How to Create the Perfect Wife (5 page)

With his plain clothes and unkempt hair at odds with his educated voice and evident wealth, Day attracted a mixture of curiosity and mirth when he knocked on cottage doors asking to interview the ragged inhabitants on their philosophical outlook or strode into village inns intent on interrogating the locals over a lunch of bread and water. But the bounty he left behind generally helped to stifle the laughter. He was like a wandering vagrant who gave out alms instead of begging for them.

Alone on these country expeditions, Day confided his romantic anguish in poems he composed in a large, weather-worn journal—which survives still. Written by the light of a windblown candle in a remote cave or under rain-soaked canvas in a field, his melancholy odes and ballads celebrate the primeval power of untamed nature in the turbulent rivers and stormy seas he saw on his hikes. Almost unerringly his scrawled verses tell tales of pent-up passions and unrequited love—which always end badly.

One poem, which he wrote while sheltering in a dripping cave poised perilously above the Severn River, describes a “hopeless Love” for a “heav’nly Maid” against the backdrop of the “raging Passions” of the torrent rushing through the gorge below. He called it, with a literal poignancy, “Sonnet written in a Cavern of dangerous Access near Bristol.” As he crossed the Severn into Wales, his anguish only increased. Here he devoted twenty-seven verses to the “hopeless Flame” of a tormented love for a woman who was devoted to a “Hated Rival.” The poem climaxes in a violent revenge as the tortured lover swears to “plunge a Dagger in the Heart,/That robs me of my Fair!”

Three of the poems in Day’s camping journal invoke the name of Laura. They were probably in homage to the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, who wrote hundreds of poems on the theme of his unrequited love for an unattainable French woman named
Laure. It was common for eighteenth-century poets to invoke Laura as their muse. Perhaps Thomas was also thinking of the Leonora who had snubbed him at Oxford. According to a friend, Day was “wounded by the caprice” of the mysterious Laura but wrote his poems “before her fickleness became indisputable.”

Day’s poems return repeatedly to her who “alone my constant Breast can fire” and lament the fact that the “lovely Laura” will smile only for someone else. In one of these elegies, even more densely packed with passionate metaphors than the rest, he finally adopts the dark cloak of seducer himself: “This once at least, I clasp thee in my Arms,/The next let Ruin join us in the Grave.” For all his protestations about the irrationality of love, young Thomas was plainly as tortured as any other youth by its vagaries. And as he confided his tangled emotions in verse, Laura attained the status of an imaginary ideal.

During his lonely walks and lonelier nights, Day fleshed out his fantasy of a virginal maid who would meet his exacting specifications. In one poem copied into his water-stained journal in the West Country, he described in detail his perfect woman and the perfect life they would lead together. He sought a “gentle Lady of the West” with “Health’s rosy bloom upon thy cheek” and “Eyes that with artless lustre roll.” This divine maiden would be indifferent to the “eye of Fame” with a “noble mind” not led astray by “false culture.” And most importantly, she would happily live “Sequestered in some secret glade” where she would be “heedless of the praise or blame/Of all mankind, of all but me.” Seeking his flawless soulmate, he declared, was “my only task.”

O gentle Lady of the West,

Whose charms on this sequester’d shore,

With love can fire a stranger’s breast;

A breast that never lov’d before!

O tell me, in what silent vale,

To hail the balmy breath of May,

Thy tresses floating on the gale,

All simply neat thou deign’st to stray!

So far he had been unable to find the woman of his dreams among the educated, sophisticated, urban women of his own rank. But neither had he found her yet among the red-cheeked, rough-mannered peasant women of the countryside. Even though he was still in his late teens he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that his vision of female perfection might exist only in his fevered imagination. So how in the world could he possibly bring his fantasy woman to life? How could he create his perfect wife?

It was now that Day first began to entertain a new and shocking idea. As he wandered from farm to village his eyes strayed from the buxom, suntanned, strong-armed women laboring in the fields to the flat-chested, thin-legged little girls approaching adolescence who worked alongside their parents. He had been looking for a perfect woman, but perhaps what he needed was a perfect girl whom he could train to meet his needs. If the way that women were educated was the chief reason he could not find his ideal partner, then he could simply educate a girl himself to suit the role. As he would explain to John Bicknell, “the Habits of the Mind are like those of the body; at one Period of Life perhaps they may be totally prevented, at another remedied in Part; & there is doubtless another Stage where they become totally inveterate, & incurable.” If only he could teach a girl to absorb his ideas before her mind was prejudiced by other influences then perhaps he could create his perfect woman.

Now his mind turned to the knotty problem of how he might obtain such a girl ripe for grooming. And there were two further difficulties: he needed a trusty collaborator to sort out any troublesome legal problems and a sure method of education to help him attain his goal. As luck would have it, two friends were on hand to provide those vital missing elements.

While Day hiked the hills gloomily moping for a perfect partner, his loyal friend Bicknell was living life to the full. Having studied law at Middle Temple since 1761, Bicknell was well on his way to becoming a barrister. As the second eldest son in one of London’s most successful legal dynasties, he was ideally placed to rise quickly once he qualified. But his long student stint in London’s prime bachelor abode had provided Bicknell with as much knowledge of the ways of the world as the ways of the law. As the customary training for the bar involved at least three years Ianguidly
studying a few books and observing essential rites of passage, there was plenty of time for other pursuits. And since the Inns of Court were at least as decadent as the colleges of Oxford, there was no shortage of opportunities. Far from disdaining the pleasures of the flesh like his friend Day, Bicknell indulged them as much as he could.

Living with his parents in Chancery Lane, Bicknell only had to stroll a few minutes to Fleet Street, then slip through the seventeenth-century gatehouse to enter the legal quarter shared by the Inner and Middle Temples. Originally the base for the Knights Templar, the medieval religious order pledged to protect pilgrims heading for Jerusalem, the area squashed between Fleet Street and the Thames had been appropriated by lawyers in the fourteenth century—and had changed little since then. Like a walled town preserved in Tudor aspic, the huddle of narrow lanes, shady courtyards and teetering brick buildings provided a self-sufficient community for the barristers and students who lived and learned there.

Threading his way down Middle Temple Lane with the Old Post House on his left and the Devil’s Tavern on his right, Bicknell would have joined fellow students, barristers and judges in the imposing Middle Temple Hall for the midday meal. Attending dinner at least three times a term for a minimum of twelve terms—there were four terms a year—was one of the few requirements of a legal training that were strictly enforced. Bicknell duly enjoyed his dinners each term from January 1765. But in between these far from onerous demands he was at liberty to pursue less cerebral interests.

With its proximity to the brothels and bagnios of Covent Garden, it is little wonder that Middle Temple proved such a popular retreat for bachelors. James Boswell, the lawyer, diarist and notorious libertine, thought the Temple area “a most agreeable place.” Whether Bicknell followed Boswell’s example and “picked up a girl in the Strand” and then took sexual liberties with her in an alleyway in return for sixpence or else trod the well-worn path from the Temple to Covent Garden, he certainly adopted similarly lascivious manners judging by later comments.

One female acquaintance would later be shocked to hear of Bicknell’s “bachelor voluptuousness” from one of his contemporaries at Middle Temple. Naturally she assumed that Day, with his horror of female seduction,
was blissfully in the dark about his friend’s proclivities. Bicknell was exactly the kind of predatory male he would ordinarily have challenged to a duel. It seemed that Bicknell tendered no romantic notions about seeking a perfect woman. But he would be more than willing to use his legal expertise to help Day achieve his goal. All Day lacked now was an alternative educational system to put his bold new plan into action.

It was during holidays from Oxford in 1766 that Day met Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Two more incompatible people would be hard to imagine. Although he was only four years older than Day, at twenty-two Edgeworth had already been married three times—in legal terms at least—and was father to the first of many children. But the exuberant and inventive Irishman had no intention of letting family responsibilities diminish his lust for life.

Born in 1744, the second son of an Anglo-Irish family, Edgeworth had been allowed to roam freely around the family’s extensive country estate, often in the company of his favorite sibling, his younger sister Margaret. But after his elder brother died, when Edgeworth was six, his parents suddenly became overprotective of their sole remaining heir. Now the boy was muffled from head to toe on the rare occasions he was permitted to leave the house and dosed daily with preventive medicines. From this point, Edgeworth would write in his marvelously candid memoirs, “my feet never brushed the dew, nor was my head ever exposed to the wind or sun.” This sudden reversal in his previously carefree upbringing would have a deep impact on his subsequent views on education.

Precociously intelligent, Edgeworth read books voraciously but was far more excited by the prospect of inventing practical solutions to everyday problems. From the age of seven, when he watched his mother being attached to an electrical device in an attempt to cure the paralysis she had suffered during his birth, Edgeworth had been fascinated by all forms of machinery. His childhood interest in mechanics would become a lifelong passion. He discovered his other abiding passion—for women—while still at school.

At fifteen, during celebrations for his elder sister’s marriage, Edgeworth playfully pretended to marry the daughter of a local curate using a door
key for a ring. His father, a trained lawyer, was so alarmed that the wedding might be deemed legally binding—in an age when it was not uncommon to wake from a drinking bout to find oneself irrevocably married—that he had the mock marriage formally annulled by the church. Edgeworth was already married and divorced, therefore, when he entered Trinity College, Dublin, at sixteen. Uninspired by academic studies, he frittered away the next six months in dissipation. At that point his despairing father promptly removed him from one scene of iniquity and sent him to an even worse one.

So Edgeworth was packed off, at seventeen, to Oxford University under the protection of a family friend, Paul Elers, who lived in the Oxfordshire village of Black Bourton. A lazy man with an expanding family and escalating debts, Elers gamely warned Edgeworth’s father that he had four grown-up daughters, all “pretty girls” without a dowry to rub between them. Entering Corpus Christi College in 1761, three years before Day, Edgeworth was diverted from the usual temptations of university life by the even more diverting temptations of the four pretty girls in the Elers household. Within two years he was “insensibly entangled so completely” with the eldest daughter, eighteen-year-old Anna Maria, “that I could not find any honourable means of extrication.”

She was pregnant—as perhaps her feckless father had planned. Although his passion had already cooled, Edgeworth felt duty bound to marry the girl. For all his libertine tendencies he was nothing if not honorable. And since they were too young to marry in England without the consent of both sets of parents, the pair eloped to Scotland where they married at the end of 1763. Facing his father’s wrath on his return, Edgeworth was made to go through the ceremony again—effectively his third wedding—with his father’s grudging consent in the church at Black Bourton in February 1764. The couple’s first child, Dick, was born three months later.

With a relatively small allowance, a year later Edgeworth settled his young family in a modest house overlooking the common at Hare Hatch, a hamlet on the main coach road between Reading and Maidenhead, in Berkshire. Already Edgeworth heartily regretted his hasty marriage. His wife was pretty enough—a portrait of Anna Maria shows a dark-haired, slender and graceful woman—even if Edgeworth pronounced her no
beauty. But although she was “prudent, domestic and affectionate,” she did not possess “a cheerful disposition,” he complained. “She lamented about trifles, and the lamenting of a female, with whom we live, does not render home delightful.” One family member would remember Anna Maria as “always crying”—but then she probably had much to cry about, since her new husband took every opportunity to escape their unhappy home.

Leaving Anna Maria miserably holding the baby, Edgeworth directed his inexhaustible energies into his passion for invention. He spent much of his time in his workshop, emerging periodically to test bizarre contraptions on the village common with sometimes disastrous results. At one point an experimental carriage powered by sails escaped its moorings and flew across the green with its young inventor in frantic pursuit. Overtaking his “wheel-boat” just as several stagecoaches appeared on the road, he brought it under control and averted disaster. Undeterred, Edgeworth next produced a giant wheel that could be propelled by a man inside walking within a smaller inner wheel. But before he could add the final touch—a set of brakes—the machine was taken for a joy ride by a local ruffian. Rapidly running out of control, the great wheel was dashed to pieces in a chalk pit only seconds after its driver jumped to safety.