day: nature and nurture at dawn

Eighteenth-century England and the circle of brilliant men around Josiah Wedgwood. Some were more eccentric than others. Even peculiar…

Thomas Day made no great mark in the world beyond establishing an undisputed reputation for almost perfect eccentricity. His friends loved him and his widow died of a broken heart. Today, he would be called a classic champagne socialist, the NIMBY archetype, but there was literary talent there and his basic premise was that democracy and capitalism would always be at loggerheads: the rich get fat on the back of the poor, and that colonialism manifests itself in innumerable contexts. The wealth of the nation rarely goes to those responsible. He is credited with the first poem to directly attack slavery, also packaged in his basic belief of Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage, and the quest for pure essence, uncorrupted by what he once wrote as the “sordid gold of Christian traffic.”

…(see link at end)…Thomas Day, the author of “Sandford and Merton,” who spent a good deal of his life in hunting for a wife, made love to Honora. She, however, refused to marry him; and small wonder, for the conditions he wished to impose on her were ridiculously stringent and restrictive, and she, not unnaturally, refused to entertain the prospect of the unqualified control of a husband over all her actions, implied by his requirements. Later on Day wished to marry Honora’s sister, but she also refused his offer. It may be added that he eventually succeeded in marrying a Yorkshire lady, who became devoted to him, and was inconsolable on his death, in 1789, from a kick by a horse. Read More:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26383/26383-h/26383-h.htm

—Thomas Day, another eccentric, also rich, idealistic and charming. He was also a depressive mysogynist, lacking in the social graces. Stooped and dishevelled, he never combed his hair but was fond of washing in a stream! He was a follower of Rousseau’s ideas on ‘education through kindness and freedom’, determined to find a wife ‘out of duty’ – hence his famous experiment with two orphan girls to discover which would be the perfect wife. Anna was totally sceptical about this experiment, though Lunar Society members were enthusiastic. They valued him but she thought it was because he owned a vast estate and had £1200 a year!—Read More:http://www.search.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/engine/resource/exhibition/standard/child.asp?

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…As Seward admitted, “There was no finding such a creature ready made” – he would have to create the wife he wanted, all by himself.

He set out to do just that. Inspired by a suggestion in Rousseau’s Sophie, he planned to adopt two girls and bring them up so that in time he could decide “which of them would be agreeable to himself for a wife”. In some ways, this astounding arrogance was a version of contemporary experimental optimism, applied not to gases or mechanics but to life itself, but it was also a political project, linked to a strong British tradition which contrasted classical virtue with modern luxury. And it was alarmingly easy to procure guinea-pigs.

With an old schoolfriend, Thomas Bicknell, Day went to the Foundling Hospital in Shrewsbury where he picked out a girl and named her Sabrina Sidney (after the River Severn and his hero, the Whig martyr Algernon Sidney). The next stop was Coram’s Fields in London, where he chose a second, named Lucretia. They were 11 and 12; contrasting pre-pubertal dolls, one with chestnut hair and dark-eyes, and the other fair.

—In the western part of England lived a gentleman of great fortune, whose name was Merton. He had a large estate in the Island of Jamaica, where he had passed the greater part of his life, and was master of many servants, who cultivated sugar and other valuable things for his advantage. He had only one son, of whom he was excessively fond; and to educate this child properly was the reason of his determining to stay some years in England. Tommy Merton, who, at the time he came from Jamaica, was only six years old, was naturally a very good-tempered boy, but unfortunately had been spoiled by too much indulgence. While he lived in Jamaica, he had several black servants to wait upon him, who were forbidden upon any account to contradict him.—Read More:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30274/30274-h/30274-h.htm

All Day had to do was to promise that he would apprentice one girl to a trade, and give her £400 on her marriage; the other he intended to marry and if he did not, he would place her in a good family and give her £500. He also “solemnly engaged not to violate her innocence”. And as Sabrina had to be officially “apprenticed” to a married man, Day simply named Edgeworth, without telling him. He began by lodging the girls in London but then took them to France, in the belief that as they knew no French, corrupting influences would be shut out. The trio settled in Avignon, to the bemusement of the locals. Slowly, he taught the girls to read and lectured them to hate “dress, and luxury, and fine people, and fashion, and titles”. But apart from “Excellent Rousseau! best of humankind!”, he soon decided that all Frenchmen were vacuous, and the women were imbecilic, obsessed by fashion and unnaturally dominant. Even French roads were terrible. He longed for news from home, and sent a dictated letter from Sabrina herself:

“Dear Mr Edgeworth, I am glad to hear you are well, and your little boy – I love Mr Day dearly, and Lucretia – I am learning to write – I do not like France so well as England – the people are very brown, they dress very oddly – the climate is very good here. I hope I shall have more sense against I come to England – I know how to make a circle and an equilateral triangle – I know the cause of night and day

nter and summer. I love Mr Day best in the world, Mr Bicknell next, and you next.”

Then things began to go awry. Bored, unable to speak a word of the language, the girls squabbled, pestered Day constantly and finally caught smallpox, demanding that he sit by their beds night after night. The smallpox passed, and Day struggled on through multiple disasters: a capsized boat; a French officer who spoke to the girls too freely and had to be challenged to a duel. After eight months, exhausted, he came home.

Having decided that Lucretia was either invincibly stupid, or impossibly stubborn, Day apprenticed her to a milliner on Ludgate Hill in London. Soon, she married a linen-draper and received her promised dowry. Sabrina, he kept. Early in 1770, largely to be near Erasmus Darwin, he rented Stowe House in Lichfield. The town was agog: at 13, Sabrina was a soft-voiced beauty, with long eyelashes and loose auburn ringlets. But nobody questioned Day’s motives: he was seen as noble, principled, philanthropic. He absolutely looked the philosopher, thought Anna Seward, meditative and melancholy, awkward yet dignified:

“Powder and fine clothes were, at that time, the appendages of gentlemen. Mr Day wore neither … There was a sort of weight upon the lids of his large hazel eyes; yet when he declaimed, ‘Of good and evil,/ Passion, and apathy, and glory, and shame,’ very expressive were the energies gleaming from them beneath the shade of sable hair, which, Adam-like, curled about his brows. Joseph Wright painted his portrait this August, draped in swirling russet silk against a tempestuous sky, a book in his hand, almost certainly Emile – a sable-haired hero.” Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/oct/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview24

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