How to Create the Perfect Wife (44 page)

Among the many pupils who benefited from Sabrina’s efficient management at the Burney School was James Haliburton, an Egyptologist who excavated tombs in the Valley of the Kings; while working in Egypt, Haliburton purchased a Greek slave, twenty-five years his junior, whom he brought back to England as his wife. One of his fellow alumni was Thomas Fowell Buxton, who would become one of Britain’s foremost campaigners against slavery. Rather less noble among the Burney School boys, however, was Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who was suspected of poisoning his uncle, mother-in-law and sister-in-law. Escaping charges for murder, he would be convicted of forging documents to obtain money from his grandfather’s will and transported in 1837 to a penal colony.

Most of the time Burney’s pupils submitted meekly to his draconian discipline, just as his housekeeper had once submitted to her tutor’s ordeals. But just as schoolboys elsewhere periodically rose up in rebellion, so the Burney boys at one point refused to toe the line. In February 1808 more than forty boys barricaded themselves in their dormitory in protest at Burney’s liberal use of the birch rod. “The boys were very angry with Burney for being so strict & severe with them & thought they could put an end to it by rebelling,” one boy, John Graham, told his mother. Armed with sticks and knives, the boys nailed shut the door and only finally let Burney in when he threatened to break it down. At that point, the boys “hit him with their sticks,” said Graham, who had wisely kept out of the riot, but Burney hit the offenders back until finally they quieted down. Two of the ringleaders were expelled and the rest of the boys “forgiven.”

For all the occasional protests, most of the Burney scholars seemed happy enough. As John Graham told his mother, “we play till we are quite tired & then lie down in the shade in a nice field at the bottom of the playground.” In another letter home he wrote: “Mrs Bicknell is exceedingly kind to me & I am quite happy.” Certainly Sabrina’s sons viewed their schooldays with fondness. John and Henry became founder members of
the Burney Club, whose former pupils met for convivial dinners in homage to their stern headmaster.

While Sabrina remained at the center of the school, her sons moved on. When they both announced plans to marry in 1808, Sabrina relayed the news to Edgeworth just as she had turned to him for advice over her own marriage more than twenty years earlier. “My Dear Sabrina,” he replied, “If your sons marry to please you I wish you joy with all my heart.” Promising to send her usual allowance by the next post, Edgeworth told her, “I assure you most sincerely of my esteem and affection.”

Edgeworth had himself remarried, his fourth wife, in 1798. When Elizabeth had followed her sister Honora to the grave in 1797, leaving Edgeworth with ten children, he had been single for all of six months before marrying Frances Anne Beaufort, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of an Irish clergyman. Twenty-five years his junior, Frances was nearly two years younger even than Maria. Frances would give Edgeworth six more children, bringing his total brood (including those who died in infancy) to twenty-two.

Of Sabrina’s sons, Henry took the plunge first and married his first cousin, Mary Arnold, the daughter of his father’s sister Mary, on August 23, 1808. Four months later, on December 28, John married Jane Will-mott, the daughter of a paper manufacturer who lived not far from Greenwich. Grandchildren followed swiftly. Henry’s wife Mary gave birth to a daughter, Marianna, a year after their marriage followed by five more daughters and two sons. Henry would marry a second time, after his first wife’s death left him with five surviving daughters, to Caroline Gason, who gave birth to four more children, although only a daughter would survive infancy. John and Jane, however, would remain childless until 1824, when Jane gave birth to a daughter, their only child, named Mary Grant Bicknell.

Like his namesake, Henry Edgeworth Bicknell would always live life on a grand scale. Tall, good-looking and dapper, Henry rose effortlessly up the legal ladder and was soon established in the Court of Chancery. A portrait of Henry in later life shows a stylish, handsome man with a steady
gaze. For John, life would always be a struggle, dogged by his ill health and reminders of the family shame that he endeavored to submerge. He too progressed up the legal ladder, but it was a hard and laborious haul. John would eventually become solicitor to both Greenwich and Chelsea Hospitals—the retirement homes for sailors and soldiers respectively—as well as private solicitor to the eccentric architect and collector John Soane. A portrait of John in later life shows a short, stout, respectable gentleman with a tight-set mouth and a deeply etched worry line between his eyes. While Henry moved with his large family into a smart townhouse in central London, John stayed close to his mother, leasing a house for himself and his new wife in Crooms Hill, two doors up from the Burney School.

When Charles Burney retired as headmaster in 1813, Sabrina continued in her job as school housekeeper, working for his son Charles Parr Burney. Worn out by hundreds of rebellious pupils and one unhappy wife, Charles Burney became rector of St. Paul’s Church in nearby Deptford. Sabrina, now a fifty-six-year-old grandmother, escaped the flurry of school business during the interregnum to see the Edgeworths, who were visiting London for a few weeks. Worried they would return to Ireland before she could see them a second time, Sabrina wrote, “I
long
to see you
once
more.”

As Henry’s marriage might suggest, Sabrina’s sons forged strong links with their Bicknell relatives despite their uncles’ apathy to their childhood plight. Uncle Charles, who had acquired the lucrative positions of solicitor to the Admiralty and to the Prince of Wales, helped his nephews establish themselves in the legal world, and the boys were friendly with his daughter Maria. Cousin Maria came to stay with John and his wife, Jane, in Greenwich for a week in February 1816. Since Charles Bicknell was determined that none of his family would ever face the debts that had embarrassed his brother John and impoverished his sister-in-law Sabrina, he had forbidden Maria from seeing John Constable, a struggling artist with uncertain prospects who had courted her faithfully for seven years. But Maria smuggled him a furtive letter from Greenwich, complaining, “I walked out a very damp day, and have got a cold.” Eight months later Maria defied her father and the couple were married. So John Constable, who would
become one of the age’s greatest painters, became Sabrina’s nephew by marriage, and he took a close interest in her work and her sons.

If anything Charles Parr Burney was regarded as an even stricter headmaster than his father had been. Constable, at one point, told Maria that he had upset some friends with a “dictatorial” letter “demanding (almost)” that they return their unhappy son. Constable thought Burney “a heartless fellow” though he added dolefully “but all schools are woeful things at best.” Passionately happy and perfectly devoted, the Constables would enjoy just twelve years of marital harmony before Maria died of consumption—tuberculosis—in 1828, leaving a heartbroken husband and seven children under eleven.

In the meantime, Sabrina had her own grief to deal with. In the three years up to 1817, her son Henry lost three children—his eldest daughter Marianna and two infant sons—and her son John was severely ill again. He continued an invalid and was “likely to remain so,” Sabrina told Edgeworth in April. For herself, she was “still toiling on with Mr Burney” but hoped she could continue “enduring the labours of this situation” a few years longer before retiring “to some quiet retreat where I may have leisure to devote my mind to subjects necessary to prepare me for a better world.”

The following month, she thanked Edgeworth for £50 that he had sent her but assured him that she no longer needed his bounty and had not done for several years past. Her sons were now settled and “are not the drag on my purse they used to be” so that she was able to put aside some savings in order to “make a reserve for my infirmities, which I feel daily approaching.” Her ailments were less the result of old age, she said poignantly, than “the
many
trials I have had to encounter.” And she added: “Whenever my life ends I trust I shall feel that it
has not
passed uselessly or intirely unprofitably.” She was now sixty, and working as hard as ever, yet retirement remained a distant hope.

But in the midst of Sabrina’s worries about her sons and her grandchildren, it was Edgeworth’s ill health that now brought her distress. “Your account of yourself & declining health gives me great uneasiness & has sunk my spirits more than I can express,” Sabrina wrote to him. “I had hoped for the happiness of seeing you once more—but should this blessing be
denied me in this world God grant that I may be worthy of meeting in
that
World where
all
is peace & joy.” It was only after sealing the letter that the realization truly hit home that this might be the last time she would ever write to the faithful friend and benefactor to whom she had written—in dictation to Day—her first-ever letter forty-eight years earlier, from Avignon, at the age of twelve. On the outside she added a hurried postscript: “Adieu dear dear Sir & again accept a thousand grateful thanks for all your goodness to me.”

Her fears were realized. On June 13, 1817, Richard Lovell Edgeworth died. He was seventy-three. Throughout his long and grueling illness he had remained characteristically positive. He had continued performing his experiments and mechanical trials—he was still trying to create the perfect carriage—until just a year earlier. When he became too ill to continue his experiments unaided, his children had gathered around the bed to conduct them for him. Five days before he died, after a sleepless night spent in pain and sickness, Edgeworth wrote to his sister, Margaret Ruxton, bubbling with vigor and joy as much as ever, to assure her that “my mind retains its natural cheerfulness.”

According to his wishes, Edgeworth was placed in a plain coffin “without velvet, plate or gilding.” It was carried by his own laborers to the family vault where a simple marble tablet was erected recording just his name and the dates of his birth and death. He left behind his fourth wife, Frances, and thirteen surviving children of the twenty-two he had fathered; Maria, now the eldest, was forty-nine, and the youngest was only five.

True to his abiding interest, Edgeworth had left among his papers some plans for a school to be built in Edgeworthstown, where children of poor families could learn basic reading, writing and arithmetic, with opportunities to study mechanics, of course, for those inclined. He had insisted that the school should be open to Catholics and Protestants alike. And never forgetting his lifelong commitment to the Rousseau method—albeit with typical Edgeworth pragmatism—he had stipulated: “In this school the understanding should be cultivated and exercised, without loading the memory; and the constant object should be, to excite the pupils to think and to apply their understandings to their conduct.” His eldest surviving son, Lovell, began work immediately building the school.

When Sabrina heard the news of Edgeworth’s death in a letter from Maria sent a few days later, she was devastated. “By this loss I am deprived of my oldest friend, &
one
I have always found
most
ready, & prompt to assist me in
every
way in his power,” Sabrina replied. “His kindness to me is deeply engraved on my heart, & while I have life I shall dwell with
grateful pleasure
on his
dear
&
loved memory.”
Edgeworth had been presented unbidden with the responsibility for Sabrina when she was twelve, and all his life he had done his best to safeguard her welfare and happiness.

But just as with Day’s death, so Edgeworth’s demise reopened old wounds. Having acted as her father’s business manager and personal secretary for most of her life, Maria began the task of sorting through his letters—“those to and from Mr. Day especially,” she told Sabrina in August—with a view to publishing his unfinished memoirs. Now she asked Sabrina to return “a little manuscript life of Mr. Day” that she believed her father had sent her. Dictated by Edgeworth to Maria, it was probably a draft of the biography that Edgeworth had originally planned to publish before Keir assumed that task; with his customary deference to her feelings Edgeworth had evidently invited Sabrina to peruse the details. Now Maria was desperate to have it back. “I am particularly anxious to have it because it was in fact not mine but
his.
It was all spoken by him to me,” she told Sabrina. She added: “I entreat you to look carefully before you give me the pain of answering NO.”

But before she had time to contemplate the effect of Edgeworth’s memoirs being published, Sabrina had to bear the loss of a second close friend. After years of painful gout and debilitating headaches, Charles Burney suffered a stroke on Christmas Eve 1817 and died three days later, aged sixty. The loss in a single year of both Burney and Edgeworth—her two most loyal friends and allies—was inestimable.

Sabrina had now turned sixty herself, and her heavy duties at the Burney School began to take their toll on her. Her eyesight had deteriorated to the extent that she could no longer read unaided, and in the spring of 1818 she became ill with an abscess on her back, which took more than six months to heal. As well as the ebb and flow of pupils, there were new additions in the Burney family, making demands on her time too. Charles Parr Burney had married in 1810, and the first of six children, Frances
Anne, arrived two years later. Growing up amid hordes of rowdy boys, little Fannittina, as she was known, took refuge with the housekeeper she called Bicky. When a third daughter arrived to the Burneys in February 1818, Sabrina was asked to become godmother, and the baby was named Susan Sabrina in her honor. Working on despite her ailments, Sabrina had probably forgotten all thoughts of Edgeworth’s impending memoirs when a letter arrived in October from Maria.

Having begun writing his memoirs in his sixties, Edgeworth had broken off midsentence in 1809 when illness had struck him down. At that point he had made Maria promise she would complete the work after his death. Scrupulously honest and disarmingly humble, Edgeworth’s memoirs related his miserable first marriage and subsequent three happier marriages, his failed efforts at educating Dick and his rather more successful attempts with his younger children, his wild inventions and his Lunar club connections, and, of course, his recollections of his lifelong friend Thomas Day along with a full and frank account of Day’s mission to educate Sabrina.