page_title: Cowan Bridge School
section_title: The school described by Charlotte Brontë
hierarchical_section_title: Cowan Bridge School / The school described by Charlotte Brontë
caption_attribution_description: English: The Bronte sisters' plaque, Cowan Bridge
context_page_description: Cowan Bridge School refers to the Clergy Daughters' School, a school mainly for the daughters of middle class clergy founded in the 1820s. It was first located in the village of Cowan Bridge in the English county of Lancashire, where it was attended by the Brontë sisters. Two of the sisters, Maria and Elizabeth died from tuberculosis in the aftermath of a typhoid outbreak at the school. In the 1830s the school moved to Casterton, a few miles away, where it was amalgamated with another girls' school. The institution survived to the twenty-first century as Casterton School.
context_section_description: This punishment is described by Charlotte in Jane Eyre and reports by Mrs Gaskell confirm this ill-treatment. Furthermore, when Mr Williams, reader at Smith, Elder & Co, congratulated her for the narrative vigour of her description, Charlotte, unusually vehemently, insisted that it was true, and that furthermore she had deliberately avoided telling everything so as not to be accused of exaggeration. Indeed, it is  difficult to think  that Charlotte, having  persistently repeated for twenty  years the stories about the bad treatment inflicted on her sisters, could have exaggerated or invented them. For example, there is the description, given by an unidentified witness to Mrs  Gaskell, of the little Maria who, very ill and having just received a suction cup placed on her right side by the doctor, rose suddenly on seeing  Miss Andrews enter the room, and began to get dressed. Before she could slip into some clothing, however, the mistress pulled her violently into the centre of the room, scolding her for negligence and disorder, and punished her for being late, upon which Maria descended from the dormitory although she could hardly stand up. According to Mrs Gaskell, the witness spoke as if she saw it yet, and her whole face flashed out undying indignation.
  The hardest days were Sundays. In all weather, without adequate protective clothing, the pupils had to walk more than three miles (five km) over the fields to their pastor's church to attend the Sunday service. As the distance did not permit a return to the school, they were given a cold snack at the back of the church before evensong, then finally walked back to school. On arriving, cold and famished after the long walk, they were given a single slice of bread spread with rancid butter. Their Sunday devotions ended with long recitations from the catechism, learning long biblical texts by heart, and hearing a sermon of which the main theme was often eternal damnation. The Revd. Carus Wilson, unlike Patrick Brontë, was a Calvinist Evangelist who believed in predestination, and consequently in the damnation of the majority of souls. His preachings and writings, in the form of small manuals for the use of the pupils, were full of rhetorical force and other effects designed to make an impression on their young readers' minds.
caption: A dedication plaque on the building.
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