I found this one on the wall of the tea room at Franklin House, a spinster and governess!*

Charlotte’s brother ran a boys school at Franklin Village, but she “was forced to gain employment. This she found at the Archer family house of Northbury near Longford” (pictured above). At first she worked as “a governess for the young Alice Archer, once Alice married, Charlotte continued in Mrs. Archer’s employment to run the household, organising servants, children and visitors”. In the last years of her life Charlotte lived with her sister-in-law and later alone in the house where her brother had once had his school.

Daily Telegraph, 24 June 1881

The quotes are from a page that used to be on the National Trust website and now on a panel in the tea room at Franklin House. Although that has now disappeared from the Trust’s site, you can still read it with the Way Back Machine. This gives more about Charlotte’s life based on extracts from letters written to her nephew in New Zealand.

She died in 1888. Here is her will.

The Colonist, 24 March 1888

Franklin House, Franklin Village, formerly Hawkes’ Academy.

Daily Telegraph, 28 May 1888

*I had to find one eventually
**Because only boys went to school see, or so the guide told the visitors. (I say told as I like to think she’s stopped.)

Image at top: Longford, John T. Collins, from the State Library of Victoria