How to Create the Perfect Wife (29 page)

The Burney School
adjoined Charles Burney’s house in Greenwich.

Sabrina and her sons.
The only known portrait of Sabrina Bicknell, this engraving shows her at 75 with her copper curls as buoyant as ever.

Her younger son, Henry Edgeworth Bicknell, was a happy-go-lucky, high-flying lawyer who lived to 91

while her elder son, John Laurens Bicknell, was a status-conscious worrier who died at 59.

EIGHT

SABRINA

  
London, July 1773
  

T
he mystery over the author of the impassioned poem against slavery had all literary London guessing. Published as an anonymous pamphlet at the end of June 1773,
The Dying Negro
related the true story of a slave who had escaped the previous month from the London house of his master, a certain Captain Ordington, and been baptized in order to marry a fellow servant, an English maid, with whom he had fallen in love. Marriage to an Englishwoman would automatically have made the African a free man. But before the couple had time to say their vows, the slave was seized on the London streets and taken on board the captain’s ship moored in the Thames and bound for the West Indies. Desperate to avoid being sent back to a life of bondage, the slave shot himself in the head with a pistol.

Although the story had merited only a single paragraph buried in the news columns at the end of May, which did not even record the couple’s names, the poem, which described the slave’s ordeal and tragic fate, became an instant best seller and drew widespread attention to the issue of slavery. Both eloquent and powerful, the poem was written in the form of the slave’s last letter to his lover before he committed suicide. By July Thomas Day was privately letting it be known that he was the chief creator of the nineteen-page polemic. In truth it was a joint production between Day
and his old schoolfriend John Bicknell. The literary duo “Knife and Fork” was back in action.

Having settled in London earlier in 1773, Day had resumed his desultory study of law at Middle Temple while devoting his plentiful leisure hours to debating politics in the local taverns and coffeehouses with Bicknell and other radical young lawyers. Now twenty-seven and a well-established barrister, Bicknell had just become a commissioner of bankrupts. Appointed by the Lord Chancellor, the bankruptcy commissioners were notorious for charging lucrative fees and expenses; sometimes their charges were so exorbitant that they left nothing for the creditors, thereby ensuring a constant supply of new bankrupts. With this steady source of income, Bicknell had exchanged his previous poky chambers in Garden Court, close to the noxious kitchens of Middle Temple Hall, for more salubrious premises in New Court within earshot of the tinkling notes of the Temple fountain. But since Bicknell preferred to spend his time gambling for high stakes at cards to scrutinizing his law briefs, he was almost as likely to be in debt as his hapless clients. Reunited with his old literary collaborator, Bicknell introduced Day to fellow firebrands including many of the Inn’s American students.

Middle Temple had been a magnet for settlers from the American colonies wanting to make their name in the legal profession since the 1600s. Over the ensuing centuries, those Middle Templars who returned to the colonies with the foundations of English law etched deeply in their hearts had assumed prominent roles in American public life, and they in turn sent their sons to study law at Middle Temple. The Inn’s popularity with the colonists peaked in the eighteenth century when as many as 150 Americans were admitted. So when fury erupted in the colonies at Britain’s imposition of direct taxes in 1765, those Americans who had imbibed the principles of citizens’rights as young students at Middle Temple were among the most vociferous opponents. It was a Middle Templar, John Dickinson, who coined the rallying cry “No taxation without representation.” As resentment against British authority simmered to the boiling point in the early 1770s, so Middle Temple had become a bubbling cauldron of angry young Americans whipping up support for greater independence. Mingling with these campaigners for liberty and equality
over dinner at Middle Temple Hall, Bicknell and Day found common cause. The fact that many of these agitators came from families who relied on slavery for their wealth had not escaped their notice.

When Day and Bicknell read the short news article in the
Morning Chronicle
at the end of May describing the slave’s last desperate act, they were appalled. It was Bicknell who suggested they should write a poem to publicize the scandal, and he led the way by drafting the first eight lines. Working by candlelight, most probably in one of the drinking haunts near the Temple, they passed the quill from one to the other to compose succeeding lines. With its graphic depiction of the man’s abduction from Africa and his brutal treatment in the sugar plantations of the West Indies, the poem evoked Rousseau’s idealization of “natural man” and the popular sentimental image of the “noble savage” while also echoing Rousseau’s rallying calls for social equality and liberty. By the time they laid down the quill, as the poem reached its climax with the narrator’s dying cry of “remember me!” Bicknell and Day could be proud of their shocking and moving condemnation of slavery.

Rumors immediately began circulating that attributed the verses to Day—although Bicknell had written almost half of the poem. While Day made no public claims to authorship, he did little in private to contradict assumptions—or to share credit with Bicknell. In July Anna Seward could not resist informing a friend: “Pray have you read the dying Negro, which I know is chiefly Mr Day’s, tho’he avoids owning himself the Author.” Although the next two editions, in 1774 and 1775, would remain anonymous—it would be 1787 before the two authors were finally named on the title page—the poem would be popularly acclaimed as Day’s. When the writers’ individual contributions were later revealed, even Edgeworth was surprised that nearly half of the poem had originated from Bicknell’s pen.

As one of the first literary contributions to the fledgling antislavery movement and the first major poem to attack slavery,
The Dying Negro
was timely and influential. Already the British justice system and popular opinion were beginning to turn against the slave trade. A vociferous campaign had been launched in the 1760s by Granville Sharp, a government clerk who published the first anti-slavery tract in 1767. Sharp went on to
champion the cause of an escaped slave, James Somerset, who won his freedom in a landmark court case in 1772 when Lord Mansfield ruled that no slave on British soil could be forcibly returned to his master or deported. Although the ruling was widely regarded at the time as a complete ban on slavery in Britain, in fact it only meant that enslavement could not be enforced by law; it would be 1833 before the Abolition Act finally made the slave trade illegal.

In
The Dying Negro,
Day and Bicknell used their legal skills to expose the limitations of the Mansfield ruling. More important they drew on popular notions of sensibility to evoke sympathy for the enslaved African. By narrating the poem in the African’s dignified voice and using his English lover to channel empathy for his story of life on the plantations—“The trick’ling drops of liquid chrystal stole / Down thy fair cheek, and mark’d thy pitying soul”—the two writers made an emotional case against slavery. In short, they made the political personal. As a critic in the
Monthly Review
remarked, when praising the poem’s “author” in July: “He expresses the highest sense of human liberty and rigorously asserts the natural and universal rights of mankind.” The poem would inspire many more writers to use the power of verse in the campaign to end the slave trade.

Day’s part in writing
The Dying Negro
helped to launch him on a successful literary and political career. The kudos he won through his laudable contribution to the antislavery movement established his reputation for progressive and visionary ideals on the world stage. Yet as they applauded the forceful arguments against slavery and wept with the tragic hero of
The Dying Negro,
few readers would have suspected that its chief author secretly maintained a teenage girl who was completely subordinate to his commands and whims.

Obediently applying herself to her studies at the Sutton Coldfield boarding school, Sabrina heard from Day infrequently and saw him even less. For two years, she had been isolated from the friends she had made in Lichfield; she had no contact with the outside world except through Day. Banished with no word of explanation, she had been told only to work at her lessons in readiness for an apprenticeship. Since she continued to believe
Day’s story that she was apprenticed to him—even though she was legally still bound to Edgeworth—she had little choice but to comply with his strictures. Moreover, the stern letters that Day sent appraising her academic progress, his payments for her school fees and the few occasions when he deigned to visit kept Sabrina in thrall. She was living in relative comfort, with adequate food, shelter and clothing, so her situation plainly did not equal enslavement, but the chains existed nonetheless.