How to Create the Perfect Wife (34 page)

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lever, amiable and wealthy, at twenty-three, Esther Milnes was popular with girlhood friends and male admirers alike. Having lost both her parents within a few months of each other when she was four, a not uncommon experience for children in Georgian times, Esther had been brought up by her older sister, Elizabeth, and assorted aunts and uncles in homes scattered across Derbyshire and Yorkshire. On her sister’s death in 1769, Esther had become the sole heiress at sixteen to her family’s mines, land and property worth a total £23,000—more than £3m ($5.6 million) in modern terms—and immediately she found herself prey to fortune hunters, not least her brother-in-law. With her expressive dark brown eyes and plump red mouth in a pretty face, Esther could have her choice. Yet while friends and family pressed her to marry, Esther had remained determinedly unattached. Making her home with two aging uncles in prosperous Wakefield, Esther was simply waiting for the right man to propose.

Born in Chesterfield in 1752, Esther was descended from a long line of merchants who had accumulated wealth through astute dealings in the wool industry across Derbyshire and Yorkshire. Two great-uncles had cornered the wool market in Wakefield by exporting manufactured goods to Russia in return for timber. Her father, Richard Milnes, had accrued a tidy sum from lead mines in Derbyshire and advanced his prospects further
by marrying an heiress, Elizabeth Hawkesworth, who added the Palterton Hall estate, near Chesterfield, to the family fortune. Of the couple’s nine children, only Esther, the youngest, and Elizabeth, twenty years her senior, survived childhood. Despite being orphaned, Esther grew up happily with her sister in Palterton Hall under the watchful care of their numerous relatives living nearby. When Elizabeth married an ambitious young lawyer named Robert Lowndes in 1761, Esther continued to live in the family home with the newlyweds. But as Esther grew fond of her charming brother-in-law, she found herself suddenly packed off by her sister to a London boarding school at the age of eleven.

At school in Queen’s Square, Esther had impressed her teachers with her application to study, her skill at languages and her dexterity at the harpsichord. Her superlative knowledge of classical history and literature earned her the nickname Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom while her teenage efforts at poetry were roundly acclaimed. Esther addressed flattering odes to her best friends, her favorite teacher and even her books—“Dear instructive constant friends”—and wrote hymns that reflected her late parents’ dissenting faith and her dedication to charity. As compassionate as she was loyal, Esther won lasting friends, who fondly called her Hetty or Essy.

During the school holidays, friends deluged Esther with letters entreating her advice on problems with parents, brothers or suitors, and Esther responded with mature counsel, which they ignored at their peril. Writing to one friend, who was about to travel to India to join her parents, fourteen-year-old Esther wrote: “You will shortly, my Friend, commence a new Life, & enter upon a Scene, where all those innate Seeds of Worth and Excellence, which you have hitherto cultivated, will be either brought to Light, or destroyed by the Contagion of Vice & Folly.” Urging her friend not to deviate “from the Laws of Virtue,” Esther concluded with a few edifying lines of her own verse. To another friend, who sent gushing letters dithering between one suitor and another, Esther urged “be cautious how you form the indissoluble Tie” and added sagely: “When an Agreement of Sentiment & Sympathy of Soul are wanting in the conjugal state Felicity cannot be found.”

As Esther parted with her friends on leaving school at fifteen, she stepped up the steady flow of prim but sincere letters advising them to remain virtuous as they entered urban society with all its temptations. Exhorting one friend to avoid the “giddy, fantastick whirl of amusements,” she added: “How melancholy is it, my friend, to consider that so many of our sex should think of nothing but the embellishment of a body, which must soon or late moulder in its original dust.” While her friends practiced their dance steps and flirted with beaux at bustling assemblies, Esther preferred to stay “far remov’d from the hurry, crowd, and noise” reading her books and writing poems in contented solitude.

In a juvenile essay, on “Politeness,” Esther scorned the “unmeaning flattery and troublesome ceremony” that had lately become fashionable as “a false gloss.” True politeness could only come “from the heart and understanding,” she insisted. In another essay, on marriage, she criticized the trend for marrying for money with the words: “When two congenial minds possessed of virtue, understanding, and sensibility, are united in Hymen’s bands, by the gentle tie of love, strengthened with the golden cord of Friendship, I can conceive no happiness equal to what the conjugal state must afford.” And she even outlined her vision of the ideal woman, who wore her learning lightly, spoke with “pure, delicate and unaffected” language and expressed sentiments ‘“beautiful, sublime, and just.” Yet while she freely advised friends on their conduct Esther was not quite so clearheaded when it came to handling her own life.

Esther’s innocent world had been turned upside down when her sister died in 1769, leaving husband Robert with two boys, Milnes and Thomas, aged four and two, to bring up alone. Immediately Esther found herself the hostage in a battle of wits between her guardians, Ann and Richard Wilkinson, who were cousins of her late father, seeking to protect her fortune and reputation, and wily Robert, who was determined to hang on to his dead wife’s money by any means. The Wilkinsons endeavored to keep Esther safe in Wakefield, but Robert implored her to come and comfort him and her motherless nephews in empty Palterton Hall. In her grief and confusion, Esther sent Robert a tender poem in which she promised to “cheer / Thy upright mind, and wipe the dewy tear.” With dutiful concern
for her nephews she added innocently: “May I each kind, parental office share, / And guard thy offspring with maternal care.”

But Robert’s mind was less than upright, and he had other parental offices in mind than chastely bringing up his sons. Esther’s Aunt Ann urged her to tell Robert it would be “improper” to live with him for reasons that might seem “mysterious” to her for the moment. When her aunt learned that Robert had professed “a regard” for Esther “of a more tender nature than what ought to subsist betwixt such relations,” she begged Esther to treat him with “great reserve” and wished that she was happily married to someone else as “the best shelter from the artifices of a designing Man.”

Steadfastly resisting the appeals of her brother-in-law, Esther found herself shuffled between friends and relatives from one end of the country to the other like a parcel of priceless but cursed gems. At one point, while staying in Manchester in 1773, she had almost consented to marry a certain Mr. Lees. Yet just as friends expected her to name the wedding day, Esther confessed to another aunt, also named Esther, her qualms as to whether her fiancé met her romantic notions of a husband or whether she was even suited to marriage at all. Eager to reassure her niece, Aunt Esther admitted it was “a very difficult question to answer you whether you would be happier in a married, or a Single state, as it depends on your own Inclination & opinion.” The aunt could not help adding some rumors that Mr. Lees was “fond of Liquor” and “rather profane in his conversation.” The wedding was promptly canceled.

Rejecting one disappointing suitor after another, Esther despaired that she would ever meet her ideal man. She told friends that she was probably best suited to “the Single State.” Repulsed by ostentatious wealth and shallow frivolity, Esther feared she would never find a man who shared her distaste of greed, vanity and fashion. While her friends seemed interested only in snaring a rich husband and stocking their wardrobes, Esther wanted to live a simple, frugal life surrounded by her books and devoted to charitable works. She would demonstrate her philanthropic ideals by promising a bequest for a young girl, a foundling, who lived in Aunt Esther’s home in Wakefield. In a world of shallow diversions and rampant consumerism, it was certainly a challenge to imagine a suitor who would
appreciate Esther’s devotion to a traditional notion of virtue, her reverence for classical history and her passion for poetry. Who could possibly fit the bill?

From the moment that Esther cast eyes on Thomas Day she knew she had found her perfect partner for life. The only problem was convincing him. Esther had first met Day in 1774 through an introduction engineered by William Small. The doctor had chanced upon Esther, most probably on one of her visits to Birmingham, in the early 1770s. She sometimes stayed with relatives in Temple Row, a few doors from Dr. Small’s home, and may even have consulted the doctor about her health. When the matchmaking doctor encountered the delightful Esther he could scarcely contain his excitement.

Cautiously Small had made inquiries about her character through friends in the north and even surreptitiously obtained some copies of her letters. His findings confirmed his wildest hopes. Esther’s benevolence was widely celebrated in Yorkshire while her letters revealed a mind of superior intelligence. With the excitement of a chemist who had just isolated a new element or a doctor discovering the elixir of life, Small wrote to Edgeworth to announce his discovery. He told Edgeworth “he believed he had at last found the lady perfectly suited to Mr. Day; a woman, who was capable of appreciating his merit, and of treating the small defects in his appearance and manners as trifles beneath her serious consideration.”

Tentatively Small mentioned his discovery to Day. According to Edgeworth, the doctor waited until Day had finally severed his attachment to Sabrina. But since Day only reignited his interest in Sabrina after the doctor’s death—according to Day’s own account—that would have been impossible. It was therefore before Day had embarked on his second trial of Sabrina that Small had first broached the subject of Esther. With characteristic suspicion, Day had quizzed the doctor closely over the young heiress’s attributes.

First Day demanded to know whether the talented Miss Milnes possessed the plump, white arms he so admired. Small, with his professional eye for female physique, affirmed that she did. Did she then wear the long petticoats required by Day’s stringent dress code? Uncommonly long, Small agreed. But was she also sufficiently tall, strong and healthy to endure Day’s
anticipated retirement to a humble country cottage? In exasperation, the physician retorted that Esther was actually quite short and not particularly robust. But how could Day, the doctor demanded, expect that an attractive, cultivated and charming woman with a large fortune and views that matched his own be formed “exactly according to a picture that exists in your imagination?” But this, of course, was precisely what Day expected.

With a keen awareness of time running out, Small persisted: “This lady is two or three and twenty, has had twenty admirers; some of them admirers of herself, some, perhaps, of her fortune; yet in spite of all these admirers and lovers, she is disengaged.” There was still, however, one overriding objection: Esther’s fortune. Determined that he would never allow financial considerations to taint his choice of a bride, Day argued that he could not marry an heiress. But the astute Small had an answer there too. “What prevents you from despising the fortune, and taking the lady?” he asked coyly. Beaten into submission Day grudgingly agreed that he would meet the inestimable Miss Milnes. And so at some point in 1774 he had ventured into Yorkshire to make her acquaintance.

Besieged by bachelors baying for her money and lovesick admirers swooning over her hand, Esther had almost given up hope of finding a suitable suitor. When Thomas Day walked into her life she could hardly believe her eyes. She was immediately entranced by the wild-haired and unworldly young poet. Pleasantly impressed by his disdain for her fortune, she was delighted by his devotion to the pursuit of virtue, his progressive ideas on human rights and his benevolence to charity. Having read his antislavery poem,
The Dying Negro,
she wholeheartedly embraced his political ideals and his literary passions. She was even beguiled by his determination to live in romantic isolation with only books and a wife for company. Esther knew beyond any doubt that she had found her ideal partner. “My affection for you was the spontaneous effusion of my heart,” she would later tell him. She added, “you alone realised all my ideas of Perfection, became the Universe to me, & in you, I found an Object capable of filling my whole soul.”

Anyone but the most obtuse perfectionist could see that they were ideally matched. Day, of course, remained to be convinced. He had to concede
that, but for her diminutive stature and occasional ill health, Esther fulfilled all the physical requirements, intellectual abilities and personal characteristics of the sublime woman for whom he had hunted halfway across Europe. Yet still he hung back. He had been betrayed before by the caprice of women who offered him their hearts only to humiliate him by rejection. It must have seemed scarcely possible that after all his efforts at education he would find his ideal woman waiting patiently on his doorstep. It had to be a trap. In the meantime, he had embarked on his second attempt to train Sabrina.

Caught in a quandary, Day wavered between Sabrina, his ivory girl, his Galatea, whom he had painstakingly molded to meet his precise requirements, and this vision, this Minerva, who gazed on him with adoration and fulfilled very nearly every one of his criteria as if by magic. Stunned into indecision, Day was cordial but cool whenever he met Esther; he treated her with “no more than esteem & friendship,” she would later say. But once he had finally given up Sabrina as a lost cause, at some point in 1775, Day felt ready to pay Esther a little more attention. And now that she knew that the field was clear, Esther was keen to respond.

Friends watched with bated breath. On the rare occasions when Day had reason to travel north he made the diversion to Esther’s home with her uncles in Yorkshire to pay court to the heiress. Among Wakefield’s distinguished residents in the villas lining the town’s broad streets, the Milnes family was known as merchant princes and their mansions as palaces. But since Day spent most of his time in London, still languidly toying with his legal studies, Esther took pains to throw herself into his company whenever she could visit the capital.