Mary Atkinson Maurice

Mary Atkinson Maurice (1797–1858) was a British teacher, educationist, and writer. With her encouragement, Mary's brother F. D. Maurice, founded Queen's College, London, of which she was a generous sponsor.

Life
Mary Atkinson Maurice was born at Kirby Cane, Norfolk, to Priscilla (née Hurry) and Michael Maurice, Unitarian minister and schoolmaster. She was educated by her father, and was gifted in languages and literature. As she grew older, she began to help teach her younger sisters, and was regarded as extremely practical.

The family moved to Southampton in 1825, where Maurice–helped by her sister, Priscilla–opened her own school to help her family financially. Inspired by the ideas of educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, she had spent time at a Pestalozzian-based school in Cheam, run by Elizabeth and Charles Mayo. Now an Anglican, hers was a church school. It prospered, later prompting a move to Reading, where Maurice and her sister Esther ran the school for ten years. When Esther married in 1844, Mary gave up the school and moved to London.

In 1829, Maurice anonymously published an educational manual titled Aids to Development, intended for mothers. In 1837, she published Conversations on the Human Frame, and the Five Senses. In its preface she wrote:"In commencing a course of lessons on Natural History, the question presents itself, What is the right plan to be pursued? Is not the proper starting point the wonderful construction of our own frame, together with the curious instruments by which the mental powers are called into exercise; and should not this study always precede that of the habits and manners of other animals?"Once in London, Maurice became active in the work of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution (GBI), on whose committee her brother Frederick Denison Maurice, sat. The Institution aimed to improve the situation of governesses, and Mary Atkinson Maurice believed that education (leading to greater respect for the profession) was key to this. In 1847, she published Mothers and Governesses and two years later Governess Life: its Trials, Duties and Encouragements (1849). Maurice urged governesses to take up opportunities for education, promoting Queen's College, Harley Street, which had opened in 1848 under the auspices of the GBI. Her brother was its principal. She wrote that: "Every young person ought to study, with the idea that she will in all probability have to teach what she is now acquiring." She became a generous subscriber to Queen's College, as well as supporting the work of another of the GBI's initiatives, the Asylum for Aged Governesses.

Mary Atkinson Maurice died of peritonitis, in Great Yarmouth, on 4 October 1858. She was buried in St Nicholas's Church.