth a watching brief over the three girls during her years-long absence in Calcutta.
Elizabeth had married James Hunter of Thurston, formerly an East India Company civil servant, then an ‘agricultural improver’ and member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His father Robert had been a wealthy East India merchant, his mother the daughter of Robert Ord, the Chief Baron of the Scottish Exchequer. Robert Hunter seems to have had some association with the two founders of the indigo trade in Bengal: Elizabeth’s father, Ross Jennings, the indigent indigo planter, and John Prinsep, the merchant. The three families merged through no less than four different marriages.
Elizabeth Jennings and James Hunter married at Innerwick in 1811 and set up in a townhouse at 10 Moray Place, then as now the most fashionable address in Edinburgh’s New Town, and just a 10 minute stroll along Heriot Walk to the Aytoun’s house at 21 Abercromby Place. This was Eliza’s home while she was at school.3
But which school? The urgent choice was Elizabeth’s. There was an established route for the boys via Westminster School and latterly the new Edinburgh Academy, which offered the benefit of teaching Greek, but a much more restricted choice for the girls; and although for both sexes the Scottish system was generally considered superior to the English, East India families were notoriously lax in the education of young women. In this respect the Dicks were an exception, following a tradition established at least as far back as the mid Eighteenth Century and the education of Charlotte Maclaren. The meeting in Dunkeld Wood between young Charlotte and Edmund Burke had included an exchange concerning her bookishness: Burke and William Wyndham related that she was reading a recent novel from the London press. “We asked her … how she got such books at so great a distance from the metropolis, and more especially one so recently published. She answered that she had been educated at a boarding-school at Perth, where novels might be had from the circulating library, and that she still procured them through the same channel”; and with her wit, she also procured — via Burke and Sir Henry Dundas — an assistant surgeoncy in India for her fiancé, Dr William Dick.4
Charlotte’s daughter (Eliza’s aunt), Eliza Serena Harris, was another well-educated young woman. She demonstrates her intelligence but also the depth and breadth of her education in her letters to her brother William Fleming Dick after Waterloo and in a memoir of her tour of Flanders during the peace in 1814. The only girl in a family with six brothers, she is fascinated by affairs that were then the preserve of men, giving a detailed account of the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat: “What a Massacre was that Battle of Waterloo; both the 42nd & 73rd behaved nobly. The 73rd after the battle had only 3 Subalterns left, out of 28 Officers, 13 killed - and out of nearly 600 Men 50 remained to march on to Paris. Many have recovered from their wounds but scarcely an Officer has re-joined, all were so badly wounded. Our dear Robert [of the 42nd] soon recovered from his, being a flesh wound. George's [of the 73rd] was severe enough, as the Musket shot went thro' the Shoulder & has greatly injured the bone, several pieces came out & from the pain he still feels at times, makes us apprehend there are some more bits to work out”. Eliza Serena gives a precise understanding of the distribution of medals and honours — British and European — to deserving officers of higher and lesser rank; also the politics of Belgium and complex allegiances and opposition to Dutch, French and British in Flanders and Brabant. She is arch, witty, quick to judge and holding nothing back - not even her new-found English arrogance: “The Brabanters are much annoyed at being given up to the Dutch, whom they detest. They desire either to be restored to Austria or given to England. They seem a despicable race, lazy & profligate.” Her descriptions are compendious and highly visual; they include the arts, churches, defences, agriculture and people of Flanders. For example: “The Women are beautiful, tho’ they dress (to an English Eye) most unbecomingly. They wear black silk or coloured cotton Gowns & straw Hats, about 1/2 a yard high in the Crown, with large nosegays of Flowers, sometimes 6 or 8 full blown Cabbage roses or an immense bow of broad ribbon, stuck in front upon the top of the bonnet; some wear 6 or 8 large feathers”.5
The records of her nieces’ education are scant. In Edinburgh Eliza and her sisters attended Mr Robertson’s Academy, a conservatory of music for the daughters of gentlemen. These young women would have been Louisa’s, Charlotte’s and Eliza’s ‘friends in common’, and included daughters of expatriate families in the East and West Indies like their own, but also the old aristocracy and new managerial class. There was Helen Hamilton, daughter of G.W. Hamilton Esq of Jamaica; Margaret and Harriet — their cousins — daughters of their uncle Richard Hunter Esq. of the Bengal Civil Service - he once sailed down the Hooghly River with William Prinsep; Hannah, daughter of James Joseph Hope Vere, Esq, MP; Catherine, daughter of his Excellency the hon General Patrick Stuart, Commander of the Forces; The Lady Jane Ogilvy, daughter of the right hon David Earl of Airlie; and Margaret, daughter of George Crichton Esq, Manager of the London Leith and Glasgow Shipping Company. This sets the tone; it is how they are described in the newspapers reporting their progress at Robertson’s, as the daughters of men, not women.
The Principal was a taskmaster, his was no mere finishing school: “It formed no part of Mr Robertson’s method of tuition to keep his pupils drawling and fagging for months over a couple of show pieces of light and ephemeral music; they were, as quickly as he could, taught to read classical music in such a way that the ordinary pieces were mere pastime.”
Louisa Dick excelled at the pianoforte, reaching First Class after three years, between the ages of 12 and 15, and in 1832 she was awarded “the highest Gold Medal”. The end of year concert was begun by the performance of Czerny’s second Pot Pourri, ”by sixteen ladies”, no less. Robertson’s challenging selections included Hadyn, Beethoven and the virtuosi Kalkbrenner, Herz (a Tyrolean air and rondo for two pianofortes) and Czerny. There is a review in the Edinburgh Evening Courant of 30th June 1832 which — for context, and as a reminder of the precariousness of mid-19th Century life — was placed alongside a report of 482 deaths from 777 cases of cholera in Edinburgh that Summer, with four new cases in the preceding two days, three recoveries and five deaths.6
Charlotte Dick also attended Robertson’s but there is no record of Eliza; however, she gives her own confirmation in a poem written 50 years later that remembers her contribution to the annual concert of 1837 or ‘38, but more particularly the affection of an anonymous young poet who left roses, pinks and mignonettes in a bouquet, waiting for her on the stage: “All for me to wear at noon // As I played a concert Tune // On a school girl platform set // Roses fresh and dewy wet // Ah to think they died so soon.”
And the poem ends, “All the links of childhood broken // Thine was Hector’s fate in Troy”, which is just a hint that the admirer was William Edmondstoune Aytoun, who had translated Homer in 1832, rendered in trochaic meter.
We can be confident that although the syllabus at Mr Robertson’s Academy may have been focused narrowly on ‘feminine accomplishments’, Eliza acquired, one way or another, an excellent education in the classics, classical and renaissance art and architecture and most likely Latin and certainly French, the breadth of which inform and positively emblazon her published work. Eliza had, according to her son-in-law Horace Bell, a “remarkably vigorous intellect & with a range of sympathy in everything [and] … a very good memory”.7 She wrote, a decade or so after leaving Edinburgh, of a fictional teacher. “Mr. Anson induced me to learn Latin; he read to me selections from the best Roman and Greek authors, also from the best English poets. He explained things which had puzzled my young brain for years; he steadied my wandering faith, which even at that early age had been staggered by Hume, comforted by Paley, materialized by Gibbon.”8 Although fiction, this smacks of autobiography spiced by later learning. Eliza’s education is evident in the pleasure she gains from recognising an example of opus reticulatum on a Roman wall where the Appian Way runs through Pozzuoli, north west of Naples; or in the confidence with which she dismisses Canova as a petit maitre making “drawing room art” which had no place in St Peter’s Basilica (“His Perseus, which occupied for a time the pedestal of the Pythian Apollo, is a manifest plagiary, and very much spoiled in the stealing”);9 or in the grim enthusiasm with which she mocks Savonarolla, the puritanical bigot and burner of books and musical instruments, “found out by fate”, crouched in his Florentine cell waiting for death — by burning, appropriately enough — on 23 May 1498.
The investment in female education continued into the next generation, and possibly with the enthusiastic support of Eliza’s sister-in-law Agnes Graham, a.k.a. Mrs Abercromby Dick. In their teens Eliza’s youngest daughter, Violet Ogilvy, and her niece Rose Dick, attended the Breymannshen Institute in Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony; this was an international school for young women, “a prestigious, widely renowned pedagogical training facility” that taught Kindergarten principles to its students. Mrs Abercromby Dick and Mrs Eliza Ogilvy sought to pass on to their daughters the principles of teaching ‘the whole child’.10
In the next generation, Ella Ogilvy Bell, Eliza’s grand daughter and keeper of her manuscripts, letters and her commonplace books, was one of an early cohort of women to enter Oxford University; she matriculated in 1906 to study Classics at St Hilda’s College with four other women, one of whom was Nurgis Naoroji, the daughter of Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsi leader of the Indian Congress Party and MP for Finsbury Central (full story here). After graduating, Ella became a librarian at the Old Bodleian Library (as it is now called), demonstrating how far things had moved in 80 years, or even the previous 25, when the focus had been on childcare, not letters.
Ella spent her time at Oxford enjoying the Art Club, Architecture Society and Dramatics. “All the first year students”, she wrote, “have proved very keen on the river, which even in the winter term is very alluring. Next term we hope, as last summer term, to have a "four," which is delightful, if taken in moderation, as it smartens up one's rowing immensely, and the pace and swing derived from four keen rowers are great fun”. This was written by Ella in her smart, enthusiastic and encouraging style in the Notting Hill High School newsletter for the girls of her alma mater. In 1908 she and other Oxford students started “a Suffrage Society, to which "pros," " antis," and " wobblers" all belong”, but Nurgis Naoroji’s radicalism was of a different order; she had by this time left Oxford so did not row and the five was left as a perfect “four”. Nurgis had returned to India in 1907, possibly for health reasons, but her activities before and after Oxford were quite unlike Ella’s; she and her four sisters were deeply involved in the resistance to British rule in India and their clandestine activities were closely observed by the Criminal Investigation Office of the Bombay police, dutifully assisted by the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police. Ella married a man on the other side of that struggle, a Captain in an Indian Army infantry regiment, part of the force fighting Pathan tribesmen on the North West frontier. Like many women of her generation, Ella was widowed when her husband died in the Great War, at Gallipoli in 1915. She was a nurse in France and later England, and after a break continued as a librarian at the Bodleian as Head of Registry, in the Second World War managing the Prisoner of War department, and later joining the War Committee of the Red Cross. She never remarried.
In the Aytoun family house at 21 Abercromby Place, female influence was the dominant force; it was employed to indoctrinate the children with a fiercely atavistic Jacobitism. William Aytoun’s mother, Joan Aytoun, née Keir, had in her childhood been adopted by the Keiths and was a close friend of Sir Walter Scott’s sister, Anne. ‘She was steeped in Scottish lore, knew by heart all the old Scottish romances and ballads…Some of her line had fought for the Stuart cause both in 1715 and in 1745, and from old aunts and other relatives who had been involved in the troubles of the latter period'.11 She had also known Scott as a boy at Ravelstone and contributed ‘anecdotes of his youthful days, which are recorded in Lockhart's life of the poet’. Joan Aytoun was also evidently a forceful influence on Eliza, who in defence of her son appears to have remarked on her great merits to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who responded, from the very heights of condescension: ‘my dearest Mrs Ogilvy, .. bad writers have had good & tender mothers from the beginning of time, & we ought not to mix good & bad things in the excess of our sympathy for the good?—now, ought we?’12
William’s father, Roger Aytoun, passed on to his son a profession in the law from which William forever struggled to escape, an ambition finally achieved in 1845 when he was appointed Professor of Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University; this was a position in which he was a phenomenal success as a teacher but also a merciless scourge of poets, some good ones, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Glasgow spasmodics, the latter being poets of talent but low social status who William set out to demean in Blackwoods Magazine and was ultimately responsible for the destruction of their literary careers, whether he meant it or not.
It wasn’t until 1838, four years after the first meeting with the Aytoun family, that William showed any interest in Eliza: she was nine years younger and just 16 at the time: he was 24. This was after William’s return from Aschaffenburg, where he learnt German and made a blank verse translation of part of Goethe’s Faust, and he was already a contributor to Blackwoods, which had accepted his translations of Uhland.
Eliza recalled: ‘He began to make friends with me. He gave me his poem Homer, and told me much of his literary work at Blackwoods.’13 This was William’s first book, Poland, Homer, and other Poems, which he had published in 1832, at the age of 19, a romanticised, Byronesque work with ‘appeals for a utopian future and an elegy for Shelley’ that matched Poland with Athens, in heroic pursuit of the right to self-determination against an autocratic Russian regime (in loco Persia). This was a political position that Aytoun would later renounce, but the effect on Eliza was to give spark to her ambition and direction to the republican nationalism that emerged fully-formed in Italy in 1847, when she wrote a first — unpublished — version of her poem Alla Giornata, a full throated cry for a great imperial power — Austria — to be overthrown, and which provides the strongest evidence that she was a natural fit for Browning’s circle, not a convert.14
Before Eliza left for India, and as a token of his friendship, affection or love, or even perhaps to retain her fidelity or as a warning of his own inconstancy, William Aytoun presented Eliza with the manuscript of a sonnet; this turned up 180 years later in a black tin strong box with a bundle of Eliza’s poems; it was first thought to be one of hers: it is highly crafted, containing a sophisticated idea but perhaps too worldly to have sprung from the pen of a 16 year-old. Closer examination showed it signed, at the foot, W.E.A. 1838. The title is simply ‘Sonnet’.
Believe in everything that will not leave thee,
But trust in nothing that is false and fair -
Believe in Hope, for tho’ its dreams be air,
Thy non-belief therein will surely grieve thee;
Believe in truth, and if it doth deceive thee
Thou hast brought wisdom with but little care;
Believe in friendship, for it can bereave thee
Of nothing, if thy friends prove false or rare.
Trust all things, if thou wilt, but love - for they
Who offer up their incense at his shrine,
Know not the traitor unto whom they pray,
Who scorning all, to all will yet incline:
O then, beware! For if he [pulls] away,
What will thou do with that lost heart of thine?
Eliza took the sentiment to her own heart. Later that year she and her sister Charley embarked for Calcutta on an East Indiaman, the Lord Hungerford. Amongst their fellow passengers was a Captain Campbell, with whom they struck up a friendship; this was George Campbell of the Horse Artillery, aide-de-camp to the Lt. Governor of the Indian North West Provinces. After their arrival in Calcutta in August 1838, George would introduce the misses Dick to his brother, Captain Archibald Lorne Campbell of the Bengal Light Cavalry: Charley was smitten. Eliza, on the other hand — and possibly still with William’s sonnet ringing in her ears — became notorious for spurning all advances throughout her stay in India. In a letter from Paris to Eliza of 18 March 1852, Elizabeth Barrett Browning shrieks: “Love to the darlings - A Mr Shore [Richard Nowell Shore, a Bengal civil servant] enquires & speaks of Miss Dick as being celebrated in India for refusing everybody!!”.15
On their voyage to Bengal the girls made friends with sailors and learned to “talk nautical”, a talent Eliza delighted in and continued to cultivate in Leith dockyard on her return. There was plenty of time to learn the talk and to write poetry: the voyage took 4-6 months before new steam packet services between Suez and Bombay shortened the trip to less than two months, but this would have involved an intrepid crossing of the Egyptian desert, one that Sir Robert Dick made just three months later, to take up his new position as Major General at Madras, but he was still reliant on sail for the last leg and complained that the sea crossing from Suez to Bombay “is generally done in 16 days. We were 25’. By the 1830s dedicated passenger lines had emerged with ‘huge floating hotels’ on the long route circumnavigating Africa, but the Lord Hungerford was not one of these. The 750 ton ship (and this is a detail provided by Eliza in her poetic paean to the age of sail: The Lord Hungerford - 750 tons) had a career that spanned every type of passage across the British empire, not just the joyful task of reuniting young ladies with their families; it’s earliest voyages transported convicts to Tasmania, and its last took indentured workers from India to the sugar plantations of Guiana, their condition close to slavery and a practice that, like transportation, became a cornerstone of the labour market in British colonial possessions after the abolition of the slave trade. Eliza’s experience, as she sailed the southern oceans, was by contrast optimistic and liberating, the difference as stark as black and white — a metaphor that can’t keep itself out of her poem16:
When I first started to seek my fate
I put to sea in a ship of Teak
With a prow as broad as a toucan’s beak
With a mighty poop that uprose abaft
Where 50 passengers talked and laughed
With three tall masts and a press of sail
That puffed and swelled in the lightest gale
She had not a piston, wheel or screw
Not one spurt of steam to drive her through
Not a spark of fire, not a lump of coal
Except in the black cook’s galley hole
If the wind blew fair she skimmed the deep
If the wind fell calm she went to sleep
But O! She was clean and white and fair
I thought her a ship beyond compare
I loved her timbers from keel to beak
That dear old tub that was built of Teak
Disembarking safely in Calcutta in August 1838, Eliza and Charley might have seemed as rare and exotic as the town appeared to them. Abercromby Dick and their sister Louie would have met them at the ghat on the Hooghly river, having come up from Midnapore, less than a day’s ride from Calcutta, much closer to civilisation than Muzzafapur had been. Aber (as he was called in the family) had taken a house in Calcutta for two months. Once through the throng of the city, Eliza and Charley would have met their mother Louisa, a stranger for 15 years who had, only months earlier, given birth to her seventh child. The girls met their brothers Abercromby Robert (nine), Alfred Abercromby (four) and sister Emily (8 months) for the first time. The girls would have looked anxiously at their parents: did they resemble their portraits or the images that had formed in their imaginations?
The parents sized them up. Robert Dick wrote, from Madras: “Charley and Eliza had arrived in good health, Aber & wife delighted with them … they have been to Balls”.
© William Owen 2024 - All rights reserved
Rosaline Masson, Pollok and Aytoun, Oliphant, Edinburgh 1898. ‘my sister’ would have been Charley (Charlotte). It’s likely that by January 1834 Louisa had left Scotland to join her parents in Calcutta.
Scott and Jardine were given permission to search Edinburgh Castle for the ‘lost’ Royal Scottish regalia that Oliver Cromwell had attempted to discover and destroy, without success. The searchers eventually found them in the little strong room at Edinburgh Castle locked in an oak chest, covered with linen cloths, exactly as they had been left after the Union on 7 March 1707.
When James Hunter inherited the Thurston estate at Innerwick he returned to Scotland having done well enough to purchase £3000 of East India Company stock, which provided an income of 300 guineas a year — equivalent to c. £450,000 today in relative income terms. James Hunter is described as a ‘landowner, inventor and agricultural improver’; he was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1820 having been proposed by the scientist Sir David Brewster, famous for his work in optics which included the discovery of the polarization of light, the design of the first practical stereo-photographic camera and the invention of the kaleidoscope, a delightful contribution to the joy of mankind. Brewster was an early proponent of photography, friend of Henry Fox Talbot and a founding member of the Edinburgh Calotype Club. Eliza later wrote a memoir of Brewster, now lost. Brewster was an important connection in her network in the 1840s and ‘50s. (see Peter Heydon, annotation, Eliza Ogilvy, copy of unpublished commonplace book 1895-’99).
Dictionary of National Biography 1885-1900 Vol 15 by Henry Morse Stephens
Eliza Serena [Dick] Harris, 1814; Unpublished memoir, Harris Papers, Belmont House, Kent
Edinburgh Evening Courant 23 July 1832
Emma Ogilvy Bell, unpublished notes and recollections of her father,
Mrs David Ogilvy, The Ladies Companion, Autobiography of Laura Studleigh, Ch.1, 1st January 1852
Mrs David Ogilvy, The Ladies Companion, A Comparison of Cathedrals, 1 November 1851. The Pythian Apollo, or Apollo Belvedere, was a Roman copy of an ancient Greek bronze that had stood in the Belvedere court of the Vatican since 1511, until it was looted by Bonaparte and removed to the Louvre. Canova’s statue of Perseus and Medusa was a replacement acquired by Pope Pius VII; it had prominent genitalia which perhaps caused offence to Eliza’s Episcopalian sensibilities.
Bildungsanstalt für Kindergärtnerinnen und Lehrerinnen, Festschrift for the 50th anniversary of the Breymann Institute in 1906, a school founded to advocate Froebelian educational ideas, founded by Henriette Breymann, the great neice of Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten movement.
Pollock and Aytoun - also see Memoir of William Edmondstoune Aytoun by Sir Theodore Martin, 1867, W. Blackwood
Browning Correspondence, 21 July [1853]. EBB to Eliza Anne Ogilvy. BC, 19, 182–185. (Letter 3231), Eton College Library
Martin
Unpublished manuscript, 1847. A substantially revised version of Alla Giornata was published in Traditions of Tuscany in Verse in 1851
Eliza Ogilvy, Unpublished manuscript, The Lord Hungerford - 750 tons, January 1885