How to Create the Perfect Wife

by Wendy Moore

  The charity was founded by sea captain Thomas Coram who was shocked to see abandoned babies on London roadsides.

  Mothers left whatever they had to hand as tokens when they I gave up their babies.

  Sabrina’s billet form (under the name Monimia Butler), filled out when she was abandoned as a baby in 1757

  Her apprenticeship form from 1769 survive still.

  The Shrewsbury Foundling Hospital, where Sabrina grew up, was perched on a hill overlooking the River Severn. After it closed in 1771, it became a “house of industry” or workhouse. Today it forms part of Shrewsbury School.

  How to create the perfect man. Books on male grooming were bestsellers in Georgian Britain. These pictures, from The Polite Academy (1762), demonstrate how to bow and dance the minuet.

  The Inner and Middle Temple Inns were popular addresses for the Georgian man about town.

  The bountiful Burneys. Charles Burney took Sabrina under his wing after she was widowed with two young sons.

  She was embraced by the Burney clan, including Charles’s sister, the novelist Fanny Burney.

  The Burney School adjoined Charles Burney’s house in Greenwich.

  Sabrina and her sons. The only known portrait of Sabrina Bicknell, this engraving shows her at 75 with her copper curls as buoyant as ever.

  Her younger son, Henry Edgeworth Bicknell, was a happy-go-lucky, high-flying lawyer who lived to 91

  while her elder son, John Laurens Bicknell, was a status-conscious worrier who died at 59.

  EIGHT

  SABRINA

  London, July 1773

  The mystery over the author of the impassioned poem against slavery had all literary London guessing. Published as an anonymous pamphlet at the end of June 1773, The Dying Negro related the true story of a slave who had escaped the previous month from the London house of his master, a certain Captain Ordington, and been baptized in order to marry a fellow servant, an English maid, with whom he had fallen in love. Marriage to an Englishwoman would automatically have made the African a free man. But before the couple had time to say their vows, the slave was seized on the London streets and taken on board the captain’s ship moored in the Thames and bound for the West Indies. Desperate to avoid being sent back to a life of bondage, the slave shot himself in the head with a pistol.

  Although the story had merited only a single paragraph buried in the news columns at the end of May, which did not even record the couple’s names, the poem, which described the slave’s ordeal and tragic fate, became an instant best seller and drew widespread attention to the issue of slavery. Both eloquent and powerful, the poem was written in the form of the slave’s last letter to his lover before he committed suicide. By July Thomas Day was privately letting it be known that he was the chief creator of the nineteen-page polemic. In truth it was a joint production between Day and his old schoolfriend John Bicknell. The literary duo “Knife and Fork” was back in action.

  Having settled in London earlier in 1773, Day had resumed his desultory study of law at Middle Temple while devoting his plentiful leisure hours to debating politics in the local taverns and coffeehouses with Bicknell and other radical young lawyers. Now twenty-seven and a well-established barrister, Bicknell had just become a commissioner of bankrupts. Appointed by the Lord Chancellor, the bankruptcy commissioners were notorious for charging lucrative fees and expenses; sometimes their charges were so exorbitant that they left nothing for the creditors, thereby ensuring a constant supply of new bankrupts. With this steady source of income, Bicknell had exchanged his previous poky chambers in Garden Court, close to the noxious kitchens of Middle Temple Hall, for more salubrious premises in New Court within earshot of the tinkling notes of the Temple fountain. But since Bicknell preferred to spend his time gambling for high stakes at cards to scrutinizing his law briefs, he was almost as likely to be in debt as his hapless clients. Reunited with his old literary collaborator, Bicknell introduced Day to fellow firebrands including many of the Inn’s American students.

  Middle Temple had been a magnet for settlers from the American colonies wanting to make their name in the legal profession since the 1600s. Over the ensuing centuries, those Middle Templars who returned to the colonies with the foundations of English law etched deeply in their hearts had assumed prominent roles in American public life, and they in turn sent their sons to study law at Middle Temple. The Inn’s popularity with the colonists peaked in the eighteenth century when as many as 150 Americans were admitted. So when fury erupted in the colonies at Britain’s imposition of direct taxes in 1765, those Americans who had imbibed the principles of citizens’rights as young students at Middle Temple were among the most vociferous opponents. It was a Middle Templar, John Dickinson, who coined the rallying cry “No taxation without representation.” As resentment against British authority simmered to the boiling point in the early 1770s, so Middle Temple had become a bubbling cauldron of angry young Americans whipping up support for greater independence. Mingling with these campaigners for liberty and equality over dinner at Middle Temple Hall, Bicknell and Day found common cause. The fact that many of these agitators came from families who relied on slavery for their wealth had not escaped their notice.

  When Day and Bicknell read the short news article in the Morning Chronicle at the end of May describing the slave’s last desperate act, they were appalled. It was Bicknell who suggested they should write a poem to publicize the scandal, and he led the way by drafting the first eight lines. Working by candlelight, most probably in one of the drinking haunts near the Temple, they passed the quill from one to the other to compose succeeding lines. With its graphic depiction of the man’s abduction from Africa and his brutal treatment in the sugar plantations of the West Indies, the poem evoked Rousseau’s idealization of “natural man” and the popular sentimental image of the “noble savage” while also echoing Rousseau’s rallying calls for social equality and liberty. By the time they laid down the quill, as the poem reached its climax with the narrator’s dying cry of “remember me!” Bicknell and Day could be proud of their shocking and moving condemnation of slavery.

  Rumors immediately began circulating that attributed the verses to Day—although Bicknell had written almost half of the poem. While Day made no public claims to authorship, he did little in private to contradict assumptions—or to share credit with Bicknell. In July Anna Seward could not resist informing a friend: “Pray have you read the dying Negro, which I know is chiefly Mr Day’s, tho’he avoids owning himself the Author.” Although the next two editions, in 1774 and 1775, would remain anonymous—it would be 1787 before the two authors were finally named on the title page—the poem would be popularly acclaimed as Day’s. When the writers’ individual contributions were later revealed, even Edgeworth was surprised that nearly half of the poem had originated from Bicknell’s pen.

  As one of the first literary contributions to the fledgling antislavery movement and the first major poem to attack slavery, The Dying Negro was timely and influential. Already the British justice system and popular opinion were beginning to turn against the slave trade. A vociferous campaign had been launched in the 1760s by Granville Sharp, a government clerk who published the first anti-slavery tract in 1767. Sharp went on to champion the cause of an escaped slave, James Somerset, who won his freedom in a landmark court case in 1772 when Lord Mansfield ruled that no slave on British soil could be forcibly returned to his master or deported. Although the ruling was widely regarded at the time as a complete ban on slavery in Britain, in fact it only meant that enslavement could not be enforced by law; it would be 1833 before the Abolition Act finally made the slave trade illegal.

  In The Dying Negro, Day and Bicknell used their legal skills to expose the limitations of the Mansfield ruling. More important they drew on popular notions of sensibility to evoke sympathy for the enslaved African. By narrating the poem in the African’s dignified voice and using his English lover to channel empathy for his story of life on the plantations—�
�The trick’ling drops of liquid chrystal stole / Down thy fair cheek, and mark’d thy pitying soul”—the two writers made an emotional case against slavery. In short, they made the political personal. As a critic in the Monthly Review remarked, when praising the poem’s “author” in July: “He expresses the highest sense of human liberty and rigorously asserts the natural and universal rights of mankind.” The poem would inspire many more writers to use the power of verse in the campaign to end the slave trade.

  Day’s part in writing The Dying Negro helped to launch him on a successful literary and political career. The kudos he won through his laudable contribution to the antislavery movement established his reputation for progressive and visionary ideals on the world stage. Yet as they applauded the forceful arguments against slavery and wept with the tragic hero of The Dying Negro, few readers would have suspected that its chief author secretly maintained a teenage girl who was completely subordinate to his commands and whims.

  Obediently applying herself to her studies at the Sutton Coldfield boarding school, Sabrina heard from Day infrequently and saw him even less. For two years, she had been isolated from the friends she had made in Lichfield; she had no contact with the outside world except through Day. Banished with no word of explanation, she had been told only to work at her lessons in readiness for an apprenticeship. Since she continued to believe Day’s story that she was apprenticed to him—even though she was legally still bound to Edgeworth—she had little choice but to comply with his strictures. Moreover, the stern letters that Day sent appraising her academic progress, his payments for her school fees and the few occasions when he deigned to visit kept Sabrina in thrall. She was living in relative comfort, with adequate food, shelter and clothing, so her situation plainly did not equal enslavement, but the chains existed nonetheless.

  Now that she was sixteen, Sabrina looked toward the end of her schooldays with uncertainty. She had no relations, no friends and no guardian figure except for Day; he remained the most important person in her life. On the rare occasions when he wrote or visited, his manner varied between warm praise on her progress and cool words of reproach on her failings, according to his perceptions of her conduct and his mood. Although Day had sent her away for failing to meet his exact ideals of perfect womanhood, he continued to exert control of every detail of her life. Having insisted that her schoolteachers exclude her from music and dance lessons, he ordered them to ensure that she was kept hard to her studies and denied any rich food or fancy clothes. If women like Margaret Edgeworth, Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd had spurned him, he could, at least, still maintain control over his teenage captive. Although he kept Sabrina on a long leash, he could not quite give up his project to groom her toward his pinnacle of female perfection. She would always be there—in case she was needed. For her part, Sabrina, in the manner of many child hostages, viewed her captor with devotion; yet—as Seward had noted—it was a devotion born largely of fear.

  Oblivious to any whiff of hypocrisy, Day threw himself into defending human rights with gusto. Over the next few years, he would dedicate himself to campaigns to secure liberty and independence for slaves, for Americans, for working men and for religious skeptics. But since his commitment to civil rights frequently did not extend to being civil to his fellow campaigners, he would end up in conflict with many of his compatriots—and even with his greatest idol.

  Now that Day had cemented links with the Lunar circle in the Midlands, he began forging new friendships among radical political groups in London. Needing a base in the capital, he took lodgings with his old university chum William Jones, the expert linguist, who had chambers in Pump Court in Middle Temple. Even if he showed little regard for the rights of women, Day used his legal learning in support of human rights and even the broader cause of animal rights.

  In keeping with his frugal approach to meals, Day had always disliked eating meat. He told friends he would happily abstain from eating all animal products were it not that his philosophy—in accordance with the Rousseau veneration for nature—suggested that humans were naturally intended to eat meat; indeed he concluded that “the practice of rearing and killing animals for food was productive of more happiness than of pain to them.” But wanton cruelty to animals, which was a common enough sight in Georgian Britain, “used to give him uneasiness,” according to Keir. He was so sensitive to animal feelings that he even refused to kill a spider when it scuttled out from some dusty books in his lodgings. Addressing his fellow lodger Jones as he might do a jury, Day declared: “I will not kill that spider, Jones. I do not know that I have a right to kill that spider!” In typically sentimental terms he urged Jones to imagine how he would feel if a “superior being” suddenly demanded that a companion “kill that lawyer,” reminding his friend that “to most people, a lawyer is a more noxious animal than a spider.” It was a rare glimpse of Day’s comic side.

  When he was not defending spiders and other animals, Day enjoyed mixing with American radicals. He had met Benjamin Franklin, the American diplomat and science enthusiast, in Lichfield in 1771. Introduced by Darwin, Franklin had been impressed by the earnest young man who shared his liberal ideas on citizens’ rights and his skeptical views on organized religion. Since Day had so far laid the blame for the slave trade squarely on European shoulders, he could overlook the fact that Franklin had originally arrived in England with two slaves in tow. And so when Franklin asked Day to join an elite dining club of religious skeptics that he had just established, Day was more than happy to accept.

  Meeting at Franklin’s lodgings in Craven Street, off the Strand, or at Old Slaughter’s coffeehouse nearby in St. Martin’s Lane, the group included Wedgwood, Thomas Bentley, who was Wedgwood’s business partner in London and an ardent antislavery campaigner, and a flamboyant Welshman, David Williams. Originally a dissenting minister, Williams had been stripped of his clerical post because of his growing religious doubts and was now a confirmed deist, believing in the existence of a single creator but disavowing any need for organized religion. Like Day, Williams was a disciple of Rousseau’s educational ideas. He had set up a boys’school in Chelsea where pupils learned through experience and conducted their own court to determine matters of discipline. Franklin called his group the Club of Thirteen—probably in reference to the thirteen colonies fighting for independence—and its membership remained fixed at that unlucky number.

  Meetings focused on Franklin’s idea for a multidenominational church where all who accepted “the existence of a supreme intelligence” could come together in celebration of common ideas of morality rather than fixed religious doctrines. In an era when the activities of Catholics, Jews, Quakers and anyone else outside the Church of England were heavily restricted, this was a bold humanitarian move. The chapel would eventually open in Margaret Street near Cavendish Square on April 7, 1776—Easter Sunday—when Williams welcomed more than a hundred people to celebrate “a being infinite and immense” in a spirit of religious tolerance remarkably rare to the eighteenth century. But by then the amicable club that first spawned the project had been splintered by religious, political and personal differences into almost thirteen parts.

  Arguments between deists like Williams and Bentley and materialists or atheists like Day caused the first fractures in the convivial club. When Williams was accused of heresy in the press, Day leaped to defend him by sending long, hyperbolic, anonymous letters to the Morning Chronicle, which only reinforced the accusations and exposed Williams to further scandal. “Those letters were undoubtedly of service,” Williams wrote wearily, “but they diffused a suspicion and alarm concerning me which I was not disposed to counter.” When Williams tactfully broached his concerns, Day turned on the Welshman and accused him of being jealous of his literary merits. A shrewd and charitable man—he would later set up the Royal Literary Fund to help cash-strapped authors—Williams said that while Day affected “to be spotless,” he was in fact driven by “insatiable ambition.”

  It was the growing rift
between Britain and its American colonies that next created conflicts for Day. Mounting anger at Britain’s determination to tax its colonists, this time on their tea, boiled over when protesters tipped £9,000—roughly £1.1 million or $1.8 million today—of the best East India Company brew into Boston harbor in December 1773. Franklin, who was so shocked by the destruction of private property at the Boston Tea Party that he offered to pay for the ruined tea, suddenly found himself cast in the role of chief negotiator for the colonies. Hauled before the Privy Council in January 1774, he was castigated for his compatriots’ actions. Fearful of being arrested or attacked by a mob, Franklin took refuge with Williams in Chelsea. Yet while Franklin could always count on support for American independence from Williams and other members of his club, including Wedgwood and Bentley, the same could not be said of Day.

  Discussing the vexed question of independence with American friends in rowdy debates in Middle Temple Hall or the smoky taverns nearby, Day announced that he could not support the Americans’cries for liberty while they denied that same right to thousands of slaves. He had acknowledged, in The Dying Negro, that European traders first initiated the slave trade and Britain had later established a monopoly in the triangular transatlantic business. Yet by the 1770s hundreds of thousands of slaves were working cotton, tobacco and rice plantations in the southern colonies of America—there were 60,000 black slaves in South Carolina and 140,000 in Virginia alone—as well as in the West Indies. Many of the most prominent Americans lobbying for independence were slave owners. George Washington inherited ten slaves when he was eleven years old and cultivated his farm on the labor of 100 slaves; Thomas Jefferson inherited fifty-two slaves when he turned twenty-one and had a “slave family” numbering more than 170 on his plantation. But even in London, it was hard to ignore the issue of double standards.