Teaching during the 1840s was a thankless and under-funded profession. The country’s attitude to it was dismally reflected in the fact that, in the England of 1840, £30,000 was allocated for national education, while £70,000 was expended upon improving the kennels and stabling at Windsor Castle. Teachers, unlike the clergy, received no pensions; as a result, the church received a great many more worthy applicants than did the schools, which made no special provisions for anybody who did not belong to the gentry class.
The scheme which Lady Byron devised was simple. If teachers were known to receive a family allowance – Annabella had in mind one that would benefit both widows and orphans – their status would instantly improve. And thus, as she argued in a long and earnest letter to Harriet Siddons, the profession would come to be held in higher regard and ‘persons of a higher cast of mind’ would aspire to become teachers.
Lady Byron had chosen her correspondent with care. Harriet was asked to show Annabella’s long letter – it bore the look of a meditated formal proposal – to her brother-in-law. George Combe, as Lady Byron was perfectly aware, had become one of the most admired and influential figures in the world of progressive education. The celebrated author of The Constitution of Man was a man who would be able to make things happen.
In London, throughout the 1840s, Annabella oversaw the gradual transformation of Ealing Grove into a model school (one that she helped to replicate on a larger scale at Ockham). At Battersea Training College, Lady Byron’s fellow reformer, Dr James Kay, trained several of the former Ealing pupils to become future head-masters. Each was taught to follow the Fellenberg principle that Annabella had introduced: the basics of a formal education were to be combined with a training in technical skills that would enable graduates to earn themselves a living in an increasingly mechanised society.
As in London, so in Leicestershire. By 1840, at least five schools had been set up in the area of Kirkby Mallory. Each school was subsidised by Lady Byron. Each followed the admired Swiss model. In Leicester itself, Annabella helped to fund the city’s first public hospital. At Kirkby, Charles Noel was urged by Lady Byron to improve the cottages and to arrange that each family should have its own vegetable allotment. More impressively, her loyal land agent was instructed to argue for the rights of those families as if he himself stood in their shoes. When a weaving community faced hardship in one of the poorest villages on the estate, Annabella stepped forward to offer funds. When Charles Noel deferred action, she scolded him (‘The great thing is not to delay as the people are starving.’). Urged to reduce the wages of a retired stableman, Lady Byron refused. (‘I do not like the idea of lessening Pegg’s subsistence now that he is old and infirm.’)
Lady Byron had rounded off the improvements to her family estate, in the summer of 1840, by paying a rare personal visit to Kirkby. Her specific purpose was to inspect a new village school for girls that had been created from a converted cottage. Habitually reticent, Lady Byron was overcome by the welcome she received: ‘So many mothers came that it seemed each child had two Mothers!’ Annabella reported to Harriet Siddons, adding that the warmth of her reception encouraged her so much that she had managed to deliver a little speech with absolute confidence: ‘an odd thing in a shy person . . . I acquitted myself well.’ Her reticence returned in force a few weeks later, when she learned that Benjamin Haydon was working on a grand group portrait of the 500 British and American abolitionists who had recently been addressed in London by the elderly Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce’s sturdiest ally in Britain’s campaign against slavery. Haydon did not warm to Lady Byron. Nevertheless, impressed by the evidence of suffering that he saw etched into the wan face of one of the very few Englishwomen who had been permitted to attend, Haydon quietly overruled Annabella’s request to be omitted from the portrait and placed her well to the fore.
Ada had been scolding her mother – as she frequently did – for putting a frail constitution at risk through overwork. (Ada, as her mother might have countered, was a fine one to talk.) In March, there had been a brief collapse; by July 1840, Annabella was exhausted. It was at this point that Lady Byron decided it would do her good to spend a few months out of the country. George Combe’s brother, Andrew, was too busy to accompany her to Paris; instead Dr Fitton, an elderly geologist, was recruited to act as Lady Byron’s escort.
It was that exact moment – and it would be interesting to know just how the news of Lady Byron’s vacation plans had reached Pontivy, a remote and tiny village in Brittany – that Annabella’s relatively carefree mind was diverted into a new and dangerous channel of concern. Word reached her from Pontivy, where Augusta Leigh’s 26-year-old runaway daughter Elizabeth Medora was living with her third illicit child, Marie, that the young woman was destitute, dying and in despair. Omitted from this harrowing report was the fact that still on hand, living only four miles away, was a wife-free
