How to Create the Perfect Wife (37 page)

Now Esther blamed all their past quarrels on her own “weakness & timidity” and her failure to guard “my own temper,” which, she said, was seeded in the “wounded Vanity” and “Self Love” of her youth. “As to what passed on Wednesday evening, in the comparison I drew between your Conduct & mine, nothing but the blindest passion could have prompted me to say, what certainly betrayed the most contemptible folly as well as palpable injustice,” she wrote. “For I assure you in the most solemn manner, that I think your behaviour to Sabrina, was that of a man of sense & honour; mine to Mr Lxxx, such as from its indiscretion & inconsistency, would have disgraced the weakest of my sex.” As to her affection for her other suitor, Mr. R., she now realized this had only been “founded upon Gratitude.” But her love for Day, she assured him, was superior to that for either of these previous lovers. “I have always maintained & still continue to assert, that my ideas of you, & feelings for you, have been far beyond what I have experienced before.”

Esther blamed her disappointing behavior on “the errors of my youth,” which she could only excuse by pointing out that she had not been lucky enough to have a father or brother, like Day, “capable of instructing me in the severe duties of female decorum.” And she added: “All that I proposed in leaving you, was to pass the rest of my days in gloomy Solitude, cherishing
the same tender mournful esteem & affection for you which I should do for the memory of a beloved, departed Husband.” Although she admitted that she sometimes felt “anger & resentment” at his “severity,” she assured Day of “my perfect Love & Veneration for you.”

After another argument and separation, a year later, when Esther repaired again to her mother-in-law’s to contemplate her failings, she wrote another letter seeking his forgiveness. She apologized for the “foolish and inadvertent things” she had said in “moments of anger” and fully accepted that her lapse was due once again to her “caprice and unsteadiness.” Promising to try harder in the future, she wrote: “I flatter myself I am already improved in some parts of my character since my connection with you; & therefore, may reasonably hope to make still farther improvements in the regulation of my mind & character.” She added: “If I had before contemplated myself in that faithful mirror, which my dear Love has held up to me, I should have found the task more easily accomplished.” For all her “thousand inconsistencies” she pledged that “in one thing I am uniform; in feeling for you, all that one human Being can feel for another.” Little by little, Day chipped away at Esther’s self-esteem, making minute corrections as he tirelessly strove to perfect his imaginary being. He could never be happy; as an obsessive perfectionist, perfection would always stay tantalizingly out of reach.

If the Days led a hard, spartan life, there was little comfort for the Edgeworths either when they came to stay in early 1780. As the telltale symptoms of consumption weakened Honora’s health, Edgeworth had taken her to Lichfield the previous summer to consult Darwin. The physician gave Edgeworth little hope that she would live much longer. More devoted than ever, Edgeworth was distraught. He had felt the “violence of love” before his marriage, he said, but six years later he felt it even “more strongly.” In a desperate attempt to prove Darwin wrong, he consulted “every physician of eminence in England.” Having given up their Hertfordshire home, the couple came to stay with the Days so that they could visit the best doctors in London. To his dismay Edgeworth found that the capital’s physicians offered no better prognosis while the Days did little to relieve his despair. “They were very kind to Mrs. Edgeworth,” he wrote, “but they did not see her danger in as strong a light as I did.”

Taking their leave of the Days’cold comfortless farm, Edgeworth took a house in Shifnal, Shropshire, to be close enough to Lichfield for regular medical visits. He nursed his wife until the end. In her last letter, Honora wrote: “I have every blessing & I am happy. The conversation of my beloved Husband, when my breath will let me have it, is my greatest delight. He procures me every comfort, & as he always said he thought he should, contrives for me every thing that can ease & assist my weakness.” She ended with an excerpt from a popular poem: “Like a kind Angel whispers peace & smooths the bed of Death.” At the moment she died, in her husband’s arms, on May 1, 1780, Edgeworth heard the sound of something falling on the floor. It was Honora’s wedding ring, which she had gripped on her wasted finger, until her last breath. She was twenty-eight years old.

Edgeworth was devastated. Lying on the bed beside his wife’s corpse all night, he wrote to tell twelve-year-old Maria, at school in Derby, of her stepmother’s death. “She now lies dead beside me, and I know, I am doing, what would give her pleasure if she were capable of feeling any thing, by writing to you at this time to fix her excellent image in your Mind.” The following day he personally prepared his wife’s body for burial as she had requested. And even as she lay in the coffin, Edgeworth could barely tear himself away. He attended the funeral in a trance. “I followed the coffin,” he wrote, “I heard the service.” But when the earth was shoveled into the grave he stumbled away and found himself back at his house with no idea how he had got there.

Clearly deranged by grief, Edgeworth thought he might find solace in conversation with Day. He took his youngest daughters, Anna and Honora, with him to stay at the Days’ farm. But somehow neither Day’s long diatribes nor his bleak house alleviated Edgeworth’s sorrow, for he found that “even divine philosophy was in vain” and confessed: “I merely existed, and I felt indifferent about every thing and every place.” Writing nearly thirty years later, Edgeworth would describe Honora as “The most beloved as a wife, a sister, and a friend, of any person I have ever known.” No woman, for Edgeworth, would ever match his second wife.

Almost as bereft as Edgeworth to hear of her adored Honora’s death, Anna Seward mourned her surrogate sister with a passion that had been
distinctly lacking in real life in recent years. When the Edgeworths had called at the palace a few years after their marriage, in 1776, Seward had collapsed in hysterics and refused to see them for a full hour until prevailed upon by an aunt. Later, when Honora was plainly dying, Edgeworth brought a portrait of her he had commissioned to show Seward. But Seward had recoiled in horror at what she regarded as Edgeworth’s “vanity” in possessing “the original.” She told a friend that had the picture not been such a poor likeness she would have obtained a copy for “when she is no more.” In truth, Honora had been dead to Seward ever since she had married Edgeworth; no likeness painted for Edgeworth could ever approach the idea of Honora in her distorted memory.

After Honora’s death almost every letter Seward wrote would include a reference to “my lost Honora.” The phantom of her idealized woman—the “loveliest of the maids” with her “peerless face” who possessed “every excellence, that e’r combined / To breathe perfection on the female mind”—would haunt all her poems. Determined to wreak revenge on her perceived rival, Seward accused Edgeworth of neglecting and mistreating his wife—a travesty of the truth—in both private and public. In her
Monody on Major André,
published the year after Honora’s death, she callously and erroneously depicted the dead soldier as Honora’s true love. Writing to a friend even ten years later she would describe Edgeworth as “the specious, the false, the cruel, the murderous Edgeworth, who cankered first and then crushed to Earth, the finest of all human flowers.”

While Edgeworth would mourn Honora all his life, he knew that—for the sake of his six children at least—he could not remain alone. Returning to Lichfield he resolved to carry out Honora’s dying wish: to marry her sister Elizabeth. Edgeworth joined Elizabeth Sneyd on a seaside expedition with her siblings to Scarborough, where he found that the bracing air and bracing company gradually restored his spirits. Elizabeth had previously described Edgeworth as “the last man of her acquaintance” she would have considered as a husband, and Edgeworth believed Elizabeth was “as little suited to me.” But by the time they returned from the seaside they were both determined to marry.

Major Sneyd was aghast at the news and blankly refused his approval. The gossiping neighbors of Lichfield were horrified. Not only was it
widely considered immoral to marry a brother-in-law, but some critics believed such a marriage was actually illegal. Edgeworth wrote to Boulton, who had married his sister-in-law after his first wife’s death, for advice; Boulton assured him, if necessary, they would brave hell together. Then Elizabeth took matters into her own hands. She fled her father’s house on October 24 and took refuge with friends in Cheshire. Her father would never forgive her; to lose one daughter to the irrepressible Edgeworth was bad luck, to lose a second was unspeakable. Barely able to hold a pen in anger he wrote in his diary: “To my inexpressible concern my Daugr. Elizabeth left me & went off with her Bror. in Law.” He promptly changed his will to disinherit Elizabeth and bind all his children never to speak to Edgeworth again.

When Edgeworth’s sister Margaret expressed similar shock at his marriage plans, Edgeworth wrote in an uncharacteristic fury “perhaps I shall send all my little children to you for I cannot bear their present orphan state.” On the point of getting married in Staffordshire, the couple were left standing at the altar when the vicar got cold feet and canceled their wedding. Undeterred, Elizabeth and Edgeworth headed for London where they were finally married, on Christmas Day 1780, at St. Andrew’s Church, Holborn, with Day as one of the witnesses. Elizabeth could never replace her sister in Edgeworth’s eyes, but their marriage would prove happy and successful, producing a further nine children.

Trips to London, for weddings or otherwise, were no rarity for Day despite his supposed retirement from society. When he was not engaged in the task of improving his wife in their Essex home, Day was far from reclusive. Leaving Esther alone to ponder her faults, Day devoted as much time and energy to his social, political and literary interests as ever. He had finally been called to the bar in 1779, after one of the longest legal trainings on record, although he would never practice law. Renting new chambers in Furnival Inn, near Chancery Lane, as a convenient London refuge, he roved the country giving lectures on human rights and liberty while Esther stayed at home, effectively a captive to Day’s authoritarian regime.

Having made a name for himself with his defiant stands on slavery and American independence, Day became a leading figure in the reform movement
that was launched in 1780 to campaign for wider electoral suffrage, annual elections and reduced powers for the Crown. Day gave rousing speeches at public meetings in Cambridge and Chelmsford calling for a right to vote for all working men—though not, of course, for women—and he was even urged to stand for parliament. Although he refused to be drawn into the murky world of parliamentary politics he soon found himself further embroiled in the American war.

Ever since Day had pledged support for American independence, he had remained true to the cause. So when Henry Laurens, the slave owner who had become president of the American Congress in 1777, was captured at sea by British forces and charged with treason at the end of 1780, Day knew where his loyalties lay. Laurens was incarcerated in the Tower of London, but on his release, fifteen months later, following Britain’s defeat at Yorktown, he immediately sought out Day on his Essex farm. They became firm friends, and Day used his parliamentary contacts to secure Laurens safe conduct to France in order to take part in the peace negotiations.

Laurens had just arrived in Paris when news came through that his son John had been killed in an assault on British forces. He asked Day to write an epitaph. And as the peace talks drew to a climax at the end of 1782, Laurens sent Day a complete transcript of the draft treaty still under secret discussion with British negotiators. Cautioning Day to “keep a proper reserve” on the details, Laurens pricked out the proposed new boundaries of the “United States” on a map and added: “We are at the threshold of Peace.” When Laurens read almost identical details published in the
Morning Herald
in January 1783, he could not help harboring suspicions. It was, however, probably not Day who leaked the American peace treaty—although he had certainly read the entire contents of the draft agreement to Esther—and he earnestly assured Laurens that he had “shewn no one else.” For all his double standards, Day made an unlikely double agent. With peace secured and independence inevitable—the Treaty of Paris would be signed in September 1783—Day applauded his American friends’ climactic steps toward independence in the true spirit of Rousseau’s ideals of liberty and equality.

Attempting to create a miniature version of Rousseau’s utopian ideal in his little corner of England, Day ministered to the needs of the tenants
and workers on his Essex farm. When he bought a new estate, Anningsley Park near Chertsey in Surrey, where he and Esther moved in 1782, he created a prototype welfare system that provided work, education, religious instruction and medical care for all the folk in the neighborhood. Together the Days distributed blankets, food and medicine, held Sunday school in their home for local children and invited the sick into their kitchen to share meals.

Yet Day found no pleasure in his philanthropy and begrudged every penny. Although he was still in his thirties, he was already a grumpy old man. “I have never expected any thing romantic from my fellow creatures, and have long confined myself to the lowest returns of good behaviour, or the commonest attentions of civility,” he grumbled to Edgeworth. “Yet daily experience shews, that even this is too much to be expected from those, who make the greatest professions, and have most experienced your friendship.”

Although it was a larger and more comfortable house than the Days’ former retreat, Anningsley Park looked if anything more forbidding. The two-story house lay sunk in a hollow encircled by dense woods and bounded by acres of barren heath. One visitor described walking toward the house through silent trees so thick that scarcely any sunlight penetrated. When Maria Edgeworth came to stay, in holidays from her new boarding school in London, she was struck by “Mr. Day’s austere simplicity of life” and the “icy strength of his system.” With a “stern voice” mixed with “something of pity” Day made her drink a daily tumbler of tar water—a popular medicine of the time—in a misguided effort to treat an eye infection. Elizabeth Warburton-Lytton, whose father had made her roll in snow as part of her toughening regime, later described her dread when she arrived at Anningsley Park late one night to see “a tall man, with a grave and precise face, much marked with the habits of authority and the ravages of small-pox.” While Day made her translate long tracts of Latin, she was consoled by “cakes and caresses” from Esther.