Schools for Girls

Abstract

Netta Syrett, schoolgirl, and later novelist and playwright, entered the North London Collegiate School for Girls in the 1880s, when the vanguard institution had been running for just over three decades. Her experiences there were to haunt her. In her semi-autobiographical novel, The Victorians (1915), Syrett voiced the dislike and fear that she still carried, emotions triggered by interiors that reminded her of school. ‘From that moment which she entered it, Rose [Syrett] never lost her detestation of plain, distempered walls, cold stone staircases, dadoes of pitch pine and of a certain yellow, painful in its crudeness, henceforth always connected in her mind with Swedish desks.’¹ Syrett found life at the North London Collegiate painful, as she struggled to cope with the institution’s multifarious spatial and material rules. The school’s distance from her home compounded her problems, as it meant that she dwelt in Myra Lodge, a boarding house run by headmistress Frances Mary Buss, who clashed with the untidy and chaotic Syrett. While most NLCS pupils had a better time, many remarked on the school’s complex rules and regulations. The system at this institution, and at its sister schools founded later in the century, aimed to deal with a new problem. Buss, and the other headmistresses, faced a completely new task, establishing institutions to educate girls to the same standard as boys. For the first time, hundreds of female pupils were to be taught together, and discipline, to be achieved without corporal punishment, was a challenge. This chapter explores the material world that these headmistresses created. While this was an important part of a new disciplinary system, the decoration of these places often had strong links with domesticity, creating a feminine institutional space.