In 1879 Lotti made her first venture beyond the family in Doughty Street and the cousins in the Isle of Wight. She was entered as a pupil in the Gower Street School. The school was not more than twenty minutes’ walk away up Guildford Street and past the British Museum, so that she was able to come home for her mid-day dinner, but the headmistress, Miss Lucy Harrison, made a profound impression on her, which might be described as a revelation of a kind.
Lucy Harrison left a strong mark, in fact, on several thousands of young girls who passed through her hands. It couldn’t be said of her – as it was of Miss Buss, at the North London Collegiate – that she was ‘a great educator who should never have been allowed to come into contact with children’. There are very many tributes to her good influence, intellectual and moral – she would never have distinguished between the two – but there was, in Octavia Hill’s words, ‘something Royal’ about her which perhaps exempted her from criticism. She may not always have known what she was doing.
She had been born in 1844, in Yorkshire, of Quaker parents, the youngest of eight, and grew up into a top-whipping, boat-building tomboy, such as many large mid-Victorian families produced. A good shot with a stone, she felt, when she killed her first robin, ‘after the first start of joy in the success of the action, a revulsion like the horrors of Cain’ when she held the warm body in her hands. When she threw her favourite pocketknife into the water (apparently by mistake) ‘I felt’ – she wrote – ‘as if I had thrown my heart in.’ Hers was the excess of guilt attributed to Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, or Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, or Jo in Little Women, when their behaviour was not only passionate, but masculine. Lucy Harrison had to come to terms with it in order to control her own life and those of others.
She was educated in France and Germany and at the liberal and unsectarian Bedford College. Languages came easily to her, history and poetry were her passion. Coming as she did from a broadminded Ruskinian background, she prayed to be serviceable. This meant the Octavia Hill Settlement, temperance clubs, the Suffragists, prisoners, exiles. Mazzini, when she visited him in his wretched rooms, gave her a cigar which she kept as a souvenir till it fell to pieces. There was still a wealth of undirected energy which had to be worked off in heavy carpentry and amateur dramatics. Then, when she was twenty-two, she was asked to help out at the Bedford School, then attached to the college. In 1868 the college gave up the school, and it moved to Gower Street, with Lucy Harrison as assistant.
Children adored Miss Harrison. She kept them in order because she never expected to be disobeyed. All, apparently, felt when she stood in her favourite attitude, looking upwards with her hands clasped behind her, that what she said was ‘given from above’. For these youngers ones she evolved an effective question-and-answer method, which she later published as Social Geography for Teachers and Infants.
Here is a picture of a church. Where is it standing? – ‘In the middle of a churchyard’ – Sometimes there is grass round the church, with trees and plants. How is the church separated from the street or road? – ‘By iron railings’ – When you walk up the steps or along the path, how do you get into the church? ‘Through the door’ – Sometimes when people die they are taken into the church which they attended while they were alive. How does the bell ring then? – ‘Very slowly. It is said to toll.’
In 1875 the headmistress, Miss Bolton, retired, and Lucy Harrison took over. Worshipped by all the visiting staff, men as well as women, she had no problems of organization: concentrating now on the senior girls, she made them feel what education had meant to her – an uplifting emotional experience. ‘You need not call anything a luxury that you can share.’ They were to love music and poetry. A book, even a book’s title, is a door into another mind, letting in light and fresh air, and in the pain and joy of poetry the soul has the chance to meet itself. As to what they read – and she read aloud to them untiringly – it must be what went deepest and lifted highest – Shakespeare, Dante in Cary’s translation, Blake, Wordsworth, and her own favourites, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, the Brownings, Coventry Patmore, Alice Meynell. Carlyle, describing the hero as poet, insists that we ourselves have Dante’s imagination, though with a weaker faculty, when we shudder at the Inferno. This kind of thing gives endless scope to the teacher, and can end up as something like sentimentality. There was in fact a certain confusion in Miss Harrison’s interpretations between the windswept heights which Dante and Shakespeare were then thought to share with the Authorised Version, and the indulgence of hot tears in the dark. A reading which all her pupils heard often, and never forgot, was from Alice Meynell’s Preludes of 1875 – the sonnet To a Daisy, which ends
Thou little veil for so great mystery
When shall I penetrate all things and thee,
And then look back? For this I must abide,
Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled
Literally between me and the world.
Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,
And from a poet’s side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God’s side even on such a simple thing?
This strange double perspective, the poet’s corpse buried beneath the daisy’s roots and at the same time contemplating the earth from God’s side, wouldn’t have been strange to Ruskin (who called the last lines some of the finest in modern poetry) nor to Christina Rossetti, nor, evidently, to the Gower Street girls. With all Miss Harrison’s liberality and fresh air went a certain morbidity. But hard work was called for, because it develops intellect, and intellect forms thought, and thought forms character. In this vein Miss Harrison returned to Carlyle, and to the idea of the heroic life as a model to imitate. She would speak of Sir Philip Sidney, and the girls sat and thought of Miss Harrison.
At the end of the summer term there was an Open Day, when the reports were read and there was music, and a French or German play. Miss Harrison approved of amateur dramatics, though not of low mimicry. Lotti, a born impersonator who could ‘do’ anybody, and did mimic, perhaps in a low way, Professor Kinkel, the venerable lecturer in geography, would not have been encouraged to take part. But as a brilliant pianist with a delicate touch she was needed for the concert, and, at this stage of her life, still frankly enjoyed being told that she played well.
The trouble was that she would only learn what interested her, and a number of things, including geography, didn’t. But in spite of these failures her one motive was to please her headmistress. In her plain black jacket and waistcoat, with her short hair and calm gracious voice, Miss Harrison brought into the room ‘the sense of august things’. Dissent would be shameful, and the ‘inexpressible charm of her presence’ made it impossible. There were no rules, as such, at Gower Street, although there were many precepts, from ‘if a pudding is begun with a fork, the help of a spoon must not be called in half-way through’ to Coventry Patmore’s
Love wakes men once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy heads and look;
And lo, what one sweet page can teach
They read with joy, then shut the book.
Lotti could not dress like Miss Harrison. She had of course, at the age of fourteen, no choice as to what she wore. She had a black-and-white checked dress, with a plain silver chain and cross, for weekdays, and a brown dress with a gold cross on Sundays. But she was allowed to keep her hair short, like Miss Harrison’s.
Her best friends were sober, hard-working girls. The three Chicks – Elsie, Margaret, and Harriet, from Ealing – seemed set to become teachers. Ethel Oliver was the daughter of Professor Daniel Oliver, the curator of Kew Herbarium, and a friend of Ruskin and the painter Arthur Hughes. Maggie Browne, also