How to Create the Perfect Wife

by Wendy Moore

  Day had chosen well. Ann was a quick and enthusiastic pupil, eager to please her teacher and responsive to his praise. Oblivious to his plans for her future, she flourished under his attentions and absorbed his teachings like a sponge. And he lost no time in beginning his young orphan’s transformation. Inspired by the sight of the turbulent river that he had crossed to claim his future bride, Day renamed her Sabrina, Latin for the Severn. Doubtless Day was aware of the Celtic legend that the river had gained its name from the illegitimate granddaughter of an ancient British king, a virginal maiden called Habrena in Welsh, Sabrina in Latinized English, who was put to death there by drowning. The tale had been evoked by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene and later by John Milton in his play Comus in celebration of chastity. Day added the surname Sidney, after a childhood hero, the Elizabethan courtier, soldier and poet Sir Philip Sidney. It was her third new name in twelve years. The girl who had been first named Monimia Butler, and then Ann Kingston, number 4579, was gone forever; in her place Day had created Sabrina Sidney, his future wife.

  Changing his pupil’s name was a smart move on Day’s part. Even though she was now living within a mile of the Foundling Hospital headquarters in Holborn, she would prove impossible for the governors to trace. Yet for all her pretty looks, her readiness to learn and her promising talents, Day was still unsure whether he would succeed in moulding Sabrina Sidney into his ivory girl. His deep-rooted suspicion of the opposite sex still niggled. He had secured the perfect pupil—of that he felt sure—but how could he be certain that she would bend sufficiently under his training to blossom into the perfect wife? He wanted, therefore, to be doubly sure of success. And so just a few weeks after he had begun Sabrina’s education, on September 20, Day set out for the Foundling Hospital headquarters in Holborn again.

  Once again Day told the charity’s officials that he wished to select a young girl to work as a maid in his married friend’s home. Now that he was a generous benefactor and an elected governor of the charity he had no trouble convincing the clerks of his honest intentions. Once again he walked up and down a row of adolescent girls lined up for his perusal in their identical brown uniforms. And once again Day gave his friend Edgeworth’s name as the girl’s proposed employer. Indeed, it seems likely that Edgeworth accompanied Day on this second visit since he signed the chosen orphan’s apprenticeship indentures. But this time—by way of contrast—Day picked out of the line an eleven-year-old girl with blond hair and blue eyes. Like Sabrina she was described as “beautiful,” but unlike Day’s first choice she was “fair, with flaxen locks, and light eyes.” Her name, within the orphanage at least, was Dorcas Car. Shepherded through the gates of the hospital by Day, she was whisked back to the lodgings near Chancery Lane to meet her fellow pupil.

  Like Sabrina, Dorcas had been abandoned at the gates of the London Foundling Hospital as a baby and promptly renamed by the governors. Like Sabrina, she was immediately renamed by Day. This time he chose the name Lucretia, presumably in homage to the legendary heroine of classical history whose rape and subsequent suicide sparked the rebellion that led to the creation of the Roman republic, rather than the infamous daughter of the Borgia Pope who was reputed to have helped murder her husband and given birth to a child by her brother. A fitting complement to Sabrina, Lucretia was said to be equally alluring yet opposite in looks and personality. Each possessed an “extraordinary beauty but each with a beauty in contrast to the other,” wrote one acquaintance. “One of them, Sabrina, had the air of a sensitive nature coupled with delicate features, a slim waist, eyes suggestive of spirit and engaging manners” while Lucretia “was more classically beautiful with a radiant complexion, plump face, smiling eyes and the look of a joyful soul.”

  They were opposite sides of the same coin; they were two of a kind. Day was not taking any chances on his future marital happiness; he was hedging his bets. Much in the way that the heads of aristocratic families aimed to father two sons—“an heir and a spare”—so Day had obtained a second orphan in case his first choice failed to match his exalted expectations. In the past he had been humiliated and spurned by the “bitch” Leonora and the “toad” Margaret, but now that he had two young girls at his command, who were free of womanly wiles, he could feel sure he would never be rejected by a woman again. He planned to educate them both according to the Rousseau system, pick the winning candidate for his future wife, and then simply discard her failed companion. Lucretia, of course, had no more idea than Sabrina of the future that lay in wait. But, just as with Sabrina, orphanage records reveal her past.

  A year younger than Sabrina, Lucretia had been born within the same parish, Clerkenwell, on May 11, 1758, just a few streets away from her new playmate’s place of birth, and she was baptized in the same church with the name Ann Grig, probably in the presence of one or both of her parents. For most of that year she had thrived. But as winter approached, some kind of calamity must have hit the family and she was surrendered to the Foundling Hospital, a chubby, well-nourished, breast-fed, blond-haired baby of nearly six months, during the General Reception on November 9. As with Sabrina, no token was left with the child, but this time two tiny scraps of material—a square of blue and cream striped cotton and another of gray and cream striped silk—were snipped from her clothes by the clerks as an identifying clue in the event of a future reunion with her family. They would remain to this day pinned to the billet form that was filled out on her admission day, mysterious remnants of a buried past.

  Like Sabrina, Ann Grig was given a number, 10,413, and her new name, Dorcas Car. Unlike Sabrina, Dorcas had been allowed to stay with the same foster mother, in the village of Brentwood, just north of London, until she was nearly eight. At that point, in January 1766, she had been returned to the Foundling Hospital in London and there she remained for the next three years while she learned her alphabet, read from the Bible and became proficient in sewing and spinning until the moment that she had caught the eye of Thomas Day on his second wife-hunting expedition in September 1769.

  Over the next few weeks, Day visited the two girls on a regular basis to conduct their lessons while his friends looked on with a mixture of disbelief and mirth. “They were eleven and twelve years old, good humoured, and well disposed,” wrote Edgeworth. “Mr. Day’s kindness soon made them willing to conduct themselves according to his directions.” Cooped up with only each other for company for much of the time, the two children grew close. They had much in common, of course, and there was much to talk about—not least their curious situation left alone with only their widowed landlady as an occasional chaperone. But although the girls were eager to please their attentive teacher, Day made sure they remained in total ignorance of his true motives. His friends, however, were well aware of his intentions from the start, and even if they had some misgivings, none made any efforts to halt the experiment.

  Day’s plan was spelled out from the first in clear terms in a legal document that was apparently drawn up at the time by the ever obliging Bicknell, who stood as its guarantor. In this remarkable contract, Day pledged that within twelve months he would decide which of the two girls showed most potential to become his wife. He would then surrender the other and bind her as an apprentice to a “reputable tradeswoman” with £100 (£15,000 or $24,000 today) for her maintenance. He would continue to provide her with financial support “if she behaved well” until she married or began trading herself, at which point he would advance a further £400. The remaining girl would continue under his control to be educated by Day “with a view to making her his future wife.” Careful to leave nothing to the imagination, Day swore “never to violate her innocence.” And if he should at any point renounce his plan of marriage he would support her in the home of a “creditable family” until she married, at which point he would provide a handsome wedding dowry of £500.

  According to an acquaintance who described the contract, the document was presented to the Foundling Hospital along with credentials proving Day’s age
and moral probity in exchange for the requisite two orphans. Perhaps Day himself promoted this explanation. But nothing of the sort was ever seen by the charity’s staff or governors. Even supposing that the governors or clerks could have been persuaded to consent to such a morally repugnant idea, which was completely at odds with their usually vigilant care of the orphans’ welfare, the charity’s rules strictly forbade single men from taking apprentices. And in any case it was Edgeworth, not Day, who was formally named in the charity’s records as the girls’ apprenticeship master. The contract, therefore, must have been a private undertaking secretly agreed to between Day and Bicknell. But however much the arrangement was couched in legal language, there is no doubt that Day’s actions were highly irregular and completely illegal.

  Even in the laissez-faire world of Georgian morals, Day’s scheme was outrageous and scandalous. He had abducted two innocent and helpless young girls through an elaborate deceit and changed both their names to conceal his plans. When Edgeworth’s licentious friend, Francis Delaval, lured a young actress into living with him earlier in the 1760s, her father pursued him through the court of King’s Bench and won her release—though once freed she walked away arm in arm with charming Frank. In France, just a year before Day’s escapade, when the Marquis de Sade imprisoned a young woman in his chateau, his mother-in-law had obtained a royal arrest warrant. At a time when stealing a handkerchief was a capital offense in Britain, a man with lower social standing might have expected little mercy for such an act. Yet Day knew that he was protected by his rank, wealth and status. He was a rich landowner with influence and connections living in a man’s world; they were powerless girls, born into poverty and branded with the shame of illegitimacy, without friends, family or rights.

  At a time when women were commodities, to be exchanged in marriage for vast fortunes and land or bought in a dark alley for sixpence, Day had purchased two girls as easily as he might buy two shoe buckles. As obsessed as he was with the idea of virtue and feminine purity, he had not the slightest compunction about jeopardizing the reputations of the two girls now in his control. But now he came to the obvious conclusion that the busy, gossipy metropolis was not the ideal place for a respectable bachelor to attempt a controversial experiment on two young girls. As the weather cooled, the hordes of fashionable society were flooding back to the capital from their summer retreats in the country. In the first week of November, therefore, Day abandoned his legal studies, collected his two pupils and set sail for France.

  FIVE

  SABRINA AND LUCRETIA

  Paris, November 1769

  Life with Thomas Day was certainly an education. For most of their short lives, Sabrina and Lucretia—as they were now known—had been accustomed to the repetition and routine that marked out their dreary hours at the Foundling Hospital. Now each day brought something new. Having barely had time to marvel at the crush and chaos of London, by early November the two girls were immersed in the sights and sounds of Paris.

  Like fugitives evaporating into the London fog, Day had smuggled his orphans across the Channel during the first week of November, most probably in the sturdy little packet ship that plied its way between Dover and Calais carrying the mail. A popular route with British travelers embarking on continental tours through France and Italy, the twenty-two-mile voyage could take as little as three hours in favorable conditions or as many as fifteen if contrary winds blew the ship off course or, worse, dropped and left it helplessly marooned mid-Channel. Passengers unerringly complained of feeling seasick as the tiny vessel pitched and rolled. And by the time they had been conveyed to and from the ship in open boats in both Dover and Calais harbors, many were drenched as well as nauseous. While nearly all around them retched and groaned, Sabrina and Lucretia proved robust travelers, Day would later boast, and they made not a murmur of complaint.

  From Calais the little party headed for Paris, rattling along the well-paved, straight roads of northern France, most probably in a regular stagecoach, or diligence. The 188-mile journey commonly took three days including overnight stops at inns. But the steady stream of carriages and hired post chaises trundling along the main route between coast and capital could sometimes prove so dense that travelers were obliged to share rooms with complete strangers at the wayside inns. In his comic novel A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, published a year before Day’s trip, Laurence Sterne told the true story of a friend who had to surrender one of the two beds in his room to a Frenchwoman who had arrived late at night. The roommates negotiated their sleeping arrangements, which stipulated that the curtains around the woman’s bed must be pinned firmly shut and the Englishman must wear his breeches all night. Given the high demand for beds on the busy tourist trail, chances are that Day and his two wards were likewise obliged to share a room, although Day would always, figuratively, draw a curtain over their particular sleeping arrangements.

  When they entered through the gates of Paris after days on the open road, the girls would have been assailed by the uproar of carriages and pedestrians jostling for space in the narrow streets. The city’s population was half a million by the second half of the eighteenth century—about half that of London—but its streets were at least as congested and rowdy. The lack of pavements made them hazardous for pedestrians while the traffic din was increased by the echoes reverberating around the apartment buildings that towered up to seven stories high. As they took in the foreign shops, the foreign clothes and—not least—the foreign language, there was much for the girls to see and hear.

  The trio arrived in the city during the second week of November. Jubilant at his first taste of continental travel, now that he was twenty-one and free from his stepfather’s purse strings at last, Day was looking forward to touring the city sights. But his encounter with French food and hospitality in Paris largely confirmed his bias for the English way of life. No doubt the sight of the greasy-haired and scruffily dressed Englishman with two wide-eyed girls in tow reinforced a few French stereotypes about English eccentricity along the way.

  The idea of taking his pupils to France, and particularly to Paris—Europe’s capital of culture and center of fashion—seems an odd choice for Day given his avowed horror of urban polite society. He could easily have found a suitably remote country retreat in England or Ireland. And being as much a Francophobe as his hero Rousseau was an Anglophobe, Day would automatically have wanted to protect the two girls from everything he knew, or thought he knew, about France. Like many Englishmen, Day associated the French lifestyle with a slavishness to fashion and foppish effeminacy, which he naturally abhorred. Certainly the move surprised his friends. “Mr. Day had as large a portion of the national prejudice in favor of the people of England, and against the French, as any man of sense could have,” observed Richard Lovell Edgeworth, adding that it was “therefore something strange, that he should take two young girls to that country, one of whom he destined to be his wife.”

  Day would later attribute his move to France to a recommendation from his new friend, Dr. William Small, to seek a change of climate to improve his health. But the major benefit of the move was to safeguard his wife-training project rather than his own well-being. In France, the girls were not only beyond the legal dominion of the Foundling Hospital’s governors, they were out of sight and earshot of chattering London society. The two foundlings, the girls named Ann and Dorcas, had vanished into thin air. And there was a further reason—which was even more pertinent in the context of Day’s plan. Without a word of French between them, the two orphans were completely divorced from any source of aid and every outside influence except for that of Day himself. To make doubly sure that the girls were cut off from any other contact, Day took no English servants, so that, as one friend noted, “They might receive no ideas, except those which himself might choose to impart.”

  Even Rousseau, in stipulating that Émile should be educated in the countryside to protect him from external vices, had not dreamed up quite so foolproof a sh
ield against unwanted influences. Day’s belief that the flaws inherent in the female sex were largely owing to the foolish, faddish world in which girls were brought up had convinced him that the orphan destined to become his future wife should be educated inside a virtual bubble. In France, he knew, he could control his experiment just as effectively as the philosopher turning on and off the oxygen to the imprisoned cockatoo in Joseph Wright’s painting.

  Having settled himself and the girls in a Paris hotel, Day devoted the week to exploring the French capital. He had been pleasantly surprised by the welcoming inns, the well-cultivated countryside and the “well cloth’d and healthy” peasants on the journey from Calais—so different from the “Wretchedness and Misery” he had been led to expect. But his prejudices now reasserted themselves with a vengeance as he trod the capital’s crowded streets. Paris, he was delighted to report to his mother in a dutiful letter sent on November 18, was no match for London. “Its streets are narrow, always dirty, without foot-ways, and the houses high—nothing can be more inconvenient than walking in this most elegant and polite City, for you are in continual Danger of being run over by the Carriages.” Furthermore, the Parisian shops were inferior to those in London and the French food less palatable.

  Like many an English traveler visiting France, Day yearned for hearty roast beef instead of fancy dishes smothered in rich sauces. He marveled that the French could “cook up a dish out of any thing,” and reported: “I have had one Dish almost every day I have been in Paris, which is compos’d of nothing but the Pinions of Fowls, fricasied.” But he told his mother, “I own I am yet so little Frenchified, that I prefer, or should prefer if I could get it, one good joint of Meat, to all their Fricasies.” There was nothing like home cooking.