How to Create the Perfect Wife (6 page)

Such setbacks only spurred Edgeworth to further inventions. In rapid succession, he turned out of his workshop an eleven-spoked “perambulator” that measured distances, a large umbrella to keep haystacks dry, an articulated wagon, a turnip-cutting machine, a track-laying vehicle and a phaeton with each of its four wheels fixed independently. The last could turn on a tiny circle without overturning and could also be instantly detached from its horses as required—a wise precaution given Edgeworth’s earlier mishaps. The tireless inventor bombarded the newly founded Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce with his designs and won the society’s silver and gold medals for his efforts. The epithet “ingenious” was applied with liberal abandon to creative figures in the eighteenth century, but few deserved it so much as Edgeworth.

Eager for any excuse to evade domestic duties, Edgeworth frequently lodged in London on the pretext of studying law. Having enrolled in 1762 at Middle Temple, like Day and Bicknell, he began dining in hall from
late 1765, although, like Day, he had no intention of practicing law. Instead Edgeworth divided his time between charming London society and staging theatrical displays of his curious inventions. He soon teamed up with Sir Francis Blake Delaval, a gambler, drunkard and libertine notorious for his wild antics, whose idea of a good time included contests to ride horses up a grand marble staircase and party games to bite the heads off sparrows suspended on strings in a macabre version of bobbing for apples. Driven by a mutual taste for mechanics and showmanship, the pair drew crowds to Delaval’s town house for mind-boggling exhibitions of conjuring tricks using magnets and pulleys.

Edgeworth’s appetite for novelty soon drew him into the orbit of Erasmus Darwin, the genial physician, inventor and part-time poet. Having heard that Darwin shared his interest in carriage design, Edgeworth sent him the blueprint of a prototype phaeton in 1766. A sociable and generous man, Darwin had settled in the prosperous town of Lichfield (some hundred miles from London in the English Midlands) and built up a thriving medical practice. Now in his mid-thirties, though his lumbering figure and full-bottomed wig made him look much older, Darwin invited Edgeworth to visit. Needing no further persuasion, Edgeworth harnessed his horses to his custom-built carriage and sped off for Lichfield that summer.

Darwin was impressed by Edgeworth’s sporty chariot and entranced by its designer. With an interest not only in medicine and transport but also in chemistry, geology, mineralogy and mechanics, Darwin opened his home to visitors of a scientific bent. But living too far from London to frequent the capital’s numerous clubs and societies for similar enthusiasts, Darwin had begun to build around him in the Midlands an informal circle of like-minded thinkers, inventors and industrialists who exchanged ideas at convivial dinner parties. Meeting for dinner and then discussion on the Sunday (later Monday) nearest to a full moon—for the purposes of traveling safely at night—they took the name the Lunar Society of Birmingham and were sometimes dubbed the “lunaticks.” Edgeworth was a natural fit.

During Edgeworth’s brief visit that summer, Darwin touted his new friend tirelessly around the Lichfield social scene, pressing him to perform
tricks with magnets and mechanical devices like an entertainer at a children’s party. Dashing off a letter to urge his industrialist friend Matthew Boulton to join them, Darwin proclaimed: “I have got with me a mechanical Friend, Mr Edgeworth from Oxfordshire—The greatest Conjuror I ever saw.” Barely able to contain his excitement, Darwin drummed up enthusiasm for his guest as if he were John the Baptist announcing the Messiah: “He has the principles of Nature in his Palm, and moulds them as He pleases. Can take away Polarity or give it to the Needle by rubbing it thrice on the Palm of his Hand. And can see through two solid Oak Boards without Glasses, wonderful! astonishing! diabolical!!!” With such a fanfare, Boulton could hardly resist.

Into Edgeworth’s exhilarating, dazzling, fun-filled world, Thomas Day appeared on a summer’s day in 1766 like a looming black rain cloud. Day was home for the holidays at his mother and stepfather’s house at Barehill, but being uncomfortable in his stepfather’s company he was keen for any excuse to escape. The news that a neighbor had recently attended the same college, and shared the same tutor, provided the ideal opportunity. And so Day ambled the short distance to Edgeworth’s home at Hare Hatch to pay his respects.

The tall, stooped, pockmarked youth with his matted black hair and scruffy clothes arrived unannounced. For once, Edgeworth was at home—probably busy in his workshop, his sleeves pushed up to the elbows and his hands covered with grease, constructing his latest invention. Ever ready to welcome a guest, despite appearances, Edgeworth invited his neighbor to stay for refreshments. But the gawky eighteen-year-old did little to improve on first impressions when he spoke in his usual bombastic manner. After conversing together for several hours it was abundantly plain that the pair had almost nothing in common.

Looking back, Edgeworth would later compare himself and Day: he himself was full of “constitutional joy” while Day was “grave and melancholy.” While Edgeworth was a man of “strong passions,” Day was a sober and misanthropic pedant. And while Edgeworth was “fond of all the happiness” that the company of women could bestow, Day was “suspicious of the female sex, and averse to risking his happiness for their charms or their
society.” But most of all, Edgeworth was baffled by Day’s simultaneous condemnation of “the evils” of love and his remorseless quest for a perfect woman who was divinely intended for him.

Having determined to make the best of his own imperfect marriage, Edgeworth was astounded to learn that Day “expected that, with a person neither formed by nature, nor cultivated by art, to please, he should win some female wiser than the rest of her sex, who should feel for him the most romantic and everlasting attachment—a paragon, who should forget the follies and vanities of her sex for him” and be prepared to “live in a cottage on love.” As Edgeworth put it: “Though armed in adamant against the darts of beauty, and totally insensible to the power of accomplishments, he felt, that for an object, which should resemble the image in his fancy, he could give up fortune, fame, life, every thing but virtue.”

In short, the only areas on which the pair could agree was “a love of knowledge, and a freedom from that admiration of splendour, that dazzles and enslaves mankind.” What is more, Edgeworth was a practical, pragmatic man determined to find workable solutions to problems; Day was a cerebral idealist who seemed hellbent on creating them. Yet despite all their differences, there was something about Day that evidently touched Edgeworth profoundly. Like the handful of disciples, such as Warburton-Lytton and Oriental Jones, Day had attracted at Oxford, Edgeworth found himself in awe of the sober young poet with a childlike belief in noble causes and dogged contempt for luxury.

After no more than a few hours’ conversation that first day, the odd couple forged an immediate and lasting friendship that was founded, said Edgeworth, “on mutual esteem, between persons of tastes, habits, pursuits, manners, and connexions totally different.” Stopping abruptly as they were walking together along a lane near Hare Hatch, Edgeworth impulsively predicted that they would be lifelong friends. Sure enough, from that first meeting in 1766, through good times and bad, the two would remain loyally devoted.

Whenever Day could escape his studies and Edgeworth could resist the lures of Lichfield or London, the pair would be found holed up in Edgeworth’s workshop. As the indefatigable inventor battled to assemble another of his cunning contraptions, his talkative friend would hold forth
on a contentious topic and occasionally lend a helping hand by, for example, in Day’s words, “calculating the vibrations of your wooden horse’s legs.” So far Edgeworth had dedicated himself to the instant gratification of impulses—whether seducing the daughter of a family friend or attempting to build a giant wooden mechanical horse capable of bestriding hedges. But Day obviously appealed to Edgeworth’s latent moral purpose, a desire to do good. Day was quite simply, Edgeworth stated—and would maintain until his dying day—“the most virtuous human being I have ever known.”

Certainly Edgeworth believed that Day’s influence on him was crucial. Meeting Day marked the beginning of “a new era in my life.” Strangely, perhaps, Mrs. Edgeworth did not share her husband’s enthusiasm for his new friend. Although she apparently felt no unease at her husband’s friendship with the gambling, drinking, lewd Delaval, she took an immediate and fervent dislike to Day. Edgeworth was bewildered. “A more dangerous and seductive companion than the one, or a more moral and improving companion than the other, could not be found in England,” he protested. Yet perhaps Mrs. Edgeworth had more of an instinct for danger and immorality than her trusting husband.

The timing of their meeting was critical: it was the beginning of a new era for Day too. For in between his scientific endeavors and his legal studies, Edgeworth had become enthralled by a radically different approach to education, which he was eager to share with his latest friend. It was this experimental new system that would furnish Day with the tool he needed to solve his search for love.

Although Edgeworth’s marriage was far from perfect, he was about to provide the final piece of the puzzle to help Day create his perfect wife.

THREE

SOPHIE

  
Staffordshire, summer 1766
  

E
njoying a stroll in the gardens of Wootton Hall, a friend’s country house in Staffordshire, Erasmus Darwin stopped outside the entrance to a grotto. With a casual air, which belied his corpulence, the physician stooped down to examine a small flower. Since he had already added botany to the long list of his interests, there was nothing obviously remarkable in Darwin’s scrutiny. In fact, however, his seemingly spontaneous action was a carefully contrived ploy. By halting outside the grotto, Darwin was determined to coax out its shy and fearful inhabitant. The trick worked. For out of the gloom loped a thin, frail figure with beady, black eyes. It was the international fugitive Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Ever since the philosopher had published his controversial views on liberty and education in 1762, Rousseau had been hounded across Europe. Church authorities in his adopted country of France had banned both
The Social Contract,
with its daring views on freedom and equality, and
Émile,
with its progressive ideas on education. Forced to flee France, Rousseau headed for his homeland only to discover that his native city of Geneva had followed suit by publicly burning both books. He spent the next three years lying low in the Swiss mountains until villagers stoned his cottage and Rousseau was on the run again. Finding himself with nowhere left to hide, the fifty-three-year-old exile had reluctantly accepted safe passage
to England. Under the protection of David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, who was serving as secretary of the British Embassy in Paris, Rousseau had crossed the Channel.

Arriving in London in January 1766, Rousseau had been fêted by the press and mobbed in the streets. “All the world are eager to see this man, who by his singularity, has drawn himself into much trouble,” announced the
Public Advertiser.
Dressed in the colorful Armenian costume he had recently adopted, “the celebrated John James Rousseau”—as he was dubbed by the English newspapers—was deluged by admirers including the Prince of Wales. Such celebrity status did nothing, however, to improve Rousseau’s temper.

Notoriously cantankerous and neurotic, Europe’s most wanted philosopher detested fame almost as much as he hated obscurity. Rousseau had no love of England or the English, and he longed for his companion Thérèse Levasseur until she was escorted across the Channel a month later by James Boswell, a keen admirer of Rousseau’s work. Inevitably, Boswell being Boswell, the job of chaperone entailed several steamy nights of passion en route. Reunited with his lover, Rousseau accepted the offer of a quiet retreat at Wootton Hall, the country home of another admirer, Richard Davenport. But the charms of this pastoral idyll soon wore thin.