Researched and written by John Bark
“Wherever we go among parents of the middle class, we find the one gnawing anxiety which abides in their hearts is the dread of their daughters ‘having to go out as governesses’. ‘Anything but that!’ says the father, when talking confidentially after his day’s work at the office, or the mill, or the counting-house, or in going the rounds of his patients.”[1]
– Harriett Martineau (1860)
Constance MATTHEY was one of those daughters.
A fatherless child
Born in Catharine Street, Liverpool in late 1853, Constance was the second child of John James MATTHEY and Frances TURQUAND. Her father was a commission merchant and agent who died of TB in 1863, leaving his wife with seven young children, five of them girls. Constance was just ten years old.
How Frances Matthey educated her younger children with the help of her wealthy brother William TURQUAND is described in her life story. Constance’s schooling is unknown, but it was probably over by the time of the 1871 census when she was living with her mother and one servant in Grove (Milman) Road, Reading.
St Bride’s Church, Liverpool where Constance was baptised in 1853. Her older sister Catherine was born in Sicily. Photo by David Humphreys at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.
The only profession
In spite of the anxiety described by Martineau, almost all middle-class families knew someone who became a Governess. At least three of Constance’s four surviving sisters did so. According to Kathryn Hughes in The Victorian Governess (1993) many of these women were like the Matthey sisters: merchant’s daughters from a large female family whose father had died.[2] Their options, always limited, now narrowed to teaching or marriage. Despite the work of Jessie Boucherett’s Society for Promoting the Employment of Women founded in 1859 and the writings of Emily Davies, co-founder of Girton College, other avenues (reliance on family, seamstress, hairdresser, nurse, writer) still had serious drawbacks for the middle-class. Anything else was unthinkable. The two youngest sisters (Ellen and Laura) married, but even Laura was described as a governess in the census prior to marriage.
Suitable for a lady?
Parents’ main fear was that working for a living would prove a bar to matrimony (“Reader, I married him,” was generally reserved for fiction). This was bound up with status anxiety for both parents and prospective employers. Was the woman in charge of their children’s education and moral upbringing genteel enough for the task? After all, was she behaving like a gentlewoman by asking for money? As a result of these tensions no-one was sure of the governess’s status. Was she a servant or member of the family? In any case she had to present herself as a lady, leading to resentment from the other servants, particularly the male ones. Over-work and under-pay were hall-marks of the profession so it is perhaps not surprising that the rate of incarceration of governesses in mental health institutions was twice that of general servants in 1861.[3] Punch, concerned at the low wages and unrealistic expectations of prospective employers, warned of an even darker fate: “soul and body-killing commerce in the dreadful street.”[4]
The social network
The low pay was in part due to the profession being over-subscribed, and many of the women chasing these jobs were happy just to have a roof over their heads. In this competitive situation, the Matthey sisters had some advantages. They could present as ladies obliged to find paying employment because of their father’s death and whose maternal grandfather had been a gentleman with an important government-appointed position. In addition family connections might have helped them get the all-important first position.
The Curate
While Constance was with her mother in Reading in 1871, her older sister 18 year-old Catherine was a governess in Erith, a growing industrial town and port on the Thames in Kent. She was a visitor in the home of Robert and Charlotte Wood and their young family. He was “Vicar elect of [the] proposed new district of Christchurch” where the foundation stone of his church was yet to be laid.[5] Wood had been, until 1868, senior curate at Christ Church in Whitley, where the Mattheys were parishioners.[6] He seems to have lived in Milman Road at one time and owned property in nearby Spring Gardens.[7] It is possible that Catherine was not merely a visitor but was, or had been, governess to Robert and Charlotte’s children. If so, it’s likely that she was offered her first job by someone the family knew well.
The Vicar
Just over a year later, Robert Wood was back in Reading at Christ Church. He was assisting the vicar Matthew Powley at the wedding of Evelyn, daughter of local landowner and church warden Richard Attenborough. The groom was John Becke, cousin of the main officiator, Rev. Cecil Hughes, vicar of the small village of Powick in the Malverns.[8]
Nine years on, Constance, aged 27, was a governess “boarding” in Powick Court, the impressive country-house of one of the Rev Hughes’ closest neighbours.
The Banker
John Swinton Isaac was an important figure in Powick and in the county generally: partner in a local private bank, pillar of county life. He was active in the Yeoman Cavalry, golf club committee, Three Choirs Festival, the Severn Fishery Conservancy and much else.[9] His wife Amy was the daughter of a Major-General in the Royal Artillery from an Anglo-Irish family. They had six children under 14 and eight servants. Whatever the 1881 census says, it seems unlikely Constance was just a paying guest come to see the glorious Malvern Hills.
Constance’s links to the Isaac family are however stronger than they appear at first glance, because the Rev. Wood’s wife was related to someone very important indeed.
John Swinton Isaac and his second wife Amelia Alicia Anne Crofton from family photographs in the album of Admiral Sir Leopold George Heath.
The politician
Charlotte Ernestina Wood was the sister of the Right Hon. George Joachim Göschen, Liberal MP for the City of London and First Lord of the Admiralty. Like the Mattheys and Turquands he was of immigrant descent, a banker and grandson of a rich printer from Leipzig, part of the middle-class intake in Gladstone’s 1868 Cabinet.[10] Just two weeks before the Becke/Attenborough wedding, he had laid that foundation stone for his brother-in-law’s new church.[11] But from Constance’s point of view, he was not the strongest link to the Isaac family. That was his spouse Lucy.
The Politician’s Wife
Lucy Göschen was the ideal politician’s wife. Fully supportive and engaged with her husband’s career, she was not afraid to give advice, as Göschen wrote in his journal: “Milner and Lucy [Mrs Göschen] are pitching into me tremendously to make a speech on foreign and colonial affairs and I shall probably do so,”.[12] Yet Lucy and her husband were careful to set boundaries to protect their children. The couple reportedly turned down the Vice-royalty of India for their sake and demurred from attending Lady Palmerston’s celebrated salon because they insisted on spending Wednesdays and Saturdays at their primary residence in Eltham, Kent.[13]
Grandmother
When in London, Lucy Göschen hosted a salon of her own. It was mostly politicians and theologians (according to Reynold’s Newspaper) but she also played host to Lord Tennyson and introduced George Eliot to Royalty.[14] Constance may or might not have been part of this glittering company, but if anything she had a closer connection to Mrs Göschen than these celebrities. Lucy’s late father was John Dalley, a Customs official. One of his sisters was Constance’s grandmother, Henrietta Ellen Turquand, buried in Reading Old Cemetery, aged 71.
In a world where family and class mattered, being cousins to a Cabinet Member’s strong-minded, charming and sociable wife probably did the Matthey sisters no harm.
Uncle William
As well as being a first cousin to Mrs Goschen, Constance’s uncle William Turquand was an important figure in the increasingly professional world of accountancy. It is possible that he put in a word here or there for his nieces and nephews where it might do some good. Part of his business (his favourite) was liquidating companies. The other was auditing them. One of the latter was the Ebbw Vale company, re-launched with a share offering in 1864 by Abraham Darby IV.[15] In April that year, Darby “presented” Constance’s brother Charles to the highly-regarded Christ’s Hospital “Blue Coat” school in the City of London, as was his right as a newly-elected school Governor. Four years later George Göschen, a Governor since 1854, did the same for her youngest brother Arthur.[16]
If these were small favours (not mere coincidences) were they discretely returned? Like many politicians in charge of military spending, Göschen as 1st Lord of the Admiralty sided with his Admirals over costs. In 1873 he made a lengthy speech defending the size of the Navy budget, arguing that peacetime commitments made major savings impossible. Furthermore, he reassured a House of Commons committee: “during the year an efficient and painstaking inquiry had been made into the system of accounts in the Navy, which had been undertaken with great public spirit by Messrs. Turquand and Young, who gave their services gratuitously….”[17]
The Mechanician
The public records do not tell us what life was like for Constance at Powick (did Mr Elgar, bandmaster at the nearby Asylum ever make a call?).[18] But she certainly didn’t marry. The next time we see her is in 1891 when she is 38, still single and “living on her own means”. Constance was now at “Annandale” a red-brick and flint-faced property on Grange Gardens, Eastbourne. It is an unusual household: a ten year-old boy Walter Pigott, accompanied by Constance, a school-teacher friend of his mother, a private governess and three female domestic servants. His widowed mother Agnes is missing, but she is in the next census and lived until 1924.
Agnes Pigott (nee Mitton) a curate’s daughter from Baildon, Yorkshire was about the same age as Constance. Her husband, George West Royston Pigott, had died two years previously. He was a physician turned specialist in the refinement of scientific optical instruments, the author of a number of books and scientific papers and Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society.[19]
This couple also had a connection to Reading. Two of their children were born at Hartley Court, a 16th century manor house near Sindlesham, where they lived for about five years in the 1870s.[20] During that time George was a manager of the Reading Savings Bank and was hurt in a coach accident on Whitley Rise not far from the Matthey residence.[21] Again, we can see it was possible Constance gained a job though personal acquaintance.
Sisters
Constance’s unmarried sisters seem to have found good positions too. Catherine’s employer in 1891 was a landowner at Lawton Hall, Cheshire; In 1881 Fanny* was in Snaresbrook, Waltham Forest, with a wealthy benefactor of nearby Forest School. Ten years later she was working for the wife of a Rear-Admiral in Kensington.
We can again glimpse signs of the Matthey social network in Fanny’s life. In her middle-age, apparently no longer a governess, Fanny associated with two women from Malvern young enough to be ex-pupils, Ethel and Alice Lord. Their parents were certainly at public events attended by John Swinton Isaac of Powick Court.[22]
A life cut short
Constance did not live to face or avoid the challenges of an elderly, unmarried governess like her sisters. At 40 years old she died of peritonitis on the 21st November 1893 at her mother’s house, now in Russell Street, Reading. Her epitaph reads: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.”
Six degrees of Constance Matthey
This life story says a lot about a social network. There is good evidence it existed, but not enough to be sure Constance used it as suggested. We don’t know if one day her mother said: “Constance, you must go as a governess. It is all arranged.” But from what we know of her family, she would have been active, intelligent and resourceful, part of a middle class network with many family and social contacts that now reached into the heart of Government.
*I refer to the daughter Frances as ‘Fanny’ to distinguish her from her mother. This may not have been her preference in life.
Sources
The main resources I used in writing this life story were:
- Ancestry.com, Findmypast, The Genealogist and The British Newspaper Archive via Berkshire Family History Society (BFHS) at Reading Central Library and the Library, Sonning Common.
- Local Studies section of Reading Central Library
- University of Reading Library
- The Royal Berkshire Archives
- The National Archives, Kew
- From home: The Internet Archive, FreeBMD.org, GRO, FamilySearch.org, ProbateSearch.org. Jstor.org Wikipedia and Google.com
- Special mention to Regent Furniture, Books, Rugs & Gifts in Wantage where I found Kathryn Hughes’ The Victorian Governess in a magical labyrinth of books disguised as a furniture shop. https://www.regentfurnitureandbooks.co.uk/
References
[1] “The Governess: Her Health” H Martineau in Once a Week Vol 3 1860 p 271 also quoted in The Victorian Governess K Hughes, London 1993 p 34
[2] The Victorian Governess K Hughes, London 1993 and “The Figure of the Governess” K Hughes, British Library web site https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/the-figure-of-the-governess/ [accessed 23/08/2024] were invaluable guides in writing Constance’s life story. This and the following two paragraphs draw heavily on these works.
[3] Hughes 1993 op cit table II p 206 adapted from Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration 1830-1919 A J Hammerton London 1979. In 2019 Ofsted found that “teaching staff and education professionals report the highest rates of work-related stress, depression and anxiety in Britain.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teacher-well-being-at-work-in-schools-and-further-education-providers/summary-and-recommendations-teacher-well-being-research-report#findings [accessed 24/08/2024]
[4] Punch 1844 vol 7 p 11
[5] Reading Mercury 6th July 1872 p 5
[6] Crockford’s Clerical Directory 1878
[7] Owned property at 39 Tank Road, Spring Gardens: Reading Mercury 27th May 1871 p 7; lived in Whitley: Macaulay’s Directory of Reading 1867 and 1870; Grove Road: Register of Electors 1866-67
[8] Reading Mercury 20th July 1872 p 5
[9] Worcester Chronicle 1st September 1888 p8 Golf: Berrows Worcester Journal 16th April 1881 p 3 Severn Fishery: Berrows Worcester Journal 26th November 1881 p. 3
[10] Victorious Century: The United Kingdom 1800-1906 D Cannadine 2017 p 343
[11] Reading Mercury 6th July 1872 p 5
[12] Goschen, Jan 4th 1885 quoted in The life of George Joachim Göschen, first viscount Göschen, 1831–1907 A D Eliot 1911
[13] Ibid p 196 p 77
[14] Reynold’s Newspaper 27th February 1898 p 6
[15] Daily News 30th June 1864 p 8
[16] E-mail from Christ’s Hospital Museum (Clifford Jones) dated 10/11/2022 quoting from transcriptions of applications by Frances Matthey for Arthur and Charles Matthey; Governor elections: e-mail from Clifford Jones dated 11/09/2024
[17] Hansard House of Commons Debate 24 March 1873 vol 215 cc32-8732: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1873/mar/24/supply-navy-estimates [accessed 23/08/2024]
[18] Elgar worked one day a week from January 1879 at the Powick Asylum: Edward Elgar: a creative life J N Moore, 1984 p 82. Elgar and Isaac attended a testimonial meeting for A J Caldicott: Worcester Journal 22nd July 1882 p 3; Isaac’s wife performed in the same concert as Elgar: Worcester Journal 25th November 1882 p 4
[19] Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 50, p.176. He is described as ‘a mechanician of the highest order’
[20] Views from the Hill: The Story of Whitley and memories of Whitley Life in Times Past D Wood 2017 p 10; Berkshire Chronicle 26th December 1874 p 8 and 4th May 1878 p 8
[21] Berkshire Chronicle 20th December 1873 p 6 and 13th October 1877 p 5
[22] For example, Worcester Archery Society: Berrows Worcester Journal 28th August 1875 p 3 Review of the Worcestershire Yeoman Cavalry: Berrows Worcester Journal 11th October 1873 p 4
Division 61, Row C, Plot 11