How to Create the Perfect Wife

by Wendy Moore

  Finally, on the last sheet of his eleven-page letter, Day asked Bicknell to perform two mysterious tasks before his return to London. For the first of these “Commissions” he wanted Bicknell to visit his saddler, in Holborn, and arrange for “the Saddle & proper Appendages” to be sent to his home at Barehill. This was evidently a contraption he had already ordered—probably a pillion saddle to enable him to bear away his young girl in the manner of a medieval knight. The second request was to call on Day’s tailor, also in Holborn, and order two new suits to be made and sent to Barehill. According to Day’s precise instructions these were: “One a Green with light Gold Embroidery, about the Button Holes, as light as possible; the other a plain white or lightish colour’d Suit, Coat, Waistcoat & Breeches, & also an embroider’d Waistcoat adapted to them, as free from tawdriness, & Frippery as possible.”

  Given Day’s scorn for new clothes of any description, especially with such dandified details as embroidery, this was quite an astonishing mission, as Day himself acknowledged. “You are surpriz’d at this, but I do assure you I have no Reason for having laced cloaths, but to convince myself, & other People I have [reasons] which make me wear plain ones.” Whether this order was a last-ditch attempt to impress Margaret or a calculated move to impress figures in authority over his teenage nymph, Day did not reveal.

  Naturally Day divulged nothing of his bizarre scheme to train a teenage bride to Margaret, or indeed to her brother. When Margaret suddenly decided to hedge her bets and send Day home with an agreement to marry each other unless either found an alternative by the following summer, Day hurriedly buried his plan. Sailing back to England with his expectations high in October he seemed to have forgotten the idea entirely.

  Back in London, Day moved into lodgings with Bicknell in the vicinity of Middle Temple and applied himself to his law books through the winter of 1768 to 1769. In his spare time he cemented his new acquaintance with Erasmus Darwin and was welcomed into the circle of Darwin’s scintillating Lunar friends.

  Day might well have accompanied Edgeworth on one of his excursions to the Midlands in 1769. On one of these visits Edgeworth decided to test-drive his latest mode of transport: a one-wheeled chaise pulled by a single horse in which he perched precariously on a low-slung seat about two feet above the ground with his feet placed either side on wooden boards that collapsed upward whenever they met any obstacle. He had fashioned this latest chariot so that he could speed along the narrow country roads and even through water—with his legs protected by leather attachments shaped like bellows—looking for all the world like a future Hells Angel astride a prototype Harley-Davidson as he startled sheep and scattered ducks.

  Stepping into the sparkling spotlight shed by the Lunar circle, Day was its newest, youngest and—without doubt—its oddest member. First formed in the late 1760s, the group was initially a loose network of like-minded men who met to discuss advances and perform experiments in mechanics, chemistry, medicine, geology and a diverse range of other areas grouped under the term “natural philosophy”—or what would later become known as science.

  Forming a twin nucleus with Darwin at the center of this circle was Matthew Boulton, the son of a metalworker, who had left school at fourteen and built up a vast manufactory at Soho, near Birmingham, producing luxury silverware and metal trinkets. Both loud, generous, genial characters, Darwin and Boulton gradually drew others into their orbit. An early member was the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood, who had painstakingly accumulated a small fortune through hard work at his growing business. Yet it was William Small, a quiet, retiring Scottish physician, who had recently set up in medical practice in Birmingham after teaching mathematics in America—including to a young Thomas Jefferson—who formed the linchpin of the group; effectively he became its secretary.

  Later this core was joined by James Watt, busy trying to improve the design of steam engines in Glasgow, and James Keir, another Scot and a fellow medical student with Darwin who had just moved to Lichfield after ten years in the army. With their diverse backgrounds, interests and political views, this group of talented and gregarious men would become pioneers in assorted scientific fields and cheerleaders of the Industrial Revolution in the Midlands. A recent recruit into this ingenious community, Edgeworth memorably described the group as “such a society, as few men have had the good fortune to live with; such an assemblage of friends, as fewer still have had the happiness to possess, and keep through life.”

  The Lunar gatherings provided a lively diversion while Day looked forward confidently to his nuptials with Margaret. His friends shared his grief, but not his surprise, when the wedding plans were called off in spring 1769. Dr. Small, in particular, who was nearly a generation older than Day, sympathized deeply with him and took a fatherly interest in his marital hopes. Margaret, however, had no regrets. A year later she would marry an Anglo-Irish army officer, John Ruxton, who shared her tastes in fine living.

  For Day, if nothing else, Margaret’s letter, which put an end to his marital hopes, confirmed his opinion that the entire female population was fickle. Now that he was convinced that he would never find the woman that he sought within contemporary society, there was plainly no alternative but to create her for himself. And so as he approached his twenty-first birthday in June he returned to the daring scheme he had sketched out to Bicknell and made arrangements to put his plan into action. Just as Edgeworth was attempting to produce his own version of Émile, so Day would groom his own Sophie.

  It was a cold, wet summer with frequent squalls and thundery showers. But the rain did nothing to dampen Day’s enthusiasm. On June 22, 1769, when he turned twenty-one, Day gained both his fortune and his independence. He was now master of the house and estate at Barehill, and he took control of a comfortable income of £1,200 a year—today worth nearly £200,000, or $324,000. Out of this fortune, Day had to pay his mother her annual widow’s pension of £300. Since she, or more likely his stepfather Phillips, had complained this was insufficient, he increased her allowance to £400 and allowed them both to continue living at Barehill. But more important than his financial independence, Day was now free of any interference from his mother or stepfather. He was the author of his own destiny, and he lost no time in putting his audacious plan into action.

  First he needed a collaborator to help him carry out his stratagem. Since the scheme was highly unethical if not downright illegal, he reasoned that a lawyer might prove useful. He dismissed the idea of telling Edgeworth, who was likewise studying law at Middle Temple inn; Edgeworth’s status as a married man would later prove vital, but for now he was kept entirely in the dark. Instead Day asked John Bicknell, his closest friend and fellow lodger, to help enact his experiment. Having studied law for a full eight years, Bicknell was finally on the point of qualifying as a barrister. Sworn to secrecy, he readily agreed to the plan. Now all Day needed was to find a suitable young girl.

  In licentious Georgian London there was no shortage of pliable young girls in search of a kindly male benefactor. Wide-eyed country maidens stepped down from the coaches at London staging inns every day naïvely seeking their fortunes. Often as young as twelve or thirteen, they made easy pickings for pimps and brothel madams eager to lure them into a career in the buoyant Georgian sex industry. Few people batted an eyelid at the custom of single, or married, men of means maintaining such a teenage mistress in a convenient metropolitan hideaway. But this would not do for Day.

  Day, of course, had set his sights on finding a simple, pure, innocent maid unsullied by the vices of urban life and untainted by the ideas of contemporary society. He wanted to be certain of her virginity; it was unthinkable that she might have been seduced by a lascivious rake or a country plowboy before he had the chance to exact his marital privileges. She should be physically healthy and hardy enough to withstand his planned lifestyle in cold, comfortless austerity. She must be young enough to comply with his training without question or resistance, yet old enough so that he would not need to
wait too long before they could lawfully wed. With parental consent, girls could marry from the age of twelve; boys from fourteen. Obviously, however, he did not want any meddlesome parents withholding consent or asking awkward questions. Nor did he want to embark on his project in the full glare of gossipy London. It was a tall order to find a girl who would satisfy such an exacting list of specifications. But Day knew exactly where to look.

  A few days after his birthday, in the last week of June, Day set out through the driving rain with his trusty friend Bicknell in tow. With the long summer holidays stretching ahead, Bicknell entered into the jaunt with enthusiasm. The pair traveled north on the muddy roads for two or three days, most probably on horseback, stopping overnight on the way. At last they arrived at the little market town of Shrewsbury in Shropshire. Nestling near the border with Wales and almost encircled by the River Severn, the compact walled town provided a pleasant setting for its prosperous residents. Here the two young men crossed the Severn, scaled a winding lane and arrived at the door of a fine three-story, redbrick mansion.

  Built as a country branch of the Foundling Hospital in London, the Orphan Hospital at Shrewsbury enjoyed a commanding view of the river as it wound around the town below. The orphanage had opened six years previously to accommodate the overflow of abandoned babies then being deposited at the doors of the charity’s London headquarters. Surrounded by fields and orchards, the vast building housed more than 300 children—most of them girls.

  Viewed from the town, the imposing mansion presented an elegant façade, but inside the decor was plain and the furnishings simple as befitted its lowly occupants. Yet for all its utilitarian uniformity, the orphanage provided a caring regime where the children were better fed and better treated than many of their young counterparts struggling to survive in the harsh outside world of overcrowded cities and impoverished villages. Taught to read and to do simple sums but not to write, most of the children were being trained in spinning and weaving in the orphanage’s own woolen manufactory to prepare them for an apprenticeship in the mills of the nearby Midlands and North. Others learned household skills in the laundries and kitchens in readiness for jobs in domestic service.

  At its peak, in 1766, the Shrewsbury orphanage had housed nearly 600 boys and girls, in segregated dormitories and classrooms, looked after by more than forty staff. But since the London charity had closed its doors to abandoned babies in 1760 when its money ran out, and had subsequently increased pressure on its branch hospitals to apprentice those remaining orphans, the numbers had rapidly dwindled. Now only 357 children remained in the Shrewsbury home, and these were being parceled out to apprenticeships as fast as the governors could process them.

  Only a few weeks before Day’s arrival, the London office had ordered staff at Shrewsbury to send off 100 boys by wagon to apprenticeships in Yorkshire. With nimble boys in constant demand by the woolen manufacturers, girls now outnumbered boys in Shrewsbury by six to one. Acknowledging that the “girls will be harder to be placed out properly” the London office reminded the Shrewsbury governors of “the Care which should be taken in the having proper Characters of the Persons to whom Children are placed out.”

  Drawn from the local gentry and town dignitaries, and all of them volunteers, the Shrewsbury governors took immense pride in the children they had nurtured since they were babies and their various achievements as they grew up. Ordinarily, therefore, they paid meticulous attention to scrutinizing prospective employers before signing over their charges to apprenticeships and maintained a close watch on their welfare after they left the orphanage. Earlier in 1769, the governors had prosecuted an employer who had tied a boy by his neck to a bedpost and beat him so badly that a piece of his ear was torn off. Occasionally there were even instances of sexual abuse, and the governors tackled these just as severely. But given the relentless pressure from London to dispatch the orphans quickly and the voracious demand of the mill owners during the course of 1769, it was scarcely surprising if they were sometimes a little lax in their oversight of their wards.

  First impressions spoke volumes in Georgian society. And so when two well-spoken and self-assured young lawyers turned up at the orphanage doors in late June they were warmly welcomed inside. When the men explained that they wanted to take a young girl to be apprenticed as a maid for a friend, the Shrewsbury officials readily agreed. Amid the chaos of packing 100 boys off to Yorkshire, they were naturally eager to find a place for one of their surplus girls. Without hesitation the two men were invited to inspect a lineup of likely candidates.

  As he walked up and down the parade of girls standing silently side by side in their identical brown woolen dresses, white cotton aprons and white linen caps, Day was bewildered by the choice. Which of these pre-pubescent girls could be molded under his careful touch to make a perfect wife? And so it was Bicknell who pointed out the slim and pretty girl with the auburn ringlets and brown eyes. Later acquaintances would describe her as “beautiful” with “chestnut tresses” and dark eyes “expressive of sweetness” fringed with long lashes. Happy to defer to his friend’s superior knowledge of the female sex, Day concurred with the choice. Her name was Ann Kingston, and she was twelve.

  Abandoned at the gates of the London Foundling Hospital soon after her birth, most probably because of illegitimacy and almost certainly in poverty, Ann had been brought up to accept the disgrace of her past and thank God for her salvation. Like most of the orphans raised on their frugal diet, she had grown up small and slender. But since she had survived a barrage of childhood diseases that had sent weaker individuals to their graves, she was tough and hardy too. Trained in expectation of a life of domestic servitude, she was adept at sewing, cleaning and other household chores and thanks to lessons in the classroom she had learned to read if not to write. Schooled in humility, unsullied by society, she was the perfect subject for Day’s experiment.

  Satisfied with his choice, Day provided the necessary details to complete the transaction. He informed the orphanage secretary, Samuel Magee, that he wanted to take the girl as a maid to work in the country house of a married friend near London. This last factor was significant since Foundling Hospital regulations stipulated that girls should only be apprenticed into the household of a married man. It was, of course, a lie. Although Magee had no cause to doubt Day’s word, it was nevertheless highly irregular to sanction an apprenticeship to an unknown man, particularly one who lived so many miles distant. If a tailor or blacksmith from a nearby village had put forward such a request his credentials would have been thoroughly checked. But faced with two prospective lawyers from London, Magee had no qualms about forgoing the usual vetting process. Without further ado, he agreed to bind the twelve-year-old to a married man he had never met for the next nine years of her life. Naturally she had no say in the matter. Leaving the clerks to finalize the paperwork, Day and Bicknell sped back to London, where Day made preparations for his young pupil’s arrival.

  A few days later, on June 30, Ann Kingston’s apprenticeship was approved, along with that of sixteen others, at a meeting of governors in a Shrewsbury coffeehouse. All the other apprenticeships agreed to that day were for typical local trades—weaver, thatcher, shoemaker, tailor—all within a few miles of Shrewsbury. All bar one included the customary payment—£4 with the girls and £3 with the boys—which was given as incentive to their new masters. And yet without a quibble or a query, the Shrewsbury governors confirmed that Ann Kingston should be apprenticed without a fee until the age of twenty-one or until she married—whichever might come sooner—to Richard Lovell Edgeworth Esq. of Kiln Green, Berkshire.

  Printed on parchment and sealed with red wax, the indenture contract—which still survives—pledged that Ann “faithfully shall serve in all lawful Businesses according to her Power, Wit, and Ability; and honestly, orderly, and obediently in all Things demean and behave herself towards her said Master.” For his part the absent and unknowing Edgeworth was bound to provide his new apprentice with “meet,
competent, and sufficient Meat, Drink, and Apparel, Lodging, Washing, and all other Things necessary and fit for an Apprentice.” There was nothing in the document to specify how Edgeworth, and more importantly his two representatives, should “demean and behave” themselves.

  Bundled up with apprenticeship papers for ten other children, a copy of Ann’s indenture would be sent to London the following month. There it would be ratified on October 4 by the charity’s General Committee. Whether it was something about the nature of her selection, or the unusual distance to her place of work, or simply the fact that her supposed master was prepared to accept her without the customary £4 payment, out of the eleven apprenticeships considered by the committee that day only Ann’s raised an eyebrow. The following day, the London office wrote to ask Magee: “Pray was any thing remarkable in the Girl Ann Kingston no 4579.” Harassed by the press of business, Magee answered no.

  Long before then, on August 17, Day and Bicknell retraced their steps to Shrewsbury, probably with the empty pillion saddle at the ready, to sign their names on the approved indenture and claim their prize. Clutching a parcel of new clothes, a Bible, a Book of Common Prayer and a copy of the “Instructions to Apprentices” given to all departing orphans, Ann Kingston walked out of the Shrewsbury orphanage in every expectation that she was about to begin a life of domestic servitude in faraway Berkshire. No doubt she faced the unknown world beyond the orphanage with trepidation. She had no idea how strange that world was about to become. Hoisted up onto the pillion seat behind Thomas Day, she left the orphanage forever. Passing through the orphanage gates the little party headed not for Berkshire, but for London.