How to Create the Perfect Wife (7 page)

Feeling isolated and fed up with the damp English weather, Rousseau grew miserable and anxious. Always a difficult character, who was as hard on his friends as he was on his enemies, he began to suspect that Hume and Davenport were united in a conspiracy against him. He feared that his food was adulterated by servants, his letters were being intercepted by spies and the house was surrounded by French assassins. And so when he was lured out of his hideaway, the grotto beneath the terrace in front of the house, by Darwin, eager to discuss plants and politics with the foreign visitor, Rousseau rightly suspected a trick and was duly infuriated. Although Darwin’s grandson, the founder of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, would later insist that the pair struck up a friendly correspondence, none of their supposed letters have survived. But his British sympathizers should not have been surprised by such apparent ingratitude. Stirring up trouble was Rousseau’s stock in trade.

In the space of sixteen months, in 1761 and 1762, Rousseau had published three very different but pioneering books that were equally acclaimed and condemned throughout the world. His novel,
Julie, or The New Héloïse,
outraged prudish critics with its sensational and sensuous story. Readers loved it, and the book became the best-selling novel of the eighteenth century. He followed his success as a novelist with two revolutionary books,
The Social Contract,
published in April 1762, and
Émile, or on Education,
which appeared a month later. Both provoked furious debates and sowed profound changes that reverberate still. The founding fathers of American independence would draw inspiration from
The Social Contract
while the leaders of the French Revolution would likewise be fired by its ideals. Arguably,
Émile
would launch even more far-reaching change.

As a child, Rousseau had received no formal education until the age of ten. As a tutor to a wealthy family, while wandering through Europe in his youth, Rousseau had proved a dismal failure. As a father, who gave up all five children he had sired with Thérèse Levasseur to the Paris foundling hospital, he had abdicated all parental responsibility. Yet Rousseau’s views on education were both revolutionary and pivotal.
Émile
has been described as the most important work on education since Plato’s
Republic
; a modern educationalist has argued that all writing on progressive education since
Émile
is a series of footnotes. Written in the form of a novel, in Rousseau’s characteristically direct style, the book outlines an ideal education for the pupil Émile from cradle to adulthood as narrated by his tutor.

In
Émile
Rousseau rejects both the prevailing religious doctrine that children are born with original sin and the more modern view, outlined by John Locke in 1693, that at birth children’s minds resemble “white Paper, or Wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases.” Instead, Rousseau argues that children are born essentially good but are corrupted by the influences of civilization. In a typically arresting first line, Rousseau announces: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Education, Rousseau argues, should be the means of protecting and nurturing those original innocent instincts against society’s vices. To achieve such protection,
Rousseau advocates a “natural education” that places the child at the center of the educational process. Entirely at odds with the disciplinarian methods in use in classrooms across Europe at the time—where children learned by rote and by rod—Rousseau proposed a free and unconstrained upbringing in which the child learns at a natural pace through play and discovery.

In accordance with this “back to nature” approach, the infant Émile is breast-fed by his mother, not wet-nursed by strangers; he is left free to kick and squirm, not encased in swaddling bands; and he is tutored by his father rather than hired teachers—although Rousseau accepted that a trusted friend could be substituted since fathers might find themselves rather too busy to become full-time tutors. As a boy—and Rousseau’s program was aimed exclusively at boys—Émile grows up in the countryside in the manner of a peasant. He is nurtured lovingly, never scolded and allowed to roam free, but at the same time he is trained to withstand hardships like hunger, cold and fatigue, allowed to fall and hurt himself and taught to fear nothing.

Growing up happy and carefree, despite his bumps and bruises, Émile learns through his mistakes and from his tutor’s patient responses to his inevitable questions. There should be no verbal lessons, no attempts to impose ideas through reason and emphatically no books, says Rousseau, insisting: “I hate books.” Émile only learns to read when he finds it necessary to do so—and not before the age of twelve. Instead he works out the orbit of the earth by watching the sun rise and set and understands the position of the stars by getting lost in the woods. He grasps geography by making maps of where he lives and physics by playing with magnets. In his teens, Émile learns a useful trade, as an apprentice carpenter, and travels, in order to see the world’s vices for himself. Religion should play no part in a child’s education, Rousseau says, so Émile should simply be free to adopt whichever religion he chooses based on his own reasoning when he reaches eighteen. Finally, at the age of twenty, Émile is ready to enter society and—crucially—to find a partner to share his worldview. So Émile begins a search for a simple, artless, country maid whom he can educate to suit her allotted role.

Although
Émile
was not the first parenting manual, it has probably proved the most influential. Nobody before—or perhaps since—had gone so far in placing the child at the center of education or advocating a “learning
by doing” approach designed to suit a child’s natural development. Rousseau had kickstarted a debate between huggers and hard-liners, between carrot and stick, which would ricochet down the centuries. His ideas would change not just educational practice but basic ideas about childhood fundamentally and forever.

Although religious zealots—inflamed by the book’s rejection of religious teaching—persecuted Rousseau, many more welcomed his visionary ideas on child care and education with feverish intensity. In nurseries across Europe, mothers embraced breast-feeding, fathers abandoned the birch rod and infants sprung free of their swaddling bands like slaves breaking free from their chains. Some parents even determined to follow Rousseau’s child-rearing regime to the letter.

The Prince and Princess of Wurtemberg decided to bring up their baby daughter, Sophie, who was born in 1763, precisely according to the plan outlined for Émile—despite her being a girl. The couple and the author exchanged nearly fifty letters over fine points such as teething. At four months little Sophie was bathed each morning in an ice-cold fountain then left outside naked for much of the day. Although it was then October, her parents boasted that baby Sophie rarely cried. In fact she was probably too weak from cold to cry. Ultimately her toughening regime would prove little use; Sophie died at the age of eleven. Another enthusiast, a Swiss banker named Guillaume-François Roussel, banished his five young daughters to live in the woods, barely clothed, to scavenge for nuts and berries. Eager to pay homage to his idol, the banker visited Rousseau during his mountain exile, but Rousseau was so aghast that he packed Roussel home immediately to end the girls’ plight.

When
Émile
was published in English in late 1762, the book attracted even more admirers. Having already adopted Locke’s progressive views on education, many upper-class parents in England and Ireland were ahead of their continental counterparts in enjoying more affectionate and liberal relationships with their children. Painters, like Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, reflected this shift in sentimental portraits of mothers dandling cherubic infants and groups of children playing together. Joseph Wright, who was friendly with Erasmus Darwin, went one step further and depicted children watching scientific experiments more or less as equals alongside adults. In one painting, An
Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump,
he portrayed girls and boys watching a demonstration of a bird, a white cockatoo, being deprived of air in a vacuum flask with a mixture of fascination and horror. There was no shortage, therefore, of followers eager to put Rousseau’s ideas into action in Britain.

Richard Davenport, who had placed Wootton Hall at Rousseau’s disposal, eagerly adopted his approach in educating his orphaned grandchildren, six-year-old Phoebe and five-year-old Davies. The experiment had mixed results. While Phoebe would exchange friendly letters with Rousseau for many years, Davies regretted his lack of formal education so much that he refused to allow Rousseau’s name to be mentioned. Rather more successfully, Emily Kildare, the Duchess of Leinster, set up a little school for her children adjoining the family’s seaside villa near Dublin and employed a tutor to teach them à la Rousseau. In this seeming paradise, the Kildare children—eventually numbering seventeen—swam in the sea, grew vegetables in the garden and made hay in the fields.

But nobody in Britain was more enthusiastic about the Rousseau method than Richard Lovell Edgeworth.

While Rousseau was hiding from imagined French assassins in his Staffordshire grotto in 1766, Edgeworth devoured
Émile.
The following year, as Rousseau fled back to France under a false name, Edgeworth resolved to apply the educational system to his three-year-old son, Dick. “His Emile had made a great impression upon my young mind,” Edgeworth wrote. “His work had then all the power of novelty, as well as all the charms of eloquence; and when I compared the many plausible ideas it contains, with the obvious deficiencies and absurdities, that I saw in the treatment of children in almost every family with which I was acquainted, I determined to make a fair trial of Rousseau’s system.”

It took Edgeworth little time to persuade his wife, Anna Maria, to comply with the plan. After four years of marriage to Edgeworth she knew better than to oppose any experimental idea. Having frequently been left alone with the infant Dick while her husband sought adult company in London and Lichfield, Anna Maria had spent much of her time with her sisters at her parents’ home in Black Bourton. Now, however, she was forced to give up her only son to his father’s bold experiment. For, as
Rousseau specified, the best tutor was the child’s father. But if his wife was pushed out of the picture, Edgeworth made sure to involve his new friend Day.

Introduced to Rousseau’s ideas by Edgeworth, Day was an instant convert. Here at last was the overarching philosophy that he had been seeking in his studies at Oxford—a modern interpretation of the ancient ideals that he so revered. With his passion for social justice, Day was completely in sympathy with Rousseau’s call to liberty and equality—for men at least. At the same time Day agreed wholeheartedly that natural country life was superior to the corrupt trappings of fashionable urban society. Just like the fictional Émile, Day had envisaged living in a rustic haven devoted to doing good. And when Day came to the pages that described Émile’s search for a wife to share his retreat, he knew at last he had found what he was looking for. For while Edgeworth seized Rousseau’s
Émile
as the sure route to bringing up his young heir, Day now decided that he would use Rousseau’s educational system to create his perfect wife.

That year, in the summer of 1767, Day left Oxford without taking his degree. Now nineteen he knew he would soon inherit his fortune and would never need a profession in order to earn a living. And with plenty of time at his disposal, Day threw himself into Edgeworth’s project to educate Dick. Taking Dick’s education as a template, Day could practice for educating his future spouse.

Since he was already three, young Dick had missed out on the vital early years of Rousseau’s natural approach. It is not known whether Dick had been wet-nursed or breast-fed by his mother, but he had obviously learned to crawl, walk and talk without the benefit of Rousseau’s guiding hand. Fortunately, the boy had grown up mainly in the countryside—in line with Rousseau’s preference—having spent his first year with his parents in Ireland before they settled in Berkshire. But with his father absent from home for much of his childhood to date, Dick had been pampered and indulged by his “soft-hearted mother and tender aunts.” Nevertheless, Edgeworth was determined that from now on Dick should grow up like the natural child envisaged in
Émile.
And so for the next five years, from ages three to eight, Dick was to become the subject of an extraordinary educational experiment.

From the beginning Edgeworth embarked on his child-rearing project in precisely the same manner that he launched into creating his sailing carriage or his sporty phaeton or any number of other inventions that emerged from his workshop. He took the materials at hand and set about shaping his new creation with a tireless vigor. With his much-thumbed copy of
Émile
in one hand and his toddler son in the other, and Day watching over his shoulder, Edgeworth followed Rousseau’s program with a fiercely literal interpretation.

Having been dressed in petticoats in the manner of all Georgian boys before they were “breeched” at the age of six or seven, Dick was now put into a sleeveless jacket and “trowsers” without stockings or shoes. Having been petted and cosseted indoors by his mother and aunts, now Dick was let loose into the gardens and countryside surrounding his Hare Hatch home. Running barefoot across the common and through the woods and fields of Berkshire, Dick was free to roam and explore at will. With his father’s blessing, the boy was encouraged to play outside in all weathers, to splash in puddles and to jump into snowdrifts, to climb trees and to clamber into chalk pits, with never a word of rebuke. There were no restraints, no rules, no routines and no punishments, no matter what Dick did.

It was a child’s dream—indeed it was very much the carefree existence that Edgeworth himself had enjoyed in the Irish countryside before his parents changed direction—and a mother’s nightmare. As his father encouraged Dick to indulge every whim and brave every peril, his unhappy mother could only stand by and watch helplessly. For, as Edgeworth insisted, “the body and mind of my son were to be left as much as possible to the education of nature and of accident.”