How to Create the Perfect Wife (33 page)

The laissez-faire system advised by Rousseau and previously championed by Edgeworth had been abruptly dropped in favor of a new tough love regime. Instead of running carefree through the grounds, the children were now subjected to a regime of discipline and order; they were expected to make their own beds from the age of three. Although Maria was sent to boarding school when she reached seven there were still Emmeline, four, and Anna Maria, two, from Edgeworth’s first marriage, at home, and they were quickly joined by two more children—Honora and Lovell—in 1774 and 1775. Gloriously happy in his wife, his home and his young family, Edgeworth fervently wished that Day could find equal joy. He was just not convinced he would find it with Sabrina.

When first Day had presented Sabrina as a twelve-year-old orphan, Edgeworth had seriously doubted she could ever become “sufficiently cultivated” or gain “a sufficiently vigorous understanding” to become his friend’s wife. Even if Day managed to give her a basic education, Edgeworth believed that Sabrina could never be trained to sacrifice her own needs and desires to Day’s commands. So when Day had sent Sabrina to boarding school—at Edgeworth’s insistence, of course—the end of the first experiment had come as something of a relief. Now, however, as Edgeworth read the barrage of letters in which Day boasted of Sabrina’s daily progress toward accepting his ideas and conforming to his rules, Edgeworth had to concede that Day might after all be right. Perhaps Sabrina really was the woman his friend had been searching for.

“Mr. Day took great pains to cultivate her understanding, and still more to mould her mind and disposition to his own views and pursuits,” wrote Edgeworth. “His letters to me at this period were full of little anecdotes of her progress, temper and conduct.” Indeed Day’s letters describing his revived experiment on Sabrina in minute detail were apparently so effusive—and so revealing—that Edgeworth would later burn the lot. At length, after “much time and labour,” Day wrote jubilantly to announce that his project was complete. According to Edgeworth, Day had sueceeded
at last in shaping Sabrina into “a companion peculiarly pleasing to him in her person, devoted to him by gratitude and habit, and, I believe, by affection. . . . He certainly was never more loved by any woman, than he was by Sabrina; and I do not think, that he was insensible to the preference, with which she treated him; nor do I believe, that any woman was to him ever personally more agreeable.” Sabrina loved him just as he was, with all his flaws. The young girl who had once dictated the words “I love Mr. Day best in the world” still felt that he was the most important person in her life.

So certain did it seem that Day had finally found his ideal wife that Edgeworth now expected any day to receive a letter announcing his friend’s engagement. Since Sabrina was under the age of twenty-one, Edgeworth, as her legal guardian, would be required to give consent. There was only one problem: Day had yet to inform Sabrina of this forthcoming happy event. It simply never occurred to him that she needed to know, or that she might have any relevant views on the matter. Yet although he kept her in the dark, he naively declared his intentions to their friends. As he later told her, “I studiously avoided the word marriage to you, though I used it to your friends.” Whether this was the Parkinsons, or the Savilles, or even the Sewards, Day failed to reveal, but inevitably at some point Sabrina’s friends felt the need to inform her of her benefactor’s marital plans.

When Sabrina confronted Day about the rumors she had heard, he at last admitted that he wanted to marry her—though not, crucially, that this had been his original plan all along. One acquaintance, who later heard the story from Sabrina herself, reported: “He finally explained to Sabrina, in full confidence of seeing the happy recognition that she had shown him until then, developing into a gentle love based on friendship and esteem.” Even now Day expected her to celebrate her luck at being selected for this choice role. He was baffled and perturbed by her reaction.

To Sabrina the discovery that Day was intent on marrying her came as a devastating shock, which threw her emotions into turmoil. According to a friend of hers, “immediately, she became serious, silent, and sad.” Sabrina had looked on Day as her guardian, her teacher and her employer, as a benevolent father figure and a well-meaning philanthropist—but
never as her husband or lover. She knew, of course, that she owed Day everything. He had looked after her, educated her, and maintained her since she was twelve. But the idea of sharing his bed and bearing his children seemed monstrous—at least at first.

Sabrina wrestled with her conscience. Many women in Georgian times consented to far less suitable marriages on the basis of economic prudence; the notion of marrying for love was still a relatively modern concept. Girls younger than Sabrina were commonly betrothed to men they had never even met who were significantly older—and less attractive—than Day by parents arranging advantageous matches. To marry Day was not, therefore, completely implausible. He was rich, clever and influential, a landowner, a lawyer and a poet, with a rising literary reputation and a lively political flair, and he was largely well-meaning even if he was utterly self-absorbed and arrogant. And whereas the idea of a man of twenty-one marrying a girl of twelve might seem distasteful—even in Georgian times—the gap between a woman of eighteen and a man of twenty-seven seemed perfectly reasonable. Yet at the same time Sabrina knew that marriage to Day would entail constant and enduring adherence to his petty scruples and stringent rules. And since marriage was virtually impossible to end, except through the death of one or other spouse, it would be a life sentence.

Baffled by her confusion, Day now tried to persuade Sabrina to consent to marriage by stressing that his own happiness “was dependent uniquely on her,” but this only served to make her more troubled still. “As soon as she seemed convinced of this truth, the more sensitive she appeared and even to be softening, the less happy she seemed to him,” her friend would later say. Day continued regardless to make plans for the wedding in the confidence that their “mutual esteem” would lead to “conjugal bliss.” At last Sabrina seemed resigned to the marriage. Day was poised to set the wedding date; Edgeworth waited in anticipation. And then suddenly Day’s plans went horribly awry.

Leaving Sabrina with his friends—probably still at the Keirs’ house—while he proceeded with the preparations, Day disappeared for a few days. But before departing he gave Sabrina, as usual, some precise instructions over the manner of her dress, and she, as usual, solemnly promised to comply. When Day returned, he walked into the room, took one look at Sabrina
and recoiled in horror. She had dressed herself contrary to his directions. Day flew into a rage.

Precisely how Sabrina had violated Day’s dress code on her final judgment day would never be adequately explained; indeed it may have been a smokescreen. It was a “trifling” consideration, wrote Edgeworth, who heard the story from the “gentleman” at whose house the drama took place. “She neglected, forgot, or undervalued something, which was not, I believe, clearly defined,” he wrote somewhat evasively. “She did, or she did not, wear certain long sleeves, or some handkerchief, which had been the subject of his dislike or of his liking.” Sabrina, Edgeworth reasoned, was just “too young and too artless, to feel the extent of that importance, which my friend annexed to trifling concessions or resistance to fashion, particularly with respect to female dress.” But whatever rules she had supposedly transgressed, Day took her omission as proof of her “want of strength of mind,” said Edgeworth. Sabrina had failed her ultimate obedience test.

Even Day would later have trouble recalling the exact particulars that Sabrina had supposedly contravened, or else he was equally eager to obfuscate the facts. “I gave you particular injunctions,” he later told her, “whether these injunctions were mild or harsh, proper or ridiculous, it is now unnecessary to inquire; you undertook to comply with them.” The “accusations” against her were “neither great or many,” he would later concede, but were “rather faults in respect to my particular modes of thinking than any crimes in you.” But he added: “That you did violate them, you well remember, and my behaviour has been exactly as was then predicted.”

Keir, who almost certainly knew, and probably witnessed, the final showdown chose to remain steadfastly mute. But another contemporary, who knew Sabrina in later life, suggested that rather than waiting placidly for Day to return and bear her down the aisle, Sabrina had in fact run away in panic at the planned wedding. “She completely disappeared for a few hours, astonishing him with dismay at this unprecedented turn of events,” she wrote. Day was both distraught and disturbed that Sabrina had run off without his permission, she said.

Whatever the actual cause of the rift, the outcome was the same. Sabrina had flouted Day’s rules, she had thrown off her chains and declared her independence. Just at the moment that America rose up in defiance
against its mother country, as battle commenced in Massachusetts, so Day found that the creature of his own invention had turned against him. The perfect woman he had created in his own image was no longer under his control. Galatea had rejected Pygmalion’s embrace. Faced with this insubordination, Day acted precisely as he had warned that he would. He coldly informed Sabrina that since she had violated his instructions, the trial was over and he would never see her again.

Day was true to his word. He dispatched Sabrina immediately to a boardinghouse on the outskirts of Birmingham with an annual pension of £50. While this sum was more than five times the annual wage of a housemaid, it was far from sufficient for her to live in the manner that would assure her access to the social circles she had so far enjoyed. Furthermore, since her apprenticeship had ended prematurely and she had no means of earning her living, she was still financially dependent on Day. More significantly, since her name had been so closely linked to Day’s for so many years—and most of their friends believed they were about to get married—she now had little chance of making a respectable marriage elsewhere. According to the double standards of eighteenth-century Britain, a man could cavort with any number of women and still be sure of making a successful marriage, but if a woman was regarded as being romantically linked to any man—no matter how innocently—her chances of marriage were damaged irrevocably.

Sabrina would never describe in her own words her treatment by Thomas Day during his long and bizarre wife-training experiment. On the contrary, she would beg friends not to refer to what she called “my checker’d & adventurous history.” Over the ensuing years, Day’s payments would arrive reliably, his stern letters would continue to come and their lives would always be inextricably linked. But he would never see her again.

Most of Day’s friends were relieved when they heard that his wife-training experiment was at last over. Edgeworth, however, was shocked at his friend’s behavior. To abandon his marriage plans over “such a trifling motive” seemed not only absurd but deeply troubling. The letter that arrived from Day describing his actions did nothing to relieve his uneasiness. Although
Edgeworth realized that with Day’s “peculiarities” he had “judged well for his own happiness,” he added gravely that “in the same situation, I could not have acted as he had done.” Edgeworth, of course, had only married his first wife on the grounds that they were so “insensibly entangled” that he could not walk away with honor.

Looking back in later life on his descriptions of Day and his extraordinary experiment, Edgeworth would feel concerned that he had somehow “betrayed” his friend. He never intended to “throw ridicule” on Day, he would protest, and he continued to insist that Day was “the man of the most perfect morality I have ever known.” Yet, as he burned Day’s letters, he wanted to make clear in depicting Day’s extreme behavior that “too much of one thing is good for nothing.”

Edgeworth’s bewilderment was understandable. Day’s explanation defied all logic. Even for Day, Sabrina’s errors seemed ridiculously petty motives on which to decide his matrimonial future once and for all. He had teetered on the brink of marrying the woman he had devoted so many years to crafting just when she appeared to have reached the point of perfection. The truth was obviously much more complicated; in reality other factors were at play. The judgment was driven not only by Day’s exacting expectations and Sabrina’s ultimate rebellion but also by his warring emotions.

Day had chosen, created and crafted the woman of his fantasies. But at the very moment when he was poised to consummate his dreams and embrace his ivory girl, he had suffered a crisis of confidence. Should he carry through his daring scheme and marry his foundling? Having created his ideal woman, did he really want the creature of his own making? Day had taken the human quest for perfection to the ultimate extreme—and found perfection wanting.

For even if he had not yet admitted the fact, just as Day was about to announce his engagement to Sabrina, he had already met the woman who would fulfill his dreams. Like Sabrina she was an orphan, but there the resemblance ended.

NINE

ESTHER

  
Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1775