How to Create the Perfect Wife (43 page)

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
  

F
or 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.”

But Seward was not to be cowed. Replying to John Bicknell’s letter she threatened to defend herself publicly by calling “several credible witnesses” who knew “all the circumstances I have stated to be true.” And she added: “Mrs. Bicknel well knows that they are all unvarnished facts. If she has sanctioned this dark, malicious, and lying scroll, the virtues which I believed she possessed, and that which my memoirs have invested her, could not have been genuine.” Exchanging increasingly angry letters, Seward and Bicknell battled for supremacy in a “furious paper war.” But finally forced to accept the truth of Seward’s story, young Bicknell had no choice but to come to terms with his mother’s past.

To Sabrina’s lasting distress and her son’s mortification, the press’s fascination with the story of the nation’s best-loved children’s author and the child he took to train as his wife would never completely subside. Taking a typically high moral tone, reviewers of Darwin’s biography savaged Seward for exposing the innocent victims of Day’s exploits while simultaneously reproducing the titillating details of his life at length. “There is a want of delicacy, and even of decorum, in publishing so much of the private history of the living as appears in this narrative,” observed a critic in the
Annual Review.
Yet the reviewer had to admit that Day’s “domestic history” formed the “most interesting part” of the volume.

If Seward felt the press’s fury, the attack on Day was worse. “With regard to Mr. Day, language is deficient in terms to express his character: that he was either a madman or a fool is more than probable; that he acted
infamously is beyond contradiction,” raged a reviewer in the
Universal Magazine.
A writer for the
Critical Review
chimed in, “In short, the most puerile of mankind could not have formed a more absurd system, or pursued it with greater folly.” And echoing the shock of thousands of parents up and down the country, the
British Critic’
s reviewer declared that the revelations were “very disgraceful to him, and much diminish any previous respect which might have been conceived for the author of
Sandford and Merton
.”

Times had changed: what might have been casually dismissed as eccentric folly a few decades earlier was now viewed as dangerous irregularity that smacked of French radicalism. The absurd misanthrope who had been indulged for his unworldly ways at the end of the eighteenth century was condemned as a shameful brigand at the beginning of the nineteenth. Yet while none of the newspapers identified Sabrina directly—as Seward had done—there was evident sympathy for her plight. “What woman is there who does not feel a natural and proper indignation,” asked a writer in the
Annual Review
, “if she knows that the secret history of her life, her courtship and her marriage, and her distress, has been made the subject of tea-table tittle-tattle?”

Always a highly strung character who was frequently in poor health, John Bicknell would never fully recover from the shock of discovering his mother’s origins. Over the ensuing decades, any mention of Day or his children’s book would reignite the stories of his quest for a perfect wife and prompt questions about the fate of his former pupil. One magazine article, relating “a half true, half false history,” would even suggest that Sabrina was dead, causing John renewed upset and sickness. Sabrina would later confess that her elder son’s ailments kept her
“anxious
&
unhappy”
and had played “greater havock with my constitution than 15 or 20 years labour would have done free from mental suffering.”

As victory at Trafalgar in October 1805 decisively scotched all threat of a French invasion—and Admiral Nelson’s body was brought back to lie in state for three days at Greenwich—the subject of the tea-table tittle-tattle continued to live in relative anonymity. For all the press interest and her son’s neurosis, Sabrina continued quietly to devote herself to the
demands of the Burney School and its pupils. Once at the center of a radical eighteenth-century educational experiment, now Sabrina helped to mold generations of schoolboys into some of the most famous—and infamous—figures of the nineteenth century.