Book #106: How to Create the Perfect Wife

Book #106: How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and his Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate by Wendy Moore

August 12, 2014

This book popped up as a “new release” on my library’s ebook site, and I was instantly fascinated by the title. Until I read the description, I imagined a farce involving a mad scientist of some sort in old timey England. Well, this is actually a nonfiction text, essentially a biography of Thomas Day and Sabrina Bicknell (aka…well, lots of other names).

I thought that I recognized the name Thomas Day, but then I thought maybe I was just mixing up Thomas Hardy and Charlie Day. It seems like it could be a pretty common name, anyway. Then, when the book started talking about Day’s theories on education, and his influences (especially Jean-Jacque Rousseau), I began to wonder about a text that I’d read for one of my graduate courses. The text  Act Your Age: A Cultural Consturction of Adolescence by Nancy Lesko gives a history on education, with a focus on how society has created the state of adolescence that many young people stifle under. I thought maybe I had read about Day in this text, but much of the research that she sites goes back to after his time. However, as one of the first children’s authors  ever, and writing stories for children that imposed certain morals and values (another theme in Lesko’s text), his influence is felt.

See, Thomas Day wasn’t a bad guy. Moore doesn’t try to show him that way. She does a great job of putting the whole situation into context, showing how Day is a product of his time and his environment. He came from wealth and privilege, and was able to indulge in years of study, and became known to his friends and admirers as a philosopher. He was socially awkward and didn’t give much care to his appearance; he sounded like a pompous douche to me, though Moore doesn’t go so far in her descriptions. The worst thing about him was that he hated to be wrong, refused to be wrong, in fact. And while he had very lofty ideals, he was, in fact, a hypocrite, as Moore proves.

So Day is best known in history as an abolitionist, a philanthropist, and a poet. Those are all good things, right? Yet while he helped the poor and condemned slavery, he in fact had his very own “slave” (to a certain extent). Sabrina (a name that Day gave the girl himself) was chosen by Day from an orphanage to be trained up as his “perfect” wife. There’s another girl, whom he calls Lucretia, involved at one point, but he decides to ditch her and focus his efforts on Sabrina exclusively. When the girl was 13, she lived alone with Day. This was unheard of at the time, and would definitely still be considered creepy today, but what’s weird (as Moore points out) is that none of the people who knew what Day was attempting with the girl tried to put a stop to it. What he was doing was highly illegal for a number of reasons, but being wealthy and educated, he got away with it.

He educates Sabrina in a traditional sense, with reading and writing and math and all that stuff, but he also wants to build up the traits in her that he thinks an ideal wife (for him, at least) should possess. He dictates that she dress plainly, and even that she scorn fashion. He expects her to be submissive to him. And he also wants her to be strong-hearted…so much so that he basically tortures her. The hot wax (dropped onto the girl’s bare arms and back, which is sadistic to say the least), and shooting blanks at her skirts with a loud pistol were certainly the worst physical punishments that he put her through, but he was cruel to her in other ways as well.

Day felt all along that he could treat the girl however he wanted to because, no matter what, he’d provide her with a better station in life than she, as an “illegitimate” orphan, would have otherwise had. When he decides that she doesn’t suit the bill, he packs her off to boarding school, but continues to have control over her life, though he rarely writes to her or comes to see her. That’s probably the worst of it, in my opinion, how he left her isolated from people she’d come to know, and how he hardly cared for her at all. He gave her what he considered one last chance to pass his tests, years later, but he made an excuse not to marry her and packed her off again, because he’d fallen in love with someone else.

Sure, Day provided Sabrina with connections that would later help her through her troubles. Because of him, she met her husband, the man who had originally selected her as the girl for Day’s experiment (so, so crazy!). Day ran with some important people at times: Benjamin Franklin was someone he would have intellectual discourse with; Anna Seward was an intimate friend at one time, but later despised him because of the whole Sabrina situation; Charles Darwin’s grandfather was a close friend. Jean-Jacque Rousseau himself didn’t seem to have much love for Day, but then he was a pretty awful guy himself. Most of these people, at one time or another, respected Day, but came to be alienated by his sanctimoniousness and his propensity for long-winded monologues. Essentially, he wanted a wife who would listen to him blather on while they lived in some isolated hideaway, and would agree with him always and obey him, but would be smart enough to at least understand what he’s talking about. Urg, this guy is such a dick!

There are some interesting-sounding texts mentioned in this book that I would maybe read myself. It’s clear that Moore knew her shit, that she did the appropriate research. It’s incredible how much of the story she’s able to piece together from all of the correspondence that she found (and she’d probably be dependent on the letters of Day’s most famous acquaintances), and from speculation that she can back up with evidence. Never on any huge points, but like she is able to speculate that Sabrina had been a certain child’s godmother based on something that the mother had mentioned about the baptism and Sabrina’s impending arrival.

I couldn’t help but compare this book to The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë. Tully was making wild and scandalous claims about the well-known Brontë family with scant evidence (much of the “evidence” presented in the book was fictionalized!), and heavy speculation…lots and lots of assumptions. And Tully provided maybe a short list of references at the end of the book. With this work, Moore cited pages…and pages…and pages…of notes, citations, etc. Again, she knew her shit, and that was clear in the style of the text, as she included a myriad of well-placed quotes from the people mentioned on the subject of Day and Sabrina, among other related topics of these people and the time. It hardly ever got dull, whereas with Tully’s book, I found myself nodding off and spacing more than a handful of times.

I would love to read other nonfiction works that are of this quality. I wonder what other texts Moore herself may have out there? What I really appreciated about this book is that while it truthfully revealed the disgusting and scandalous actions of Day toward this poor girl, it was also rich was interesting information about the time period. This was around the time of the American Revolution, and Moore creates a rich portrait of Georgian England. This impulse read was a great choice.