How to Create the Perfect Wife (20 page)

Day was not the only Rousseau fanatic to subject his pupil to physical ordeals. Edgeworth, of course, had followed the same regime in turning young Dick out of doors in all weathers—and with much success. It was for the same reason that the Wurtembergs doused baby Sophie in freezing fountains and the Swiss banker Roussel abandoned his five babes in the wood. Richard Warburton-Lytton, Day’s friend at Oxford, who was another Rousseau disciple, would send his infant daughter Elizabeth out in winter to roll in the snow. And many more Georgian parents inspired by Rousseau adopted a similar approach in “hardening” their children by exposing them to cold temperatures and wet weather. Indeed, the idea became so fashionable that the surgeon John Hunter curtly demanded of one father, whose five children had all died as babies through exposure, whether he intended to kill his sixth child as he had “killed the rest.” It was the other side of the nurturing Rousseau method—the school of hard knocks in conjunction with the classroom of soft cushions.

But Rousseau’s tough love was intended to turn boys into men—not girls into women. According to his scheme, girls should undergo a gentler, kinder and more domesticated upbringing with its own particular privations; it was mind-numbing tedium, rather than finger-numbing cold, that girls were expected to bear. Day’s attempt to impose a rigorous physical training on Sabrina was therefore a perverse striving for sexual equality.

Growing up with her foster families in the countryside Sabrina had been used to meager meals and bitter cold. Living in the Foundling Hospital she had endured long days of hard labor. And even over the last year living with Day, she had grown used to his plain diet and domestic servitude.
But nothing could have prepared her for the trials he was about to unleash. If Day’s actions had appeared essentially benign so far, now they began to smack of sadism. Across the Channel in France, the Marquis de Sade had progressed from subjecting occasional young women to his brutal fetishes to committing wholesale sexual violence upon a stream of men and women he abducted or hired. Day’s behavior could not be described as sadistic—he took no particular pleasure in his torments—yet he plainly felt that he too possessed a right to inflict pain upon an unwitting young girl.

Behind the closed doors of Stowe House, Day ordered Sabrina to roll up her sleeves and bare her shoulders. He then took a stick of sealing wax and began to heat it in the flame of a candle. Ordering her not to move or to cry out, he dropped globules of molten wax onto her bare back and arms. Not surprisingly, Sabrina jumped up and screamed as the hot wax burned her skin—at least at first. As a variation on the ordeal by sealing wax, Day sometimes stuck pins into Sabrina’s flesh and commanded her not to move or cry. The pain endurance tests were repeated on a regular basis. But this was only the beginning of her trials.

As well as learning to withstand pain, Sabrina had to be conditioned to extremes of temperature. For this challenge Day led her down to the banks of Stowe Pool in front of the house. There he forced her to wade into the lake fully dressed until the water reached her chin; according to one report he even threw her in. Unlike Samuel Johnson who had learned to swim in the lake, Sabrina was unable to swim, as Day knew, having had to save her from the Rhône the previous year. After nearly drowning in the French torrent, she was no doubt petrified in the murky waters of Stowe Pool.

Once he had satisfied himself that she was thoroughly soaked, Day allowed Sabrina to scramble onto the bank. Then he took her to the nearby meadows—marshy from the summer’s downpour—and made her lie down in the grass. There she had to stay while her clinging garments and wet ringlets dried slowly in the sun. If she had not already been so well hardened to the battery of infectious diseases that had seen off weaker foundlings, she might have succumbed to pneumonia. Sabrina had survived the waters of Stowe if not Rousseau’s “waters of Styx,” and now Day
wanted to test her resistance to fear. Rousseau had recommended that tutors subject their little pupils to thunderclaps or hairy spiders to wean them away from unfounded terrors by gradual degrees. He had even suggested accustoming children to loud noises by firing pistols. Typically pistols of the period were loaded with a single ball, which was rammed down the barrel after the main charge of gunpowder. A smaller charge of powder was packed into the cavity called a “pan” and ignited by striking a flint. This sent a “flash” through a small hole into the barrel to ignite the main powder charge and propel the ball. Rousseau recommended firing a pistol initially merely by putting powder in the pan to produce a flash, then placing increasing amounts of powder in the barrel to sound louder and louder bangs. Day decided he would apply Rousseau’s test with a literal precision.

With no prior warning Day marched Sabrina to a secluded spot—probably in the enclosed gardens behind Stowe House. Then he took a pistol out of its box—probably one of the two dueling weapons with which he had threatened the lascivious officer in France—and instructed Sabrina to stand still and not utter a sound. He walked some distance away, cocked the weapon, took aim and fired directly at her skirts. Whether the pistol had been charged with gunpowder and loaded with ball Sabrina had no idea, and Day had no intention of enlightening her. She was expected to react with perfect calmness as he repeated the firearms test on a regular basis.

How well and how often Sabrina withstood these bizarre tests of strength was described with varying reports by various sources. “His experiments had not the success he wished and expected,” Anna Seward would later write. “Her spirit could not be armed against the dread of pain, and the appearance of danger. . . . When he dropped melted sealing-wax upon her arms she did not endure it heroically, nor when he fired pistols at her petticoats, which she believed to be charged with balls, could she help starting aside, or suppress her screams.” But another acquaintance, living in Lichfield at the same time, told a different story.

Richard George Robinson, who was chancellor vicar in Lichfield cathedral in 1770, wrote: “What Miss Seward says respecting Sabrina’s not bearing pain heroically is not true. I have seen her drop melted sealing wax voluntarily on her arm, and bear it heroically without flinching.”
Whether the Reverend Robinson was a guest at some event where Day demonstrated Sabrina’s stoicism to prove the success of his training or for some reason Sabrina felt the need herself to prove her ability to withstand the hot wax to doubters, Robinson declined to say.

Another contemporary supported Robinson’s version of events. Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, who was the daughter of the Lunar club member Samuel Galton, was transfixed by the stories of Sabrina’s ordeals, which she heard from a mutual acquaintance. “We heard how she stood unmoved when, every morning, he fired a pistol close to her ear, and how she bore melting sealing-wax being dropped on her back and arms.” And another anonymous writer suggested that Day’s pistol was definitely loaded with a potentially lethal ball. This source stated that when Day fired his pistol at Sabrina’s skirts “the ball went through her cloaths but without injury.”

There were further challenges ahead as Day invented ingenious methods and went to ludicrous lengths to measure his future bride against his ideal. To test her resistance to luxury and vanity, Day presented her one day with a large box. When Sabrina lifted the lid she found it full of beautifully handmade clothes. She had spent the majority of her life in her drab brown orphanage uniform, which she had exchanged for the plain gowns of Day’s preference, so it is not hard to imagine her brown eyes widening with delight. What teenager would not have been impressed by the present of stylish new clothes? Then Day commanded her to throw the entire box onto the fire and watch as the flames reduced the expensive silk and lace to ashes. Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck recorded that “we were told of her throwing a box of finery into the fire at his request,” and she could not help adding wistfully: “Sometimes I wished I were a philosopher.”

Just in case Sabrina might be tempted by some choice foods or pretty adornment offered by a kindly soul when she was out of Day’s sight, he made sure to forbid any of their acquaintances to indulge her. “I always discouraged every appearance of indolence & finery with the greatest vehemence,” he would later tell her, “& I particularly desired every person who approached you to regulate his behaviour by these principles: of this there are many living witnesses at Lichfield.” He maintained strict control of every aspect of her life at every moment.

Other trials were aimed at testing Sabrina’s loyalty and obedience. For one assignment, Day invented some secrets concerning a supposed danger to himself which he confided to Sabrina under strict instructions that she must not reveal the details to anyone else. To his fury Sabrina blurted out the stories to others. As Anna Seward reported, “When he tried her fidelity in secret-keeping, by telling her of well-invented dangers to himself, in which greater danger would result from its being discovered that he was aware of them, he once or twice detected her having imparted them to the servants, and to her play-fellows.” Since there were no servants within Day’s household, she presumably meant the palace or elsewhere. Sabrina’s indiscretion was hardly surprising; she was probably worried about the perceived danger to her protector—although there were obviously lots of secrets that Sabrina could have divulged concerning Day’s treatment of herself had she so wished.

Yet there was one terror that, no matter how hard Day tried, Sabrina was unable to conquer: she was petrified of horses. To be afraid of horses was a most inconvenient phobia in the eighteenth century, when horses provided the chief mode of transport, the main vehicles for communication and the most important source of power. Horses were the driving force of the Georgian world. Yet Sabrina steadfastly refused to approach any horse no matter what inducement Day tried—and naturally he tried his damnedest. “Mr. Day told me he could not conquer her dread of a horse,” wrote the Reverend Robinson, “and that no persuasion or bribe could prevail upon her to stroke its neck, though it was held by the bridle.” She would rather suffer molten wax on her arms than stroke a horse. Robinson did not know the origin of Sabrina’s terror, if indeed she knew it herself.

Even harder to explain is the fact that Day felt fully entitled to impose his torments on Sabrina, and those who knew about his actions did nothing to prevent him. The Georgians were not noted for their kindness to animals and children. Many children were forced to work in the mills, scale chimneys, beg on the streets or live by prostitution from the age of ten or less. Yet premeditated, pointless and repeated violence such as Day imposed on Sabrina was rarely condoned. Was Day simply impervious to the pain and terror he inflicted? Or did he just believe he had every right—as a wealthy, upper-class, educated man—to enact whatever cruelty he could dream up in his quest to create the perfect wife?

Although Day would later be praised for his kindness to animals—he refused to break in horses through the usual method and even opposed hunting for a time—he evidently felt no compunction about subjecting a thirteen-year-old girl to repeated physical and psychological abuse. As he would later explain in a letter to Sabrina, “I never thought I had a right to sacrifice another being to my own good or pleasure; but I thought myself sufficiently entitled to make an experiment where, whatever else ensued you would be placed in circumstances infinitely more favourable to happiness than before.” Since he had rescued her from the Foundling Hospital and saved her from a life of hard labor, Day believed he was entitled to do what he pleased. Of course, he felt no need to ask Sabrina for her views. Like Professor Higgins, he presumed she did not have “any feelings that we need bother about.” Yet as Sabrina’s trials by water, sealing wax, pistols and horses proceeded over the summer months his friends in the Lunar Society viewed his project with growing alarm—for Day, if not for Sabrina.

Dates and details of early Lunar Society meetings are sketchy; indeed there would never be a formal constitution or a fixed membership. In the early 1770s, gatherings were usually held in Darwin’s family home in Lichfield or Boulton’s mansion at Soho, near Birmingham. As the prime movers, Boulton and Darwin tended to invite whoever they could reach at short notice to assemble for dinner and scientific debate on the Sunday nearest a full moon.

Quite why Day was invited to these lively, practical, gregarious get-togethers remains baffling. While the other members were all actively involved in some aspect of scientific progress—Darwin and Small testing advances in medicine; Keir manufacturing glass and experimenting with chemicals; Wedgwood improving ceramics; and Boulton collaborating with James Watt to improve steam power—Day took not the slightest interest in such marvels. At one point he would reject an offer from Boulton of some rocks and fossils with the blunt reply that he was far too engrossed in the “study of man” to be bothered with the study of science. While most of the Lunar men were driven by an entrepreneurial spirit to make their names and their fortunes, Day had nothing but disdain for the kind of luxury items that Boulton and Wedgwood were turning out of their factories
to embellish the homes of the rich. At the same time his puritanical outlook, his wearying propensity for long monologues and his intolerance of contradiction were entirely at odds with his friends’warm, bubbling enthusiasm for each other’s company and ideas. Day was not what Samuel Johnson would term “clubbable.” Or as Boulton would delicately put it, he was “rather inclinable a little to the Misanthrope.” Day was the dark, cold, hidden side of the lunar surface, the wobble in its orbit.

Yet while Day’s involvement in the Lunar group would always be sporadic, it would also be enduring. He did share the other members’largely skeptical, sometimes atheistic, view of religion and their radical, occasionally revolutionary, politics. He also shared his money. Day lent significant sums to Small, Keir and Boulton to help finance their business ventures. Just as money smoothed Day’s path into Lichfield so it oiled the wheels of the Lunar circle.