September means back to school for a lot of people so this month’s object is a photograph of Charlotte Mason’s students in 1897.
Charlotte Mason established her House of Education at the northern end of Ambleside on Rydal Road, which opened in January 1892 with four students. In 1894, the main base of the college was moved across the road to Scale How. Once the next two-year teaching course began, the original number of four students rose to around fifty – word was spreading about the House of Education. The House of Education was far from being Charlotte Mason’s first educational undertaking. She was already fifty years old in 1892.
She had been a teacher in Worthing, and a lecturer at the Bishop Otter College in Chichester. She had published a series of school geography books which became very popular and provided her with a small but regular income. In the 1880s, after becoming aware of the generally poor standard of the education provided by governesses in middle class households, she had written a book on ‘Home Education’, first published in 1886 and later to run to many editions.
The book and her public lectures on the same theme struck a chord with many middle-class mothers, who had first-hand experience of entrusting the education of their children to governesses with little to no training. In 1887, at a meeting in Bradford (where another of Charlotte’s friends ran a school), the gathering of over eighty people inspired by Charlotte’s methods set up the Parents’ National Education Union (PNEU). Amongst them was Lady Aberdeen who was keenly interested in the advancement of women. It was she, who in 1891 persuaded Charlotte Mason to set up a training institution for governesses, which materialised in the House of Education at Ambleside.