How to Create the Perfect Wife (59 page)

253
   
a short story, “Forester”:
Edgeworth, Maria, “Forester” in
Moral Tales for Young People
(London, 1801), pp. 1–258. For more discussion about Day’s effect in stifling ME’s writing career see Myers. Myers describes Day as “the patriarch who stopped the young woman’s career cold” until ME was “freed” by Day’s fall from his horse. Myers also provides an illuminating portrait of Day’s wife-training experiment. For further discussion of Day’s influence on ME see Butler, M.

253
   
Maria Edgeworth’s first “society” novel,
Belinda: Edgeworth, Maria,
Belinda
(first pub. 1801; Oxford, 1999). The quotes are from pp. 362–77.

254
   
Maria Edgeworth made no secret of the inspiration:
Edgeworth, RL and M, vol. 2, p. 349.

254
   
it was
Belinda
that firmly established Maria Edgeworth’s literary career:
Butler, Marilyn,
Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English literature and its background, 1760–1830
(Oxford, 1981), p. 96.

254
   
Fanny decided to improve her French by writing some short compositions:
Burney, French Exercise Book (Berg).

255
   
Trollope would tell a similar story:
Trollope, Anthony,
Orley Farm
(2 vols., London, 1935). The quotes are from vol. 1, pp. 176, 330, 226 and vol. 2, p. 137. In a key element of the plot, Graham is also thrown from his horse although, unlike Day, he survives with just a broken arm. My thanks to Tilli Tansey for drawing my attention to Trollope’s book.

CHAPTER II: GALATEA

257
   
the British had lived with the fear of invasion:
Information on the expected French invasion is from Fortescue, Sir John William,
A History of the British Army
(13 vols., London, 1910), vol. 5, pp. 167–244; Schom, Alan,
Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle 1803–1805
(London, 1990); Pocock, Tom,
The Terror before Trafalgar
(London, 2002).

257
   
he picked up the book
Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin: It is not possible to date exactly when John Laurens Bicknell read Seward’s biography of Darwin and wrote to her—his letter has not survived—but she referred to his letter in January 1805. AS had been away from Lichfield for five months up to December 1804. It has also not been possible to date his birth precisely, but he was born in the winter of 1785–86. The descriptions and quotes relating to Day in Seward’s memoir are from Seward (1804), pp. 12–38.

258
   
In law, as John would have known, illegitimate children:
William Blackstone, in his
Commentaries on the Laws of England,
states that an illegitimate child “can inherit nothing, being looked upon as the son of nobody.” Blackstone, William,
Commentaries on the Laws of England
(2 vols., London, 1765–69), vol. 1, p. 447. Literary references are from Zunshine, pp. 133–34. Fanny Burney, in her novel
Evelina,
wrote that illegitimacy would bring “shame and dishonour” on her heroine. Fanny Burney,
Evelina
(first published 1778; Oxford, 2008), p. 337.

259
   
“such a state of irritation”:
Sabrina later described her son’s reactions to ME who related the story to her stepmother. ME to Frances Edgeworth, October 13 and 15, 1818, in Edgeworth (1971), pp. 121–22.

259
   
“the dearest friend I had on earth”:
AS to R. Fellowes, August 31, 1803, Seward (1811), vol. 6, p. 101.

259
   
forced by his family to issue a retraction:
Robert Darwin to AS, March 5, 1804, LRO, D262/1/34; Darwin, pp. 70–75.

259
   
“a base and surely most unprovoked attack”:
AS to Rev. Thomas Sedgewick Whalley, January 22, 1805, in Whalley, vol. 1, pp. 263–64. AS describes her reply to JB in her letter to Whalley.

260
   
reviewers of Darwin’s biography savaged Seward: Annual Review
, January 1804;
Universal Magazine,
April 1804;
British Critic,
October 1804.

261
   
“a half true, half false history:” ME
to Frances Edgeworth, October 13 and 15, 1818, in Edgeworth (1971), pp. 121–22.

261
   
Sabrina would later confess that her elder son’s ailments:
Sabrina Bicknell to RLE, April 21 and May 13, 1817, Edgeworth Papers, MS 22470/10 and 12.

262
   
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who was suspected:
Peach, Annette, “Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths (1794–1847),” in
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford, 2004) online edn., accessed December 29, 2011.

262
   
more than forty boys barricaded themselves:
John Graham to his mother, Mrs. Graham, February 24, 1808, transcript at GHC. Twenty years later, CB’s sister, Sarah Harriet, met one of the boys involved in the riot, Willoughby Crewe, who had become a curate. See SHB to Charlotte Barratt and Charlotte Broome, February 17, 1828, in Burney, SH, p. 273. Background on the rebellions in other schools is from Moncrieff, pp. 210–11. Riots erupted at Winchester, Rugby, Harrow and Eton schools on a number of occasions during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Charles Dickens did not exaggerate when he created the sadistic Wackford Squeers as headmaster of Dothe-boys Hall in
Nicholas Nickleby.
Squeers was based on a real headmaster, William Shaw, who was prosecuted when several boys in his school, the Bowes Academy in Yorkshire, went blind due to the unhygienic and inhumane conditions.

262
   
As John Graham told his mother:
John Graham to his mother, Mrs. Graham, September 22 and August 29, 1805, Lambeth Archives, IV/4/50 and IV/4/48.

263
   
“If your sons marry to please you”:
RLE to Sabrina Bicknell, August 28, 1808, BL Add. MS 70949 f 280.

263
   
Grandchildren followed swiftly:
I am indebted to Jacky Worthington for her help in tracing John and Henry Bicknell’s descendants and to the Bicknell family descendants for their interest in my book.

264
   
A portrait of Henry in later life:
Portrait of Henry Edgeworth Bicknell by Charles Baugniet, 1853, NPG D31757. Portrait of John Laurens Bicknell by Charles Baugniet, 1845, Wellcome Library.

264
   
leasing a house for himself and his new wife in Grooms Hill: Hughes New Law List,
1809, p. 47; Rates Books, Greenwich West, from 1814, at GHC.

264
   
Worried they wouldreturn to Ireland before:
Sabrina Bicknell to Frances Edgeworth, June, 9, 1813, Edgeworth Papers, MS 22470/9.

264
   
Maria smuggled him a furtive letter from Greenwich:
Maria Bicknell to John Constable, February 24, 1816, in Constable, vol. 2, p. 178. For the full story of Constable’s relationship with Maria Bicknell see Gayford, Martin,
Constable in Love: love, landscape, money and the making of a great painter
(London, 2009), pp. 295–302.

265
   
Constable, at one point, told Maria:
John Constable to Maria Constable (née Bicknell), January 21, 1825, in Constable, vol. 2, pp. 372–73.

265
   
her son Henry lost three children; John was severely ill again:
Sabrina Bicknell to RLE, April 21, Edgeworth Papers, MS 22470/10.

265
   
The following month, she thanked Edgeworth:
Sabrina Bicknell to RLE, May 13, 1817, Edgeworth Papers, MS 22470/12.

266
   
Throughout his long and grueling illness:
Edgeworth, RL and M, vol. 2, pp. 445–53.

267
   
“By this loss I am deprived of my oldest friend”:
Sabrina Bicknell to ME, June 30, 1817, Edgeworth Papers, MS 22470/13.

267
   
Maria began the task of sorting through his letters:
ME to Sabrina Bicknell, August 17, 1817, BL Add. MS 70949 f. 271.

268
   
the housekeeper she called Bicky:
Wood, p. 123.

268
   
Sabrina was asked to become godmother:
Susan Sabrina Burney was born on February 25, 1818, and baptized December 21, 1818: St. Alfege baptism register, LMA. Sabrina described her as her goddaughter in her will.

268
   
and the draft manuscript of her father’s memoirs carfully stowed in a sturdy boxfile:
Edgeworth (1971), pp. 75–99. On her way to London ME stayed with various friends to whom she showed the manuscript of her father’s memoirs. Étienne Dumont, a Geneva-born writer and editor who was an old friend of RLE, “hates Mr. Day in spite of all his good qualities,” according to ME. She wrote: “He says he knows and
cannot bear
that sort of man ‘who has such pride and misanthropies about trifles and who raises a great theory of morals upon an amour propre blessé.’” Lady Louisa Lansdowne, her hostess in Wiltshire, took an opposite view. “She admires and loves Mr. Day as much as Dumont dislikes him,” Maria wrote but added shrewdly: “Had she seen him she would not have endured his manners however 24 hours.”

268
   
“a little, dark, bearded, sharp, withered, active”:
Butler, M, p. 3.

268
   
she wrote to Sabrina in Greenwich with a request to meet:
ME to Frances Edgeworth, October 13 and 15, 1818, in Edgeworth (1971), pp. 109–11 and 121–22. Sabrina’s reply is related by ME to her stepmother. ME stayed in Hampstead with the poet Joanna Baillie and her sister Agnes, who were nieces of the surgeon John Hunter. Her visits to Essex and to Greenwich are described in her letters home.

270
   
“enraged” again when a magazine retold the story:
The offending article may have been a column in the journal
La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine,
published the previous month and headed “Curious particulars of Mr. Day, the author of ‘Sandford and Merton,’” which replayed the details from Seward’s
Life of Erasmus Darwin
at length.
La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine,
September 1818, pp. 105–6.

270
   
Day had “made her miserable
—
a slave &c!”:
Edgeworth, RL and M, vol. 2, p. 114.

270
   
There was nothing in the document:
Sabrina Bicknell to ME, October 29, 1818, Edgeworth Papers, MS 22470/15.

271
   “
from a number of orphans, one of remarkably promising appearance”:
Edgeworth, RL and M, vol. 1, p. 209.