How to Create the Perfect Wife (36 page)

Arriving in Bath in June, Day took lodgings in Kingston Buildings, a few minutes’ stroll from the Roman baths and the Royal Parade. He must have looked an incongruous figure in his plain clothes and usual wild hair as he plunged into the pools among the belles and beaux of elegant society and swigged the water in the fashionable Pump Room. Day would later tell his old chum Bicknell that he had consulted “half the physicians and surgeons in London” and even tried electrical therapy for three months without the least benefit to the aches and pains in his legs, yet the spa waters at Bath had brought him “very great medicinal virtues.”

The hot waters certainly revived his spirits. For it was in Bath, in St. James’s Church, on August 7, 1778, that Thomas Day finally married Esther Milnes. He was thirty and she twenty-five. The search to which he had devoted almost half his life was at last over. Day had married his perfect wife, or so he hoped.

The sound of champagne corks popping must have reverberated through the houses of all their long-suffering friends and acquaintances. Thomas Bentley wrote jubilantly to tell Wedgwood the happy news. Wedgwood replied: “I hope he will contrive to be happy & make his lady so. They are good people & I hope will not sacrifice real solid happiness to whim & caprice.” When Boulton heard the news, he generously offered Day his mansion, Soho House, as a honeymoon retreat while he was away in Cornwall drumming up business for his and Watt’s steam engine.

A month later, Keir, who was valiantly trying to sort out Boulton’s chaotic business, sent a jaunty note to Boulton in Cornwall reporting that Day and Esther, with her cousin, Miss Walker, had arrived at Soho House “& strut about the Gardens as if all Soho belongs to them.” Visiting friends in Lichfield on their honeymoon tour, the Days called at the palace
for tea with Anna Seward. She pronounced Esther “extremely engaging” although Day was “just what he us’d to be,” Seward told a friend, without needing further explanation. She added: “Of the degree of his attachment to her I cou’d form no judgment, but never did I see a Woman, whose ev’ry word & look bore greater testimony of infinite tenderness, mix’d with no small degree of awe.” While friends certainly celebrated Day’s marriage, Sabrina’s reaction to the news is unknown. There is no record of when or how or even if Day informed her of his marriage.

All their friends at least were in no doubt that Day and Esther made a peerless match. In Keir’s words, “the tastes of two persons could not be more in unison than theirs.” Edgeworth thought the couple “peculiarly suited.” And Esther’s nephew, Thomas Lowndes, would later talk of the “extraordinary similarity in their taste, disposition, and understanding” and “their hearts and minds being so extraordinarily in unison.”

Day had finally found his perfect wife in the most unexpected of guises—in a conventionally educated and independently wealthy woman who possessed all the means, manners and accomplishments of high-ranking Georgian society. Esther had been born into privilege, brought up amid the dissipation and luxury of urban life and educated at one of the top girls’ schools to acquire the standard attributes of a debutante. By nature and by nurture she amounted to everything that Day had despised. Yet everyone could see that Esther was Day’s consummate woman. In intellect, interests and ideas they were ideally suited; prim, philanthropic and passionate about poetry, Esther was a mirror image of her husband. It was the perfect marriage of hearts and minds, and they should have been perfectly happy. There was only one dissenter who believed that Esther needed any change—and that was Thomas Day. In his view, Esther would require continual checks and corrections in order to fine-tune her character and conduct to approach his unattainable ideal. Her marriage would be one long program of improvement.

By the beginning of November the honeymoon was well and truly over. Leaving behind the sumptuous furnishings and delightful pleasure gardens of Soho, Day took Esther to Hampstead, at the time a village one hour’s coach ride north of London, where he had rented a small furnished house.
Here he began the arduous process of breaking Esther in for her future life of deprivation. Or as Edgeworth put it, “by living in inconvenient lodgings, where he was not known, and consequently not visited by any body except his chosen few, he should accustom his bride to those modes of life, which he conceived to be essential to his happiness.”

The Edgeworths, who had settled in nearby Hertfordshire, came to visit the newlyweds in the midst of winter. They were astonished to find the diminutive Mrs. Day, who had always had a reputation for delicate health, trudging through thick snow on Hampstead Heath at her husband’s side wrapped in a cloak and wearing thick shoes. The hardening exercises had begun. But even more astonishing to the love-struck Edgeworths was Esther’s complete submission to her husband.

In conversation, Esther could hold forth on any subject with equal knowledge and articulacy as Day possessed, Edgeworth noted, and by calm reasoning she frequently won listeners over to her view while Day alienated people with his long, dogmatic speeches. She was “really mistress of the English language, and she spoke with great eloquence,” he said. Yet although the couple conversed and argued constantly, Esther always ultimately deferred to Day. “I never saw any woman so entirely intent upon accommodating herself to the sentiments, and wishes, and will of her husband,” a dumbfounded Edgeworth wrote. In every situation, Esther always showed the “most complete matrimonial obedience.”

Eager to revive their days of youthful companionship, Edgeworth tried to persuade Day to make his home near his own house so that they could get together often. But Day was implacably opposed to living anywhere near his friends. According to Edgeworth this was in order to protect Esther from coming into contact with “any opinions contrary to his system of connubial happiness,” though it may also have been to protect her from coming into contact with Edgeworth; after all, his charming friend had already stolen one former lover.

Steering clear of Hertfordshire, then, the Days stayed in Hampstead through the bitter winter. Day was busy viewing houses and buying furniture in January, he told Darwin’s son Erasmus Junior in January 1779. In March he took delivery of a silver coffeepot and steak dish he had ordered from Boulton; there would be a few comforts at least. In the spring
Day found the ideal home. It was a small, drafty, dilapidated house on a rough piece of land near the village of Stapleford Abbotts in Essex. “The house was indifferent and the land worse,” wrote Edgeworth, who was used to the boggy landscape of County Longford.

Reached at the end of a long drive, the redbrick house was shielded from view until the last minute by a dip in the lane and thick trees. It contained only one decent room and “was ill adapted” to the needs of a family, according to Edgeworth. Although it was only five miles from the nearest town of Ongar and less than twenty miles from London, the hidden house was ideal for Day’s purposes. While Day was within easy reach of the capital so that he could continue his pursuits as he wished, he could rest assured that Esther was sufficiently removed from her family and friends in Yorkshire and secluded from inquisitive neighbours to protect her from any corrupting ideas. Sequestered in this “secret glade,” Day embarked on the puritanical life he had so long envisaged with his chosen helpmeet at his side.

Dispensing alms, food and medicine among the poor in the vicinity, the couple led a life with scarcely more comforts than those they sought to relieve. Day employed local laborers to dig his poor soil and continued to pay them during the winter when most farmers laid off their workers. One laborer would later remember that Day helped him financially and that Mrs. Day sent wine to his wife when she was in labor. In his efforts to extend the house and improve the land, Day studied architectural and agricultural manuals. He found one book on architecture at a market stall and determined that he would attempt the building work himself. But he soon tired of this manual labor because it disrupted his long conversations with Esther on their daily walks, so he employed stonemasons and carpenters to complete the work.

Not long afterward, Edgeworth was paying his friend a visit when a mason interrupted to ask Day where he wanted a window placed in the first floor extension. Engrossed in a book, Day curtly told the mason to build the walls first and cut out the windows later. Mrs. Day’s dressing room would always be windowless; she would have to put on her long petticoats and plain gowns by candlelight. But that was the least of her hardships.

Since music was banned from the house, Esther no longer practiced the harpsichord. Since Day believed that women should not be allowed to write, Esther no longer wrote poetry. And since all other pleasures and luxuries were banished, she was permitted no carriage or any other means to escape her solitude and no maid to help with personal chores. Day proudly boasted to Bicknell that he drank “nothing but water” and ate “scarcely any meat,” and there is no doubt that Esther had to follow the same regime. At the same time, Day insisted on taking daily exercise in all weathers so that he rode across the countryside for two or three hours every day and escorted Esther on long walks in rain, sleet or snow. “I know no medicine which is worth a farthing,” he told Bicknell, “but spare living and much riding produces the great and most certain effects.”

It was probably an exaggeration when Anna Seward later suggested that Esther’s life was entirely devoid of comforts or friends. There were certainly one or two servants: Esther’s relative Mrs. Walker served as the couple’s housekeeper, and a laborer, George Bristow, stayed with the family for several years. There were also visitors. Esther’s nephews, Thomas and Milnes, who were now in their teens, sometimes came to stay, and an old school friend visited once or twice. But Seward was probably correct when she stated that Esther “often wept” as Day made frequent tests on her temper and her loyalty. And it was certainly no exaggeration when Seward said: “No wife, bound in the strictest fetters, as to the incapacity of claiming separate maintenance, ever made more absolute sacrifices to the most imperious husband.” At a time when married women, even in the highest ranks of the aristocracy, had little if any independent income, Esther was virtually unique in maintaining full control of her sizable fortune; but in submitting her will entirely to her husband’s command she made herself as dependent as the poorest waif.

Yet the Days were devoted. When Day described Esther as “the dearest object to me, which this world affords” he was plainly speaking the truth. When Esther told Day that “my whole soul” is “wrapped up in you” she spoke with sincerity. Day had found his perfect soulmate, his Sophie, the innocent, docile virgin willing to share his spartan life. They were living the Rousseau dream—and it should have been paradise. But such a romantic idyll could easily turn into a nightmare, as Rousseau himself belatedly suggested.

When Rousseau died in July 1778, just a few weeks before Day and Esther married, several unfinished works were found among his papers. There was an addition to his racy 1761 novel
Julie, or The New Héloïse.
There were the shocking
Confessions,
detailing Rousseau’s juvenile sexual exploits and subjugation to women, which would appall even his most avid supporters when published, the first half in 1782 and the second in 1789. And there was a sequel to
Émile.
When it was later published in English, under the title
Emilius and Sophia; or, The Solitaries,
the book’s editor felt the need to add an apology for its “repugnance.” Thousands of admiring readers of
Émile
had rejoiced at the moment when Émile had married Sophie and anticipated their marital happiness. Now they were horrified to read the fate of the perfect couple in the sequel that Rousseau had been working on when he died.

Perhaps as a correction to all those parents and other readers who had taken his ideas so literally, or perhaps as a cautionary tale born of his own romantic disappointment, Rousseau had painted a hellish picture of Émile and Sophie’s perfect marriage foundering on the rocks. After one of their two children dies, the couple grow bored and scornful of each other. Sophie takes a lover and becomes pregnant with his child, then Émile flees in disgust and descends into a demented despair. The story peters out as Émile wanders the world and is sold into slavery.

For Thomas and Esther marital bliss would prove almost as elusive. Their wedded life was blighted by stormy rows and bitter recriminations as Day repeatedly found fault with Esther’s conduct, accused her of disloyalty and chided her about her treatment of previous suitors, while she protested at his coldness and bridled at his severity. There would be no marital infidelity or children born out of wedlock (or in wedlock, for that matter), but the Days’ married life would be nearly as stormy as that of their idols. On at least two occasions, and possibly many more, their arguments were so fierce that Esther walked out, and she even contemplated separating from Day forever.

One of these quarrels, four years into their marriage, was prompted by Day accusing Esther of fickleness—his pet hate in women, of course—toward her former fiancé Mr. Lees and another past suitor, Mr. R. It was no excuse that these supposed indiscretions had occurred long before Esther knew Day or that but for her ‘“fickleness” she would never have been
able to marry him. Esther responded, with justification, by criticizing Day’s treatment of Sabrina as equally fickle. At that Day erupted in fury, and Esther left him with the threat that she would stay away permanently. But only a few days after leaving, when she was probably staying at his mother’s house in Berkshire—for she had nowhere else to go—Esther wrote a poignant eight-page letter begging his forgiveness and insisting that the faults were entirely on her side.

“I have not for a long time, experienced such a dejection of spirits, as I have done since I parted from my dearest Love,” she wrote. “How melancholy is the condition of human things when two people so formed in many respects to contribute to each others happiness, so often inflict mutual uneasiness. In the moments of calm deliberate reflection, when I contemplate my own conduct, with an unprejudiced eye, I feel, & now acknowledge, with conscious shame, that I have too great a share in producing our unhappy dissensions.”