How to Create the Perfect Wife (45 page)

Now that she faced the daunting task of finishing and editing her father’s memoirs for publication, Maria vowed to stay faithful to his commitment to simplicity and truth. Yet she was well aware that digging up her father’s past could prove highly uncomfortable for those few friends left alive. Having already published her fictionalized version of Day’s educational experiment in her novel
Belinda,
Maria approached the factual retelling with trepidation. In August she had sailed for Bristol with her half sister, twenty-seven-year-old Honora, and the draft manuscript of her father’s memoirs carefully stowed in a sturdy boxfile. It was, in effect, Edgeworth’s last trip to England.

Arriving in London in October Maria was feted as a literary celebrity. Admirers of her big, bold Irish novels were surprised to meet the tiny, self-effacing, mild-mannered, middle-aged woman. One described her as “a little, dark, bearded, sharp, withered, active, laughing, talking, impudent, fearless, outspoken, honest, whiggish, unchristian, good-tempered, kindly ultra-Irish body.” Seeking a break from the social whirl she retreated to Hampstead and from there she wrote to Sabrina in Greenwich with a request to meet and “look over the parts of
the
MS. in which she and her
husband” were mentioned. Sabrina wrote back immediately: “I cannot come to you my dear Miss E for I have had these 5 months an abscess in my back which prevents me from bearing the motion of a carriage.” Despite her discomfort Sabrina was busy preparing and packing clothes for a boy who was leaving for university. “There she is with an abscess in her back doing all this mending and packing,” Maria told her stepmother. “Well may it be said that half the world don’t know how the other half live.”

In the meantime Maria set out to find the Essex farm where the Days had once lived in grim austerity. Vaguely remembering the place from her holidays enduring Day’s icy system, Maria was disappointed to find that the house with its windowless dressing room had been razed to the ground and replaced with a tiny cottage. But she was gratified when the new resident, one of Day’s former laborers, recalled his old employer with warmth and declared: “Oh Mr. Day was a
good
man and did a power of good to the poorer sort.” Her faith in her father’s fondest friend as a “good man” was sorely shaken, however, the following day, October 15, when she and Honora ventured to Greenwich to meet Sabrina.

Having met Sabrina fleetingly when Maria stayed in Stowe House as a small child and Sabrina had been in her early teens, Maria was astonished when she came face to face with the doughty sixty-one-year-old widow who was managing a school for one hundred boys. “I was struck with a great change in Mrs. Bicknells manner and mind,” Maria wrote home. “Instead of being as Mr. Day thought her helpless and indolent she is more like a stirring housekeeper—all softness and timidity gone!”

It was a difficult and disturbing visit for all concerned. Maria now produced her father’s manuscript of his memoirs with the detailed story of Sabrina’s selection and education. When Sabrina told her that she was unable to read the handwritten text on account of her poor eyesight, Maria had no choice but to recite the passages out loud herself. “It was disagreeable to me as you may guess—especially to read about
the foundling hospital.” When
Sabrina then told her the harrowing effect on her son John when he had first discovered his mother’s origins thirteen years earlier, Maria was aghast. “She wishes that part to be left out on account of her sons,” Maria wrote home. “So much for the wisdom of concealment!” she
added, although she immediately agreed to further concealment by removing all mention of the Foundling Hospital from her script. “I can easily alter a sentence or two so as to avoid repeating or tearing open the wound.”

Although John Bicknell was now thirty-three, a successful solicitor earning £2,000 a year—“in a good house, with garden—greenhouse,” Maria said—he was still so ashamed of his mother’s past that he erupted in fury whenever the secret resurfaced. He had only lately been “enraged” again when a magazine retold the story, Sabrina told Maria. To Maria’s surprise neither John nor Sabrina had any knowledge of Keir’s biography although Sabrina now spoke of the Keirs with “great resentment.” The intensity of her feelings after so many years attested to the central role that Keir had played as Day’s agent in orchestrating her relationship with him. But this was nothing to the bitterness that Sabrina now expressed for her erstwhile teacher. Day had “made her miserable—a slave &c!” exclaimed Maria; the association with Day’s antislavery contributions was plainly deliberate. By contrast, when Maria mentioned her father’s generosity toward Sabrina, she replied: “You have not said enough—You
cannot
say enough of your father’s kindness to me.”

True to her word, Maria excised any mention of the Foundling Hospital in her father’s memoirs and sent a copy of the amended draft to Sabrina for approval. Finally recovering from her back complaint at the end of October, Sabrina responded with mixed emotions. There was nothing in the document that “I
ought
to object to” she told Maria, “on the contrary I feel sincere sentiments of gratitude for your friendly attention & caution not to wound my feelings & for this your goodness, I beg you to accept my
heartiest
thanks.” Sabrina was grateful Maria had omitted “the circumstance of my having been taken from the Foundling Hospital,” and she urged her “to say as little as possible respecting Mr. Days having given me the name of Sabrina Sydney.”

Yet she had to confess “that I do wish the life of my very dear & excellent friend your father could have been compleat without introducing the events of my checker’d & adventurous history.” She added: “These ro-mantick fancies do well enough in youth but in age they are repugnant & distressing to ones feelings.” And although she looked forward to reading
the book, she told Maria she would do so with “very painful sensations of pleasure.” It was a perfect choice of phrase.

When Edgeworth’s memoirs were published in 1820, the book duly made no mention of Sabrina’s origins in the Foundling Hospital, revealing only that Day and Bicknell had selected “from a number of orphans, one of remarkably promising appearance.” But the fact that the book went on to describe how Day chose a second orphan from the Foundling Hospital in London would have left few readers in any doubt of Sabrina’s past. Although the book attempted to obfuscate Sabrina’s origins, it provided new and shocking revelations about her subsequent relationship with Day including his revival of interest in her when she was seventeen and Day fully expected they would marry before the final showdown abruptly ended their connections, as well as the circumstances of Sabrina’s marriage to Bicknell. Inevitably the book triggered renewed press interest in Sabrina’s story with further outrage about eighteenth-century “crack-brained absurdities,” which shocked nineteenth-century sensibilities and brought fresh pain to John Bicknell.

It was five more years before Sabrina was finally released from her job at the Burney School. Now sixty-eight, the grandmother of seven little girls, she moved into a fine new house around the corner from the school, at 9 The Circus. Built at the turn of the century, on land sliced from the Burney School grounds, the semicircular terrace of twenty-two grand four-story houses had been modeled on The Circus in Bath. Having labored almost all her life in the service of others, now Sabrina had two servants to wait on her. Learning of his aunt’s retirement, John Constable assured his wife that he understood Sabrina’s replacement to be “as fully competent as Mrs. Bicknell was to the conducting the domestic affairs of the school.”

It was not Constable, obsessively perfecting landscapes, but one of the period’s most popular portrait artists, Stephen Poyntz Denning, who painted Sabrina’s picture in 1832 as a memorial for the hundreds of former pupils she had cared for during thirty-three years at the Burney School. Charles Parr Burney commissioned the portrait from Denning, who was best known for his picture painted in 1823 of a four-year-old girl who would grow up to become Queen Victoria. Although Denning’s original
portrait of Sabrina has disappeared, the prints that Burney ordered for distribution among his former pupils, from engravings by Richard James Lane, whose lithographic pictures featured the celebrities of the time, survive still. Denning was delighted with the prints and wrote to thank Lane “for your beautiful drawing of Mrs. Bicknell,” which was “much beyond my most sanguine expectation, and most successful.”

The only known portrait of Sabrina, it shows a buxom, rosy-cheeked, self-assured woman, looking younger than her seventy-five years, with abundant, glossy curls still springing willfully from a white cap and mischievous shining eyes looking directly ahead. The ring on her finger may be a mourning ring for her long-gone husband. She wears a handkerchief around her neck, although it is highly unlikely that it is adjusted according to her former teacher’s precise directions. And she is smiling enigmatically as if she has a story to tell. Fanny Burney was delighted with her copy of the portrait “which is so strong a likeness I should have recognized it on any part of the Globe.” But it was not long before even Sabrina began to look her age.

When Charles Parr Burney’s eldest daughter, now married as Fanny Anne Wood, visited “Bicky” in 1837 she confided to her diary: “She is, alas! much changed.” It seemed, indeed, as eighteen-year-old Victoria took the throne that year, that the old world was being swept away. The Burney School closed in 183 8, and the following year, to Fanny Anne Wood’s dismay, the “dear old house and garden” were demolished to make way for “little brick shops and Houses.” From her windows in The Circus, Sabrina would have been able to watch as the stewing stove, stone sinks and linen presses that she had known so well were all dismantled, and the old house and school were torn down to make way for a new terrace named Burney Street.

All around, previously unimaginable changes were taking place. The riverside slums were cleared, the old marketplace was demolished, a new workhouse was erected and in 1841 the railway reached Greenwich, reducing an hour’s coach journey to fifteen minutes by steam train and bringing hordes of sightseers to the previously isolated town. While Sabrina remained in The Circus, Fanny Anne moved away from the river with its threat of cholera to more salubrious Blackheath, and lamented
the decay in buildings and people around her. “I see grey hairs upon brows where I have never noticed them before; and limbs have grown feeble, faces wrinkled, steps less elastic, spirits less gay and buoyant;—in short, many of my acquaintances seem to have aged by magic.” That was certainly true when she called that summer on “dear old Mrs. Bicknell (a very old friend indeed).”

Two years later, on September 8, 1843, Sabrina died at her home in The Circus, aged eighty-six. Her death certificate recorded the cause of death as asthma—perhaps the legacy of five decades of damp Greenwich surroundings—and gave her name as Sobrina Ann Bicknell. She had accumulated a tidy sum. In her will she left £2,000 (worth about £365,000 today) to John and £ 1,000 to Henry; the difference was not due to any wish to discriminate, she had written, but on the grounds that John’s health was “by no means good” and his professional duties “anxious & laborious” while Henry was settled in a well-paid position. There were small sums for Charles Parr Burney, his daughters Fanny Anne and Susan Sabrina, and her two servants, not forgetting her seven granddaughters.

Although she died only eight miles from the parish where she had been born, Sabrina had come a long way. She had been born into utter poverty, almost certainly illegitimate, an orphan without possessions, identity or even a token to suggest her origins, at the very bottom of the eighteenth-century social scale. And she had died a respectable, well-loved and well-off Victorian matron and grandmother, with two servants under her command, at one of the most desirable houses in Greenwich. She had been renamed three times—from Monimia Butler, to Ann Kingston, to Sabrina Sidney and finally to Sabrina Bicknell—yet although the records of her arrival had been faithfully preserved in the Foundling Hospital she had never learned her original name or her place of birth.

With no known family history, no known ties or connections, Sabrina represented the archetypal anonymous orphan, the supposedly blank slate on which others could imprint their beliefs and ideas. She had been shaped by the institutional system of the Foundling Hospital into a compliant, industrious and pious young girl; she had been fashioned by Thomas Day into a hardy, bright and curious teenager; and she had been educated at her Sutton Coldfield boarding school to acquire the refinements and graces of
an elegant and amiable young woman. She had touched the lives of some of the most brilliant minds of the eighteenth century—including Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Erasmus Darwin, Anna Seward, Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney and, of course, Thomas Day, and—with the exception of Maria Edgeworth—she had outlived them all. Each of them had in some way affected and influenced her life and her outlook.

Yet for all these various efforts to transform her, to impose nurture upon nature, to change her name, her beliefs, her appearance and her behavior, Sabrina had remained essentially true to herself. The little girl who had once stood out in a row of identically uniformed orphans, the spirited teenager who had rebelled against Day’s domestic enslavement and perverse trials, the penniless young widow who had struggled to bring up her two sons alone, had ended her life as a formidable housekeeper who insisted upon her own version of events. She had been selected as the candidate for one man’s idea of the perfect woman, and she had refused to accept her fate.

Sabrina Bicknell was buried six days after her death in All Souls Cemetery, Kensal Green, in northwest London, the most prestigious final resting place in all Victorian England. John Laurens Bicknell survived his mother by only two years before he died, exhausted by work and anxiety, on August 3, 1845, aged fifty-nine. He was buried beside her. His only daughter, Mary Grant Bicknell, lived into the twentieth century before she died at the age of eighty-one in 1905. Henry Edgeworth Bicknell retired on a pension of £2,500 a year—decried as an example of government profligacy—and lived until the age of ninety-one before he died in 1879. Although four of his six surviving girls died unmarried, and another daughter emigrated to Germany, his daughter Mary Henrietta gave birth to two sons who produced a long line of descendants still flourishing in Britain today: Sabrina’s great-great-great-great-grandchildren. Sabrina, meanwhile, would live on in fiction in perpetuity under the guises of Virginia St Pierre, Mary Snow, Nora Lambert, Eliza Doolittle and many more further and future incarnations of Galatea waiting to be molded according to the Pygmalion myth.