by Wendy Moore
Yet while there may well have been times when the two girls bickered or grew petulant as they vied for the attentions of their teacher, as Day favored one pupil and then the other, the latter account is probably exaggerated. Sabrina and Lucretia were far too well trained by their Foundling Hospital upbringing to rebel quite so forcefully. And it is extremely unlikely that they came down with smallpox, the disease that had disfigured Thomas Day. Lucretia had been inoculated against the disease immediately on returning from her foster mother to the London Foundling Hospital, in 1766, when she was seven, according to the charity’s records, and Sabrina had almost certainly undergone the same procedure in Shrewsbury.
By the spring of 1770, at any rate, Day—if not his pupils—had had enough of their French vacation. Homesick for English company and cooking, and even missing the country’s seasonal fogs and showers, Day escorted his wards back through France and across the Channel to London. Thoughtfully he brought back a gold-embroidered waistcoat for Edgeworth. He confessed that he was anxious that it might be “seized” at customs; the more likely prospect that his two wards might be seized by suspicious customs officials had apparently not entered his head.
Arriving back in London, Day immediately set about discarding the unwanted Lucretia. Sticking to the terms of the contract he and Bicknell had agreed to, he placed her as an apprentice in a milliner’s shop in Ludgate Hill and left her with a £400 farewell gift, which was a third of Day’s annual income. Worth nearly £60,000 ($96,000) today, it was a small fortune for a humble milliner’s apprentice and would certainly buy her a suitable husband. Lucretia would eventually make a happy marriage to a draper; she had not been so stupid after all. “In this situation,” Edgeworth would later write, “she went on contentedly, was happy, and made her husband happy, and is, perhaps, at this moment, comfortably seated with some of her grandchildren on her knees.” For Sabrina, however, the trials would continue.
Certain now that he had found the girl he could groom to become his perfect wife, Day determined to resume her education in earnest. Since he was still eager to shield his prize pupil from the vices of the metropolis and from prying eyes, he placed her in temporary accommodation with Bicknell’s mother, at a house in the countryside not far from London. In the meantime he set about finding a convenient home where they could live together discreetly while he continued the experiment. At last, in late spring 1770, Day took a twelve-month lease on a delightful house in a perfect location where he could devote himself to molding the teenage Sabrina to fulfill his future dreams.
SIX
ANNA AND HONORA
Lichfield, spring 1770
Growing up in the plush Bishop’s Palace in its prime position beside Lichfield Cathedral, Anna Seward had naturally come to dominate the social and intellectual life of the prosperous town. Her mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of the Reverend John Hunter, the tyrannical headmaster of Lichfield grammar school, who had beaten an education into Samuel Johnson. Although he had since escaped Lichfield for London, Dr. Johnson would always say that his knees quaked at the sight of his headmaster’s granddaughter with her striking resemblance to his former torturer. Educated at home, in a rather gentler fashion, by her own father, the Reverend Thomas Seward, Anna had grown up an intelligent and precocious child who at the age of three could recite Shakespeare and Milton. Since her father considered himself something of a poet, and had once declared his support for women’s education in a poem entitled “The Female Right to Literature,” the Reverend Seward taught Anna and her younger sister Sarah to appreciate the arts. After the family moved from Derbyshire to Lichfield when Anna was seven, on her father’s appointment as Canon Residentiary of the cathedral, she immersed herself in literary pursuits. The family’s home in the Bishop’s Palace—which the bishop himself had vacated for even more salubrious accommodation elsewhere—had become the focus of learned Lichfield society.
Encouraged by her father, at nine Anna recited her early efforts at poetry for admiring guests at soirées in the drawing room. She found that she enjoyed writing poems almost as much as she liked being the center of attention. She was just thirteen when she came to the notice of Erasmus Darwin, who, on his arrival in Lichfield in 1756, moved into a house in the west end of The Close, which encircled the cathedral. As impressed by the confident teenager as she was by the exuberant physician, the two exchanged verses. Two years later, when Darwin announced that Anna’s poetry was even superior to her father’s, Canon Seward briskly decided that his daughter’s literary ambitions had gone far enough. A “female’s right to literature” was not, it seemed, to be taken quite so literally. Anna’s mother, meanwhile, fretted that too much education might jeopardize her strident daughter’s chances of marriage. Anna was promptly ordered to abandon her poems. Undaunted either by her parents’ qualms or the city’s veneration for its celebrated literary son Johnson, Anna refused to give up writing, in the conviction that her talents easily equaled those of any man.
Anna’s youth in the happy company of her sister Sarah was an “Edenic scene,” she would later say, made complete by the arrival in 1757, when Anna was fourteen, of five-year-old Honora Sneyd. The daughter of a prominent Lichfield family, Honora was adopted by the Sewards when her mother died and left her father unable to cope with eight young children. A pretty but fragile child, Honora grew close to Sarah, the quieter and gentler of the Seward sisters, and looked up rather in awe at the tall and forthright Anna. Spending their days in constant companionship, living more intimately than many Georgian husbands and wives, the three girls shared a suite of rooms at the rear of the palace, strolled arm in arm in the palace gardens and read aloud to each other on the palace terrace.
When Sarah died suddenly at the age of nineteen, Anna was distraught but compensated with bracing speed by anointing twelve-year-old Honora as her sister-substitute. Within days of her sister’s burial, Anna assured a friend that Honora “more than supplied my Sally’s place.” Setting aside her grief, Anna plowed her considerable energies into polishing the teenage Honora’s learning and finessing her charms. Half afraid that Honora might be snatched away in death like her sister Sarah, Anna told a friend: “This child seems angel before she is woman; how consummate shall she be if she should be woman before she is actually angel!”
Through her twenties Anna attracted several proposals of marriage, but none of them met her exalted ideas of romantic love. Swatting them aside like troublesome flies, she poured her passions into poems and letters extolling the virtues of her “sweet Honora.” One poem, written in June 1769 to mark the twelfth anniversary of the arrival of the “lovely infant-girl,” celebrated their “Angelic Friendship”; a typical letter praised “the oval elegance of those delicate and beauteous contours.” As Honora blossomed into a beautiful, willowy and accomplished young woman, whose dainty features were framed by sleek dark hair, she too became a magnet for ardent young men beating a path to the palace door. Jealously guarding her protégée, Anna vetted them all with scrupulous care.
In eighteenth-century Britain, many female friends enjoyed intense relationships, which they celebrated in romantic terms. Some probably compensated for stiff and formal relations with parents by forging close bonds with same-sex friends. In one case, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby ran away from their families in Ireland to set up home together in Wales, where they would live in mutual harmony for more than fifty years. Known as the Ladies of Llangollen, they attracted visitors from far and wide who venerated their romantic story with never a hint that the friendship might be anything other than platonic. Anna Seward would become one of their greatest devotees, and she established close friendships with other women too. But Anna’s love—as she always described it—for Honora was by far the most intense.
Now twenty-seven, Anna presided over palace soirées with eighteen-year-old Honora at her side and reveled in her position as undisputed queen of Lichfield social life. With her acute eye for change and sharp ear for gossip, there was little
that happened in Lichfield that escaped her notice. And so when two new arrivals slipped quietly into the neighborhood in the spring of 1770, Anna was the first to know. Always on the lookout for a consummate man who would equal the “consummate” woman she had skillfully crafted, Seward surveyed the new residents with interest. An invitation to the palace soon followed.
Taking a year’s lease on a substantial villa called Stowe House, a discreet mile outside the city, Thomas Day brought Sabrina to Lichfield in late spring of 1770. With Edgeworth having dashed back to Ireland, as his father’s failing health took a turn for the worse, Day had decided to settle in Lichfield to live near his new friend Erasmus Darwin and his invigorating circle of freethinkers. It was a bold step. Until now he had kept his wife-training experiment under wraps, concealing Sabrina in London and then France with Lucretia and later, on her own, with John Bicknell’s mother in the countryside. Now, for the first time, he decided to live openly with his prize pupil in the full glare of gossipy Georgian society.
Lichfield was a shrewd choice. On his return from France Day had first gone to visit his mother and stepfather at Barehill. Although by rights he could have taken control of the property, his estate by inheritance, he could hardly bring his pretty young orphan to live in the family home to continue her wifely education. Lichfield, however, was far enough from his parental home to evade unwanted interest and far enough from London to remain outside the orbit of the scandal-obsessed newspapers, yet it was sufficiently lively to afford him all the pleasures of cultivated society.
Situated at the crossroads of the main coaching road from London to Chester and surrounded by the mills and potteries of the fast-encroaching industrial Midlands, the peaceful city in its fertile valley still retained an air of country charm and refined gentility. The two lakes, known as Minster Pool and Stowe Pool, which spanned the valley from east to west and cut the city in half, offered tranquil walks and green meadows. The crowded social calendar of concerts and plays, card parties and musical evenings, promised congenial company. And Stowe House provided a perfect haven.
Standing on its own in a secluded spot on the far side of Stowe Pool, Stowe House was only a fifteen-minute stroll from the heart of Lichfield. A tall and symmetrical villa, perched on a mound near the edge of the lake, the house had been built about twenty years earlier. Seen from the town, the redbrick house seemed almost to float above the water; at dusk the white edging to its windows and corners glowed ethereally. It was a view much loved by Anna Seward, who could see Stowe House from the windows of her dressing room at the rear of the palace. In fine weather she liked to sit on the palace terrace, sipping tea with Honora and looking out over the “watry mirror” of Stowe Pool with its reflections of “the Trees upon the bank, & the Villa near the edge.” The “villa, rising near the lake” would figure often in her poems—especially once she discovered the events that were about to unfold within.
In Shaw’s play Pygmalion, Professor Higgins bets that he can transform the coarse-spoken, rough-edged Eliza from “a draggletailed guttersnipe” into a duchess within six months. His honorable friend Colonel Pickering insists that Higgins should inform Eliza of his plan. “If this girl is to put herself in your hands for six months for an experiment in teaching, she must understand thoroughly what she’s doing.” Grudgingly Higgins agrees. “Eliza: you are to live here for the next six months, learning how to speak beautifully, like a lady in a florist’s shop,” he tells her. “At the end of six months you shall go to Buckingham Palace in a carriage, beautifully dressed.” When Eliza moves into Higgins’s house she is taken under the wing of the capable housekeeper Mrs. Pearce, who does her best to ensure that the professor comports himself with decorum in the flower girl’s presence. Even so, Pickering cross-examines Higgins on the propriety of allowing a young woman to share his roof. “I hope it’s understood that no advantage is to be taken of her position,” presses Pickering. Higgins answers: “What! That thing! Sacred, I assure you. You see she’ll be a pupil; and teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred.”
Generous to a fault, Thomas Day was resolved to commit twelve months to train Sabrina for her role—double the time the fictional Higgins would spend on Eliza. But unlike Higgins, Day remained as determined as ever to keep her in the dark about his plans. If he gave her any information at all, it was to say that she was apprenticed to him as a servant; certainly this was the fiction he would later maintain. And unlike Eliza, now that Day had cast off Lucretia, Sabrina would be living with him alone. As Edgeworth made plain, Sabrina lived with Day in Lichfield “without a protectress.” With no experience of the outside world, this was of no consequence to Sabrina; she was completely trusting in her kindly teacher. As she climbed the stone steps to the front door of Stowe House she had no idea that her trust would be tested to the limits over the coming months.
Inside Stowe House a wide entrance hall opened on to three handsome reception rooms. To the left, a cozy library contained a delicately carved chimney piece. At the far end of the library a door led into a spacious dining room that looked out onto the stables and gardens at the back. And completing the circuit of the ground floor, a door opened at the other end of the dining room into an elegant drawing room overlooking Stowe Pool. From the library a hidden staircase descended to the kitchen and laundry room in the basement. From the entrance hall, a grand oak staircase ascended past a stained-glass window depicting the Judgment of Solomon—an apt scene for a foundling’s home—and proceeded up to two more floors containing six bedrooms.
Exploring her new home, Sabrina would have seen her reflection—a slim, pretty, auburn-haired girl on the verge of puberty—in the vast arched mirror set into the dining room wall. Standing in the drawing room looking out over the lake she would have seen the three spires of the distant cathedral perfectly framed in the central sash window. In the morning, when the sun rose behind the house, she could watch the fishing boats sliding across the sparkling water. In the evening, when the sun set behind the cathedral, she could see the wild ducks flying in to land on the dark still pool. But there was precious little time to admire the view.
As before, in Avignon, Day employed few, if any, servants. He may have hired men to tend the grounds and look after the horses, but there were no domestic staff living in the house. He was determined to live as frugally as possible, without fancy food or comforts, and his personal needs were few. But since Day anticipated that his wife would perform the bulk of the household chores in their country hideaway, he regarded housework as a vital part of Sabrina’s training. So with Lucretia now gone, the task of managing the large four-story house fell squarely on Sabrina’s slender shoulders. It was a long, tiring climb up those dark stairs from the basement to answer Day’s calls in the library and to carry his plain meals to the dining room. It was even more exhausting to trudge up the two flights of stairs to clean and air the bedrooms. Day was determined to get his money’s worth from his £50 donation to the Foundling Hospital.
On top of her increased housework, Sabrina’s lessons continued unabated. Now that she had mastered the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, Day concentrated on explaining the mysteries of the natural world and sharing his knowledge of the arts. So far he was still following the regime laid down by Rousseau in Émile. For as Rousseau recommended, once Émile found his Sophie he should teach her “everything he knows, regardless of whether she wants to learn or whether it is suitable for her.” This curriculum spanned philosophy, physics, mathematics and history—“everything in fact,” said Rousseau—although he conceded that women needed only “a nodding acquaintance with logic and metaphysics.” Flourishing in her one-to-one tutorials, Sabrina progressed well.
With her chores and her lessons, life in Stowe House was scarcely less arduous than Sabrina’s former regime in the Foundling Hospital. But even when these duties were fulfilled there was no time for rest or play since Day was impatient to introduce his promising pupil to old friends and new acquaintances. Ea
ger to gain approval for his chosen bride, he escorted Sabrina on a giddy round of social visits to Lichfield’s most affluent and influential residents. Before they left the house Day took care to ensure that his little novice was turned out in the modest and maidenly style that he favored. Her dress must be simple and unadorned, her arms and neck modestly covered, her face scrubbed clean without cosmetics and her auburn ringlets left loose and free. Her appearance adjusted to his satisfaction, Day set off on the path that skirted Stowe Pool with Sabrina at his heels.
The arrival of the wealthy young bachelor, who turned twenty-two that summer, with a girl of thirteen in tow might be expected to raise eyebrows in even the most liberal of neighborhoods. According to the unwritten code of conduct that constrained Georgian society like a corset it was strictly taboo for a respectable woman to be left alone with a man under any circumstances unless they were formally engaged; and even then a chaperone was usually mandatory. Even exchanging letters between a single man and a single woman was frowned upon. The entire plot of Fanny Burney’s novel, Evelina, hinges upon the heroine’s horror at her (mistaken) belief that her hero asks her to collude in a private correspondence.
An unmarried man openly setting up home with an adolescent girl without servants or other chaperones would usually result in his being branded a despicable rake and her being shunned as his kept mistress. Yet far from attempting to conceal his dubious domestic arrangements, Day went out of his way to parade Sabrina around Lichfield’s best-appointed drawing rooms. What was even more bizarre was that Day’s conduct was apparently condoned without a murmur of dissent.