by Wendy Moore
As housekeeper, Sabrina would have been in charge of a large fleet of servants, including cooks, kitchen maids, laundry maids and housemaids along with an impressive set of keys. Bills that survive for two pupils who attended the school reveal the press of activity. They itemize fees for lessons in fencing, drawing, geography and mathematics along with bills for the dentist, hatter, tailor and shoemaker and charges for copybooks, pens, slates and pencils. The bills each include one guinea, for “Mrs. Bicknell, at Christmas.”
Writing to the Edgeworths, Sabrina gave some idea of the unending demands on her time and labor. In one letter, she complained that she could not take a day off because the approach of the school holidays “always loads me with an unconscionable accumulation of business.” In another she apologized for writing “in the disagreeable expectation of being disturbed every moment” since her hope of finding a “quiet hour” had been continually frustrated. She certainly earned her guinea tips.
Yet the respectable middle- and upper-class parents who sent their sons to Greenwich for a rigorous education at the Burney School had no inkling that the busy housekeeper who welcomed their boys hid a sensational past. Although bland details of Thomas Day’s experiment had appeared in Keir’s biography, this sold poorly, and Sabrina’s identity had remained concealed. As her two boys thrived in Burney’s school, she hoped that John and Henry would never discover their mother’s origins or the strange story of how she met their father. But even though Day’s body had been interred in its grave, Sabrina’s history refused to remain buried. Day’s ghost would always stand at her shoulder; his crazed experiment would cast its shadow over the rest of her life.
It was hardly surprising that Maria Edgeworth should use her literary talents to wreak revenge on her father’s friend, Thomas Day. Firstly, there was all that foul tar water he had forced her to drink as part of his “icy” system. Secondly, and more crucially, Day had tried to prevent Maria from writing at all. If Day had had his way, Maria Edgeworth would never have become a novelist.
With her father’s encouragement, Maria had begun writing short stories at the age of twelve. Two years later he suggested she should translate from French a new book on education with a view to publication. Maria had just completed the task when another English translation appeared. When Day heard the news, he wrote to Edgeworth, not to commiserate on his daughter’s disappointment but to congratulate him that she had been beaten to the press. According to Maria, Day had “such a horror of female authorship” that he was “shocked and alarmed” to hear that Edgeworth had allowed her to attempt the translation at all. Indeed, Day was so eager to deter women from writing that he often quoted lines from a poem, “Advice to the Ladies,” which warned, “Wit like wine intoxicates the brain, / Too strong for feeble women to sustain.” First published in 1731, the poem was dedicated to a mythical Belinda.
Although Edgeworth was as apprehensive as any Georgian father at the idea of his daughter becoming a publishing sensation, he had vehemently defended Maria’s literary ambitions. But with Day’s harsh words ringing in her ears, Maria waited until after his death to publish her first book, Letters for Literary Ladies, in 1795, when she was twenty-seven. A sharp riposte to Day’s objections, it mounted a bold defense of women’s right to pursue a literary career. Nothing could stop her now. After Practical Education, the child-care manual cowritten with her father, appeared in 1798, Maria’s first novel, Castle Rackrent, was published to wide acclaim in 1800. Buoyed by her literary success, now Maria was ready to turn the tables on her erstwhile detractor Day.
First she limbered up for the task with a short story, “Forester,” in a collection entitled Moral Tales for Young People in 1801. Plainly based on Day, the uncouth young Forester detests “politeness so much” that society appears to him “either odious or ridiculous.” Arriving at his guardian’s house, Forester refuses to wipe his shoes or change his “disordered dress” before bursting into the drawing room. “He entered with dirty shoes, a threadbare coat, and hair that looked as if it never had been combed; and he was much surprised by the effect, which his singular appearance produced upon the risible muscles of some of the company.”
Now that she had developed a taste for literary revenge, in the same year Maria published her second novel, Belinda. She not only chose the name of her heroine, and the book’s title, as a rebuff to Day’s advice to would-be female writers, she used the story of Day’s attempt to educate Sabrina as the kernel of her narrative. Maria Edgeworth’s first “society” novel, Belinda tells the tale of the eponymous heroine’s search for an ideal husband. At seventeen, Belinda is intrigued by the rich and aristocratic Clarence Hervey, but she eventually discovers that Hervey hides a scandalous secret. As an idealistic young man, Hervey had been “charmed” by the ideas of Rousseau and had “formed the romantic project of educating a wife for himself.” Searching for a simple maid to suit his scheme, Hervey stumbles upon a young girl living with her grandmother in an isolated cottage. The girl, Rachel, is “a most beautiful creature” with a “sweet voice” and “finely shaped hands and arms” whose mother had been seduced by a rake. When her grandmother dies, Hervey takes charge of the girl and conceals her in a house with only a governess and a pet bullfinch for company. He renames her Virginia St Pierre, in a reference to another Rousseau fanatic Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the French writer and botanist whose novel Paul et Virginie, published in 1787, had imagined an idyllic romance for Rousseau’s Émile and Sophie.
Testing Virginia’s simple tastes, Hervey asks her to choose between a rosebud and a pair of diamond earrings. Unlike Day’s erstwhile fiancée, Elizabeth Hall, Virginia picks the rose. Confused by her feelings for her benevolent captor in the same way Sabrina must have felt in her relationship with Day, Virginia says: “When he is near me, I feel a sort of fear, mixed with my love.” Yet as Virginia warms toward Hervey, his passion fades in favor of the accomplished Belinda, just as Day had dropped Sabrina for Esther. “In comparison to Belinda, Virginia appeared to him but an insipid, though innocent child; the one he found was his equal, the other his inferiour,” so that “at length, he became desirous to change the nature of his connexion with Virginia, and to appear to her only in the light of a friend or a benefactor.” The tangle is happily resolved when Virginia is reunited with a childhood sweetheart, leaving Hervey free to marry Belinda.
Although the connection between Hervey and Day is never stated, at one point Belinda’s friend reads from The Dying Negro and at another quotes directly from Keir’s biography in an effort to flush out Hervey’s secret. But Maria Edgeworth made no secret of the inspiration for her plot when later editing her father’s memoirs. “Mr. Day’s educating Sabrina for his wife suggested the story of Virginia and Clarence Hervey in Belinda,” she wrote. “But to avoid representing the real character of Mr. Day, which I did not think it right to draw, I used the incident, with the fictitious characters, which I made as unlike the real persons as I possibly could.” Appropriately enough, it was Belinda that firmly established Maria Edgeworth’s literary career. Before long she had eclipsed Fanny Burney as the most popular novelist of her time, and her style would influence both Walter Scott and Jane Austen.
There was little surprise that Fanny Burney, always alert for a dramatic plot, was inspired by Sabrina’s story too. After moving to France in 1802 to join her French husband, Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard d’Arblay, Fanny decided to improve her French by writing some short compositions for her husband to correct. As she was casting around for a suitable subject to divert him, their son Alex was reading aloud from Day’s moral tales in Sandford and Merton. She needed to look no further. Having heard all about the author’s immoral past from Sabrina or Charles, Fanny decided to entertain her husband with Day’s wife-training project in her shaky, self-taught French.
In a tiny notebook, which still survives, Fanny describes Sabrina’s story with the cavalier approach to truth that only a novelist could bring to the tale. In Fanny�
��s version, Day is so torn between his “two lambs” that he resolves to bring up both Sabrina and “Juliana”—as she calls Lucretia—to become “society ladies.” When Day settles on marrying Sabrina and confesses his intentions to her, she runs away to marry Bicknell who “had desperately loved her since he first saw her and who was loved by her with adoration.” But despite marrying “the man of her dreams,” Sabrina never ceased to think of Day without “affection, gratitude, regret”—or so said Fanny.
Sabrina’s story would continue to beguile novelists such as Henry James, with his racy 1871 novella Watch and Ward. His contemporary Anthony Trollope would tell a similar story about a young man who molds an orphan to become his wife as a central thread in his 1862 novel Orley Farm. Trollope’s character, a young barrister named Felix Graham, who had left Oxford without taking a degree, is plainly based on Day. Graham is “tall and thin, and his face had been slightly marked with the smallpox. He stooped in his gait as he walked, and was often awkward with his hands and legs.” As a naïve but well-intentioned youth, Graham takes under his care an orphan, Mary Snow, the daughter of an engraver, described as “drunken, dissolute, and generally drowned in poverty.” Graham agrees to a written contract with the father to educate Snow with a view to marriage “if her conduct up to that age had been becoming.” Rather than “take a partner in life at hazard,” Graham was resolved “to mould a young mind and character to those pursuits and modes of thought which may best fit a woman for the duties she will have to perform.”
But just like Day, at the last minute, Graham cannot bring himself to carry through his plan. Having fallen in love with another woman, a judge’s daughter from his own rank in society, he discards Snow at the age of nineteen after discovering—to his relief—that she has secretly met with another man, an apothecary’s assistant. Unlike Day, Graham then admitted “that he had made an ass of himself in this affair of Mary Snow” and wisely concluded: “This moulding of a wife had failed him, he said, as it always must fail with every man.” Trollope’s choice of profession for Mary Snow’s lover was probably a coincidence; he was unlikely to have known of Sabrina’s earlier marriage proposal. But Shaw would almost certainly have known of Trollope’s book when writing his play Pygmalion, with Eliza Doolittle’s similarly dissolute father and its almost identical ending.
Yet even though Sabrina’s strange past had so far been aired in biography, in fiction and in French, she had still not been named in public, and her identity remained secure. As her sons grew into their teens and rose through the forms of Charles Burney’s school she was anxious to keep it that way. In term-time, while Sabrina supervised the school’s daily routine, the Bicknell boys must have lived as much in fear of the stern headmaster as any of the other pupils. But during the holidays, when they joined in lively Burney family gatherings with their mother, John and Henry had come to look on Charles Burney as a father figure. Reconciled with the Bicknell family too, John and Henry hoped to launch legal careers with the help of their Bicknell uncles. And at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the only obvious threat to Sabrina’s happiness came from the cannons of the French army pointed at the white cliffs of Dover.
ELEVEN
GALATEA
Greenwich, January 1805
For nearly two years the British had lived with the fear of invasion. Ever since Napoleon Bonaparte had amassed a huge invasion force at Boulogne in 1803, the threat of occupation had filled the nation with dread. Village greens across England resounded to the noise of volunteers defiantly drilling, and taverns were filled with the strains of patriotic ballads. The people of Kent fully expected to bear the brunt of the assault whether by land or river, and the heath close to Greenwich had even been proposed as the likely battlefield for the first clash with French troops. Yet the blow that now rocked Sabrina’s life did not come from Bonaparte’s army, although its effect shattered her world just as surely as if Emperor Napoleon had stormed her home.
During the winter of 1804–5, Sabrina’s eldest son, John Laurens Bicknell, had turned nineteen, and he was poised on the brink of a promising legal career in the footsteps of the father he had never known. When he picked up the book Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin, he may well have been prompted to read about the genial physician, who died in 1802, because Darwin had been a friend to his mother in her youth. The biography, by Anna Seward, had been published in early 1804. As he started reading, John was probably as bewildered as any other reader to find that the beginning of the memoir was largely absorbed not with Darwin but the life of one of his eccentric friends.
After the briefest mention of Darwin, the book’s next twenty-six pages were devoted entirely to detailing Thomas Day’s early life, his comical romances and his bizarre decision to educate two orphans from the Foundling Hospital in a quest to create his perfect wife. John learned that Day renamed the orphans Lucretia and Sabrina, then took them to France where he decided to give up the willful Lucretia in preference for the pliable Sabrina. Reading on, he discovered that Day then lived alone with thirteen-year-old Sabrina in Lichfield for a year while he conducted some shocking and seemingly prurient trials until eventually he rejected Sabrina too.
But the tale did not end there. “Ere the principal subject of this biographical tract is resumed, the reader will not be sorry to learn the future destiny of Sabrina,” Seward wrote. But young John was in fact extremely sorry to learn Sabrina’s destiny. To his horror, he now read that Sabrina had married for “prudential” reasons the lawyer John Bicknell, who had first chosen her from the line of girls at the orphanage. Seward went on to reveal that Sabrina Bicknell had been left a penniless widow with two sons and had only been saved from destitution by charitable lawyers. If any doubt remained as to the identity of the subject of this appalling social experiment, Seward announced: “That excellent woman has lived many years, and yet lives with the good Dr. Burney of Greenwich, as his housekeeper, and assistant in the cares of his academy.”
At first John refused to believe what he read. The thought that his mother had been abandoned at the Foundling Hospital was appalling; the idea that she was almost certainly illegitimate was unthinkable. Attitudes toward illegitimacy had if anything hardened since the days when the Foundling Hospital had first opened its doors. In law, as John would have known, illegitimate children were forbidden from inheriting property or titles since they were considered to be the son or daughter “of nobody.” Novelists in Georgian times returned repeatedly to this negation of identity and the disgrace illegitimacy bestowed. “I am nobody; the child of nobody,” laments the illegitimate heroine of one novel. “I am nothing,—a kind of reptile in humanity,” says another.
In novels, salvation usually came with the discovery that the book’s hero or heroine turned out to be legitimate after all—and usually rich to boot. Yet John’s mother—according to Seward’s shocking book—had apparently taken this journey in reverse: she was currently a respectable widow of modest means and had now been exposed as an illegitimate foundling. As if this was not sufficient shame, Seward had cast disgraceful aspersions on his mother’s reputation by suggesting that she had lived alone with Day and entered a marriage of convenience with his father. Pale with shock and shaking with rage, Bicknell confronted his mother and demanded to know the truth.
At forty-seven, Sabrina was still a doughty housekeeper who was used to calming nervous boys and quieting fanciful fears. But when her eldest son burst in with a book gripped in his hand, his anger was so intense that she was frightened. He was in “such a state of irritation as [I] could not describe,” she later said. Since she had never told John the details of her origins or her early life, he was “dreadfully shocked” and “violently enraged.” Even though Sabrina now reluctantly confirmed the story, John refused to allow the slur on his mother’s reputation to go unchallenged. Feverish with fury, he wrote to Seward demanding a retraction and apology.
Now sixty-two and pained by ill health, Seward lived alone in the Bishop’s Palace
after the deaths of her parents followed by the loss of her beloved John Saville in 1803. Having traveled together and received company just like a married couple for many years—despite Saville’s wife still living next door to him in the Vicars’ Close—Seward had grieved like a widow for the loss of “the dearest friend I had on earth.” Heartily regretting that she had ever undertaken to write Darwin’s biography, she had already been forced by his family to issue a correction over her unflattering portrait of the physician, in particular the claim that he had reacted with “hard and unfeeling spirit” to the suicide of his middle son, Erasmus Junior, when he drowned himself in 1799. When Seward now read John Bicknell’s letter she was infuriated.
On January 22, 1805, Seward wrote to a friend that “a base and surely most unprovoked attack is made upon my truth by a son of Mrs. Bicknel’s, Mr. Day’s ‘Sabrina’.” She fumed: “His foolish pride is stung by the publicity of circumstances concerning his mother’s singular story, which cast no shade of reflection upon her in any respect, viz. her being originally a foundling child, and having been left in straitened circumstances, and a subscription having been raised for her.” Seward could not understand why John should complain. “Surely she appears in a very amiable light from my representation, and for that glowing testimony to her merit, this is my reward.” Seward was adamant that every circumstance she had described was accurate “without a shadow of exaggeration,” with the possible exception of the subscription raised for her as a widow, which had been related by George Hardinge. “The abusive letter states no particular complaint, but avers that all the anecdotes of the author’s mother are falsehoods, and that as such he shall publicly brand them.”