by Wendy Moore
So certain did it seem that Day had finally found his ideal wife that Edgeworth now expected any day to receive a letter announcing his friend’s engagement. Since Sabrina was under the age of twenty-one, Edgeworth, as her legal guardian, would be required to give consent. There was only one problem: Day had yet to inform Sabrina of this forthcoming happy event. It simply never occurred to him that she needed to know, or that she might have any relevant views on the matter. Yet although he kept her in the dark, he naively declared his intentions to their friends. As he later told her, “I studiously avoided the word marriage to you, though I used it to your friends.” Whether this was the Parkinsons, or the Savilles, or even the Sewards, Day failed to reveal, but inevitably at some point Sabrina’s friends felt the need to inform her of her benefactor’s marital plans.
When Sabrina confronted Day about the rumors she had heard, he at last admitted that he wanted to marry her—though not, crucially, that this had been his original plan all along. One acquaintance, who later heard the story from Sabrina herself, reported: “He finally explained to Sabrina, in full confidence of seeing the happy recognition that she had shown him until then, developing into a gentle love based on friendship and esteem.” Even now Day expected her to celebrate her luck at being selected for this choice role. He was baffled and perturbed by her reaction.
To Sabrina the discovery that Day was intent on marrying her came as a devastating shock, which threw her emotions into turmoil. According to a friend of hers, “immediately, she became serious, silent, and sad.” Sabrina had looked on Day as her guardian, her teacher and her employer, as a benevolent father figure and a well-meaning philanthropist—but never as her husband or lover. She knew, of course, that she owed Day everything. He had looked after her, educated her, and maintained her since she was twelve. But the idea of sharing his bed and bearing his children seemed monstrous—at least at first.
Sabrina wrestled with her conscience. Many women in Georgian times consented to far less suitable marriages on the basis of economic prudence; the notion of marrying for love was still a relatively modern concept. Girls younger than Sabrina were commonly betrothed to men they had never even met who were significantly older—and less attractive—than Day by parents arranging advantageous matches. To marry Day was not, therefore, completely implausible. He was rich, clever and influential, a landowner, a lawyer and a poet, with a rising literary reputation and a lively political flair, and he was largely well-meaning even if he was utterly self-absorbed and arrogant. And whereas the idea of a man of twenty-one marrying a girl of twelve might seem distasteful—even in Georgian times—the gap between a woman of eighteen and a man of twenty-seven seemed perfectly reasonable. Yet at the same time Sabrina knew that marriage to Day would entail constant and enduring adherence to his petty scruples and stringent rules. And since marriage was virtually impossible to end, except through the death of one or other spouse, it would be a life sentence.
Baffled by her confusion, Day now tried to persuade Sabrina to consent to marriage by stressing that his own happiness “was dependent uniquely on her,” but this only served to make her more troubled still. “As soon as she seemed convinced of this truth, the more sensitive she appeared and even to be softening, the less happy she seemed to him,” her friend would later say. Day continued regardless to make plans for the wedding in the confidence that their “mutual esteem” would lead to “conjugal bliss.” At last Sabrina seemed resigned to the marriage. Day was poised to set the wedding date; Edgeworth waited in anticipation. And then suddenly Day’s plans went horribly awry.
Leaving Sabrina with his friends—probably still at the Keirs’ house—while he proceeded with the preparations, Day disappeared for a few days. But before departing he gave Sabrina, as usual, some precise instructions over the manner of her dress, and she, as usual, solemnly promised to comply. When Day returned, he walked into the room, took one look at Sabrina and recoiled in horror. She had dressed herself contrary to his directions. Day flew into a rage.
Precisely how Sabrina had violated Day’s dress code on her final judgment day would never be adequately explained; indeed it may have been a smokescreen. It was a “trifling” consideration, wrote Edgeworth, who heard the story from the “gentleman” at whose house the drama took place. “She neglected, forgot, or undervalued something, which was not, I believe, clearly defined,” he wrote somewhat evasively. “She did, or she did not, wear certain long sleeves, or some handkerchief, which had been the subject of his dislike or of his liking.” Sabrina, Edgeworth reasoned, was just “too young and too artless, to feel the extent of that importance, which my friend annexed to trifling concessions or resistance to fashion, particularly with respect to female dress.” But whatever rules she had supposedly transgressed, Day took her omission as proof of her “want of strength of mind,” said Edgeworth. Sabrina had failed her ultimate obedience test.
Even Day would later have trouble recalling the exact particulars that Sabrina had supposedly contravened, or else he was equally eager to obfuscate the facts. “I gave you particular injunctions,” he later told her, “whether these injunctions were mild or harsh, proper or ridiculous, it is now unnecessary to inquire; you undertook to comply with them.” The “accusations” against her were “neither great or many,” he would later concede, but were “rather faults in respect to my particular modes of thinking than any crimes in you.” But he added: “That you did violate them, you well remember, and my behaviour has been exactly as was then predicted.”
Keir, who almost certainly knew, and probably witnessed, the final showdown chose to remain steadfastly mute. But another contemporary, who knew Sabrina in later life, suggested that rather than waiting placidly for Day to return and bear her down the aisle, Sabrina had in fact run away in panic at the planned wedding. “She completely disappeared for a few hours, astonishing him with dismay at this unprecedented turn of events,” she wrote. Day was both distraught and disturbed that Sabrina had run off without his permission, she said.
Whatever the actual cause of the rift, the outcome was the same. Sabrina had flouted Day’s rules, she had thrown off her chains and declared her independence. Just at the moment that America rose up in defiance against its mother country, as battle commenced in Massachusetts, so Day found that the creature of his own invention had turned against him. The perfect woman he had created in his own image was no longer under his control. Galatea had rejected Pygmalion’s embrace. Faced with this insubordination, Day acted precisely as he had warned that he would. He coldly informed Sabrina that since she had violated his instructions, the trial was over and he would never see her again.
Day was true to his word. He dispatched Sabrina immediately to a boardinghouse on the outskirts of Birmingham with an annual pension of £50. While this sum was more than five times the annual wage of a housemaid, it was far from sufficient for her to live in the manner that would assure her access to the social circles she had so far enjoyed. Furthermore, since her apprenticeship had ended prematurely and she had no means of earning her living, she was still financially dependent on Day. More significantly, since her name had been so closely linked to Day’s for so many years—and most of their friends believed they were about to get married—she now had little chance of making a respectable marriage elsewhere. According to the double standards of eighteenth-century Britain, a man could cavort with any number of women and still be sure of making a successful marriage, but if a woman was regarded as being romantically linked to any man—no matter how innocently—her chances of marriage were damaged irrevocably.
Sabrina would never describe in her own words her treatment by Thomas Day during his long and bizarre wife-training experiment. On the contrary, she would beg friends not to refer to what she called “my checker’d & adventurous history.” Over the ensuing years, Day’s payments would arrive reliably, his stern letters would continue to come and their lives would always be inextricably linked. But he would never see her again.
/> Most of Day’s friends were relieved when they heard that his wife-training experiment was at last over. Edgeworth, however, was shocked at his friend’s behavior. To abandon his marriage plans over “such a trifling motive” seemed not only absurd but deeply troubling. The letter that arrived from Day describing his actions did nothing to relieve his uneasiness. Although Edgeworth realized that with Day’s “peculiarities” he had “judged well for his own happiness,” he added gravely that “in the same situation, I could not have acted as he had done.” Edgeworth, of course, had only married his first wife on the grounds that they were so “insensibly entangled” that he could not walk away with honor.
Looking back in later life on his descriptions of Day and his extraordinary experiment, Edgeworth would feel concerned that he had somehow “betrayed” his friend. He never intended to “throw ridicule” on Day, he would protest, and he continued to insist that Day was “the man of the most perfect morality I have ever known.” Yet, as he burned Day’s letters, he wanted to make clear in depicting Day’s extreme behavior that “too much of one thing is good for nothing.”
Edgeworth’s bewilderment was understandable. Day’s explanation defied all logic. Even for Day, Sabrina’s errors seemed ridiculously petty motives on which to decide his matrimonial future once and for all. He had teetered on the brink of marrying the woman he had devoted so many years to crafting just when she appeared to have reached the point of perfection. The truth was obviously much more complicated; in reality other factors were at play. The judgment was driven not only by Day’s exacting expectations and Sabrina’s ultimate rebellion but also by his warring emotions.
Day had chosen, created and crafted the woman of his fantasies. But at the very moment when he was poised to consummate his dreams and embrace his ivory girl, he had suffered a crisis of confidence. Should he carry through his daring scheme and marry his foundling? Having created his ideal woman, did he really want the creature of his own making? Day had taken the human quest for perfection to the ultimate extreme—and found perfection wanting.
For even if he had not yet admitted the fact, just as Day was about to announce his engagement to Sabrina, he had already met the woman who would fulfill his dreams. Like Sabrina she was an orphan, but there the resemblance ended.
NINE
ESTHER
Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1775
Clever, amiable and wealthy, at twenty-three, Esther Milnes was popular with girlhood friends and male admirers alike. Having lost both her parents within a few months of each other when she was four, a not uncommon experience for children in Georgian times, Esther had been brought up by her older sister, Elizabeth, and assorted aunts and uncles in homes scattered across Derbyshire and Yorkshire. On her sister’s death in 1769, Esther had become the sole heiress at sixteen to her family’s mines, land and property worth a total £23,000—more than £3m ($5.6 million) in modern terms—and immediately she found herself prey to fortune hunters, not least her brother-in-law. With her expressive dark brown eyes and plump red mouth in a pretty face, Esther could have her choice. Yet while friends and family pressed her to marry, Esther had remained determinedly unattached. Making her home with two aging uncles in prosperous Wakefield, Esther was simply waiting for the right man to propose.
Born in Chesterfield in 1752, Esther was descended from a long line of merchants who had accumulated wealth through astute dealings in the wool industry across Derbyshire and Yorkshire. Two great-uncles had cornered the wool market in Wakefield by exporting manufactured goods to Russia in return for timber. Her father, Richard Milnes, had accrued a tidy sum from lead mines in Derbyshire and advanced his prospects further by marrying an heiress, Elizabeth Hawkesworth, who added the Palterton Hall estate, near Chesterfield, to the family fortune. Of the couple’s nine children, only Esther, the youngest, and Elizabeth, twenty years her senior, survived childhood. Despite being orphaned, Esther grew up happily with her sister in Palterton Hall under the watchful care of their numerous relatives living nearby. When Elizabeth married an ambitious young lawyer named Robert Lowndes in 1761, Esther continued to live in the family home with the newlyweds. But as Esther grew fond of her charming brother-in-law, she found herself suddenly packed off by her sister to a London boarding school at the age of eleven.
At school in Queen’s Square, Esther had impressed her teachers with her application to study, her skill at languages and her dexterity at the harpsichord. Her superlative knowledge of classical history and literature earned her the nickname Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom while her teenage efforts at poetry were roundly acclaimed. Esther addressed flattering odes to her best friends, her favorite teacher and even her books—“Dear instructive constant friends”—and wrote hymns that reflected her late parents’ dissenting faith and her dedication to charity. As compassionate as she was loyal, Esther won lasting friends, who fondly called her Hetty or Essy.
During the school holidays, friends deluged Esther with letters entreating her advice on problems with parents, brothers or suitors, and Esther responded with mature counsel, which they ignored at their peril. Writing to one friend, who was about to travel to India to join her parents, fourteen-year-old Esther wrote: “You will shortly, my Friend, commence a new Life, & enter upon a Scene, where all those innate Seeds of Worth and Excellence, which you have hitherto cultivated, will be either brought to Light, or destroyed by the Contagion of Vice & Folly.” Urging her friend not to deviate “from the Laws of Virtue,” Esther concluded with a few edifying lines of her own verse. To another friend, who sent gushing letters dithering between one suitor and another, Esther urged “be cautious how you form the indissoluble Tie” and added sagely: “When an Agreement of Sentiment & Sympathy of Soul are wanting in the conjugal state Felicity cannot be found.”
As Esther parted with her friends on leaving school at fifteen, she stepped up the steady flow of prim but sincere letters advising them to remain virtuous as they entered urban society with all its temptations. Exhorting one friend to avoid the “giddy, fantastick whirl of amusements,” she added: “How melancholy is it, my friend, to consider that so many of our sex should think of nothing but the embellishment of a body, which must soon or late moulder in its original dust.” While her friends practiced their dance steps and flirted with beaux at bustling assemblies, Esther preferred to stay “far remov’d from the hurry, crowd, and noise” reading her books and writing poems in contented solitude.
In a juvenile essay, on “Politeness,” Esther scorned the “unmeaning flattery and troublesome ceremony” that had lately become fashionable as “a false gloss.” True politeness could only come “from the heart and understanding,” she insisted. In another essay, on marriage, she criticized the trend for marrying for money with the words: “When two congenial minds possessed of virtue, understanding, and sensibility, are united in Hymen’s bands, by the gentle tie of love, strengthened with the golden cord of Friendship, I can conceive no happiness equal to what the conjugal state must afford.” And she even outlined her vision of the ideal woman, who wore her learning lightly, spoke with “pure, delicate and unaffected” language and expressed sentiments ‘“beautiful, sublime, and just.” Yet while she freely advised friends on their conduct Esther was not quite so clearheaded when it came to handling her own life.
Esther’s innocent world had been turned upside down when her sister died in 1769, leaving husband Robert with two boys, Milnes and Thomas, aged four and two, to bring up alone. Immediately Esther found herself the hostage in a battle of wits between her guardians, Ann and Richard Wilkinson, who were cousins of her late father, seeking to protect her fortune and reputation, and wily Robert, who was determined to hang on to his dead wife’s money by any means. The Wilkinsons endeavored to keep Esther safe in Wakefield, but Robert implored her to come and comfort him and her motherless nephews in empty Palterton Hall. In her grief and confusion, Esther sent Robert a tender poem in which she promised to “cheer / Thy upright mind, and wipe t
he dewy tear.” With dutiful concern for her nephews she added innocently: “May I each kind, parental office share, / And guard thy offspring with maternal care.”
But Robert’s mind was less than upright, and he had other parental offices in mind than chastely bringing up his sons. Esther’s Aunt Ann urged her to tell Robert it would be “improper” to live with him for reasons that might seem “mysterious” to her for the moment. When her aunt learned that Robert had professed “a regard” for Esther “of a more tender nature than what ought to subsist betwixt such relations,” she begged Esther to treat him with “great reserve” and wished that she was happily married to someone else as “the best shelter from the artifices of a designing Man.”
Steadfastly resisting the appeals of her brother-in-law, Esther found herself shuffled between friends and relatives from one end of the country to the other like a parcel of priceless but cursed gems. At one point, while staying in Manchester in 1773, she had almost consented to marry a certain Mr. Lees. Yet just as friends expected her to name the wedding day, Esther confessed to another aunt, also named Esther, her qualms as to whether her fiancé met her romantic notions of a husband or whether she was even suited to marriage at all. Eager to reassure her niece, Aunt Esther admitted it was “a very difficult question to answer you whether you would be happier in a married, or a Single state, as it depends on your own Inclination & opinion.” The aunt could not help adding some rumors that Mr. Lees was “fond of Liquor” and “rather profane in his conversation.” The wedding was promptly canceled.