DAME SCHOOLS.

The article presents information on dame schools. The article scrutinizes allusions to be culled from literary, biographical and artistic sources. One of the philosophers comments that the dame school appears so frequently in English literature both poetry and prose that it must have played a very important part in the beginnings of elementary education in England. The quest for dame schools before 1800 is fascinating. Two early references are both associated with English writer Samuel Johnson. Johnson quotes this in his Dictionary of 1755 in definition of schooldame that sending little children of two or three years old to a schooldame, without any design of learning one letter, but only to keep them, out of fire and water. In 1714 was born the boy who was later to adapt to the poetic convention of an earlier age some memories of his first schoolmistress. When William Shenstone thus commemorated Sarah Lloyd he established a romantic tradition which was followed by many other writers. Shenstone, along with Richard Jago, future clergyman and minor poet, attended a dame school at Halesowen conducted by Sarah Lloyd.