How to Create the Perfect Wife (11 page)

With its simple but timeless theme, the Pygmalion story has been reworked and reimagined again and again over the ensuing centuries. Probably the best-known and best-loved version, George Bernard Shaw’s bittersweet comedy
Pygmalion
tells the tale of the phonetics expert Professor Henry Higgins, who accepts a wager to transform the Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle into a fashionable woman of the world. By training Eliza to speak with a refined accent, teaching her drawing room manners and dressing her in fine clothes, Higgins wins his bet: Eliza hoodwinks London society into believing that she is a duchess. But Shaw’s play, first staged in 1913, subverts the original myth’s happy ending. The feisty Eliza ultimately resists the fate of Ovid’s statue and refuses to fall in love with her creator. Instead, to Higgins’s horror, she rebels against his autocratic arrogance and demands to direct her own destiny; in the final
scene she leaves him to marry the lovestruck Freddy. Much to Shaw’s disgust, when his play was made into the film
Pygmalion
in 1938, the producers insisted on inventing a romantic conclusion, suggesting that Eliza returns to Higgins. After Shaw’s death, the creators of the 1956 musical,
My Fair Lady,
kept that “happy ending,” which, of course, was maintained in the 1964 film of the musical.

If the Pygmalion myth has always captivated artists and audiences alike, in the eighteenth century it acquired the status of a cult. More interpretations of the story were produced during the 1700s than in all other periods of history put together. Fired by their fascination for the classical world and fueled by the debate that raged over the balance of nature and nurture in forming personality, the Georgians reveled in the Pygmalion idea. Every schoolboy knew the Ovid myth. The story was re-created in ballet, opera and drama. And the crucial moment when the statue steps down from her pedestal and comes to life was reproduced in paintings, on porcelain and—ironically enough—in statues. Even Rousseau could not resist the lure of the dramatic metamorphosis. In 1762, he composed a poetic drama,
Pygmalion: un scène lyrique
, which took the classical myth to new heights of eroticism. And for the first time, in the Rousseau version, the statue acquired a name—Galatea.

In reality, of course, when it comes to choosing a spouse the vast majority of people have been always content to accept flawed reality over mythical perfection. But not Thomas Day. Nobody—before or since—has tried quite so literally or so systematically to create for themselves their vision of a perfect mate. There is no doubt that Day—with his veneration for classical literature—was well aware of the Pygmalion myth when he embarked on his journey to create the perfect wife. Day was the incarnation of the sculptor Pygmalion intent on bringing to life his ivory girl. He was the original Professor Higgins on a mission to transform an innocent girl plucked out of the gutter into a polished and articulate perfect companion. In a mission as absurd as it was sinister, Day would take the human quest for perfection to its ultimate extreme. If God created woman, Day was determined to go one step further and improve on that divine design.

His young pupil, of course, was completely ignorant of his plans—and Day made no attempt to enlighten her. But if she had no idea of her destiny,
Ann Kingston had little knowledge of her true origins either. Beyond the fact that she had been surrendered soon after birth, she knew no details of her arrival at the Foundling Hospital and had no clue to her previous identity.

Day would always seek to bury his pupil’s origins in obscurity. His friends would conspire to conceal or obfuscate the events. Ann herself would never discover the full details of her past. And writers down the centuries would assume that her original identity had been lost in the morass of Foundling Hospital records that accumulated over the years; one would even report that there was no trace of a girl being apprenticed from Shrewsbury to Thomas Day, when of course the official guardian was Richard Edgeworth. The story has acquired almost apocryphal status. Was it even true? Like a ghost, Day’s orphan pupil has seemed almost impossible to grasp. Yet, in fact, all the time the details of her origins and the key events of her life within the Foundling Hospital had been scrupulously recorded and preserved in the heavy orphanage ledgers—which survive to this day—just as they had for the thousands of babies who had crossed the charity’s threshold since it first opened its doors.

Founded in 1741, the Foundling Hospital was the vision of one man: retired sea captain Thomas Coram. Sent to sea at eleven, two years after his mother died, Coram was later apprenticed to a shipwright. After emigrating to America in his twenties, he made and lost a fortune before returning to his homeland. He was appalled by the unemployment, poverty and slum conditions he found in early eighteenth-century London. But most shocking of all, as he walked to London and back each day, was the sight of abandoned babies “sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes dying,” dumped on rubbish heaps by the side of the road.

With no substantial income or significant connections, it took Coram seventeen years to raise sufficient support and funds to build a refuge for orphaned and unwanted babies. But after winning royal backing in 1739 and parliamentary approval the following year, Coram’s charity received its first charges on March 25, 1741. By midnight thirty babies had been accepted while others were turned away with an appeal to their mothers not to abandon their infants that night. A clerk recording the event wrote,
“the Expressions of Grief of the Women whose Children could not be admitted were Scarcely more observable than those of some of the Women who parted with their Children, so that a more moving Scene can’t well be imagined.”

From the beginning the charity’s governors installed a rigorous system of logging and documenting their charges. While careful to preserve the anonymity of the babies they admitted, and thus erase the stain of their probable illegitimacy, they took meticulous steps to ensure the orphans could be tracked throughout their lives within the charity. On reception, therefore, any distinguishing marks that might later identify a child were carefully noted on billet forms, and mothers were encouraged to leave information about the baby’s birth, parentage and other history along with a small memento. Initially the governors hoped that mothers would later reclaim their children on production of relevant identification. In practice few children were ever reunited with their parents.

Carefully stored under lock and key, the billet forms and tokens that accumulated over the ensuing years tell a heart-rending story of desperate parents in desperate times. Some mothers left letters or poems describing the appalling circumstances that had forced them to give up their infants. One mother was under sentence of death at Newgate; another had been raped by two sailors. While most mothers were unmarried, and too poor, too young or too ashamed to support an illegitimate child, a substantial number were married women who had simply fallen on hard times. “This Little Innocent is the Darling Offspring of a Unhappy but truly Virtuous Woman by the fondest Husband,” wrote one mother.

The tokens left with their tiny babies by these bereft mothers included coins, buttons, buckles, thimbles and padlocks. Those who had nothing of value left nutshells, bottle tops, scraps of paper or whatever else came to hand. Some mothers left one item of a pair—one earring, one cufflink, one shoe buckle—or tore a playing card in half in the hope of one day joining the two halves when they were reunited with their loved ones. If no token was left, the clerks sometimes snipped a scrap of fabric from the baby’s clothes and pinned it to the form.

Upon reception each child was allotted a number, stamped on a lead tag which was tied around the baby’s neck, and this was used to track the child throughout its lifetime in the charity. At the same time, immediately
upon admission, each child was renamed. The very first babies were named after the charity’s benefactors—including Thomas Coram—but when some patrons raised concerns that the little Bedfords and Montagues might grow up to claim familial rights, other names were smartly introduced. Subsequent babies were baptized Julius Caesar, Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth Tudor after dead heroes, and when these ran out, children were named after places, flowers or virtues they might aspire to, such as Patience, Prudence and Faith. But as these too were used up, babies were named simply Jane or John as befitted their lowly station in life. With a new name, new clothes and new surroundings, the first day of admission marked day one of a brand-new life.

As the charity moved in 1745 into a permanent home, a grand building with two wings north of Holborn, support grew. Paintings donated by William Hogarth adorned the walls, and music composed by George Frideric Handel filled the chapel at the benefit concerts popular with fashionable society. Opulently dressed visitors flocked to hear the orphans singing or to watch the boys making fishing nets in the ropewalk. Although Captain Coram was later ostracized from meetings for his outspoken contributions, he continued to attend baptisms, standing godfather to twenty children. Reduced to poverty again in his old age, he remained a familiar figure in the orphanage gardens, red-coated and red-cheeked, sharing gingerbread among the children with tears spilling down his face. When he died in 1751 the captain’s body was escorted by orphans to its burial in the chapel.

Yet for all its support and fashionable cachet the charity could not keep pace with the flow of babies arriving at its door. After a while a ballot was introduced to determine which children were accepted on reception days. Hopeful mothers picked a ball from a bag to decide whether their baby could be admitted: white meant acceptance, red put the child on a reserve list and black signaled rejection. But as babies continued to exceed beds, the governors appealed to Parliament for aid. In 1756 the House of Commons awarded a generous £10,000 (£1.78 million; $2.9 million today) grant but with one crucial catch: no more babies could be turned away.

The General Reception, as it became known, began on June 2, 1756, and continued until March 25, 1760, at which point—with government funds and the patience of Members of Parliament exhausted—the governors
wryly named the last child Kitty Finis. In all a staggering total of 14,934 babies were admitted during a period of less than four years. While previously babies had been selected through a careful process to weed out those least likely to thrive, now any unwanted baby was brought to the hospital gatehouse or left outside in a basket at any time of day or night. Many were in dire health. One child was described as “a Mear Skirlinton Covered with Rags with a hole in the Roofe of the Mouth,” while another was simply “The most miserable object Ever Received.” Mortality rates leapt from an already tragic 45 percent to more than 70 percent—although even this figure was better than in some London parishes where every one of the pauper babies farmed out to wet nurses died.

As the charity struggled to find sufficient wet nurses to suckle the rising tide of infants, entire villages were transformed into nursing outposts. When these youngsters grew up, ready to leave their foster mothers for schooling at the age of five or six, the governors had to build six country branches—like that at Shrewsbury—in areas where the orphans might find future employment. It was during this period of misery and mayhem that Ann Kingston had been admitted to the Foundling Hospital.

Thursday, May 24, 1757, dawned a gray, sunless day, which grew progressively gloomier as rain swept in on a chilly northwest wind in the afternoon. After a harsh winter of soaring food prices, the spring had so far failed to nurture any green shoots of recovery. Weaving through the crowds on that bleak day an unknown person headed northwest in the teeth of the wind, from the squalid slums of Clerkenwell to the black iron gates of the Foundling Hospital, bearing a small bundle.

Business was brisk at the lodge that day. Already five babies had been admitted; a seventh was still to come. Only the sixth baby, carried from Clerkenwell, came from London. According to the hospital regulations, immediately after the baby was brought into the lodge the clerk would have locked the door to detain its bearer and rung a bell to alert a nurse in the adjacent room. Clerks were under strict orders on pain of dismissal not to attempt to discover the identity of mothers, or anyone else, who brought babies for admission, but they were expected to extract vital details of the baby’s origins including the parish of birth. After questioning the
anonymous bearer of this sixth baby, the clerk began to fill in the printed form.

The billet form, which survives to this day in the charity’s archives, records simply that a “female child,” numbered 4579, was brought to the hospital on May 24. Unlike other foundlings, there was no token left in expectation of a later reunion or any record of the clothing the baby wore, if indeed she had any. Under distinguishing marks, the clerk noted that the little girl was “marked on the Left Ear greatly,” though whether this was a birthmark or an injury sustained subsequently was left unsaid. And although she was obviously under six months old—the age limit for admission at that stage—no date of birth was given. The parish of origin, volunteered by the person who brought the baby to the lodge, was recorded in the clerk’s phonetic spelling style as “St Jons Clarkenwell.”

One further piece of information was provided. A note, which must have been handed over with the baby by her bearer, was left with the child. Pinned to the billet form for posterity, this scrap of paper declares that the infant had already been baptized, in St. James’s Church, Clerkenwell—the neighboring parish to St. John’s—and given the name, recorded as the clerk heard it, Manima Butler. Having provided the clerks with the requisite information, the anonymous bearer—her mother, her father or a parish official—reemerged into the street, empty-handed, to disappear forever into the London crowds.

Despite the assertion on the billet form, no record exists in the St. James’s Church register of a baby baptized Manima Butler or any similar name. But whether she was really baptized or not, the name was undoubtedly a misspelling of Monimia. Meaning “the lonely girl” in Greek, the name Monimia was first coined by the playwright Thomas Otway for the orphan heroine of his 1680 tragedy
The Orphan: or, The Unhappy Marriage.
Hugely popular during the eighteenth century, the play was regularly performed on the London stage. In Georgian parlance, therefore, the name Monimia was synonymous with orphanhood. Ann had originally been named for an archetypal orphan—although whether she would act out the play’s subtitle and make an unhappy marriage would remain to be seen.