How to Create the Perfect Wife (31 page)

It is probable that the Parkinsons ran a dressmaking shop in or near Lichfield, since Sabrina now renewed her links with friends there including Anna Seward, Erasmus Darwin and the Savilles. Happily returning to familiar territory, she retraced her steps to The Close. At the Bishop’s Palace, she was welcomed back by Anna Seward for teas on the terrace and musical evenings provided by her ever loyal John Saville. According to Seward, Sabrina had matured considerably since she had first arrived in Lichfield. The gauche little orphan who had hidden shyly behind her “protector” at social events four years earlier had turned into a “feminine, elegant, and amiable” young woman who comported herself with grace and could hold her own in conversation. Sabrina was “beautiful and admired” and “made friends wherever she went,” wrote Seward.

The fact that this metamorphosis had been effected largely during her last three years’ attendance at an orthodox girls’ school rather than her eighteen months being coached and tormented by Day did not escape Seward’s notice. “This young woman proved one of many instances that those modes of education, which have been sanctioned by long experience, are seldom abandoned to advantage by ingenious system-mongers,” she remarked. Despite Day’s best intentions, Sabrina had emerged from school as a polished young woman at ease in polite society.

At the other end of The Close, Sabrina revived her visits to the growing Darwin household. Mary Parker, the nanny to eight-year-old Robert, had just given birth to her second daughter by the doctor. Despite their illegitimacy the two little girls were brought up within the house—in defiance of Lichfield gossips—where they were doted on by their father. Around the corner, in the Vicars’ Close, Sabrina renewed her friendship with Elizabeth Saville, who was nearly eighteen. Known as Eliza to her friends, she was still living with her embittered mother but trooped next door for singing lessons with her father.

Keeping Sabrina in the Midlands was both prudent and convenient for Day. He could maintain his supervision over her progress when visiting his Lunar friends, as before, and they could keep him informed of her conduct whenever he was away. James Keir, in particular, performed this function. Now happily married, to Susannah Harvey—“a beauty” in the words of Dr. Small—and living behind his glass factory near Stourbridge, Keir maintained a vigilant watch on Day’s young apprentice. It is likely that Keir handled the payments to the Parkinsons; certainly he managed any awkward questions. At the same time, Small continued his paternalistic interest in Day’s romantic fortunes and continued to recommend suitable candidates for marriage. The fact that Keir and Small were both financially indebted to Day did no harm in ensuring their discretion over his connections with Sabrina.

Working with her needle beside a window during the long summer hours, and by candlelight as the days shortened toward winter, Sabrina learned to craft lavish silk gowns, cotton petticoats and flimsy muslin caps to designs supplied by well-heeled customers. Often the rich silks and printed cottons with which the dressmakers worked, imported from
France and Belgium or sent from mills in the Midlands, cost far more than the fees they could charge for making up the clothes. As an apprentice Sabrina was unpaid for her labors. Yet her working conditions were certainly better than those of many of her fellow foundlings who were even now enduring long hours in overheated, deafening and dangerous mills nearby. In fact, her apprenticeship proved significantly easier than for many young girls in similar trades.

From the first, the Parkinsons treated Sabrina with kindly indulgence. Perhaps out of deference to Sabrina’s well-spoken and wealthy patron, or conceivably out of confusion over the true nature of his relationship with their pretty young apprentice, the couple ensured that her sewing duties were relatively light and frequently excused her from the domestic chores that she was expected to perform. Day would later reprimand the Parkinsons for failing to induce “industry & frugality” in their charge. Indeed they appear to have acted like the fond parents of a favorite daughter, or foster parents doting on an adopted orphan. Since Sabrina was very probably better educated and certainly better connected than they were, this was hardly surprising. It must have been difficult to insist that Sabrina perform menial chores on her knees in the scullery between her social outings to the palace and the doctor’s house. It would have been awkward to force her to labor over dresses for customers with whom Sabrina was on tea-drinking terms. Living in comfort and harmony with the kindly Parkinsons and resuming her close friendships in Lichfield, Sabrina was probably happier than she had been for many years.

All the same she remained in a dubious position. Although she was ostensibly working toward independence as a dressmaker in her own right, she was still financially dependent on Day. And while she now enjoyed the liberty to manage her own social life and friendships, everyone in her social circle knew that she was invisibly connected with her absentee guardian. He still pulled the strings. She remained effectively Day’s property, and he directed her fate just as surely as any master his slave.

Showing no regard for the Lichfield gossips, Day left Sabrina and crossed the Channel in July 1774 for a three-week tour of Holland. Sending letters back to Bicknell and his mother, he revealed no better liking for the Dutch and their lifestyle than he had for the French. The drinking
water was “bad,” the landscape “disagreeable,” the country houses “detestable” and the women, as ever, not to his liking. “The Dutch ladies are, to my taste, not a little disagreeable,” he solemnly informed his mother. “They are so intolerably nasty and gluttonous, stuffing themselves all day with bread and butter and tea, then retiring to discharge their superfluities at the little house, without any decency, or even taking the trouble to shut the door.” There was no chance of finding his flawless female there then. Equally the Dutch women may have wondered why the scowling Englishman was skulking around the “necessary house” when they wanted a little privacy.

To Bicknell, Day wrote a typically high-handed letter insisting that they should retain editorial control of
The Dying Negro
rather than sell the rights to Flexney for a sum that Day hinted was as much as a hundred guineas, a little more than a hundred pounds. If true, this was a colossal sum for a single poem—worth about £13,000 ($20,000) today; Fanny Burney would receive £20 (£2,600 today) for her novel
Evelina
in 1778. Bicknell, who was frequently short of cash, had evidently accused him of being “too scrupulous” about profiting from their literary success. Day replied by describing two men, one a “man of real genius” and the other a “man of inferior talents” who “mistakes his part, and endeavours to sustain a character he was not born to fill.” There was little doubt which of these characters Day believed he was. But for form’s sake he continued: “Among which ever of the two the authors of the Dying Negro may find a place, I cannot now determine: but I own I could not easily reconcile my mind, after having talked of stoicism and J. J. Rousseau, the dignity of human nature and disinteredness in public, to thank any set of persons for presenting, truth, virtue, humanity, and J. J. Rousseau, with an hundred guineas.”

Despite his pomposity, Day was engaged on a rather less noble collaboration with Bicknell in the summer of 1774. While Day was in Holland, Bicknell was putting the finishing touches to another anonymous pamphlet. It seems that Bicknell was the instigator and probably wrote the bulk of the work, but the resulting text contains all the hallmarks of Day. With breathtaking arrogance, they published a satirical attack on plans to provide music lessons at the London Foundling Hospital.

The idea to create a music school within the orphanage was put forward by Dr. Charles Burney, a musician who eked out a living by teaching music to the sons and daughters of wealthy families. Inspired by similar initiatives on the Continent, Burney proposed that he and a friend should be employed to give music lessons at the Foundling Hospital. The foundlings had long been renowned for their stirring singing performances, and Burney believed that some of the most talented singers could be trained to earn a living by their voices. But less than a week after the music school opened on July 28, the governors abruptly closed the venture on the grounds that it did not comply with the charity’s legal remit. Deeply humiliated by this sudden reversal, Dr. Burney was further mortified when a jeering pamphlet appeared the following month.

Published under the pseudonym Joel Collier and dedicated to the governors of the Foundling Hospital,
Musical Travels Through England
was a brazen parody of Dr. Burney’s acclaimed book on the history of music based on his travels throughout Europe,
The Present State of Music in France and Italy,
which had been published three years earlier. In the best Georgian bawdy manner the narrator reveals that he changed his name to Coglioni—Italian for testicles—to pursue a career in music. Traveling through England he meets Dr. Dilettanti, who cuts his meat, eats and has sex to the rhythm of a metronome, and spies on Signor Manselli having sex with two young women when, at the point of climax, an “immediate explosion of the most musical intonation I ever heard, issued from behind.” While the tract poked fun at the emasculation of British values by continental influences—a favorite Day theme—it heaped scorn on the idea of a music school where orphans could be trained to “sing and play
Italian
airs.” Appealing to the Georgian lust for spiteful satire, it sold so well that two new editions would be published over the next twelve months.

After the usual mystery over the identity of the author, it would be many more years before Bicknell was named as the chief writer, but it was almost certainly written in collaboration with Day. With its reprise of the arguments espoused by the pair under their previous guise as “Knife and Fork” in their juvenile poem on politeness and its attack on Day’s pet hatred of music lessons for children, which he believed a frivolous luxury, the pamphlet bore the telltale signs of a joint venture. Yet since Day was
formally still a Foundling Hospital governor, and had furthermore illicitly abducted two foundlings, the work was hypocritical indeed.

Poor Dr. Burney was so humiliated by the attack that he almost gave up writing his latest book on music,
A General History of Music.
According to one acquaintance, he spent £200 buying every copy of the pamphlet he could find—although another source suggested it was actually Bicknell, in remorse, who later attempted to buy and burn every copy. Certainly today they are rare indeed.

By the time Day returned to London for the autumn term at Middle Temple in October 1774, the second edition of
The Dying Negro
, with its fierce assault on Americans fighting for liberty, was selling fast. Although it was still anonymous, there was now no secret as to who the authors were. As the quarrel between Britain and its thirteen colonies grew increasingly fraught, so the question of American independence divided families and friends.

Within the Lunar club, Wedgwood, Keir and Darwin wholeheartedly supported American independence while Boulton sided with the British government, albeit largely for commercial reasons. Still they continued their convivial scientific dinners. The Club of Thirteen, however, was terminally split. David Williams recorded sadly that “a spirit of discord pervading the country affected the little society formed at Dr. Franklins.” One of the main sources of that discord was the controversy sown by Day over slavery. Although Wedgwood and Bentley were among the most vociferous battlers against slavery, they put aside their concerns in order to support the independence cause. Only Day stuck firmly to his principles—on America at least—and refused point-blank to back American independence while Americans still depended on slaves.

Arguing his case with the young American revolutionaries at Middle Temple, Day won a powerful convert to the abolition cause. John Laurens enrolled as a student at Middle Temple in October and moved into lodgings with John Bicknell’s brother, Charles, also a lawyer, in Chancery Lane. The eldest son of a wealthy family from South Carolina, nineteen-year-old Laurens lost no time in joining with his compatriots in demanding independence. Like many of his friends, Laurens owed his comfortable lifestyle to his family’s connections with slavery. His father, Henry Laurens, had sold thousands of Africans in his slave-importing business in
Charlestown and plowed the profits into plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, which were all worked by slaves. But through his developing friendship with John Bicknell and through him with Day, John Laurens began to question not just his family’s but his country’s reliance on the slave trade.

Convinced to take up the abolition standard, Laurens now urged fellow Americans, including his father, that while demanding their liberty, they should also free their slaves. He even persuaded Day to petition his father on the issue. In an eloquent and forceful letter to Henry Laurens, which was later published as a pamphlet, Day insisted that since America had taken up arms against “the nation to which it owes its establishment” so Laurens must admit that “there are such things as right and justice, to which the whole human species have an indefensible claim.” It was plain that these rights did not derive their legitimacy from might, otherwise Laurens’s slaves would one day be justified in forcing him “to labour naked in the sun to the music of whips and chains.” But in case Henry Laurens remained to be convinced, Day declared that slavery was “a crime so monstrous against the human species that all those who practice it deserve to be extirpated from the earth.” He added: “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.” John Laurens would eventually drop his law studies to take up arms with the American troops fighting for liberty, but he would never give up lobbying to free American slaves.