How to Create the Perfect Wife (46 page)

The story of Thomas Day’s quest to create a perfect wife symbolizes an eternal human desire: to craft a supreme being. The quest to find a perfect
other half will always retain its seductive appeal. It is no surprise that storytellers have always been mesmerized by the idea. From Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion carving his ivory girl to Mary Shelley’s tale of Doctor Frankenstein summoning to life a monster, from Shaw’s play about the professor turning a flower girl into a duchess to maverick inventors producing robots and cyborgs, the fantasy of creating a perfect being exudes a powerful allure. For most people, of course, such a notion stays firmly in the realm of fiction.

Day took the quest for fashioning a perfect human being further perhaps than anyone before or since. While most of us might idly imagine meeting or molding a sublime soulmate, Day was convinced he could turn that dream into reality. His methods might nowadays strike us as absurd, sadistic or obscene. Anyone today who attempted to abduct two girls from an orphanage in order to train one to become his future wife would doubtless be branded a pervert and charged as a criminal. Yet at a time when people were locked in debate over the significance of nature over nurture, Day’s project did not seem quite so outlandish or immoral. As a product of his time, his gender and his rank, he possessed the power and money to pursue his quest, and he therefore believed he had every right to subvert another person to meet his ideals. He was, perhaps, more deluded than wicked.

Yet Day’s story also provides a sobering lesson. His attempt to bend Sabrina to suit his fantasy proved a disaster. His efforts to train other women to suit his fads and fancies resulted in various degrees of comedy and farce. And even as he tried endlessly to correct Esther to meet his strictures he was forever disappointed. As Day discovered, striving for perfection is a thankless task. Creating a perfect woman is an unattainable goal. Galatea is, of course, a mythical being.

FINDING MY FOUNDLING

Researching and writing this book has been a delight and a challenge. Finding my foundling proved to be one of the biggest and most delightful of those challenges. I began my search with little hope of success in the voluminous records of the Foundling Hospital kept at London Metropolitan Archives. All I knew from previous books was that Thomas Day was said to have chosen a foundling who was apprenticed to Richard Lovell Edgeworth in the latter part of 1769 and renamed her Sabrina Sidney. I had no idea of her name in the Foundling Hospital or before she arrived. It was entirely possible that the whole story was apocryphal and that Day had never taken Sabrina—or for that matter Lucretia—from the Foundling Hospital at all.

Previous writers describing Day’s story had asserted or repeated that there was no record of a girl being apprenticed by Day in the archives of the Shrewsbury Foundling Hospital. This was true. But I quickly discovered that all orphans from the branch hospitals were apprenticed centrally through the charity’s London headquarters—and of course it was Edgeworth not Day to whom Sabrina had been apprenticed. With trepidation I scoured the charity’s apprenticeship register for 1769. There, to my amazement, it was plainly written that two girls were apprenticed to Richard Lovell Edgeworth on August 17 and September 20, 1769. Their names—and even more important their numbers—were given as Ann Kingston, no. 4579, and Dorcas Car, no. 10,413. I had found my foundlings.

Armed with their numbers—those numbers that were stamped on lead tags tied around their necks—I could now trace their lives from the moment
they entered the Foundling Hospital gates until the moment they left. Almost holding my breath, I found their original admission forms, filled out nearly 250 years ago, giving their date of arrival and original names, in the hospital’s remarkable billet books. Following the paper trail, through the bundles of letters and giant ledgers, the rushed scrawls of hospital inspectors and the unfortunately named Shrewsbury “Waste Book,” I tracked Sabrina’s footsteps as she toddled in the fields around Dorking, trundled in the wagon heading for Shrewsbury, thrived with her second foster family near the town, walked through the doors of the Shrewsbury Foundling Hospital at the age of seven and walked out again with Thomas Day and John Bicknell five years later. That was the easy part.

Following Sabrina through the rest of her life was at times infuriatingly difficult. Since she was never very wealthy, she left few legal documents or financial transactions. Since she was not well connected—except through Day—she cropped up rarely in other people’s correspondence or documents. Because she was female she lived her life under the patronage of men, her movements, actions and views all subsumed under their command. And, of course, Day and his acolytes tried their utmost to erase Sabrina from their records while she and her family tried their best to conceal her origins. Only a few letters in her hand, to her benefactor Charles Burney and lifelong friends the Edgeworth family, have survived. The only portrait, an engraving of a lost oil painting, reputed to depict Sabrina seemed dubious. And so Sabrina disappeared and reappeared, vanishing in the fogs and smoke of the industrial Midlands and reemerging in Lichfield, London and Greenwich.

Yet many of the places where she lived, where she ate, drank, slept and talked, survive. The Shrewsbury Foundling Hospital stands virtually unchanged at the top of the hill overlooking the River Severn. Stowe House still hovers ghostly white beside the banks of Stowe Poole. And the house in Greenwich, where her life ended, still sits in the middle of the stately crescent now renamed Gloucester Circus. Frustrated by these blank walls, the places where she had spent her life, I doubted that the portrait that was supposed to show Sabrina was truly her. It was almost identical to another with a different name. On my last day of research I visited the archives of the National Portrait Gallery and there discovered firm proof
that the portrait of the smiling, self-confident, curly-haired woman was indeed Sabrina.

Finding Sabrina’s final resting place proved nearly as tantalizing as tracking down her beginnings. The records of the General Cemetery Company, which manages Kensal Green Cemetery, are as well kept as those of the Foundling Hospital. Armed with another number, designating her burial place, I arrived at the vast cemetery on an icily cold February morning eager to find her grave. But searching among the broken and sunken gravestones crowded into the corresponding corner of the cemetery I could not find Sabrina’s name anywhere. On the point of giving up, I spotted a stone cross—newer than all the rest—which bore the name Bicknell. It was a memorial to Sabrina’s granddaughter, Jane Grant Bicknell, who had lived until 1905. On either side of the cross were two headstones. On the right I could just make out the name of John Laurens Bicknell. The gravestone on the left therefore had to belong to Sabrina. All the writing had been worn completely smooth, and the headstone was totally blank. I had found her, but she remained as elusive and silent as ever. Walking back to the cemetery gates, I realized that I had lost an earring. I could have turned back to look for it, but it was bitterly cold. And it seemed only right to leave behind one of a pair, a token, for my foundling.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes its existence to the help and generosity of many people and many organizations. In particular I would like to pay tribute to librarians and archivists everywhere, the unsung heroes who safeguard our past, for their unstinting devotion and priceless work at a time when their resources have been and are still under severe threats and pressures.

For permission to use the archives of the Foundling Hospital, which were so crucial to this story, I wish to thank the Coram Foundation. I am indebted to the staff at the London Metropolitan Archives, where the Foundling Hospital records are kept, for their guidance. Permission to quote from the Edgeworth Papers is due to the courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, where I would like to thank James Harte and Berni Metcalfe for their prompt help. I am grateful to Middle Temple Archives for permission to use the records held there and especially to the curator Lesley Whitelaw for her invaluable knowledge and kind hospitality. I wish to thank the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, Lichfield, for permission to use the letters of Anna Seward and particularly curator Joanne Wilson, who went out of her way to make my visits such a pleasure. For permission to quote from Fanny Burney’s notebooks I thank the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. For access to the Burney Family Collection in the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection I wish to thank the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. I would like to thank Lichfield Record Office. for permission to use their archives. For permission to use the Barrington Family archives I wish to thank Essex Record Office. My thanks are due to Birmingham Central Library for permission to quote from the Boulton Papers and Watt Papers in the Soho Archives held there. I am grateful to the National Portrait Gallery for permission to quote from Joseph Wright’s account book, Richard James Lane’s account books and other archive material held there, and especially to assistant curator Alexandra Ault. I am grateful to University College London Special Collections for access to the Pearson Papers. I would like to thank Staffordshire Record Office for access to letters and diaries belonging to the Sneyd family. My thanks are due to the William Salt Library for permission to quote from letters between Thomas Day and Anna Seward and especially to assistant librarian Dominic Farr. For permission to quote from the Darwin papers I wish to thank the Syndics of Cambridge University Library and would like to record my particular thanks to Adam Perkins. I wish to thank Lambeth Archives Department for permission to quote from John Graham’s letters. In addition I want to thank staff at Greenwich Heritage Centre for their help in researching the Burney School and Greenwich history. I am grateful to staff at the John Soane Archives at Sir John Soane’s Museum for help researching John Laurens Bicknell’s connections with John Soane. I would also like to record my thanks to staff at the British Library (especially for the warm and efficient help in the Rare Books and Music reading room), the Wellcome Library, the Foundling Hospital Museum, the Royal Society of Arts, the Society of Genealogists, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Household Cavalry Archive, Islington Local History Centre, Surrey History Centre, Manchester Art Gallery, Derby Museums and Art Gallery, Bath Record Office and Sutton Coldfield Library.

Among the great pleasures in researching this book have been my visits to Lichfield and the generous help of various people based there. I want to thank Alan Baker for taking the time to show me around Stowe House, now owned by the Institute of Leadership and Management. I am grateful to Jenny Arthur and all the staff of Erasmus Darwin House for their help and to Pauline Duval at The Bogey Hole for her kind hospitality. Likewise it was a delight to visit Shrewsbury School, where the former Shrewsbury Foundling Hospital survives intact as the main block, and I am grateful to Mike Morrogh for taking time to show me around.

So many individual people have played a vital role in helping me to research and write this book. I feel privileged to have been welcomed into the Burney Society and will always have fond memories of the society’s conference in Paris in 2010. It is impossible to pay tribute to everyone within the society who has provided me with advice, support and encouragement, but I particularly want to say thank you to Hester Davenport, Lorna Clark, Peter Sabor, Nick Cambridge, Kate Chisholm, Helen Cooper, Catherine Dille, Jacqueline Grainger, Zandra O’Donnell, Elizabeth Burney Parker and Sophie Vasset. Cynthia Comyn, the widow of John Comyn, a descendant of Charles Burney, kindly answered my requests for information. Desmond King-Hele, biographer of Erasmus Darwin, generously gave me his help and in particular pointed me toward Day’s brief engagement to Elizabeth Hall. Peter Rowland, author of the last biography of Thomas Day, was extremely kind in sharing with me new sources of information that had come to light since his book was published as well as directing me toward Henry James’s
Watch and Ward.
Eric Stockdale brought eighteenth-century Middle Temple Hall to life for me and kindly treated me to lunch under the wonderful double hammerbeamed roof as well as answering my queries on legal history. Mick Crumplin gave me his usual prompt and impeccable advice on weaponry. Elizabeth E. Barker helped with trying to date Joseph Wright’s portrait of Day, and Kate Barnard gave me valuable advice on Anna Seward. Rachel Hall and Sophie Kilic were both fantastic aides in French translation and especially in helping me to decipher Fanny Burney’s untidy, eccentric and inaccurate eighteenth-century French. Mike Cudmore gave his unstinting and uncomplaining help as always in sorting out the usual technological issues.

Jacky Worthington was an invaluable help in tracing descendants of Sabrina Bicknell and others, often burning the midnight computer screen to follow a promising lead down the centuries. It was through Jacky that I managed to contact some of Sabrina’s living descendants, including Elizabeth Kiddle and Julia Wells, who helped further with my research and took a keen interest in the story. I am also grateful to Marcus Bicknell, who runs the current Bicknell family tree website, for his aid.

As ever I count myself extremely lucky to benefit from the unerring support, guidance and friendship of my agent, Patrick Walsh. My editor Kirsty Dunseath, at Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the UK, has played an invaluable and inspiring role, as she always does, in helping me to shape, improve and polish this book. Somehow Kirsty seems to know exactly what I meant to do even if I haven’t yet done it. At Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Jennifer Kerslake gave timely and efficient help in picture records. I am extremely grateful too to Lara Heimert, my editor at Basic Books in the United States, for her enthusiasm and commitment to this project, to Katy O’Donnell for her guidance and to Norman MacAfee, for his meticulous and wise editing.