Still in search of ‘my’ Victorian ladies, I headed for RCS Archives. Thanks to my British Newspaper Archive subscription, I had already ascertained that two individuals had a connection with the old Athenaeum, but I wanted to dig deeper, to find out exactly which classes the ladies attended, and for how long.
I went through annual reports and prospecti, until I had satisfied myself that I had gleaned all that there was to glean. At different times, the examination results and scholarship awards were listed in different places; fortunately, I needed to search less than a decade, so I know I haven’t missed any mentions. I can’t claim to have unearthed a wealth of information, but I did flesh out what I already knew.
At this point, even though I’d been advised that the nineteenth-century minutes of meetings really wouldn’t show me anything detailed about individual students, I decided to flick through just a couple of these minutes to see what exactly was there. I was in for a surprise. They had discovered that some of their employees were not receiving a ‘living wage’, and resolved to look into this. I had assumed that a ‘living wage’ was modern terminology, but evidently not!
And, I read, ‘the lavatories really need to be sorted out.’ The mind boggles. ‘My’ ladies had left the Athenaeum by that stage, I think, so hopefully they hadn’t been inconvenienced by the unsatisfactory conveniences!
Stock image of archival stacks free from Pixabay
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 