How to Create the Perfect Wife (2 page)

Confessing finally that her feelings had changed, and she now felt “perfectly indifferent” as to whether they married or not, Margaret volunteered—rashly or gallantly—to marry him still if neither of them found a more suitable partner within the next twelve months. Although he was naturally peeved at this sudden turnaround, Day grudgingly consented to the pact in the confident belief that Margaret would “scarcely find another Character she can coolly & deliberately think comparable to mine”—a statement that was probably true.

But just as Day was about to sail back to England in October, Margaret professed a rekindled warmth for him. “She is concern’d I am going to leave her, she acknowledges it, & that she loves me better than she herself thought,” Day announced jubilantly to a friend. She would marry him after all, Margaret declared—so long as Day made a few efforts to smarten up his appearance—and the wedding plans were back on track. Leaving Margaret with a stack of books on metaphysics for her enlightenment through the winter, Day had returned to London to resume his law studies and looked forward to his June wedding with confidence.

Although none of their friends were in the least surprised by Margaret’s last-minute change of heart the following spring, the news hit Day as a complete shock and a ghastly blow. He had suffered rejection before as a student at Oxford; then he had described the woman who spurned him as a “Bitch.” But this time was far, far worse. Against his better judgment he had allowed himself to trust in a woman’s promises again, and again he had been cruelly rejected. He had placed all his faith in obtaining the lifelong partner he had searched for to share his dream life and been rudely disappointed. He had told family and friends of his summer wedding plans and now he had to disabuse them. Disgusted by Margaret’s fluctuating feelings as much as he was furious with himself for believing in her, Day reacted with bitterness and rage. He would later describe Margaret as “a toad, which I would not injure, but cannot help beholding with
abhorrence.” So as his fellow law students ambled and cavorted in the spring sunshine, Thomas Day languished in misery.

Many men his age, including some of his friends, had suffered similar romantic setbacks. Young men and women always had and they always would. As wretched as rejection could feel, most people eventually resurfaced and acknowledged that they had just not yet met the right partner. Day, however, refused to accept this view. Utterly baffled as to why any woman should want to reject him, at the age of twenty Day came to a startling conclusion. Since he had yet not found the right woman, the right woman simply did not exist.

Strangely, perhaps, this revelation did not put Day off the idea of marriage. His conviction that he should marry remained as strong as ever. Equally Day was just as firmly committed to his “Scheme of Life” exiled in a bleak rural hideaway with a lucky female partner. But his brief experience of romantic affairs to date now firmly convinced him that he would never find an ideal woman to share this lofty dream anywhere in contemporary society. His broken engagement confirmed his suspicions that women were universally shallow, fickle, illogical and untrustworthy. “These my Friend are the Prejudices & Caprices with which the whole Sex are infected”; he had complained to one friend during Margaret’s earlier wavering, “nothing can please but what is extravigant, irrational.” Yet he did not blame the female sex per se for these fatal shortcomings.

Women were the weaker sex physically and intellectually—that much was clear. But perhaps that deficiency was largely the result of their different upbringing and education, Day now reasoned. While boys were trained in boarding schools and universities to become future leaders who would one day occupy key positions in the church, law, medicine, business and government, girls were taught at home, or briefly in schools if they were lucky, chiefly to ply an embroidery needle, tinkle on a harpsichord and make pretty conversation at tea parties. Excluded from universities and law schools, and therefore denied entry into medical, legal and clerical professions, women were essentially trained to run an efficient household and make a man happy.

Yet while most people within eighteenth-century society unquestioningly accepted that women were inherently inferior to men, Day came to
a boldly progressive view that women were potentially equally intelligent. “The Female Mind is doubtless susceptible of some Degree of Perfection,” he argued. It was simply the way that women were brought up and educated in the fatuous, faddish, superficial world that turned them into giggling, flouncing creatures who changed their minds as easily as they changed their gowns, he decided. The pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft would later applaud his liberal ideas on women’s education. Yet Day was no harbinger of female equality.

Day wanted a lifelong partner who would be just as clever, well read and witty as his brilliant male friends. He craved a lover with whom he could discourse and wrangle on politics, philosophy and literature as freely as he could in male company. He desired a companion who would be physically as tough and hardy as himself. In short he wanted a woman who would be more like a man. But he was only human—and male. So for all his apparently egalitarian views on education, Day wanted his future spouse happily to suppress her natural intelligence and subvert her acquired learning in deference to his views and desires. He wanted a wife who would be completely subservient to his wishes at all times. How then would he ever obtain the woman of his dreams?

And then out of his pit of despair came a bold and daring plan. If only he could control a woman’s education from the beginning, perhaps he could make for himself an equal—a woman who would be worthy of him. It was a scheme he had been nursing quietly for some years. He had returned again to this wild notion the previous summer during the shifting relationship with Margaret. At that point he had confided to a friend: “I am now going to try whether by taking a Woman’s Mind before it is prejudic’d, it may be possible to prevent them [prejudices].” Then he had been diverted by Margaret’s revived interest and put the idea to one side. Now he determined that he would go ahead with his experiment after all.

If the perfect wife did not exist then he would simply have to create her.

TWO

LAURA

  
Stoke Newington, near London, c. 1753
  

T
he crowded room hushed as the small boy, dressed in infant’s petticoats, piped up with a question for the vicar. Bright and precocious, the young lad had learned to read early but had been puzzled by a particular phrase he had come across in the Bible. When he had asked his mother for an explanation she had briskly swept the matter aside and suggested that he ask the parish vicar when he next visited the house. No doubt his mother hoped that he would soon forget his question, but there was no chance of that. Now that the vicar had finally come, an honored guest at one of his mother’s tea parties, the boy pushed his way to the middle of the room and loudly voiced his query: “Sir, I want to know who the whore of Babylon is?”

As the guests turned to stare, the embarrassed parson was at a loss for words. The boy was most probably not the first person to ask him for an explanation of the Mother of Prostitutes described in the Book of Revelation as sitting astride a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns. But he was almost certainly the youngest. Finally regaining his composure, the vicar replied, “My dear, that is allegorical.” But the evasive answer, which might have silenced most of his parishioners, did not satisfy his young inquisitor. “Allegorical!” the boy spluttered. “I do not understand that word.”
Throwing a look of contempt at the cleric, Thomas Day ran to his mother and whispered loudly, “He knows nothing about it.”

Thomas Day was born on June 22, 1748, in London’s East End. He was the only child of a prosperous government official, also named Thomas, who had accumulated a portfolio of country estates, and his wife, Jane, the daughter of a rich London merchant. Since his father was in his late fifties and his mother less than half that age at the time of their wedding, the marriage was probably a convenient economic alliance rather than a love match. But when their son and heir was born two years later, he was very much a planned and wanted child.

The family lived in a large four-story house in Wellclose Square, a fashionable address close to the Port of London’s Custom House, where Thomas’s father held a lucrative post collecting export taxes. Baby Thomas was baptized by his proud parents on July 8 in the nearby church of St. George-in-the-East. But only a year later, his aging father died, leaving thirteen-month-old Thomas an enviable fortune in land and property to be held in trust until he reached the age of twenty-one. And so Thomas grew up in the secure knowledge that he would never have to work to earn his bread.

From his father, who bequeathed gifts to more than 150 friends, servants and tenants in his will, Thomas inherited not just a commitment to help people in need but also the money to fulfill that goal. From his mother—who had once stared down a bull she had surprised when crossing a field—Thomas inherited an intractable obstinacy and unshakable self-belief. It was a heady combination. Thomas grew into a solemn boy with a strong urge to do good and a fierce sense of self-entitlement.

Soon after she was widowed, the formidable Mrs. Day moved with Thomas to Stoke Newington, a village several miles north of the city’s smog, “for the sake of her son’s health.” Whether or not the lad was especially sickly, his mother certainly felt a real need to protect her only child. As she established herself in village society, Mrs. Day enjoyed showing off her clever son’s talents to guests. It was at one of her gatherings for local gentry that young Thomas had expressed his scorn for the village parson.

Thomas was devoted to his mother, and so his small world was turned upside down when she married again, this time to Thomas Phillips, a junior
colleague and friend of the elder Day as well as an executor of his will. The event was climactic in seven-year-old Thomas’s life. Unable to remember his father, he had developed an intensely close relationship with his mother. As a child he was naturally dependent on her, and yet, since he was his father’s sole heir, she was financially dependent on him. Strong-willed and self-sufficient yet utterly doting and dedicated to his every whim, his mother represented a pinnacle of female perfection in her small son’s eyes. No woman could ever hope to match this ideal. It was a perfect and perfectly exclusive relationship that fulfilled every emotional and physical need he could possibly encounter in his short sweet life to date. Although it was plain, since she had faced down that bull, that Mrs. Day was more than capable of looking after herself, in the mind of the seven-year-old boy who was technically head of the family, he was her protector against all threats and dangers. It is easy to imagine the young boy’s alarm at the idea of a towering male force bearing down upon his beloved mother.

Thomas and his stepfather would never see eye to eye. As one of the guardians charged with supervising the boy’s fortune and education, as well as now becoming his stepfather, Phillips played a dominant role in steering his stepson’s upbringing and governing his expenditure. To his face, Day would always be respectful in accordance with the filial duty expected of children in the eighteenth century. Behind his back, he would sneeringly describe Phillips as “one of those common characters” who had improved his fortunes through a judicious marriage. Resentful of his stepfather’s control over his life, he would accuse him of a “busy teizing [teasing] interference in circumstances, with which [he had] no real concern.”

Three certainly proved to be a crowd in the Day household. The moody young boy was promptly dispatched to a Stoke Newington boarding school while the newlyweds moved to a country house at Barehill, near Wargrave, in Berkshire. Thomas returned briefly to his mother’s arms when he came home to recuperate after catching smallpox. Like many youngsters fortunate enough to survive the disease he was left with unsightly scars on his face. But at the age of nine he was packed off smartly again to spend the next seven years learning Latin, Greek, grammar and algebra at Charterhouse, one of England’s oldest and most elite boys’ schools, in the center of London.