Chapter 5 — Lowood; Helen Burns by the fire

Jane leaves Gateshead before dawn on a January morning, alone, on a long-distance coach traveling north. The journey takes a full day. She is ten years old and has never been outside the house before. She is given bread and cheese in a small inn at noon and arrives at Lowood Institution at nine in the evening, in driving rain, exhausted. A teacher takes her in, gives her a piece of bread and a cup of cold water, and shows her to a long dormitory where she falls asleep beside another small girl in a narrow bed.

The bell rings before light the next morning. The girls dress in the dark in stiff, identical brown frocks. They wash in basins of half-frozen water. They go down to the schoolroom for prayers and breakfast: porridge, in heavy bowls, served by a teacher with a face Jane will come to recognize as Miss Scatcherd's. The porridge has been burnt. The teachers exchange a look; the girls eat what they can; most of the food is taken away uneaten. The chapter establishes the daily fact of Lowood — cold, hunger, unrelenting routine, an institution run with religious vocabulary and starved discipline.

In the long recess outside, Jane wanders along the garden wall. She sees, sitting on a bench by the warm fire-wall, a tall older girl alone with a book — Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson. Jane approaches her. The older girl, neither friendly nor unfriendly, answers her questions plainly: this is Lowood; Mr. Brocklehurst is the treasurer; Miss Temple is the superintendent; the girls are clergymen's orphans; the food is generally as it was today. Her name is Helen Burns. Jane stays beside her. The next chapter is the first long conversation she has ever had with another child as an equal.