A Genlis Education and Enlightenment Values

Mrs Chinnery (1766–1840) and her Children

Denise Yim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032171807
• eBook ISBN: 9781000610543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Offering a unique approach to the study of late eighteenth-century/early nineteenth-century education, this book explores the life and motivations of a strong-minded, self-educated and enlightened English gentlewoman, Mrs Margaret Chinnery, who put Madame de Genlis's educational ideas into practice with marked success.

Beginning with a brief outline of Margaret's own childhood and her adolescent efforts to educate herself, drawing largely on readings recommended by Genlis, the book continues through to her marriage, her children's early and adolescent education, and ends with the benefits that the children gained in adulthood from their education. This book is not limited to a biography, as each section on the daily business of education is interspersed with a discussion and comparison of contemporary education authors and other writers, the values they espoused, which ones Margaret followed and why. It also draws on valuable surviving Chinnery documents which trace the Chinnery children's education, Margaret's correspondence with Genlis and a comprehensive catalogue of the Chinnery library. The book offers a unique opportunity to follow a real family from cradle to grave, and provides an intriguing illustration, at an individual level, of a female-crafted education embedded in Enlightenment values.

This book will be of great interest to postgraduate students and scholars researching the history and philosophy of education as well as women in the Enlightenment.

1 Family and education

DOI: 10.4324/9781003252146-2

Margaret Chinnery was born Margaret Tresilian, the eldest of three daughters of Leonard Tresilian and his wife Margaret. Her mother was the eldest daughter of Henry Holland senior of Fulham, a builder who was involved in building speculation in Mayfair and St James’s in the mid-eighteenth century. Her uncle, Henry Holland junior, was a property developer, who laid out the West End of London. Her father was a wealthy silk mercer in Covent Garden. He owned two contiguous houses in Chandos Street, one for his business and the other for his family, and also the freehold property behind for his coachhouse. He is listed in various London directories as a mercer of 9 Chandos Street, Covent Garden up to 1776 and at 10 Chandos Street from 1778 to 1785. By eighteenth-century definition, both her father and grandfather would have been considered gentlemen.

Margaret was born on 16 October 1766 in her maternal grandparents’ home in Church Row, Fulham,¹ where her parents went in late summer to escape the city heat. Four weeks later, on 13 November, she was christened at the parish church, All Saints, where her name is inscribed on the church baptism register under the heading ‘Baptisms on the Fulham Side’.² Her childhood, however, was spent in the parish of St Paul, Covent Garden. The family house stood in the widest part of Chandos Street and was a fairly typical middle-class city house of the day, with three storeys, a cellar kitchen and garret accommodation front and back for servants. The original house had burned down in 1772 when Margaret was six, and the description of the new house comes from the Chinnery family’s legal papers.³

Margaret’s mother was from a god-fearing family and would have performed her pre-ordained wifely duties, as spelled out in one of the rare early eighteenth-century conduct books that was available to her, John Newbery’s The Accomplish’d Housewife (1745). Her allegiances would have been, in descending order of importance, towards God, the king, her husband and her children. Her most important duty, she was told, was to ensure that the hours of prayer were as regular as those of meals. Being the daughter of a father who had been a church warden, Mrs Tresilian would have followed these strictures. It seems likely, too, that a significant number of hours in Mrs Tresilian’s day were devoted to music. There had been a fine harpsichord in the home where Leonard Tresilian grew up, a grand villa at Parson’s Green.⁴ When Leonard sold the family home on old Mrs Tresilian’s death, he sold the harpsichord too, presumably because his wife already owned one. It was no doubt Margaret’s mother who fostered in her the deep love of music, which she shared with Genlis, and which defined her adult life. The parish of St Paul might have had squalid living conditions for many, but the middle-class gentry enjoyed an over-endowment of ‘professors of the liberal and polite arts and sciences’.⁵ It was probably from one of these that young Margaret, perhaps at the age of six or seven, took her first music lessons. It is even possible that, in unknowing prescience, Mrs Tresilian attended the 1773 Soho concert of the promising young Piedmontese musician Giovanni Battista Viotti, who, after a stellar career in Paris, where Genlis knew and admired him, would later travel to Britain and form a lifelong bond with Margaret Chinnery. Margaret’s love of music as an adult was sincere rather than merely fashionable and was a subject that she studied and understood better than most women of her time.

Although as an adult Margaret believed that her education had been woefully inadequate, her early upbringing had probably been supervised by her mother, until she died, with loving care. Her mother would have cultivated in her religious feelings, and might have employed a French governess, chosen from among the many Huguenot refugees who had come to London early in the century. This would explain Margaret’s effortless fluency as an adult. And if the governess followed the Accomplish’d Housewife’s advice, she would have been taught manners, been read to and had her natural curiosity exploited. The book, citing the Roman orator and educator Quintilian, advised making these activities a game rather than a lesson, recommending for little children that books be considered ‘as agreeable Amusements to them, as their Play-things’.⁶ This was an idea that Genlis advocated, and Locke before her, and one that Margaret would use on her own children.

The young Margaret would also have been taught writing by a specialised master, or penman, who visited his pupils at home, and also attended at boarding schools. He would have given her passages to copy that contained ‘some rule of life, or some maxim that inculcates virtue’.⁷ Margaret’s future father-in-law and his father before him were writing masters and the latter published a beautiful example of such a work, entitled The Compendious Emblematist (1738), a splendid calligraphic pattern book with a moralising aphorism on every right-hand page.⁸ When Margaret’s future father-in-law, William Chinnery junior, published his own book, Writing and Drawing made Easy, he wrote in the Preface that it was ‘humbly proposed as an assistant to school-masters’, and that most of the ‘moral copies’ were first written by his father, and would save masters the trouble of writing their own for their young pupils.⁹ The Chinnerys (father and son) advertised themselves in the Universal Director of 1763 as private teachers of writing and accompts (book-keeping).¹⁰ Their work was so good, according to one of their colleagues, that it could be mistaken for engraving.¹¹ Margaret Chinnery’s hand was indeed neat and regular, and her letters well-formed, so there is no doubt that she would have learned from such a master, whether a Chinnery or not.

Margaret was nine years old when her mother died in January 1776.¹² The death of her mother had a profound impact on the rest of her life, and was responsible for the bitter words she wrote to her mentor Madame de Genlis in Paris in 1802, ‘I was without a mother, without guidance, ignorant, and badly educated’.¹³ Less than fourteen months after his wife’s death Leonard Tresilian married the thirty-five-year-old spinster Elizabeth Dovee Fawson from Saffron Hill, Holborn.¹⁴ Miss Fawson was a wealthy woman, who brought to the marriage assets in property, annuities, and South Sea and Bank of England stock.¹⁵ She was apparently also well educated, with an interest in the sciences, for she is listed as a subscriber to the Compendious System of Astronomy (1797) by Mrs Margaret Bryan, who ran a girls’ school in Blackheath, where she taught the atypical subjects astronomy and natural philosophy. Tresilian’s marriage was of brief duration, was probably unhappy, and ended in 1783.¹⁶ Margaret’s relationship with her stepmother appears to have been distant and she had nothing to do with her after the separation. It was probably after the death of her own mother that Margaret was sent to school, a fact mentioned by her in a letter to her son.¹⁷ According to a contemporary upper-class writer, Lady Mary Hamilton, who published a five-volume work, Letters from the Duchess de Crui, on the character and duties of the female sex, being sent away to school at that time was a normal state of affairs for both boys and girls, and the curriculum was more or less fixed:

At the age of six or seven years […] the boys in general are sent to the grammar-school, and the girls to boarding schools, in which case, the latter are instructed in dancing, music, drawing, the French and Italian languages, and other accomplishments, according to the humour and ability of the parents, or genius and inclination of the children.¹⁸

It is clear from the above statement that girls were not given a challenging curriculum. Indeed, the standard of education provided at girls’ schools was in general poor. There was no established system, and each school ran its own programme, with a varying number of girls of different ages, in premises that may or may not have been hygienic. Schools promised to give daughters all the accomplishments (i.e. music, dancing and drawing), knowing that this was what most parents wanted. Parents were usually attracted by schools away from the smog of London, in rural locations such as Kensington, Chelsea, Islington or Bloomsbury, many of which were French run or at least employed French masters, for a knowledge of the French language was de rigueur for a lady of good breeding. The author of a 1760 book on educating girls, The Polite Lady, claimed that French had become ‘so much the language of the fashionable world, that they who cannot read and write, and even speak it, on occasion, must make a very awkward figure in polite company, and be frequently put to the blush’.¹⁹ It is not known which school Margaret attended, but presumably it was somewhere in Middlesex, which had space and clean air. Whichever school was chosen, the core subjects taught would have been much the same, with accompts, geography and chronology included at the better schools.

Although books on female education published around this time criticised the practice of teaching women only polite accomplishments, they persisted in warning parents against giving their daughters too much learning. This was a fine line to tread, but it was one that was so ingrained in eighteenth-century thinking, both male and female, that only a very few schools wishing to attract pupils from well-to-do families dared to encourage girls to do more than skim the surface of the subjects they studied. This was something that Margaret Chinnery, when she herself became a mother, strongly took issue with. It accounts for her belief that she was ignorant and ill-educated. An 1809 letter to her son at Oxford contains the only explicit reference to her school education. In advising him on how to study logic (first grasp the general principles, then move on to the specifics), she cites the example of young children who can draw eyes and noses and mouths perfectly, but have no idea how to put them together so as to form a face. She remembers that when she first learned geography at school

the master followed a plan that was precisely the reverse, and made me learn the names of all the towns rivers and mountains of each country before I had even seen either a globe or a map of the world!²⁰

As a result, she did not make any progress in geography for years afterwards. These drawbacks were viewed by Margaret as serious defects in her education. The words written to her mentor in 1802, are those of a woman searingly conscious of her shortcomings, especially before such a towering education authority as Madame de Genlis.

Margaret’s school years probably came to an end in 1782, just before she turned seventeen. It was then that she read Genlis’s education novel Adèle et Théodore. Twenty years later she would tell Genlis of the enjoyment she derived from the book and of its impact on her life:

I was sixteen when I was lent the book. I devoured it, and for my whole life I have given thanks to God for this sign of his favour. Since that time I have been listening to [the author’s] voice with extreme veneration, and I have been made delightfully aware of the boundless gratitude I owe her.²¹

As mentioned above, the reading of this education novel drove home Margaret’s sense of her own inadequacy. In David Hume’s essay ‘Of the Ri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Family and education
• 2 Early married life
• 3 The education journal
• 4 Paris during the Peace
• 5 The Golden Age
• 6 Oxford
• 7 Caroline grown up
• 8 Glory achieved
• 9 George’s career
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index