by Wendy Moore
After no more than a few hours’ conversation that first day, the odd couple forged an immediate and lasting friendship that was founded, said Edgeworth, “on mutual esteem, between persons of tastes, habits, pursuits, manners, and connexions totally different.” Stopping abruptly as they were walking together along a lane near Hare Hatch, Edgeworth impulsively predicted that they would be lifelong friends. Sure enough, from that first meeting in 1766, through good times and bad, the two would remain loyally devoted.
Whenever Day could escape his studies and Edgeworth could resist the lures of Lichfield or London, the pair would be found holed up in Edgeworth’s workshop. As the indefatigable inventor battled to assemble another of his cunning contraptions, his talkative friend would hold forth on a contentious topic and occasionally lend a helping hand by, for example, in Day’s words, “calculating the vibrations of your wooden horse’s legs.” So far Edgeworth had dedicated himself to the instant gratification of impulses—whether seducing the daughter of a family friend or attempting to build a giant wooden mechanical horse capable of bestriding hedges. But Day obviously appealed to Edgeworth’s latent moral purpose, a desire to do good. Day was quite simply, Edgeworth stated—and would maintain until his dying day—“the most virtuous human being I have ever known.”
Certainly Edgeworth believed that Day’s influence on him was crucial. Meeting Day marked the beginning of “a new era in my life.” Strangely, perhaps, Mrs. Edgeworth did not share her husband’s enthusiasm for his new friend. Although she apparently felt no unease at her husband’s friendship with the gambling, drinking, lewd Delaval, she took an immediate and fervent dislike to Day. Edgeworth was bewildered. “A more dangerous and seductive companion than the one, or a more moral and improving companion than the other, could not be found in England,” he protested. Yet perhaps Mrs. Edgeworth had more of an instinct for danger and immorality than her trusting husband.
The timing of their meeting was critical: it was the beginning of a new era for Day too. For in between his scientific endeavors and his legal studies, Edgeworth had become enthralled by a radically different approach to education, which he was eager to share with his latest friend. It was this experimental new system that would furnish Day with the tool he needed to solve his search for love.
Although Edgeworth’s marriage was far from perfect, he was about to provide the final piece of the puzzle to help Day create his perfect wife.
THREE
SOPHIE
Staffordshire, summer 1766
Enjoying a stroll in the gardens of Wootton Hall, a friend’s country house in Staffordshire, Erasmus Darwin stopped outside the entrance to a grotto. With a casual air, which belied his corpulence, the physician stooped down to examine a small flower. Since he had already added botany to the long list of his interests, there was nothing obviously remarkable in Darwin’s scrutiny. In fact, however, his seemingly spontaneous action was a carefully contrived ploy. By halting outside the grotto, Darwin was determined to coax out its shy and fearful inhabitant. The trick worked. For out of the gloom loped a thin, frail figure with beady, black eyes. It was the international fugitive Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Ever since the philosopher had published his controversial views on liberty and education in 1762, Rousseau had been hounded across Europe. Church authorities in his adopted country of France had banned both The Social Contract, with its daring views on freedom and equality, and Émile, with its progressive ideas on education. Forced to flee France, Rousseau headed for his homeland only to discover that his native city of Geneva had followed suit by publicly burning both books. He spent the next three years lying low in the Swiss mountains until villagers stoned his cottage and Rousseau was on the run again. Finding himself with nowhere left to hide, the fifty-three-year-old exile had reluctantly accepted safe passage to England. Under the protection of David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, who was serving as secretary of the British Embassy in Paris, Rousseau had crossed the Channel.
Arriving in London in January 1766, Rousseau had been fêted by the press and mobbed in the streets. “All the world are eager to see this man, who by his singularity, has drawn himself into much trouble,” announced the Public Advertiser. Dressed in the colorful Armenian costume he had recently adopted, “the celebrated John James Rousseau”—as he was dubbed by the English newspapers—was deluged by admirers including the Prince of Wales. Such celebrity status did nothing, however, to improve Rousseau’s temper.
Notoriously cantankerous and neurotic, Europe’s most wanted philosopher detested fame almost as much as he hated obscurity. Rousseau had no love of England or the English, and he longed for his companion Thérèse Levasseur until she was escorted across the Channel a month later by James Boswell, a keen admirer of Rousseau’s work. Inevitably, Boswell being Boswell, the job of chaperone entailed several steamy nights of passion en route. Reunited with his lover, Rousseau accepted the offer of a quiet retreat at Wootton Hall, the country home of another admirer, Richard Davenport. But the charms of this pastoral idyll soon wore thin.
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 o
f 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 ta
king 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.