How to Create the Perfect Wife (42 page)

If Sabrina was working twice as hard as ever she had for Day, in her demanding roles as housekeeper, school secretary, nursemaid and marriage prop for the Burneys, she was now treated with a degree of respect and equality that she had never enjoyed in her former benefactor’s company. When the artist Joseph Farington came for dinner at the Burneys’ house in Greenwich, he noted that across the table from him, next to the sculptor Joseph Nollekens, sat the family housekeeper Sabrina Bicknell. Ably running household affairs below stairs while being treated as an equal above stairs, Sabrina developed a close and significant relationship with Charles.

Quite how close, especially during the frequent and sometimes lengthy periods when Rosette’s swinging moods sunk so low that she insisted on being apart from Charles, is open to conjecture. One acquaintance of the Burney family would suggest that Sabrina’s role as housekeeper involved more than chaste domestic duties. Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s friend
who had remarried in 1784 to become Hester Piozzi, would later describe Charles Burney as “living all but openly with a woman in his own
house
.” The reference was understood to point to Sabrina. However, Mrs. Piozzi was a distinctly unreliable witness. She had been estranged from the Burneys since an acrimonious split with Fanny at the time of Mrs. Piozzi’s second marriage, and she erroneously believed that Charles had published malicious gossip about her. It is unlikely that her accusation was based on more than speculation.

Whether or not Mrs. Piozzi’s suspicions were correct, Sabrina would certainly remain at Charles Burney’s right hand throughout the entire time he ran his school, often in Rosette’s absence. In some ways she fulfilled the role of a surrogate wife; in many ways it was a perfect partnership. “They understood between them very well that they both appreciated each other, that nothing could surpass the fondness or the usefulness of their liaison,” wrote Fanny Burney. “He could entrust all his affairs to her, to her foresight, to her faithfulness, and she was always sure of being treated by him as his equal, his friend, and a person whose virtues are honoured as much as her talents are useful.” He was truly her “affectionate friend.”

Shielded by the high walls that encircled the Burney School in Greenwich and sheltered within the Burney family, Sabrina felt her secret past was safe. A sleepy town beside the Thames, ten miles downriver from London, Greenwich had rather degenerated since its heyday as a glorious setting for royal palaces and the birthplace of three Tudor monarchs. Now ragged children played in the sewage that ran through the huddle of dark, narrow streets down to the stinking river while the 2,500 invalid sailors quartered in the Royal Hospital for Seamen could often be seen downing beer in the smoky taverns or lying insensible on the pavements with their crutches abandoned by their sides. But away from the dank and dangerous quayside, the town provided a pleasant location for admirals and aristocrats in the imposing villas overlooking Greenwich Park.

Situated in a redbrick mansion at the bottom of Crooms Hill, Greenwich’s oldest and most salubrious street, the Burney School accommodated around one hundred boarding pupils aged six to fifteen. Parents who deposited their boys at the blue wooden gates paid sizable fees of £ 100 a
year for their sons to be coached for Oxford or Cambridge. As a renowned classical scholar, Charles Burney taught the boys traditional subjects using conventional methods, which were as far removed from the Rousseau philosophy as it was possible to stray. A fair but stern headmaster, who was reputed to buy birch rods “by the cartload,” Burney seemingly treated his role as a form of atonement for his own misspent youth.

Helping to manage an establishment for one hundred boys, their teachers, the family, and the servants to look after them all was no mean feat. Yet Sabrina proved herself an indispensable housekeeper above and below stairs. On the ground floor and upper levels of the three-story house, where the family lived, a grand mahogany staircase led to sumptuously furnished rooms resplendent with ornate marble fireplaces and red velvet curtains. While the upper floors exuded an air of calm sophistication, the lower levels were a flurry of fevered activity. In the basement, servants sweated over a cast-iron “stewing stove,” a vast range and two stone sinks while keeping an anxious eye on a bell-board with twelve “spring bells.” A large housekeeper’s room was stocked with linen presses and a revolving mangle. There would have been constant demand for water from the hydraulic pump connected to a well in the garden and for ice from the icehouse outside. An adjoining school building housed the pupils and their classrooms.

As housekeeper, Sabrina would have been in charge of a large fleet of servants, including cooks, kitchen maids, laundry maids and housemaids along with an impressive set of keys. Bills that survive for two pupils who attended the school reveal the press of activity. They itemize fees for lessons in fencing, drawing, geography and mathematics along with bills for the dentist, hatter, tailor and shoemaker and charges for copybooks, pens, slates and pencils. The bills each include one guinea, for “Mrs. Bicknell, at Christmas.”

Writing to the Edgeworths, Sabrina gave some idea of the unending demands on her time and labor. In one letter, she complained that she could not take a day off because the approach of the school holidays “always
loads
me with an unconscionable accumulation of business.” In another she apologized for writing “in the disagreeable expectation of being disturbed every moment” since her hope of finding a “quiet hour” had been continually frustrated. She certainly earned her guinea tips.

Yet the respectable middle- and upper-class parents who sent their sons to Greenwich for a rigorous education at the Burney School had no inkling that the busy housekeeper who welcomed their boys hid a sensational past. Although bland details of Thomas Day’s experiment had appeared in Keir’s biography, this sold poorly, and Sabrina’s identity had remained concealed. As her two boys thrived in Burney’s school, she hoped that John and Henry would never discover their mother’s origins or the strange story of how she met their father. But even though Day’s body had been interred in its grave, Sabrina’s history refused to remain buried. Day’s ghost would always stand at her shoulder; his crazed experiment would cast its shadow over the rest of her life.

It was hardly surprising that Maria Edgeworth should use her literary talents to wreak revenge on her father’s friend, Thomas Day. Firstly, there was all that foul tar water he had forced her to drink as part of his “icy” system. Secondly, and more crucially, Day had tried to prevent Maria from writing at all. If Day had had his way, Maria Edgeworth would never have become a novelist.

With her father’s encouragement, Maria had begun writing short stories at the age of twelve. Two years later he suggested she should translate from French a new book on education with a view to publication. Maria had just completed the task when another English translation appeared. When Day heard the news, he wrote to Edgeworth, not to commiserate on his daughter’s disappointment but to congratulate him that she had been beaten to the press. According to Maria, Day had “such a horror of female authorship” that he was “shocked and alarmed” to hear that Edgeworth had allowed her to attempt the translation at all. Indeed, Day was so eager to deter women from writing that he often quoted lines from a poem, “Advice to the Ladies,” which warned, “Wit like wine intoxicates the brain, / Too strong for feeble women to sustain.” First published in 1731, the poem was dedicated to a mythical Belinda.

Although Edgeworth was as apprehensive as any Georgian father at the idea of his daughter becoming a publishing sensation, he had vehemently defended Maria’s literary ambitions. But with Day’s harsh words ringing in her ears, Maria waited until after his death to publish her first
book,
Letters for Literary Ladies,
in 1795, when she was twenty-seven. A sharp riposte to Day’s objections, it mounted a bold defense of women’s right to pursue a literary career. Nothing could stop her now. After
Practical Education,
the child-care manual cowritten with her father, appeared in 1798, Maria’s first novel,
Castle Rackrent,
was published to wide acclaim in 1800. Buoyed by her literary success, now Maria was ready to turn the tables on her erstwhile detractor Day.

First she limbered up for the task with a short story, “Forester,” in a collection entitled
Moral Tales for Young People
in 1801. Plainly based on Day, the uncouth young Forester detests “politeness so much” that society appears to him “either odious or ridiculous.” Arriving at his guardian’s house, Forester refuses to wipe his shoes or change his “disordered dress” before bursting into the drawing room. “He entered with dirty shoes, a threadbare coat, and hair that looked as if it never had been combed; and he was much surprised by the effect, which his singular appearance produced upon the risible muscles of some of the company.”

Now that she had developed a taste for literary revenge, in the same year Maria published her second novel,
Belinda.
She not only chose the name of her heroine, and the book’s title, as a rebuff to Day’s advice to would-be female writers, she used the story of Day’s attempt to educate Sabrina as the kernel of her narrative. Maria Edgeworth’s first “society” novel,
Belinda
tells the tale of the eponymous heroine’s search for an ideal husband. At seventeen, Belinda is intrigued by the rich and aristocratic Clarence Hervey, but she eventually discovers that Hervey hides a scandalous secret. As an idealistic young man, Hervey had been “charmed” by the ideas of Rousseau and had “formed the romantic project of educating a wife for himself.” Searching for a simple maid to suit his scheme, Hervey stumbles upon a young girl living with her grandmother in an isolated cottage. The girl, Rachel, is “a most beautiful creature” with a “sweet voice” and “finely shaped hands and arms” whose mother had been seduced by a rake. When her grandmother dies, Hervey takes charge of the girl and conceals her in a house with only a governess and a pet bullfinch for company. He renames her Virginia St Pierre, in a reference to another Rousseau fanatic Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the French writer and botanist whose novel
Paul et Virginie
,
published in 1787, had imagined an idyllic romance for Rousseau’s Émile and Sophie.

Testing Virginia’s simple tastes, Hervey asks her to choose between a rosebud and a pair of diamond earrings. Unlike Day’s erstwhile fiancée, Elizabeth Hall, Virginia picks the rose. Confused by her feelings for her benevolent captor in the same way Sabrina must have felt in her relationship with Day, Virginia says: “When he is near me, I feel a sort of fear, mixed with my love.” Yet as Virginia warms toward Hervey, his passion fades in favor of the accomplished Belinda, just as Day had dropped Sabrina for Esther. “In comparison to Belinda, Virginia appeared to him but an insipid, though innocent child; the one he found was his equal, the other his inferiour,” so that “at length, he became desirous to change the nature of his connexion with Virginia, and to appear to her only in the light of a friend or a benefactor.” The tangle is happily resolved when Virginia is reunited with a childhood sweetheart, leaving Hervey free to marry Belinda.

Although the connection between Hervey and Day is never stated, at one point Belinda’s friend reads from
The Dying Negro
and at another quotes directly from Keir’s biography in an effort to flush out Hervey’s secret. But Maria Edgeworth made no secret of the inspiration for her plot when later editing her father’s memoirs. “Mr. Day’s educating Sabrina for his wife suggested the story of Virginia and Clarence Hervey in Belinda,” she wrote. “But to avoid representing the real character of Mr. Day, which I did not think it right to draw, I used the incident, with the fictitious characters, which I made as unlike the real persons as I possibly could.” Appropriately enough, it was
Belinda
that firmly established Maria Edgeworth’s literary career. Before long she had eclipsed Fanny Burney as the most popular novelist of her time, and her style would influence both Walter Scott and Jane Austen.

There was little surprise that Fanny Burney, always alert for a dramatic plot, was inspired by Sabrina’s story too. After moving to France in 1802 to join her French husband, Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard d’Arblay, Fanny decided to improve her French by writing some short compositions for her husband to correct. As she was casting around for a suitable subject to divert him, their son Alex was reading aloud from Day’s moral tales in
Sandford and Merton.
She needed to look no further. Having heard all about the author’s immoral past from Sabrina or Charles, Fanny decided to entertain her husband with Day’s wife-training project in her shaky, self-taught French.

In a tiny notebook, which still survives, Fanny describes Sabrina’s story with the cavalier approach to truth that only a novelist could bring to the tale. In Fanny’s version, Day is so torn between his “two lambs” that he resolves to bring up both Sabrina and “Juliana”—as she calls Lucretia—to become “society ladies.” When Day settles on marrying Sabrina and confesses his intentions to her, she runs away to marry Bicknell who “had desperately loved her since he first saw her and who was loved by her with adoration.” But despite marrying “the man of her dreams,” Sabrina never ceased to think of Day without “affection, gratitude, regret”—or so said Fanny.

Sabrina’s story would continue to beguile novelists such as Henry James, with his racy 1871 novella
Watch and Ward.
His contemporary Anthony Trollope would tell a similar story about a young man who molds an orphan to become his wife as a central thread in his 1862 novel
Orley Farm.
Trollope’s character, a young barrister named Felix Graham, who had left Oxford without taking a degree, is plainly based on Day. Graham is “tall and thin, and his face had been slightly marked with the smallpox. He stooped in his gait as he walked, and was often awkward with his hands and legs.” As a naïve but well-intentioned youth, Graham takes under his care an orphan, Mary Snow, the daughter of an engraver, described as “drunken, dissolute, and generally drowned in poverty.” Graham agrees to a written contract with the father to educate Snow with a view to marriage “if her conduct up to that age had been becoming.” Rather than “take a partner in life at hazard,” Graham was resolved “to mould a young mind and character to those pursuits and modes of thought which may best fit a woman for the duties she will have to perform.”