Mr Brocklehurst, a do-gooder?

Authors Avatar

Mr Brocklehurst is a Christian “do-gooder” who wants to educate children. To what extent do you agree with this statement?

Mr Brocklehurst, in Charlotte Brontë ’s Jane Eyre, is the headmaster of Lowood Institution; a clergyman who feels like his mission in life is to “save” the young girls at Lowood and to point them in the direction of God, and all that is good and proper. I strongly disagree with the statement that Mr Brocklehurst is a Christian “do-gooder” who wants to educate children, and I shall be exploring this further within this essay.

Schools in the Victorian era were expensive, if you were a family with little income and couldn’t afford the fees of a decent school, there was always the option of Charity Schools. This is what the Lowood Institution is, a Charity School for girls whose parents could not afford to send them to a better school.  These schools were unpleasant, for example the windows were placed high to deter the children from getting distracted by the outside world, this meant a great problem in ventilation and the lack of fresh air often caused children to faint. Corporal punishment was favoured over any other, the “Dunce” caps placed on the heads of pupils in which their progress was not deemed as good enough. Teachers enjoyed humiliating the pupils as punishment, shown in Jane Eyre when Brocklehurst forces the young girl to stand on a chair for around half an hour just for dropping her slate. Pupils were beaten for stepping out of line, or breaking rules, being expected to “be seen and not heard”. Conditions were often unhygienic and disease spread quickly, causing many of deaths in the children. Two of Brontë’s sisters were killed by an outbreak of tuberculosis, her image of school perhaps not the most pleasant after her own experiences. Her image of Brocklehurst could have been based largely on the headmaster of her school at this time, considering Jane Eyre is semi autobiographical.

Join now!

In chapter 4, when we first meet Brocklehurst, Jane describes him as a “black pillar”. In the bible it tells Christians to be like “pillars of light”. The colour black conjures dark, evil, threatening imagery, completely contradicting who Brocklehurst claims to be, a good Christian man wanting to help the souls of young girls. He is shown as callous and lifeless, “grim face”, “carved mask”. The “mask” it speaks of could be the mask he presents to other adults, that he is running Lowood for the girls, and for God, Jane hinting at this mask to show Brocklehurst is not ...

This is a preview of the whole essay