“So much danger about the school”: A literary portrait of a mid-Victorian racially-minoritized woman educator from a global critical race perspective

Few historical accounts exist of racially-minoritized women working in mid-Victorian English schools, a silence that stems from the political construction of archives more than their absence. The cultural and literary imagination is therefore necessary to gain insight into their experiences. Drawing on a critical global race perspective, I examine a character in Anthony Trollope’s novel, Dr. Wortle’s School, named Ella Beaufourt Peacocke. She is an American Creole woman working as a school matron at an elite primary school. Trollope employs Peacocke to provide a familiar lesson to White British Victorian readers: they bear responsibility for managing racialized populations across the globe to advance the modern/colonial world-system. Through analysing this character, as well as the racial thought of Trollope, I illuminate the processes of gendered racialization that would have threatened racially-minoritized women as they attempted to perform their responsibilities in English schools during this period.