How to Create the Perfect Wife (30 page)

Now that she was sixteen, Sabrina looked toward the end of her schooldays with uncertainty. She had no relations, no friends and no guardian figure except for Day; he remained the most important person in her life. On the rare occasions when he wrote or visited, his manner varied between warm praise on her progress and cool words of reproach on her failings, according to his perceptions of her conduct and his mood. Although Day had sent her away for failing to meet his exact ideals of perfect womanhood, he continued to exert control of every detail of her life. Having insisted that her schoolteachers exclude her from music and dance lessons, he ordered them to ensure that she was kept hard to her studies and denied any rich food or fancy clothes. If women like Margaret Edgeworth, Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd had spurned him, he could, at least, still maintain control over his teenage captive. Although he kept Sabrina on a long leash, he could not quite give up his project to groom her toward his pinnacle of female perfection. She would always be there—in case she was needed. For her part, Sabrina, in the manner of many child hostages, viewed her captor with devotion; yet—as Seward had noted—it was a devotion born largely of fear.

Oblivious to any whiff of hypocrisy, Day threw himself into defending human rights with gusto. Over the next few years, he would dedicate himself to campaigns to secure liberty and independence for slaves, for Americans, for working men and for religious skeptics. But since his commitment to civil rights frequently did not extend to being civil to his fellow campaigners, he would end up in conflict with many of his compatriots—and even with his greatest idol.

Now that Day had cemented links with the Lunar circle in the Midlands, he began forging new friendships among radical political groups in
London. Needing a base in the capital, he took lodgings with his old university chum William Jones, the expert linguist, who had chambers in Pump Court in Middle Temple. Even if he showed little regard for the rights of women, Day used his legal learning in support of human rights and even the broader cause of animal rights.

In keeping with his frugal approach to meals, Day had always disliked eating meat. He told friends he would happily abstain from eating all animal products were it not that his philosophy—in accordance with the Rousseau veneration for nature—suggested that humans were naturally intended to eat meat; indeed he concluded that “the practice of rearing and killing animals for food was productive of more happiness than of pain to them.” But wanton cruelty to animals, which was a common enough sight in Georgian Britain, “used to give him uneasiness,” according to Keir. He was so sensitive to animal feelings that he even refused to kill a spider when it scuttled out from some dusty books in his lodgings. Addressing his fellow lodger Jones as he might do a jury, Day declared: “I will not kill that spider, Jones. I do not know that I have a right to kill that spider!” In typically sentimental terms he urged Jones to imagine how he would feel if a “superior being” suddenly demanded that a companion “kill that lawyer,” reminding his friend that “to most people, a lawyer is a more noxious animal than a spider.” It was a rare glimpse of Day’s comic side.

When he was not defending spiders and other animals, Day enjoyed mixing with American radicals. He had met Benjamin Franklin, the American diplomat and science enthusiast, in Lichfield in 1771. Introduced by Darwin, Franklin had been impressed by the earnest young man who shared his liberal ideas on citizens’ rights and his skeptical views on organized religion. Since Day had so far laid the blame for the slave trade squarely on European shoulders, he could overlook the fact that Franklin had originally arrived in England with two slaves in tow. And so when Franklin asked Day to join an elite dining club of religious skeptics that he had just established, Day was more than happy to accept.

Meeting at Franklin’s lodgings in Craven Street, off the Strand, or at Old Slaughter’s coffeehouse nearby in St. Martin’s Lane, the group included Wedgwood, Thomas Bentley, who was Wedgwood’s business partner in London and an ardent antislavery campaigner, and a flamboyant
Welshman, David Williams. Originally a dissenting minister, Williams had been stripped of his clerical post because of his growing religious doubts and was now a confirmed deist, believing in the existence of a single creator but disavowing any need for organized religion. Like Day, Williams was a disciple of Rousseau’s educational ideas. He had set up a boys’school in Chelsea where pupils learned through experience and conducted their own court to determine matters of discipline. Franklin called his group the Club of Thirteen—probably in reference to the thirteen colonies fighting for independence—and its membership remained fixed at that unlucky number.

Meetings focused on Franklin’s idea for a multidenominational church where all who accepted “the existence of a supreme intelligence” could come together in celebration of common ideas of morality rather than fixed religious doctrines. In an era when the activities of Catholics, Jews, Quakers and anyone else outside the Church of England were heavily restricted, this was a bold humanitarian move. The chapel would eventually open in Margaret Street near Cavendish Square on April 7, 1776—Easter Sunday—when Williams welcomed more than a hundred people to celebrate “a being infinite and immense” in a spirit of religious tolerance remarkably rare to the eighteenth century. But by then the amicable club that first spawned the project had been splintered by religious, political and personal differences into almost thirteen parts.

Arguments between deists like Williams and Bentley and materialists or atheists like Day caused the first fractures in the convivial club. When Williams was accused of heresy in the press, Day leaped to defend him by sending long, hyperbolic, anonymous letters to the
Morning Chronicle,
which only reinforced the accusations and exposed Williams to further scandal. “Those letters were undoubtedly of service,” Williams wrote wearily, “but they diffused a suspicion and alarm concerning me which I was not disposed to counter.” When Williams tactfully broached his concerns, Day turned on the Welshman and accused him of being jealous of his literary merits. A shrewd and charitable man—he would later set up the Royal Literary Fund to help cash-strapped authors—Williams said that while Day affected “to be spotless,” he was in fact driven by “insatiable ambition.”

It was the growing rift between Britain and its American colonies that next created conflicts for Day. Mounting anger at Britain’s determination to tax its colonists, this time on their tea, boiled over when protesters tipped £9,000—roughly £1.1 million or $1.8 million today—of the best East India Company brew into Boston harbor in December 1773. Franklin, who was so shocked by the destruction of private property at the Boston Tea Party that he offered to pay for the ruined tea, suddenly found himself cast in the role of chief negotiator for the colonies. Hauled before the Privy Council in January 1774, he was castigated for his compatriots’ actions. Fearful of being arrested or attacked by a mob, Franklin took refuge with Williams in Chelsea. Yet while Franklin could always count on support for American independence from Williams and other members of his club, including Wedgwood and Bentley, the same could not be said of Day.

Discussing the vexed question of independence with American friends in rowdy debates in Middle Temple Hall or the smoky taverns nearby, Day announced that he could not support the Americans’cries for liberty while they denied that same right to thousands of slaves. He had acknowledged, in
The Dying Negro,
that European traders first initiated the slave trade and Britain had later established a monopoly in the triangular transatlantic business. Yet by the 1770s hundreds of thousands of slaves were working cotton, tobacco and rice plantations in the southern colonies of America—there were 60,000 black slaves in South Carolina and 140,000 in Virginia alone—as well as in the West Indies. Many of the most prominent Americans lobbying for independence were slave owners. George Washington inherited ten slaves when he was eleven years old and cultivated his farm on the labor of 100 slaves; Thomas Jefferson inherited fifty-two slaves when he turned twenty-one and had a “slave family” numbering more than 170 on his plantation. But even in London, it was hard to ignore the issue of double standards.

The sight of American businessmen, and plantation owners from the West Indies who styled themselves Americans, walking the streets of Georgian London with black slaves was familiar to all. Indeed it was not uncommon to see American law students strolling through the courts and lanes of the Temple with a slave at their heels. So as British troops moved
to confront the rioting protesters in Boston in the summer of 1774, Day decided to make a courageous stand.

William Flexney, the publisher of
The Dying Negro,
had been clamoring for a reprint of the popular poem. As the appetite for battle between Britain and its rebellious colonists intensified, so Day and Bicknell sharpened their quills to fortify their verses. The first word set the tone. Instead of the passive “Blest with thy last sad gift—the power to dye,” the poem now began: “Arm’d with thy last sad gift—the power to die.” The resigned lament in the fourth line, “The world and I are enemies no more,” became an explicit rallying cry: “Where all is peace, and men are slaves no more.” And working through the poem the pair augmented the language to create a more strident, militant and confrontational stance, which culminated in an extra two pages containing a shocking warning. The first edition had ended with the shackled slave calling on heaven to sink the ship on which he is about to die as he utters his pitiful lament “remember me!” But now Bicknell and Day added fifty-four more lines—forty-four of them were Day’s—in which the slave foresees a bloody vengeance being exacted on his tormentors. There was no ambiguity in the message to their American friends in the words: “I see your warriors gasping on the ground; / I hear your flaming cities crash around.” But just in case there were any lingering doubts, Day added a long dedication to precede the poem, which spelled out his views on American calls for liberty in no uncertain terms.

Day addressed this eight-page dedication to his enduring hero Rousseau, who had begun his
Social Contract
with the transcendent words: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Day acknowledged in his dedication that he had not actually asked the philosopher’s permission to make his homage, an oversight he would come to regret. In a blistering attack on the American campaigners Day proclaimed: “For them the Negro is dragged from his cottage and his plantane shade; by them the fury of African tyrants is stimulated by pernicious gold; the rights of nature are invaded; and European faith becomes infamous throughout the world. Yet such is the inconsistency of mankind, that these are the men whose clamours for LIBERTY are heard across the Atlantic Ocean!” He ended his assault with a stark challenge: “Let the clamours of America prevail, when they shall be unmixt with the clank of chains, and the groans
of anguish: let her aim a dagger at the breast of her milder parent, if she can advance a step without trampling on the dead and dying carcases of her slaves.”

Day had leveled an unequivocal charge of hypocrisy against the American revolutionaries fighting for their liberty. Having delivered the explosive second edition of
The Dying Negro
to the printers just as his law studies ended for the summer, Day packed his bags to head off for a sightseeing holiday on the Continent. But first, he had to visit his own little hostage in Sutton Coldfield.

Coming to the end of three years at boarding school in the summer of 1774, Sabrina had grown into a popular, charming and accomplished young woman of seventeen whose slender figure, chestnut ringlets and lively brown eyes turned heads. Having applied herself diligently to her lessons, she had “gained the esteem” of her teachers. So when she saw the familiar stooped figure loping through the school gates, she may have thought her long program of improvement was finally over. She may even have harbored hopes that she would be taken back into Day’s heart and home. She was wrong. Instead Day brusquely informed her that she was being bound in a new apprenticeship to a couple, the Parkinsons, who were mantua-makers, that is, dressmakers. Day had selected this occupation on the grounds that dressmaking was, as he later told her, “a trade which I thought exposed you to no temptation, while it would teach you habits of industry & frugality more than you could learn in any other situation.” It was a curious choice to say the least.

While originally a “mantua” denoted a formal woman’s gown usually worn over hoops and split at the front to reveal petticoats underneath, by the second half of the eighteenth century “mantua-making” had come to mean dressmaking in general. Mantua-makers were usually commissioned by wealthy and middle-class clients to produce bespoke clothes from patterns often copied from the latest designs in London or Paris. Since needlework was a staple lesson in most girls’ education, working as a mantua-maker was regarded as a respectable job for daughters of the rising middle classes and certainly one step up from becoming a domestic servant.

Yet given Day’s averred hatred for fashion and declared determination to protect Sabrina from all frivolity and vanity, his decision seems bizarre. The idea that the teenage Sabrina should faithfully copy the extravagant designs of French couture in exotic silks and printed cottons while inwardly despising any interest in fashion seems irrational—even for Day. She would be producing precisely the kind of garment he had earlier instructed her to throw on the fire. But, of course, she had no say in the matter. She was effectively his chattel to be passed on as he pleased.

Day delivered Sabrina to the Parkinsons at some point in 1774. It is unlikely that there was a formal apprenticeship agreement, for Day made plain both to Sabrina and to the Parkinsons that she remained “under my protection.” Day paid the Parkinsons for Sabrina’s board, gave them explicit instructions that she should work hard at her chores and—as usual—she should be denied any indulgences or comforts. Sporadically keeping in contact with the couple and with Sabrina, Day maintained his command and continued to appraise her conduct. Naturally this was a thankless task. “During this time I always had a disposition to like you,” Day told her later, “which was always checked by my opinion, that you would not take the trouble of acquiring the qualities I could wish & therefore my ideas & behaviour were various; I sometimes taking some pains to improve you & correspond with you, at other times totally giving up the idea and paying you no attention whatever.” He had no intention of loosening those invisible chains.