How to Create the Perfect Wife

by Wendy Moore

  Rushing back to England in early 1772, he hurried around to present himself at the Sneyd residence in Lichfield. When she saw Day after nearly a year’s absence, Elizabeth Sneyd could hardly believe her eyes. The scruffy young poet who had intrigued her during the balmy days of the previous summer had changed beyond recognition. Dressed in the height of French fashion, in colorful silk breeches, flamboyantly embroidered waistcoat and shapely long jacket, his wild black hair shorn and covered by a neat gray wig and his feet shod in silver-buckled shoes, Day bowed low in the customary manner and addressed his fiancée in the mannered style of a town dandy.

  The effect was ridiculous. For all his efforts and lessons, Day looked even more awkward than before. “The studied bow on entrance, the suddenly recollected assumption of attitude, prompted a risible instead of the admiring sensation,” laughed Anna Seward. “The endeavour, made at intervals, and by visible effort, was more really ungraceful than the natural stoop, and unfashionable air.” Day’s “showy dress” was “not a jot more becoming,” she wrote. All in all, the sight of “Thomas Day, fine gentleman” was infinitely more unattractive than the plain, unkempt Thomas Day of old, Seward noted.

  The ladies of Lichfield sniggered behind their handkerchiefs; Elizabeth Sneyd was aghast. Her efforts to fashion the ideal husband had proved no more successful than Day’s attempts to create his ideal wife. She had sent him away to become the perfect gentleman, and he had come back a perfect fool. Recoiling in horror at the strange creature that she had summoned to life, Elizabeth swiftly broke the engagement. A furious and tearful row ensued before Day stormed off in a rage. With relief, Elizabeth threw away her books on metaphysics, and by March she was dancing merrily at an assembly in Shrewsbury.

  Rejected once again, Day fell into another deep gloom. For all his serious stances on politics and manners, he was now a laughingstock among friends and associates far and wide. Even Darwin’s son, also named Erasmus, who was only thirteen at the time, would capture Day’s humiliation in a mischievous poem written secretly to his younger brother Robert a few years later.

  Mr Day too was there, who was reckon’d you know

  A Man who had travel’d & rather a beau

  The very first moment we enter’d the Town

  Good Lord! I discovered he was but a Clown;

  Though he powders his Hair, & strives to look gay

  But I charge you don’t tell him a word that I say.

  Casting aside his stylish new clothes and his curled wig, Thomas Day resumed his plain dress and let his hair grow long and tangled again. He would later write a bitter defense of his slovenly ways in the form of a mock court case entitled “The Trial of A. B. in the High Court of Fashion.” The charges read: “That he the said Defendant, A. B. had at sundry times, been guilty of the highest, and most enormous, offence against the dignity and majesty of the Court then assembled.” The defendant’s “crimes” included “That in dress he went remarkably plain” and “That in the management of his house he was notoriously guilty, keeping no more servants than were just necessary, and arbitrarily forbidding, upon pain of dismission, the use of curling irons, powder, and pomatum.” But he recovered swiftly enough.

  Retreating back to Paris, in March 1772 Day wrote to tell Seward that he had never been “much in Love” and did not believe he ever would be again. Commiserating with Anna over her painful separation from Saville, he assured her that he knew from experience that time healed all wounds. “In respect to my fair Lichfield Friend, I have forgotten the very feelings of Passion. It is in my mind as a thing which never has existed.” He did not doubt that Elizabeth would have made him happy if they had married, he wrote, but “that I am disengaged with honour to myself, & without prejudice to her Happiness, I rejoice.” Unlike Margaret Edgeworth, the “toad” whom he said he still regarded with “abhorrence,” he bore no hard feelings toward Elizabeth. And he wanted Seward to tell her so. “Tell her if you see her that I am not at all in love with her, but that I have an higher opinion of her, & more affection for her than ever.”

  At age twenty-four, Day was now totally convinced of the fickle nature of women. He told Anna that he had befriended “some fair female Acquaintances at Paris, with whom I talk of nothing but Sensibility” and who “continually exhort me to marry because it is a great pity so much sensibility should be lost.” Yet his wealth of experience in love made him realize, he said, that “when a woman fancies herself in love with me, tells me she shall love me eternally” and “would suffer death or torture, or poverty for me” he was “seldom deceiv’d.” He ended the letter with a poem to “Celia”—plainly Elizabeth—which recounted his “despair” when “with weeping eyes, you bid your swain adieu.” The poem did not explain whether the tears were due to sorrow or laughter.

  Nevertheless, for all his bad luck with women, he had still not given up his romantic ideals entirely. Mixing in Parisian intellectual circles, Day met Amélie Suard, the liberated and intelligent sister of the writer and publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, at about this time. Mme Suard, who was married to the French journalist Jean-Baptiste Suard, was perhaps one of the “fair Female acquaintances” so eager to talk about sensibility with Day while exhorting him to marry. Although Mme Suard, who was twenty-nine in 1772, was already married, Day apparently “paid his court to her”; one source would say that he was “in love” with her. Evidently Day had decided to adopt the contemporary French approach to marital fidelity. But however much Mme Suard was taken with Day’s sentimental ideas, she gave his advances short shrift.

  Despite his brave words to Seward, Day was still smarting from his rejection by Elizabeth when he visited Sutton Coldfield at the end of July. He must have been paying one of his rare visits to check on the progress of Sabrina’s education at her boarding school. Now fifteen, she had spent the past eighteen months poring over her books and being excluded from singing and dancing lessons while her guardian pranced and bowed as he practiced the minuet in France. But Day paid her little attention.

  Stopping at an inn in the town he scratched a poem on the window lamenting his rejection by Elizabeth Sneyd and signed it T. D., July 24, 1772. Regarded rather as a mark of romantic sensibility than as a mindless act of vandalism, scrawling odes on windows, walls and doors in public places was not an uncommon practice for aspiring writers. Rousseau, for one, had scribbled a proclamation condemning the conspiracy he believed was working against him on the bedroom door of an inn near Lyon in 1769. In his usual passionate and declamatory style, Day’s poem envisages fleeing the sorry scene of his recent humiliation for Italy and Switzerland. “On, on ye coursers! roll ye rapid wheels!” he begins, as he urges his horses to bear him speedily away from the “friendless grove” and “dull diminished spires” of Lichfield where he has been rebuffed by the “cold Nymph.” Anticipating visits to Etna and the Alps on his travels, he ends the ode: “Full many a Nymph the wandering swain shall find / In other realms, as faithless and as fair.” The quest continued.

  Returning to France—Italy and Switzerland would have to wait—Day rejoined the Edgeworths in Lyon. For once, Mrs. Edgeworth was pleased to see him. Having found herself pregnant not long after the reunion with her husband, she was now thoroughly fed up with French society—and with her husband’s obsession with mastering the Rhône. Now that he had succeeded in carving out a channel for the anticipated new route of the river, and the approach of winter threatened a surge of water, Edgeworth was busier than ever. Terrified of giving birth in a foreign country, Mrs. Edgeworth wanted to return home and Day gallantly volunteered to escort her back. A distracted Edgeworth waved them off.

  Soon afterward, Edgeworth was warned by one of the boatmen he had befriended that a “tremendous flood” was on its way. Desperate not to lose all his hard-won labors, he begged the river company to employ more men to work day and night in order to complete the fortifications. The company refused. A few days later Edgeworth was woken at dawn by a deafening roar and the bustle of crowds rushing t
o the banks of the river. He got there in time to see all his ingenious engineering work, along with piles, barrows, tools and timber, “carried down the torrent, and thrown in broken pieces upon the banks.” To forget Honora, he had thrown himself into taming the Rhône, but the Rhône had beaten him. He consoled himself by designing experimental windmills to while away the winter months.

  In the New Year Edgeworth made one last desperate effort to repair his battered marriage. In an earnest letter to his wife on January 12, 1773, he promised that she could choose where they would live in the coming summer and offered to renew their marriage vows.

  Will you agree to be unmarried again?—I mean as to the contract made between ourselves—and shall we make a new one?—If you will give it under your hand I will seriously—You become more agreable to me every day—and I hope the reason is that you become more deserving—Your character really and truly is mended and is I think a very desirable one—let the past be past—And I will return to England with a real desire to be pleased and to please.

  It was probably the last letter that Anna Maria received from him. In March she gave birth at her aunts’ house in London to a fourth child, a daughter named Anna, and then died ten days later. Maria, now five, would remember being led to her mother’s bed for a last kiss. Edgeworth received the news later that month and immediately abandoned his work, then wended his way, pensively, back through France with Dick to arrive in London in May. Poor little Maria, bereft at the loss of her mother, had thrown tea in someone’s face, and as a punishment her great-aunts had shut her in a gap between two doors to consider her sins. From her dark prison she suddenly heard a voice that struck her as being “quite different” from any she had previously heard. When the doors opened she saw a man dressed in black whom she immediately decided was “sublimely superior to all she ever saw before.” It was her father.

  A letter from Day awaited him. After a winter in Paris, he had returned to Lichfield and ascertained the answer to the question his friend most wanted to hear. They arranged to meet in the village of Woodstock near Oxford. Edgeworth had probably been visiting his wife’s grave at Black Bourton nearby. Immediately Day informed his friend that Honora was still single—and what was more she was “in perfect health and beauty; improved in person and in mind, and, though surrounded by lovers, still her own mistress.” Edgeworth needed no more encouragement. He had failed to stem the force of the Rhône; he had tilted at windmills in vain.

  Heading straight for Lichfield, he rushed to the Sneyds’ house where he found the drawing room crowded with friends and acquaintances. In a trance of mixed fear and excitement, Edgeworth threaded his way through the room. Later he would say that friends told him that the very last person he came to was Honora. “This I do not remember,” he wrote, “but I am perfectly sure, that, when I did see her, she appeared to me most lovely, even more lovely than when we parted.” When Edgeworth asked Honora to marry him, she, of course, agreed.

  Scandalizing many of their friends and relations, the couple refused to wait the conventional year of mourning. They were married a few weeks later, on July 17, 1773, by the Reverend Seward in Lichfield Cathedral. A glowering Major Sneyd, fuming over the hasty marriage and furious with the brash Edgeworth, reluctantly gave his daughter away. His son-in-law William Grove, the husband of Honora’s eldest sister Lucy, was equally horrified by the surprise match and made his views well known. Honora’s sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, sat glumly unsmiling throughout the ceremony; indeed Elizabeth had fallen into a “strange gloom” immediately after the marriage had been announced. By refusing to bow to her father’s views, Honora had incurred the wrath of most of Lichfield society. “They call her behaviour undutiful, & spare her not for presuming to judge for her self & for being too wise to sacrifice her felicity to her Father’s, & Mr. Groves, & the World’s idle prejudices,” wrote Anna. But Seward, as chief bridesmaid, and Day, joined in the celebrations with enthusiasm.

  After the ceremony the party adjourned to Major Sneyd’s house for a wedding breakfast, and at noon a beaming Edgeworth helped his bride into his sporty phaeton and dashed away. Edgeworth, at least, had secured his ideal wife; perfect in his eyes, she needed no changes or improvements. Honora, for her part, was equally confident that she had found her ideal husband—the perfect gentleman—and she now enjoyed “the utmost happiness.” Eager to escape the disapproving sneers in Lichfield, the newlyweds headed immediately for Edgeworth’s estate in Ireland, taking his three young girls with them—Dick being sent to another boarding school—and proceeded to live in blissful harmony in their country retreat. Having abandoned Rousseau’s educational dogma but still attached to the philosopher’s natural approach to learning, Edgeworth now devoted his spare hours to educating his daughters—and many future children—with his special brand of tolerance, insight and verve.

  Left behind, their friends waved them off with mixed emotions. Both Seward and Day had lost their closest friends and confidants. Although Anna professed herself delighted that “the two fond Lovers” had found happiness, she was well aware that she was unlikely ever to enjoy such bliss for herself. Her beloved Saville had now left his family home and moved into the house next door to it. Although he had reignited his relationship with Anna they would never be free to marry; indeed his wife continued to shop for him and launder his clothes. Destined therefore to live a single life, Seward was inconsolable at the loss of “my Honora” as she admitted to a friend: “she is happy. I bless Heaven that she is—but she is absent, & I must mourn.” From now on Honora was effectively lost to her.

  All her life Anna would invoke Honora in poetry; Honora’s name appears on almost every page of her published poems. Seward regarded Honora’s marriage as the ultimate betrayal. She would never forgive her for breaking the “vows” they had made and abandoning her for a mere man. In future poems she would lament that Honora’s “plighted love is changed to cold disdain” and addressed her former soulmate as “false Friend!”

  But Seward was disappointed with Day too. He had abruptly ended her matchmaking plans by failing to measure up to Honora’s aspirations and had made himself a laughingstock in his efforts to woo Elizabeth. There would be no more jovial correspondence with “Monsieur Le jour.” Her strongest ire, of course, was reserved for Edgeworth, who had stolen the “matchless prize” from under her eyes. She would accuse him of scandalously stealing Honora from the heroic John André and—when Honora’s health began to fail—of coldly neglecting his wife.

  Day suffered more stoically. He went to stay with his Lunar friend Dr. Small in Birmingham, from where he wrote a melancholy letter of congratulations to Edgeworth in August. Although he sent the “sincerest wishes” for Edgeworth’s happiness, Day glumly observed that his intimate relationship with his old traveling chum was now likely to fade. Previously they had shared all their confidences, Day reminisced. “When you experienced vexations, you sought a comforter in me, and I hope sometimes succeeded: to me you entrusted your uneasiness, your hopes, your fears, your passions.” Likewise Day had confided in Edgeworth all his romantic trials—with Margaret, Honora, Elizabeth and, of course, Sabrina. “To you, when my hopes were more active, and life a novelty, I entrusted all the fantastic emotions of my own heart—schemes of happiness, which a young man conceives with enthusiasm, pursues with ardor, and sees dissipated for ever, as he advances.” But Edgeworth’s marriage and move to Ireland “must necessarily make us of less active importance to each other,” he reasoned.

  While Edgeworth would now find companionship with his “amiable friend in a wife,” Day expected to spend his time “roving about the habitable earth, not in pursuit of happiness, but to avoid ennui.” His pride wounded from his failed romances and his ludicrous attempts to transform himself, Day proclaimed that he felt “an indifference to all human affairs, an aversion to restraint, and engagement, and embarrassment, continue to increase in my mind.” Day was happy that his friend had finally achieved his perfect marriage. There were
no hard feelings, he assured Edgeworth. “With what pleasure shall I, when I meet you again, contemplate that happiness, which you say you so fully possess!” And with a dramatic flourish he now declared that fate had marked him out for “an old bachelor.”

  It seemed that Day had abandoned his marital aspirations forever. And yet, he knew, there was still one person who had been carefully molded to suit his rare and particular expectations who waited in anxious anticipation for his visits.

  Stormy weather. Thomas Day by Joseph Wright in 1770, portrayed in gold waistcoat and red mantle against gathering clouds while living at Stowe House in Lichfield. The book in his hand is probably Rousseau’s Émile.

  Core members of the Lunar Society Richard Lovell Edgeworth

  Dr. Erasmus Darwin

  James Keir

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau provided the inspiration for Day’s educational experiment.

  Day’s women. The poet Anna Seward was an early ally and confidante of Day.

  Beautiful Honora Sneyd captivated both Seward and Day.

  Novelist Maria Edgeworth was deterred from writing by Day but later used his wife-training project in her fiction.

  Esther Milnes thought Day her ideal man.

  Georgian philanthropy. The London Foundling Hospital, built amid fields to the north of London, opened in 1741.