How to Create the Perfect Wife (17 page)

Accounts differ wildly on the state of domestic harmony in the little household in Avignon. One writer, who knew Sabrina in later life, painted a poignant picture of a happy trio. According to this view, Day could not look upon his “two charming foundlings” without “a mixture of admiration and pity” in the knowledge that he had plucked them from a life of hardship and now held their fates in his hands. Day, apparently, “could never see these two young girls without melting into tenderness; and this sensibility towards them brought out in him a softness of voice, a tenderness of manner, when he spoke to them that touched them so much that they, in return, could never reply to him without eyes full of tears in recognition of his kindness.” Edgeworth, too, went to great pains to emphasize that Day treated the orphans with unremitting kindness so that both of them were always eager to do his bidding.

Another contemporary, however, who knew both Day and Sabrina at a later period, told quite a different story. According to this account, both girls quickly became fed up with their tutor and with each other. “They teized and perplexed him; they quarrelled, and fought incessantly; they sickened of the small-pox; they chained him to their bed-side by crying, and screaming if they were ever left a moment with any person who could not speak to them in English. . . . He was obliged to sit up with them many nights; to perform for them the lowest offices of assistance.” Finally, according to this version, Day was “heartily glad to separate the little squabblers.”

Yet while there may well have been times when the two girls bickered or grew petulant as they vied for the attentions of their teacher, as Day favored one pupil and then the other, the latter account is probably exaggerated. Sabrina and Lucretia were far too well trained by their Foundling Hospital upbringing to rebel quite so forcefully. And it is extremely unlikely that they came down with smallpox, the disease that had disfigured Thomas Day. Lucretia had been inoculated against the disease immediately on returning from her foster mother to the London Foundling Hospital,
in 1766, when she was seven, according to the charity’s records, and Sabrina had almost certainly undergone the same procedure in Shrewsbury.

By the spring of 1770, at any rate, Day—if not his pupils—had had enough of their French vacation. Homesick for English company and cooking, and even missing the country’s seasonal fogs and showers, Day escorted his wards back through France and across the Channel to London. Thoughtfully he brought back a gold-embroidered waistcoat for Edgeworth. He confessed that he was anxious that it might be “seized” at customs; the more likely prospect that his two wards might be seized by suspicious customs officials had apparently not entered his head.

Arriving back in London, Day immediately set about discarding the unwanted Lucretia. Sticking to the terms of the contract he and Bicknell had agreed to, he placed her as an apprentice in a milliner’s shop in Ludgate Hill and left her with a £400 farewell gift, which was a third of Day’s annual income. Worth nearly £60,000 ($96,000) today, it was a small fortune for a humble milliner’s apprentice and would certainly buy her a suitable husband. Lucretia would eventually make a happy marriage to a draper; she had not been so stupid after all. “In this situation,” Edgeworth would later write, “she went on contentedly, was happy, and made her husband happy, and is, perhaps, at this moment, comfortably seated with some of her grandchildren on her knees.” For Sabrina, however, the trials would continue.

Certain now that he had found the girl he could groom to become his perfect wife, Day determined to resume her education in earnest. Since he was still eager to shield his prize pupil from the vices of the metropolis and from prying eyes, he placed her in temporary accommodation with Bicknell’s mother, at a house in the countryside not far from London. In the meantime he set about finding a convenient home where they could live together discreetly while he continued the experiment. At last, in late spring 1770, Day took a twelve-month lease on a delightful house in a perfect location where he could devote himself to molding the teenage Sabrina to fulfill his future dreams.

SIX

ANNA AND HONORA

  
Lichfield, spring 1770
  

G
rowing up in the plush Bishop’s Palace in its prime position beside Lichfield Cathedral, Anna Seward had naturally come to dominate the social and intellectual life of the prosperous town. Her mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of the Reverend John Hunter, the tyrannical headmaster of Lichfield grammar school, who had beaten an education into Samuel Johnson. Although he had since escaped Lichfield for London, Dr. Johnson would always say that his knees quaked at the sight of his headmaster’s granddaughter with her striking resemblance to his former torturer. Educated at home, in a rather gentler fashion, by her own father, the Reverend Thomas Seward, Anna had grown up an intelligent and precocious child who at the age of three could recite Shakespeare and Milton. Since her father considered himself something of a poet, and had once declared his support for women’s education in a poem entitled “The Female Right to Literature,” the Reverend Seward taught Anna and her younger sister Sarah to appreciate the arts. After the family moved from Derbyshire to Lichfield when Anna was seven, on her father’s appointment as Canon Residentiary of the cathedral, she immersed herself in literary pursuits. The family’s home in the Bishop’s Palace—which the
bishop himself had vacated for even more salubrious accommodation elsewhere—had become the focus of learned Lichfield society.

Encouraged by her father, at nine Anna recited her early efforts at poetry for admiring guests at soirées in the drawing room. She found that she enjoyed writing poems almost as much as she liked being the center of attention. She was just thirteen when she came to the notice of Erasmus Darwin, who, on his arrival in Lichfield in 1756, moved into a house in the west end of The Close, which encircled the cathedral. As impressed by the confident teenager as she was by the exuberant physician, the two exchanged verses. Two years later, when Darwin announced that Anna’s poetry was even superior to her father’s, Canon Seward briskly decided that his daughter’s literary ambitions had gone far enough. A “female’s right to literature” was not, it seemed, to be taken quite so literally. Anna’s mother, meanwhile, fretted that too much education might jeopardize her strident daughter’s chances of marriage. Anna was promptly ordered to abandon her poems. Undaunted either by her parents’ qualms or the city’s veneration for its celebrated literary son Johnson, Anna refused to give up writing, in the conviction that her talents easily equaled those of any man.

Anna’s youth in the happy company of her sister Sarah was an “Edenic scene,” she would later say, made complete by the arrival in 1757, when Anna was fourteen, of five-year-old Honora Sneyd. The daughter of a prominent Lichfield family, Honora was adopted by the Sewards when her mother died and left her father unable to cope with eight young children. A pretty but fragile child, Honora grew close to Sarah, the quieter and gentler of the Seward sisters, and looked up rather in awe at the tall and forthright Anna. Spending their days in constant companionship, living more intimately than many Georgian husbands and wives, the three girls shared a suite of rooms at the rear of the palace, strolled arm in arm in the palace gardens and read aloud to each other on the palace terrace.

When Sarah died suddenly at the age of nineteen, Anna was distraught but compensated with bracing speed by anointing twelve-year-old Honora as her sister-substitute. Within days of her sister’s burial, Anna assured a
friend that Honora “more than supplied my Sally’s place.” Setting aside her grief, Anna plowed her considerable energies into polishing the teenage Honora’s learning and finessing her charms. Half afraid that Honora might be snatched away in death like her sister Sarah, Anna told a friend: “This child seems angel before she is woman; how consummate shall she be if she should be woman before she is actually angel!”

Through her twenties Anna attracted several proposals of marriage, but none of them met her exalted ideas of romantic love. Swatting them aside like troublesome flies, she poured her passions into poems and letters extolling the virtues of her “sweet Honora.” One poem, written in June 1769 to mark the twelfth anniversary of the arrival of the “lovely infant-girl,” celebrated their “Angelic Friendship”; a typical letter praised “the oval elegance of those delicate and beauteous contours.” As Honora blossomed into a beautiful, willowy and accomplished young woman, whose dainty features were framed by sleek dark hair, she too became a magnet for ardent young men beating a path to the palace door. Jealously guarding her protégée, Anna vetted them all with scrupulous care.

In eighteenth-century Britain, many female friends enjoyed intense relationships, which they celebrated in romantic terms. Some probably compensated for stiff and formal relations with parents by forging close bonds with same-sex friends. In one case, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby ran away from their families in Ireland to set up home together in Wales, where they would live in mutual harmony for more than fifty years. Known as the Ladies of Llangollen, they attracted visitors from far and wide who venerated their romantic story with never a hint that the friendship might be anything other than platonic. Anna Seward would become one of their greatest devotees, and she established close friendships with other women too. But Anna’s love—as she always described it—for Honora was by far the most intense.

Now twenty-seven, Anna presided over palace soirées with eighteen-year-old Honora at her side and reveled in her position as undisputed queen of Lichfield social life. With her acute eye for change and sharp ear for gossip, there was little that happened in Lichfield that escaped her notice. And so when two new arrivals slipped quietly into the neighborhood
in the spring of 1770, Anna was the first to know. Always on the lookout for a consummate man who would equal the “consummate” woman she had skillfully crafted, Seward surveyed the new residents with interest. An invitation to the palace soon followed.

Taking a year’s lease on a substantial villa called Stowe House, a discreet mile outside the city, Thomas Day brought Sabrina to Lichfield in late spring of 1770. With Edgeworth having dashed back to Ireland, as his father’s failing health took a turn for the worse, Day had decided to settle in Lichfield to live near his new friend Erasmus Darwin and his invigorating circle of freethinkers. It was a bold step. Until now he had kept his wife-training experiment under wraps, concealing Sabrina in London and then France with Lucretia and later, on her own, with John Bicknell’s mother in the countryside. Now, for the first time, he decided to live openly with his prize pupil in the full glare of gossipy Georgian society.

Lichfield was a shrewd choice. On his return from France Day had first gone to visit his mother and stepfather at Barehill. Although by rights he could have taken control of the property, his estate by inheritance, he could hardly bring his pretty young orphan to live in the family home to continue her wifely education. Lichfield, however, was far enough from his parental home to evade unwanted interest and far enough from London to remain outside the orbit of the scandal-obsessed newspapers, yet it was sufficiently lively to afford him all the pleasures of cultivated society.

Situated at the crossroads of the main coaching road from London to Chester and surrounded by the mills and potteries of the fast-encroaching industrial Midlands, the peaceful city in its fertile valley still retained an air of country charm and refined gentility. The two lakes, known as Minster Pool and Stowe Pool, which spanned the valley from east to west and cut the city in half, offered tranquil walks and green meadows. The crowded social calendar of concerts and plays, card parties and musical evenings, promised congenial company. And Stowe House provided a perfect haven.

Standing on its own in a secluded spot on the far side of Stowe Pool, Stowe House was only a fifteen-minute stroll from the heart of Lichfield. A tall and symmetrical villa, perched on a mound near the edge of the
lake, the house had been built about twenty years earlier. Seen from the town, the redbrick house seemed almost to float above the water; at dusk the white edging to its windows and corners glowed ethereally. It was a view much loved by Anna Seward, who could see Stowe House from the windows of her dressing room at the rear of the palace. In fine weather she liked to sit on the palace terrace, sipping tea with Honora and looking out over the “watry mirror” of Stowe Pool with its reflections of “the Trees upon the bank, & the Villa near the edge.” The “villa, rising near the lake” would figure often in her poems—especially once she discovered the events that were about to unfold within.