How to Create the Perfect Wife (28 page)

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Authors: Wendy Moore

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Beautiful Honora Sneyd captivated both Seward and Day.

Novelist Maria Edgeworth was deterred from writing by Day but later used his wife-training project in her fiction.

Esther Milnes thought Day her ideal man.

Georgian philanthropy.
The London Foundling Hospital, built amid fields to the north of London, opened in 1741.

The charity was founded by sea captain Thomas Coram who was shocked to see abandoned babies on London roadsides.

Mothers left whatever they had to hand as tokens when they I gave up their babies.

Sabrina’s billet form
(under the name Monimia Butler), filled out when she was abandoned as a baby in 1757

Her apprenticeship form from 1769 survive still.

The Shrewsbury Foundling Hospital,
where Sabrina grew up, was perched on a hill overlooking the River Severn. After it closed in 1771, it became a “house of industry” or workhouse. Today it forms part of Shrewsbury School.

How to create the perfect man
. Books on male grooming were bestsellers in Georgian Britain. These pictures, from
The Polite Academy
(1762), demonstrate how to bow and dance the minuet.

The Inner and Middle Temple Inns
were popular addresses for the Georgian man about town.

The bountiful Burneys.
Charles Burney took Sabrina under his wing after she was widowed with two young sons.

She was embraced by the Burney clan, including Charles’s sister, the novelist Fanny Burney.

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