The document summarizes and analyzes George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss. It discusses several key elements and contexts of the novel, including Victorian conceptions of childhood, Eliot's use of an intrusive narrator, themes of the novel like family and education, and parallels between characters in the novel and Eliot's own life. It also analyzes Eliot's realistic style of writing and compares the novel to a female bildungsroman.

2. Critical Reception of Mill
I. M. Luyster wrote in Christian Examiner in 1861 that
"since half the book is devoted to the childhood of the
principal characters, it loses with some readers a portion
of its interest as a romance."
He also objected to Eliot's occasional use of "gratuitous
vulgarity, for which the author is solely responsible,"
which, he noted, was "a great blemish, especially in a
woman's book." However, he wrote, this vulgarity
seldom appears in The Mill on the Floss and then only in
some of the characterizations.

3. George Eliot
1. Life story? Personal
2. Professional achievements
3. Writing style
4. Beliefs
5. Feminine beauty
6. Religious beliefs
7. Personal relationships
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl0ZUnGchHE

4. Historical/ Cultural
• Religion
• Feminism and gender
• Education
• Industrialisation
• Social class
• Family
• Sexuality
• Respectability

5. Autobiographical elements
The Mill on the Floss is the closest to being
autobiographical of all Eliot’s works; in it, she
expresses her great love for the English countryside
where she grew up and for her own older brother
Isaac, who, like Tom,
rejected his sister out of strict moral principles.
The novel is therefore double-sided: full of love,
longing, and nostalgia, but also bitter and sad. Eliot
shows clearly both the love she felt and the pain
she suffered—and she lets the reader know why.

6. Narrator
• Narrator
• Realism vs metafiction
• Almost a ‘story-teller’
• Enter the omniscient narrator
• ‘God-like’ judgements
• Intrusive narrator
• Nostalgic tone
• “honest waggoner”

7. Water Mill & Symbolism
• TENSION - “loving tide” and “checking” action
• Secluded
• Organic dimension to life
• FLOW
• Churning
• Nature’s vengeance/ indifference
• Parochial

8. Darwin’s Natural Selection
• The Mill is modernised by Tom; Tulliver
represents the pre-industrial world. He is not
fit to survive in the harsh, competitive
landscape of Victorian England.
George Eliot began her interest with the theory of evolution since 1851.
She discussed it with her friend Herbert Spencer so when The Origin of
Species was published she immediately read it. She then wrote: "But to
me the Development theory and all other explanations of process by
which things came to be, produce a feeble expression compared with the
mystery that lies under the process. (...) Natural selection is not always
good and depends on many caprices of very foolish animals“. Her
characters become the mirrors of her ideas concerning the idea of
natural selection on the basis of Darwin's work.

9. Attack on Parochialism: The “Emmets”
• But it is the Dodson aunts who are the real stars of The Mill
on the Floss. This bustling trio of self-regarding matrons is
one of the great comic creations of 19th-century fiction, as
good as anything Dickens ever did.
• The Dodsons are Mrs Tulliver's married sisters, and
regularly descend on the mill in a disapproving chorus,
ready to dispense home truths beginning with, "It's for your
own good I say this."
• Devoid of culture or curiosity about lives other than their
own, the Dodsons nonetheless know themselves to be
experts in everything that really matters, including
"obedience to parents, faithfulness to kindred, industry,
rigid honesty, thrift, the thorough scouring of wooden and
copper utensils".

10. Bildungsroman?

11. A Female Bildungsroman?
• An interrupted bildungsroman
• Maggie’s education is thwarted
• Her intellectual development is incomplete
• Eliot kills off Maggie because she cannot
complete the bildungsroman
• Contrast this with Charles Dicken’s novels:
David Copperfield and Great Expectations in
which the hero attains knowledge albeit
through a painful and arduous journey

12. Victorian Conceptions of Childhood

13. Victorian Conceptions of Childhood
MAGGIE TULLIVER??/

14. Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
The novel can only be viewed as Art when it is ‘TRUTHFUL’
MIMESIS
Adam Bede “…source of delicious sympathy in these faithful
pictures of a monotonous, homely existence, which has been
the fate of so many more among my fellow mortals than a life
of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of
world stirring actions…

15. Realism
• The dominant paradigm in novel writing during the second half of the
nineteenth century was no longer the Romantic idealism of the earlier part
of the century.
• a new approach to character and subject matter, a school of thought which
later came to be known as Realism.
• On one level, Realism is precisely what it sounds like. It is attention to
detail, and an effort to replicate the true nature of reality in a way that
novelists had never attempted. There is the belief that the novel’s function
is simply to report what happens, without comment or judgment.
• Seemingly inconsequential elements gain the attention of the novel
functioning in the realist mode.
• In contrast to what came before, the realistic novel rests upon the
strengths of its characters rather than plot or turn of phrase. The
characters produced are some of the most famous in literary history
• They are psychologically complicated, multifaceted, and with conflicting
impulses and motivations that very nearly replicate the daily tribulations of
being human.

16. The Influence of Journalism
• Realism coincided with Victorianism, yet was a distinct collection of
aesthetic principles in its own right.
• The realist novel was heavily informed by journalistic techniques, such as
objectivity and fidelity to the facts of the matter. It is not a coincidence
that many of the better known novelists of the time had concurrent
occupations in the publishing industry.
• The idea of novel-writing as a “report” grew out of this marriage between
literature and journalism. Another fair comparison would be to think of
the realist novel as an early form of docudrama, in which fictional persons
and events are intended to seamlessly reproduce the real world.
• The Victorian Period saw growing concern with the plight of the less
fortunate in society, and the realistic novel likewise turned its attention on
subjects that beforehand would not have warranted notice.

17. Psychology
• Advances in the field of human psychology also fed into the preoccupation with representing
the inner workings of the mind, and the delicate play of emotions.
• Psychologists were just beginning to understand that human consciousness was far more
complicated and various than had previously been considered. Debates about nature versus
nurture were as popular then as they are today. More than anything, the understanding that in
the human mind there are very few absolutes was critical for the realist sensibility.
• The overriding concern of all realist fiction is with character. Specifically, novelists struggled to
create intricate and layered characters who, as much as possible, felt as though they could be
flesh and blood creatures.
• Much of this effect was achieved through internal monologues and a keen understanding of
human psychology. Not surprisingly, the field of psychology was in the process of evolving from
metaphysical quackery into a bona fide scientific pursuit.
• Students of the human mind were beginning to realize that an individual is composed of a
network of motivations, interests, desires, and fears. How these forces interact and sometimes
do battle with each other plays a large part in the development of personality. Realism, at its
highest level, attempts to lay these internal struggles bare for all to see. In other words, most of
the “action” of the realist novel is internalized.

18. Eliot: Intrusive Narrator
• Her clear, racy, nervous English, heightened by gleams of
quiet humour and thrills of calm pathos, lends rather a
perilous charm to passages teeming with the worst luxuriance
of that petty realism which passes with careless critics for art
of the first order. Even these are less intolerable than those
other passages of laboured irony and didactic commonplace,
which read like bits of private notebooks foisted into their
present places. Her interjectional remarks are seldom very
wise or very pertinent. In nine cases out of ten they only
interrupt the story, without offering a fair sop to the reader's
impatience.... With the peevish fretfulness of a camel in the
act of loading, our authoress keeps groaning out her tiresome
tirades against evils for the most part of her own imagining.
A Contemporary Critic Takes Issue

19. Omniscient Narrator
• For the most part, the narrator is omniscient. The narrator gives us
detailed insight into all of the characters and tells us their thoughts
and feelings. However, the narrator sometimes switches over into
the first person, using "I" and directly addressing the reader as
"you." These breaks between the third person and the first person
voice make for interesting reading. Generally, the first person
narrative sections are really generalized discussions of topics like
history and religion. The actual narrative of the plot and the
characters occurs almost exclusively in the third person, with a few
notable exceptions. The very first chapter has the narrator using the
first person to describe what seems to be a "memory" of a young
Maggie Tulliver. It is never made clear if this is simply Eliot herself or
the narrator is supposed to be an actual character who is somehow
omniscient.

20. Narrative Tone
• The narrator here is above all else sympathetic. Characters are frequently referred to as
"poor" whoever, and the narrator is very careful to give us detailed insight into all the
characters’ thoughts, feelings, and (often) personal hardships and tragedies.
• Characters we might be inclined to dismiss as bad, like Wakem, are given a detailed
treatment that allows us to feel sympathy for them, or at least to better understand
them. The narrator very rarely mocks the characters here, opting instead to detail their
suffering and often to commiserate, or sympathize, with them.
• However, the narrator isn’t overly emotionally involved. Overall the tone is an
interesting blend of detached and emotional.
While sympathetic, the tone is also very insightful, intelligent, and often philosophical.
The narrator often gives detailed and highly rational explanations for a certain
character’s behaviour. We also often get passages that consider major philosophical
issues, like religion.
• But while the tone is largely sympathetic and intellectual, it is not without humour.
There are many instances where the narrator uses irony, or teases the characters a
little. Tom’s and Maggie’s aunts and uncles are frequently on the receiving end of
humorous descriptions and eye-rolling commentary.

21. Themes
• The Women Question (Gender)
• Constraint and Escape
• The nature of Family
• Education
• Pride and Stubbornness
• Imagination and ‘Realism’/ Practicality

22. Love
• Sibling love
• Filial love
• Forbidden love/ Desire

23. Greek Love

24. Philia
• Philia (/ˈfɪljə/ or /ˈfɪliə/;
Ancient Greek: φιλία),
often translated
"brotherly love", is one
of the four ancient
Greek words for
love: philia, storge,
agape and eros. In
Aristotle's Nicomachean
Ethics, philia is usually
translated as
"friendship" or
affection.

25. As Gerard Hughes points out, in Books VIII and IX
Aristotle gives examples of philia including:
"young lovers, lifelong friends , cities with one
another, political or business contacts, parents and
children, fellow-voyagers and fellow-soldiers,
members of the same religious society, or of the
same tribe, a cobbler and the person who buys
from him.
All of these different relationships involve getting
on well with someone, though Aristotle at times
implies that something more like actual liking is
required.

26. Eros

27. • Eros was the Greek god of
love, or more precisely,
passionate and physical
desire. Without warning he
selects his targets and
forcefully strikes at their
hearts, bringing confusion
and irrepressible feelings
or in the words
of Hesiod he ‘loosens the
limbs and weakens the
mind’. Eros himself is a
carefree and beautiful
youth, crowned with
flowers, especially of roses
which were closely
associated with the god.

28. • According to Hesiod in his Theogony,Eros was one
of the primeval gods who, along with Chaos and
Gaia (Earth), were responsible for the Creation.
Here he perhaps represented a universal love.
• In other traditions he was the winged acolyte or
assistant of the goddess Aphrodite, goddess of
Love and Beauty. He was also sometimes
regarded as the child of Aphrodite, with Ares as
his father, and his brothers were Deimos (Fear),
Phobos (Panic), and Harmonia (Harmony).
• In some traditions Eros also had a younger
brother - Anteros - who was a much darker figure
and avenger of unrequited love

30. Contexts
• Victorian
• Angel in the House
• 1930s
• Roaring twenties
• D.H. Lawrence

31. The Flappers

33. Whether married or not, Victorian women
were expected to be fragile, innocent,
modest, polite, obedient, chaste,
submissive, delicate flower incapable of
deciding anything except menu and her
evening attire.
In order to find a suitable (rich, noble and
accepted in the society) husband girls were
polished head to toe. Victorian women’s
knowledge consisted of singing,
painting/drawing and embroidery skills,
playing an instrument and dancing.
Besides all this it was also good for a girl to
know a little bit of French or Italian, but her
most valued skills were the domestic ones.
Women were expected to be ”Household
Angels”; taking care of their children and
learning them proper values but also
keeping eyes on the servants and arranging
a menu for the day. The ideal Victorian
women were tirelessly patient and
sacrificing.

34. D.H. Lawrence
• Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H.
Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first
edition was printed privately in Florence, Italy,
with assistance from Pino Orioli; an unexpurgated
edition could not be published openly in the
United Kingdom until 1960. (A private edition was
issued by Inky Stephensen's Mandrake Press in
1929.)[1] The book soon became notorious for its
story of the physical (and emotional) relationship
between a working classman and an upper
class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and
its use of then-unprintable words.

35. Significance
• Richard Hoggart argues that the main subject of Lady Chatterley's
Lover is not the sexual passages that were the subject of such debate
but the search for integrity and wholeness. Key to this integrity is
cohesion between the mind and the body for "body without mind is
brutish; mind without body... is a running away from our double
being.
• Lady Chatterley's Lover focuses on the incoherence of living a life
that is "all mind", which Lawrence saw as particularly true among the
young members of the aristocratic classes, as in his description of
Constance's and her sister Hilda's "tentative love-affairs" in their
youth:
So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with
whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The
arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and
connection were only sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-
climax.

36. Philip and Maggie
• Philia: actually
played out in the
terms of brother
and sister
• The kiss is chaste,
affectionate,
supportive

37. Eros: Robbie and Cecilia
A moment of Eros irrevocably joins them through prison and a war

39. Mill vs Atonement

40. Comparative SWEATY
• Whereas Eliot presents the love Philip and
Maggie in Mill as ……………………., this sharply
contrasts with McEwan’s depiction of the love
of Cecilia and Robbie as …………………..
• Both the relationship of Philip and Maggie in
Mill and Cecilia and Robbie in Atonement have
an element of sibling love to them.

41. Structure Paragraph Level
• Linking statement connecting the texts
• Mill
• Evidence woven
• Analysis of Language
• Form/ Structure/ Context
• Linking statement to Atonement
• Evidence woven
• Analysis of Language
• Which compares and contrasts Language
& Form/ Structure/ Context

42. 1. Sibling nature
 Robbie is a sort of adopted brother
 Philip asks to be treated as a brother
2. Absence of courtship
 Relationship is Platonic
 Too sudden for courtship
3. The Nature of attraction
 Admires intelligence, sensitivity, ‘feminine’ qualities. Strong elements of pity
 More mysterious, erotic, elemental
4. First contact
 “earnest” kiss
 Passion unleashed
5. Obstacles to love
 The bitter feud, small elements of class?
 Social class, incest taboo?
6. The pace of the relationship
 Evolutionary and gradual
 A strike of lightning?
7. Both relationships involve an element of betrayal
 Tom/ Mr. Tulliver
 Briony feels betrayed by Cecilia

43. Imagery/ Patterns
• Water
• Music
• Time
• Food

44. Chapters 1-8
FOCUS on MAGGIE TULLIVER and CHILDHOOD
• Actions
• Beliefs
• Description
• What others say about her
• Relationships

45. Chapter 2
• Mrs Tulliver’s Fears of drowning
• Punishment for contravening Victorian norms
• Livestock analogy used by Tulliver

46. Chapter 3
• History of the Devil
• Maggie’s education vs Tom’s
• Tom’s ineptness for higher learning
• Maggie’s interpretation of the witch dunking
• Tulliver’s comments on choosing his wife,
Bessie

47. Chapter 5: Fishing
• Fishing with Tom
• The Jam puff
• The ‘manly’ discussion of ferrets and ‘a rot
catcher’

48. Chapter 7: Off with those Curls!
• Maggie’s Fantasy World of being a queen
• The curly haired feminine ideal
• Cutting the Curls
• Family Reactions

49. Chapter 9 & 10
• Tom’s behaviour to Lucy
• Tom’s contemptuous conception of girls
• Maggie’s Jealousy
• The shocking shove in the mud

50. “Creskens genittivo!” exclaimed Tom, with a
derisive laugh, for Tom had learned this omitted
passage for his yesterday’s lesson, and a young
gentleman does not require an intimate or
extensive acquaintance with Latin before he can
feel the pitiable absurdity of a false quantity.
“Creskens genittivo! What a little silly you are,
Maggie!”
“Well, you needn’t laugh, Tom, for you didn’t
remember it at all. I’m sure it’s spelt so; how was I
to know?”
“Phee-e-e-h! I told you girls couldn’t learn Latin.
It’s Nomen non crescens genitivo.”

51. Starter
• “Little girls are silly beasts…they
are impetuous and rash about
the most trivial of things”

52. The Mill on the Floss

53. Daniel Defoe: The History of the Devil
• General scholarly opinion is that Defoe really
did think of the Devil as a participant in world
history. He spends some time
discussing Milton's Paradise Lost and
explaining why he considers it inaccurate.
• His view is that of an 18th-century
Presbyterian – he blames the Devil for
the Crusades and sees him as close to
Europe's Catholic powers.

54. Autobiographical?
• Maggie Tulliver reads The Political History of the Devil as a young child, at
the beginning of The Mill on the Floss. It is likely that this 1819 edition is the
same as Maggie’s, since the image shown here entitled ‘Ducking a Witch’ is
very like the one Maggie describes, with ‘an old woman in the water’ and a
‘dreadful blacksmith with his arms akimbo, laughing’.
• The other illustrations are equally gruesome. The Political History of the
Devil would be a difficult book for a child to read (it belongs to Mr Tulliver),
and the fact that Maggie enjoys it suggests her intelligence, love of learning
and capacity for perseverance.
• Eliot herself owned a copy of The Political History of the Devil when she was
young. Her husband John Cross wrote in his biography of her that her copy
was ‘still religiously preserved at Griff [the house in which Eliot lived as a
child] with its pictures just as Maggie looked at them’.

57. • "What! they mustn't say any harm o' Tom, eh?"
said Mr. Tulliver, looking at Maggie with a
twinkling eye. Then, in a lower voice, turning to
Mr. Riley, as though Maggie couldn't hear, "She
understands what one's talking about so as never
was. And you should hear her read,—straight off,
as if she knowed it all beforehand. And allays at
her book! But it's bad—it's bad," Mr. Tulliver
added sadly, checking this blamable exultation.
"A woman's no business wi' being so clever; it'll
turn to trouble, I doubt. But bless you!"—here
the exultation was clearly recovering the
mastery,—"she'll read the books and understand
'em better nor half the folks as are growed up."

58. Mr. Stelling
• Views on Victorian education

59. But the immediate step to future success was to bring on Tom Tulliver during this first
half-year; for, by a singular coincidence, there had been some negotiation concerning
another pupil from the same neighborhood and it might further a decision in Mr.
Stelling’s favor, if it were understood that young Tulliver, who, Mr. Stelling observed in
conjugal privacy, was rather a rough cub, had made prodigious progress in a short time.
It was on this ground that he was severe with Tom about his lessons; he was clearly a
boy whose powers would never be developed through the medium of the Latin
grammar, without the application of some sternness. Not that Mr. Stelling was a harsh-
tempered or unkind man; quite the contrary. He was jocose with Tom at table, and
corrected his provincialisms and his deportment in the most playful manner; but poor
Tom was only the more cowed and confused by this double novelty, for he had never
been used to jokes at all like Mr. Stelling’s; and for the first time in his life he had a
painful sense that he was all wrong somehow. When Mr. Stelling said, as the roast-beef
was being uncovered, “Now, Tulliver! which would you rather decline, roast-beef or the
Latin for it?” Tom, to whom in his coolest moments a pun would have been a hard nut,
was thrown into a state of embarrassed alarm that made everything dim to him except
the feeling that he would rather not have anything to do with Latin; of course he
answered, “Roast-beef,” whereupon there followed much laughter and some practical
joking with the plates, from which Tom gathered that he had in some mysterious way
refused beef, and, in fact, made himself appear “a silly.”

60. Historical and Cultural Background

61. Fenton’s photograph clearly captures
an intimate, though posed, moment
between the couple.
Interestingly, Queen Victoria is not
presented as monarch, but as wife to
Prince Albert. Indeed, the positioning
of Albert gazing downwards at Victoria,
yet not looking directly at her, places
him in the dominant role in the
marriage.
To heighten this interpretation, it is also
worth noting that Albert is in full
military regalia, with numerous
honours on his jacket.
In terms of gender politics, then, this
photograph is very interesting,
especially as Victoria is feminised and
softened.

62. By the Victorian era, the concept of "pater
familias", meaning the husband as head of the
household and moral leader of his family, was
firmly entrenched in British culture. A wife's proper
role was to love, honour and obey her husband, as
her marriage vows stated. A wife's place in the
family hierarchy was secondary to her husband, but
far from being considered unimportant, a wife's
duties to tend to her husband and properly raise
her children were considered crucial cornerstones
of social stability by the Victorians.
The Angel in the House

63. The General in the Home
• The Household General' is a term coined in 1861 by Isabella Beeton in her
manual Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. Here she explained
that the mistress of a household is comparable to the commander of an
army or the leader of an enterprise. To run a respectable household and
secure the happiness, comfort and well-being of her family she must
perform her duties intelligently and thoroughly. For example, she had to
organise, delegate and instruct her servants, which was not an easy task as
many of them were not reliable. Isabella Beeton's upper-middle-class
readers may also have had a large complement of "domestics", a staff
requiring supervision by the mistress of the house. Beeton advises her
readers to maintain a "housekeeping account book" to track spending. She
recommends daily entries and checking the balance monthly. In addition
to tracking servants' wages, the mistress of the house was responsible for
tracking payments to trades such as butchers and bakers. If a household
had the means to hire a housekeeper, whose duties included keeping the
household accounts, Beeton goes so far as to advise readers to check the
accounts of housekeepers regularly to ensure nothing was amiss

64. Coventry Patmore, published in 1854:
Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings her breast [...]
She loves with love that cannot tire;
And when, ah woe, she loves alone,
Through passionate duty love springs higher,
As grass grows taller round a stone.

65. KILLING THE ANGEL
The poem became such a touchstone of British culture that in
a lecture to the Women's Service League in 1942,Virginia
Woolf said "killing the Angel in the House was part of the
occupation of a woman writer." Woolf described the angel as:
immensely sympathetic, immensely charming, utterly
unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She
sacrificed herself daily ... in short, she was so constituted that
she never had a mind but preferred to sympathize always with
the minds and wishes of others. Above all ... she was pure.
Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty.[8]

66. Maggie’s Thwarted Education
• At the start of the 19th century very few children went
to school. Most poor children worked. If they went to
school, their families lost the money they earned.
• There were some good schools for boys, for
example, grammar schoolsand public schools. Only
richer families could afford to pay the school fees,
though some schools gave free places to poor boys.
Poor girls did not go to school when the Victorian age
began meaning they had little education. Girls from
wealthy families would usually be taught at home by a
governess. Sometimes, wealthy girls may have
attended boarding schools too.

67. • Up until the late 1840s women's schools were small and
the academics leaned more towards the role they would
eventually in the family. The findings of the Royal
Commission on Secondary Education (the Taunton
Commission) in 1864 showed a lack of thoroughness and
foundation, the need of organization and a broader
curriculum. Astronomer Mary Somerville was quoted as
saying about her experience at a Scottish boarding school
for girls that "the chief thing I had to do was learn by heart
a page of Johnson's dictionary."1Frances Power Cobbe
regarding her own expensive boarding school education
was that whatever they were taught was de-emphasized in
its importance.2

68. Inequality: Think of Maggie & Tom
• Stories abound of the women who sought an
education in Victorian England. Annie Rogers whose
education was obtained mostly through the teaching of
governesses received an offer to study at Worcester
College which was withdrawn when her sex was
discovered and given to a male who tested six places
below her in exams. Many women of the time lacking
the opportunity of formal education organized their
own education through small interest groups or alone.
The cry for education was more than just for the sake
of eliminating boredom, but rather for the opportunity
of escaping dependence on the male population.

69. North London Collegiate School and
Cheltenham Ladies College
• North London Collegiate School and Cheltenham
Ladies College also became prominent schools of the
times. Frances Buss, began her teaching career at the
age of 14. After gaining her diploma from a reorganized
North London Collegiate School, brought it to academic
success. The school offered an academic education at
nine guineas per annum to the "families of professional
men, the leading tradesmen and so on""3 and although
Anglican, religious education was not required.
Cheltenham Ladies College rose to a similar academic
status but catered to a higher social class.

70. • In the upper classes it was assumed that a girl would marry and that
therefore she had no need of a formal education, as long as she could look
beautiful, entertain her husband’s guests, and produce a reasonable
number of children. ‘Accomplishments’ such as playing the piano, singing
and flower‐arranging were all‐important. If she could not find a husband
she faced a grim future as a 'maiden aunt' whose help could always be
called on to look after her aged parents or her siblings’ children. She might
even be forced to take on employment as a governess, shut away in the
schoolroom with children who had little interest in absorbing the
information she was teaching. This became increasingly unattractive to
intelligent women. But their future was improved when Queen’s College in
Harley Street, London was founded in 1848, to give governesses a
recognized and marketable qualification. No ‘accomplishments’ there. Ten
more years saw the foundation of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Other girls’
public schools followed. This increase in female education led to renewed
demands for the vote. - See more at: http://www.bl.uk/victorian-
britain/articles/education-in-victorian-britain#sthash.ugS9d3eN.dpuf