“So Much Danger about the School”: A Literary Portrait of a Mid-Victorian Racially-Minoritised Woman Educator from a Global Critical Race Perspective

Few historical accounts exist of racially-minoritised 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 Beaufort 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 racialised 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 racialisation that would have threatened racially-minoritised women as they attempted to perform their responsibilities in English schools during this period.