EDITORS: Photo available on request.

ANN ARBOR—No, it wasn’t money that eight-year-old Elizabeth Barras wanted from her parents in Philadelphia during her term in a boarding school from 1838 to 1840. It was food and specific items of clothing.

Attending the Bethlehem Female Seminary in Bethlehem, Pa., where the nieces of George Washington and Ethan Allen also had attended, Elizabeth’s letters to her parents don’t reveal much about her education, but much about her personal tastes in foods and style.

From a collection of 24 letters at the University of Michigan’s Clements Library comes a revelation that the wishes of a schoolgirl may have changed greatly since the early 19th century and that maybe there is not all that much change after all.

“Elizabeth Barras reported relatively little to her parents, who were evidently annoyed that she had not written longer newsier letters,” says Barbara DeWolfe, a Clements curator. “She mentions only a few classes, such as German, music and Bible instruction, talks about sleigh rides and walks along the Lehigh River, and apple-picking and planting violets and roses in her garden.”

Barras shared a room with 60-70 girls whose days began sharply at 5:45 a.m., followed by a breakfast of bread and butter at 6:45. Sometimes the classes attended musical evenings and lectures on natural philosophy.

A term bill of Elizabeth Barras”We learn from her term bill that she took French and drawing and that she also probably studied reading, writing and grammar, history, arithmetic and sewing,” says DeWolfe. “But this information comes from other sources and not her letters.”

Instead, her letters asked for candy, cakes, oysters, clothes, bonnets, combs, broaches, ribbons, steel pens, and leads for her pencil.

What foods did a young girl crave in an age without potato chips, corn chips, cheese curls, French fries, and pizza? The list of “snack food” requests is long and includes pineapples, oranges, prunes, apples, raisins, grapes, peaches, pears, cantaloupes along with mince pies, French Nogo candy, cocoa nut cake, jelly cake, licorice, almond candy and sweet chocolate. Running a close second to all of these were nuts, including chestnuts, hickory nuts, groundnuts, almonds, pickled oysters with crackers, oyster pie and crabs.

“She tried as best she could to steer her parents away from sending too much fruit,” says DeWolfe, “and instead to pack more candies and cakes. For her Christmas box, she wanted her favorite items: pound cake, jelly cakes, bonbons, small cucumber pickles, a large jar of pickled oysters, calf’s-foot jelly and mince pies.”

Barras’ request for clothing ran pretty much along the lines as that of today’s female students. She wanted clothing like her peers: boots like those of Charlotte’s and a cape like May Marshes’. But she decided not to trust her mother’s taste in choosing a warm-weather bonnet so wrote her parents that she wished to pick it out herself when she came home for summer vacation.

While Elizabeth’s letters tell of her wants and needs, DeWolfe says none of them “give a breath of a hint about troubles at school that led to her expulsion in February 1840.” The last letter in the collection is one from Principal John Kummer who writes that he regrets that he will have to “solicit her speedy removal,” because she is disturbing the peace, disobedient, disorderly, setting a bad example, willful, unkind, insubordinate, injurious to her companions, and a pain to her teachers, who were “almost worn out by her repeated disobedience.”

That same condition was described by a Massachusetts teacher writing to her sister when she described her students as “50 little dirty, ragged urchins, ignorant, self-willed and vicious” and the profession of teacher as “sufficient of itself to destroy every trace of whatever is lovable or desirable in the soul.”

Burnout in 1849.