How to Create the Perfect Wife (19 page)

Day’s renowned aversion to mixed company and undisguised contempt for the female mind did not augur well considering Seward’s keen literary ambitions and her faith in sexual equality, if not female superiority. His religious skepticism and frugal lifestyle were not obvious ways to impress
the vicar’s daughter who liked to host convivial tea parties. As Seward noted, Day was “a rigid moralist, who proudly imposed on himself cold abstinence, even from the most innocent pleasures” who was marked by a “tincture of misanthropic gloom” and displayed “a proud contempt for common-life society.” Yet in other ways they were kindred spirits. They were both afflicted by difficult relations with their parents; they had both suffered unfulfilling romantic experiences; and they both poured these frustrations into poetry. And so Seward was drawn to the “youth of genius,” and she pronounced Day to be “less graceful, less amusing, less brilliant than Mr. E. but more highly imaginative, more classical, and a deeper reasoner.”

Since Honora, the usual target for her affections and audience for her secrets, had been sent to Bath that summer in the hope the spa waters would restore her precarious health, Seward and Day became close friends and confidants. Before long Seward was divulging the secrets of her various romantic trials, and Day was describing the details of his eccentric marital project. Initially, at least, Seward was captivated rather than shocked when she heard about the astonishing educational experiment that was taking place on her very doorstep. Had she not, after all, been engaged in her own educational program in helping to tutor Honora Sneyd? Although their ideas about the desired attributes of womanhood were distinctly different, Seward and Day were both committed to grooming their particular vision of a perfect woman.

Seward, too, was an admirer of Rousseau. When Rousseau’s novel
Julie
,
or The New Héloïse
was first published, she had asked Honora to translate the book into English for her. Having learned French at a local day school run by a French couple, ten-year-old Honora had read the steamy passages aloud while Anna listened with breathless appreciation; the reading sessions must certainly have proved educational. When
Émile
appeared, Anna read the English translation and declared the writing “exquisitely ingenious.” She probably already knew of Edgeworth’s efforts to apply the educational theory on young Dick. It was only later that she would describe the idea of putting Rousseau’s system into practice as “wild, impracticable, and absurd.”

On Day’s repeated trips to the palace over the summer, Seward listened with rapt attention as he described his “aversion” to contemporary women’s
education, which he blamed for “the fickleness which had stung him.” Day was still smarting from his rejection by Margaret; Seward realized the young poet was scarred by love as well as smallpox. Although Seward believed that it was better to be ditched at the church door than to “plight at its altar the vow of non-existing love,” she found that Day was still determined to marry. And as she encouraged him to reveal all, she marveled at his recipe for the perfect spouse. She would later describe his plan with relish: “He resolved, if possible, that his wife should have a taste for literature and science, for moral and patriotic philosophy. So might she be his companion in that retirement, to which he had destined himself; and assist him in forming the minds of his children to stubborn virtue and high exertion. He resolved also, that she should be simple as a mountain girl, in her dress, her diet, and her manners; fearless and intrepid as the Spartan wives and Roman heroines.”

Of course, as Day had concluded, there was “no finding such a creature ready made; philosophical romance could not hope it.” And so, as Seward reported: “He must mould some infant into the being his fancy had imaged.” Unwisely, perhaps, Day now divulged the whole story of how he had procured Sabrina from the Shrewsbury Foundling Hospital and then embarked on her training “with a view to making her his future wife.” Recounting the tale much later, Seward described the contract Day signed with Bicknell pledging him “never to violate” his orphan’s innocence. Enthralled by Day’s scheme, Seward surveyed his “bachelor mansion” from her dressing room window with interest to see what would happen next.

His acceptance at the palace secured, Day made haste to introduce his pupil to Darwin at the other end of The Close that encircled the cathedral. Escorted by Day across the little Chinese-style bridge that spanned the moat in front of the doctor’s house, Sabrina was warmly welcomed and became a favorite guest with the whole family. But there was little gaiety in the Darwins’ house that summer. Darwin’s wife, Mary, or Polly as he called her, had been ill for several years and despite her husband’s ministrations—and liberal quantities of opium and brandy—died on June 30, 1770.

Darwin was devastated. He had married Polly, the daughter of a Lichfield lawyer, when she was seventeen and he twenty-six, in 1757. In one
love letter, urging her to marry him quickly, he had jokingly claimed to have found a book of recipes. One recipe, he wrote, was entitled “To make Love.” Darwin copied it out: “Take of Sweet-William and of Rose-Mary, of each as much as is sufficient. To the former of these add Honesty and Herb-of-grace; and to the latter of Eye-bright and Motherwort of each a large handful: mix them separately, and then, chopping them altogether, add one Plumb, two springs of Heart’s Ease and a little Tyme.” But when he came to a recipe called “To make a good Wife,” Darwin told Polly: “Pshaw, an acquaintance of mine, a young lady of Lichfield, knows how to make this Dish better than any other Person in the World.” Darwin had successfully mixed the ingredients for his perfect wife. Now he wept over Polly’s corpse before tearing himself away to visit patients in an effort to “abstract my mind.”

The following morning he returned for a last look at her, and wept again as he reread their love letters and compared her lively portrait with “the palid Hue of her dead Features.” Left a widower at the age of thirty-eight, with three sons aged four, ten and eleven, Darwin invited his sister Susannah to take charge of his household. But there was little time for grieving. With his young family, his busy practice and his relentless scientific research, the doctor soon filled his hours—and his bed.

Although both Seward and Darwin had been let into the secret of Day’s plans regarding Sabrina, neither made any attempt to enlighten her. Both were effectively complicit in his scheme. But their willingness to turn a blind eye to Day’s errant conduct perhaps owed less to complacency and more to the need to suppress the inconvenient truths in their own lives. For behind the elegant doors of Darwin’s house and the Bishop’s Palace scandal skulked. That summer, just as Day and Sabrina settled into Stowe House, rumors were beginning to percolate around The Close concerning the overly friendly relationship between Anna and one of the cathedral’s lay vicars.

John Saville had arrived in Lichfield from Ely in 175 5, a shy but good-looking youth of nineteen, who took up a post as one of the vicars choral. A lay position with no religious duties or clerical outfit, the job entailed singing in cathedral services. Since he was already married, Saville had moved into one of the medieval cottages in the Vicars’ Close, near the
cathedral, with his wife, Mary, who was a year younger. The young newlyweds soon produced two daughters; indeed they may have married because Mary was already pregnant. An intelligent young man, with a keen appreciation of music and a melodic tenor voice, Saville was naturally invited to gatherings at the palace where he was often called upon to sing or play. He may even have given young Anna music lessons. But the intimate friendship that gradually evolved between Seward and Saville was regarded as going beyond the normal duties of a musical tutor by his furious wife.

After her disappointment with earlier suitors, Anna drew close to Saville in her early twenties and before long she was deeply in love. Following one musical soirée in 1764 she enthused: “The ingenious Mr S-, whose fine voice and perfect expression do so much justice to the vocal music of Handel, was at my side in warmly defending the claims of that great master.” Whether Saville was equally smitten, or simply felt powerless to resist Anna’s unstoppable dynamism, would never be clear. With Anna it was always all or nothing: unbounded loyalty and all-encompassing friendship or venomous enmity and utter rejection. Certainly she was not going to let a wife and two daughters stand in the way of her desires; she would later describe Mary Saville as “the vilest of Women & the most brutally despicable.”

Not surprisingly, by 1770 Mrs. Saville had become fed up with the amount of time her husband was spending at the palace and suspicious about the activities that detained him there. Rumors suggesting that the friendship between Anna and the tenor had gone beyond a mutual love of music began to spread. An anonymous letter to the Reverend Seward—which may have been written by Mrs. Saville herself—alleged that Anna and Saville shared an unseemly intimacy. In short, Anna was being accused of adultery.

Anna Seward knew that she could never marry Saville, unless, of course, he became a widower. For the vast majority of people in Georgian England marriage meant literally “till death us do part.” A legal divorce, allowing remarriage, was impossible to obtain without a private Act of Parliament that required vast amounts of money and powerful connections and would prompt unthinkable scandal—most especially for a lay vicar
and a vicar’s daughter. Yet she would not give him up either. Furiously denying any suggestion of improper conduct to her parents, Seward insisted that Saville—or Giovanni, as she liked to call him—should remain a guest at the palace. It was the beginning of a love affair that would last thirty years—until death did indeed them part—in defiance of opprobrium from parents, friends, neighbors and even Church of England authorities. In her inimitable style, Seward would always refuse to acknowledge any hint of wrongdoing and imperiously insist on her right to pursue her desires. “He cannot be my husband,” she would tell one disapproving friend, “but no law of earth or heaven forbids that he shou’d be my friend.” She would always maintain that the relationship was purely platonic—and it is entirely possible that it was—yet she would celebrate the undying devotion between herself and Saville in fifteen love poems in which she changed their names to Evander and Emillia. In alternating voices, the poems describe the jealousy and anguish of two lovers who are separated by circumstances beyond their control yet pledged eternally to stay faithful to their “long-disastrous love.” Forever forbidden from consummating their love, the pair will only be “Clasp’d in each other’s arms” in the “bed of death.”

For the moment, however, Saville continued as guest at musical evenings at the palace, where he was duly introduced to Day and Sabrina in 1770. Sabrina struck up a lasting friendship with Saville’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who at nearly fourteen was just a few months older than her. And glad of a new confidant with a secret at least as explosive as her own, Anna confessed her love for Saville to Day. Both of them kicking against the conventions of contemporary society, they provided mutual sympathy.

It was not long before rumors began to circulate at the other end of The Close. Just a few weeks after the death of his beloved Polly, Darwin employed a young woman, seventeen-year-old Mary Parker, as a live-in nanny for four-year-old Robert. And while helping the young boy to cope with his grief, she was soon helping his father to recover from his. Within a year Mary Parker was Darwin’s mistress. While living in the doctor’s house she would give birth to two daughters by Darwin, Susan born in 1772 and Mary in 1774, who were both brought up as part of the family. Indeed, Darwin’s grandson, the future naturalist Charles Darwin, would even suggest
that the physician fathered an earlier illegitimate daughter, with a different mother, born in summer 1771 and who was conceived, therefore, in autumn 1770. Day’s friends in Lichfield were clearly in no position to condemn his questionable domestic setup at Stowe House, even if they had wanted to, in 1770.

With the summer season of garden parties and concerts getting into full swing, Day and Sabrina became a familiar sight as they shuttled along the poolside path—or took the longer, drier route via Stowe Street—between Stowe House and the town’s attractions. It was another wet summer. When Samuel Johnson made his “annual ramble” to Lichfield in July he complained that “this rainy weather confines us all in the house.” Since his friend Elizabeth Aston, the landlady of Stowe House, was away from her home higher up the hill that summer, there was no reason for Johnson to brave the rain for his usual stroll around Stowe Pool, where he had learned to swim as a boy, and past Stowe House. Grumbling that “nothing extraordinary” was happening in Lichfield that summer, he cut his visit short and left for Derbyshire.

Johnson was wrong. For as the rain beat against the windows of Stowe House that summer some very extraordinary developments were taking place within. Pleased with the progress Sabrina was making in her lessons and chores, Day was eager to take her education to the next level. Having so far focused his attentions on shaping Sabrina’s mind, now he devoted himself to grooming her body. Since he had determined that he and his future wife would live in primitive isolation—“Sequestered in some secret glade”—Day wanted to be sure that Sabrina was sufficiently strong to withstand all the privations and hardships of their planned life together in mutual misery. Indeed, as there would be no servants in this spartan household, Day’s wife would probably need even greater stamina than he in order to perform her domestic drudgery. So Day devised some bizarre challenges. Inside the villa by the lake and within its secluded grounds, Day set out to test Sabrina’s strength, courage and endurance to the very limits.

Drawing his inspiration partly from the program set down by Rousseau designed to steel the young Émile against hardship, but largely from his
own fertile imagination, Day embarked on a series of trials designed to accustom Sabrina to extremes of cold, pain and terror. Rousseau, of course, had stipulated that children should be taught to withstand adversity by exposing them as infants to cold baths, to hunger and thirst, and to terrors such as spiders and thunder. “Harden their bodies against the intemperance of season, the climates, the elements. Inure them to hunger, thirst and fatigue. Dip them in the waters of Styx,” exhorted Rousseau. “When reason begins to frighten them, make habit reassure them. With slow and carefully arranged gradation man and child alike are made intrepid in everything.”