How to Create the Perfect Wife (21 page)

But one aspect above all made Day uniquely interesting to his Lunar friends: his marital obsession. For Day was conducting an experiment that was far more astonishing than anything the rest of the group could conjure with their chemical apparatus and their electrical machines. While they mixed explosive chemicals, drew sparks from electrical charges and forged steam engines, Day was meddling with the human mind. Even in the so-called age of experiments, this was an experiment to top the lot.

Although in 1770 most of the group had only very young children or were yet to marry, they all took a close interest in the subject of education and were broadly enthusiastic about Rousseau’s ideas. The Lunar men would exchange views on education as their children grew—and sometimes exchanged their children too. In line with the Rousseau philosophy, they encouraged their children to take part in scientific debates and sometimes involved them in Lunar meetings. Darwin liked to include his three boys in educational demonstrations—the two boys depicted by Wright in his air pump picture were Darwin’s eldest sons—and Edgeworth would shock visitors by passing valuable scientific instruments around his youngest children. In later years, Darwin and Wedgwood would send their children to stay in each other’s homes and consulted each other on their schooling.

Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck would certainly be encouraged to watch events at Lunar meetings later held at her father Samuel Galton’s
house. She would remember with delight one particular evening when she was allowed to catch and keep a snake that escaped from a guest’s pocket. Whether Sabrina was brought along to any gatherings held on moonlit nights is unknown, but Day certainly introduced her to his Lunar friends and they followed her fortunes with interest. In particular, Keir and Small paid close attention to Day’s wife-rearing experiment and took a paternalistic concern in its progress—for Day’s sake at least.

A huge corpulent figure, with flabby jowls and a double chin, James Keir was a brash, hearty man with a sharp wit and keen business acumen. He had just bought a lease on a glassmaking workshop at Amblecote, near Stourbridge, not far from Birmingham, and lived in a house behind. Turning thirty-five in 1770, Keir had recently retired from the army partly in order to find a wife—perhaps, as he told Darwin, “some Lichfield
fair
that has more money and love than wit.” Yet he certainly planned to find her through more conventional means than Day. It was grounded facts and fixed formulas that stirred Keir, not wild dreams of imaginary women.

Practical and rational, Keir regarded Rousseau’s ideas on education as ridiculous and Day’s plan to put the scheme into action as laughable. “Nothing surely can be more absurd than the principle of this plan of education, or more impracticable in execution,” Keir argued. He blamed Day’s cracked idea on youthful naïveté, which drew him into “delusions created by heated imagination” so that while others were merely amused by Rousseau’s ideas, they sank “deep into Mr. Day’s young and sensible mind.” As Keir explained: “It is no wonder then, that at this period he was led, like many others, by the seductive eloquence of
Rousseau,
into worlds of fancy respecting education.” Quick to laugh off his young friend’s eccentric behavior, Keir would always be ready to excuse Day’s errant conduct and conceal any inconvenient problems that arose. If Keir watched Day’s project unfold with bemusement, William Small would do his utmost to bring it to an end.

True to his name, Dr. Small was a thin, wiry man. Although shy and withdrawn, he possessed a knack of bringing friends together, which made him dearly loved by those closest to him. Generous and compassionate, he had built a medical practice in Derby where he treated the rich for large sums and the poor for free. In his spare time he helped to found the city’s first hospital as a permanent service to those who could not afford
private treatment. Something of a father figure for Day, whose own father died before he was two, the doctor held “paramount” influence over Day, friends said. Prone to introspection and melancholy, just like Day, Small would never marry—and yet he took an intense interest in Day’s mission to create a suitable wife.

Gently but doggedly, Small tried to persuade Day to abandon his Pygmalion project and adopt a more conventional approach to seeking a marriage partner. Convinced that an adolescent foundling—no matter how well educated—could never become the perfect wife for the bright young philosopher, Small tried to convince Day to discard Sabrina, and he even produced what he thought were more suitable candidates. As Edgeworth wrote, “He never saw any woman, whose character and situation in life appeared suitable to Mr. Day, without mentioning her to him, and endeavouring to give him an opportunity of judging for himself.” With Small set on changing Day’s direction and Keir determined to guard his reputation, nobody was paying much attention to Sabrina’s fortunes. But just as Keir and Small were trying to subvert Day’s Pygmalion project, the subject of his experiment was getting heartily fed up.

At first, when she had arrived in Lichfield that spring, Sabrina submitted meekly to Day’s demands. Since he had plucked her from poverty, fed, clothed and educated her, and treated her for the best part with kindness, she was understandably devoted to him. But as the months passed she began to resent the boring lessons and question the cruel torments. According to Seward: “She betrayed an averseness to the study of books, and of the rudiments of science, which gave little promise of ability.” Toward the end of the year she even had the audacity to complain about her onerous chores. As Day would later put it, in a letter to Sabrina summarizing her perceived flaws, “the dislike you soon discovered for every species of domestic application was one of the first causes of dispute which occurred between us.” Shocked at this challenge to his authority, Day complained that “I found it out of my power to make you apply as I would wish.” Sabrina, he later told her, “grew tired of living with me, & consequently negligent in your behaviour to me.” The ivory girl had stepped down from her pedestal and stamped her foot. The foundling had found her voice.

The problem, as Seward acutely observed, was that Day offered neither incentive nor explanation for the bewildering demands and perverse trials. “The difficulty seemed to lie in giving her motive to exertion, self-denial and heroism,” she wrote. Sabrina’s “only inducement” was her “desire of pleasing her protector, though she knew not how, or why he became such.” In that desire, Seward wrote, “fear had greatly the ascendant of affection, and fear is a cold and indolent feeling.” Sabrina herself would later tell a friend that Day had “made her miserable—a slave &c!”

She was growing up. As an innocent twelve-year-old who knew only the world inside the orphanage walls, she had unthinkingly accepted Day’s interest as the kindness of a benevolent gentleman like those who served the foundling charity. Now that she was heading toward fourteen and spent each day immersed in fashionable society, alert to the playful comments and meaningful looks of the adults who flirted around her—and perhaps even with her—she began to question her puzzling situation in Day’s household. She occupied a strange position without parallel in the families she had come to know, a curious hybrid of privileged daughter and unpaid skivvy, hovering precariously between the upper echelons of the gentry and the lowest rungs of society. Her visits to Darwin’s home, where seventeen-year-old Mary Parker was absorbing the doctor’s attentions, may have prompted some questions about her position; her friendship with Elizabeth Saville, in the midst of her father’s intimate relationship with Seward, may have suggested some answers. Her body most likely had begun changing too, but there was no motherly figure or chaperone to explain the onset of puberty.

Day refused to explain her role in his scheme. Although he made no secret of his marital intentions to friends, he kept Sabrina in total ignorance of this rather important detail. Indeed, he would always maintain the deliberate fiction that she was apprenticed to him as a domestic servant. He would later tell Sabrina: “When I originally took you, you were articled to me as a servant; it was in that capacity I received you, & talked to you; my whole behaviour was in unison with that idea, excepting the admitting you to sit with me, & raising you above the common drudgery of a family.” As to her future, Day told her that she could earn a position as his housekeeper if she passed her peculiar probation tests, but if she
failed to meet his exacting standards he would dispatch her to learn a trade like the unfortunate (or perhaps in fact fortunate) Lucretia. Yet from the looks that she was receiving from Lichfield’s residents, if not from some of Day’s associates, Sabrina was rapidly becoming conscious of her dubious social position. Whether Day’s physical training went even further than singeing her shoulders with burning wax would remain concealed forever behind the wooden shutters of Stowe House.

Day’s friends would always be at pains to emphasize his moral probity—Keir tirelessly praising his “virtue” and Edgeworth hymning his “strict morality”—almost to the point of protesting too much. He had, of course, undertaken to Bicknell “never to violate her innocence.” Certainly there was no direct evidence that Day took sexual advantage of Sabrina. At a time when contraception was haphazard at best, an unwanted pregnancy was usually the result of a prolonged sexual liaison—though the Georgians were highly adept at concealed pregnancies and secret births. Equally at times there was something perversely asexual about Day’s awkwardness in mixed company and his obsession with fighting female seduction. Even if Day’s conduct toward Sabrina was spotlessly honorable, however, he had certainly placed her in a perilous position that would inevitably tarnish her future reputation.

The ambiguity of Sabrina’s situation would absorb Henry James more than a century later when writing his first novel,
Watch and Ward,
published in 1871. Although James transplanted the drama from eighteenth-century England to nineteenth-century America, he plainly based his seemingly far-fetched plot on the true story of Sabrina Sidney and Thomas Day. In the novel, the wealthy Roger Lawrence unofficially adopts a twelve-year-old orphan, Nora Lambert, and educates her with a view to making her his “perfect wife.” Yet while Roger confides his plan to friends he refuses to answer Nora’s frustrated questions about her role in his life. “What are you?” Nora asks. “Neither my brother, nor my father, nor my uncle, nor my cousin,—nor even, by law, my guardian.”

Later James would all but disown his early novel, not least for its clumsy sexual imagery such as the moment when Roger “caught himself wondering whether, at the worst, a little precursory love-making would do any harm. The ground might be gently tickled to receive his own sowing; the
petals of the young girl’s nature, playfully forced apart, would leave the golden heart of the flower but the more accessible to his own vertical rays.” In the novel, in accordance with the Pygmalion myth, Roger and Nora ultimately marry. In reality, just like Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle, Sabrina was refusing to fall in with Day’s plans. By the time the autumn mists over Stowe Pool turned to ice at the end of 1770, the teenage orphan was on the point of rebellion.

It was Richard Lovell Edgeworth, bringing some rare cheer to the house when he visited over Christmas, who brought Sabrina’s ordeal to an end. After a long illness, his father had died in August, leaving Edgeworth the family estate and a sizable fortune. He now enjoyed an annual income of £1,500 (£225,000, or $363,000 in today’s currency). Returning to England in the autumn, with another addition to his growing family, a second daughter, Emmeline, Edgeworth was still straining at the reins of his unhappy marriage. With relief he escaped to Lichfield in December “curious to see how my friend’s philosophic romance would end.”

Riding up to the front door of Stowe House in one of his sporty carriages Edgeworth was impressed by his friend’s “pleasant house” near the town. But he was troubled by the situation he found within. Surveying Day’s young apprentice after a gap of more than a year, Edgeworth discovered that the shy little girl he remembered had blossomed into an attractive and accomplished young woman: She had “a beauty, which was then more striking, because other people wore enormous quantities of powder and pomatum. Her long eyelashes, and eyes expressive of sweetness, interested all who saw her, and the uncommon melody of her voice made a favourable impression upon every person to whom she spoke.”

It was immediately plain to Edgeworth what everybody in Lichfield apart from Day had already concluded: that Sabrina was “now too old to remain in my friend’s house without a protectress.” Joining Keir and Small in their efforts to subvert Day’s quest for the perfect woman, Edgeworth sought to persuade Day to find more suitable arrangements for his thirteen-year-old lodger. Little did Edgeworth guess that he would find his own perfect woman first.

Drawn into the Christmas revels that centered on the palace, Edgeworth renewed his acquaintance with Anna Seward—and with her
beloved Honora, who was now nineteen. On previous visits he had barely cast Honora a glance, as the vivacious Anna eclipsed her quiet protégée. But that Christmas, Edgeworth suddenly saw Honora emerge from the shadow of her mentor, and he was dazzled by her classical beauty and unassuming grace. To his amazement Edgeworth discovered that this radiant creature shared his fascination for mathematics and mechanics. Desperately miserable in his loveless marriage, for the first time in his life he had found “a woman that equalled the picture of perfection, which existed in my imagination.” Edgeworth, for one, had found his ideal partner.

The attraction was entirely mutual. If Edgeworth had taken his time in perceiving the charms of Honora, she had plainly been enamored of Edgeworth for some while. Back in April, when Seward had gushed to a friend about her scintillating evening with the “celebrated Mr Edgeworth,” Honora had been too overcome to add a postscript. While she had been away with her father and sisters in Bath, Honora had written secretly to Mrs. Seward—behind Anna’s back—imploring her to persuade her father to send her back to Lichfield. The moment that the summons arrived, Honora had battled through autumn floods and arrived breathless in Lichfield to “bound into the dining-room” with “tears of joy” in her eyes.