How to Create the Perfect Wife (22 page)

As far as Anna Seward was concerned, this intrepid flight was motivated solely by Honora’s desire to be reunited with her “books and conversations with me, and with a few dozen friends!” But it happened at exactly the time that Edgeworth arrived back in England; it was obviously Edgeworth with whom she was desperate to be reunited. Now that he had finally noticed her shy glances and blushing smiles, she told him he was the “first person, who had seen the full value of her character.”

Rather forgetting the inconvenient fact that he was already married, that Christmas season Edgeworth wore down the footpath between Stowe House and the palace to spend all his leisure hours in company with Honora. When he was not at the palace discussing mechanics with Honora, he was pestering his friends to affirm the superiority of Honora’s looks and talents. Good-humoredly, Darwin, Keir and Small agreed “unanimously” with his verdict—though privately they may have despaired that neither of their two young friends could manage their matrimonial affairs very wisely. Only Day dissented. Since she failed to match his particular
vision of female perfection, Day sniffily pointed out that Honora danced too well, that she was too swayed by fashion and that her arms were not sufficiently plump and white. As he laughingly dismissed his friend’s foibles, Edgeworth blamed this insensibility to the attractions of his ideal woman on the fact that “Sabrina Sydney had, perhaps, preoccupied his mind.”

Somewhat foolishly Edgeworth confessed his passions to Seward. To his delight he found that she listened sympathetically and even claimed to have guessed his interest before he had realized it himself. Indeed, she seemed “gratified” by the praises he heaped on her clever pupil and eager to place Honora’s attainments in the “most advantageous point of view.” Or so Edgeworth believed. In reality, Seward was appalled to learn that Edgeworth had now taken her own place in Honora’s affections. Determined that if anyone was going to mastermind Honora’s love life it would be she, Seward was not prepared to see her “lovely Honora” wasting her attentions on a married man. She had her own experience of that bitter sorrow. The vicar’s daughter moved in mysterious ways. Even as she encouraged Edgeworth to unburden his heart, she was plotting to undermine his interests. Casting about for a more suitable suitor, she alighted on the obvious candidate: the stoic philanthropist of Stowe House.

The New Year brought new challenges. Early in 1771, as Sabrina approached the age of fourteen, Day conceded that it was no longer respectable for her to remain in his “bachelor mansion.” After nearly twelve months of lessons and ordeals in Lichfield, Day concluded that his daring educational experiment had been a failure. At that point, he promptly “renounced all hope of moulding Sabrina into the being his imagination had formed,” according to Seward, and ceased “to behold her as his future wife.” As Day bluntly informed Sabrina and told his friends, she had failed to meet his expectations. In reality, it seems, he had begun to focus his expectations elsewhere.

As the ice thawed on Stowe Pool, Sabrina packed her plain dresses and few possessions and said goodbye to her benefactor and newfound friends. With no explanation for her abrupt dismissal apart from Day’s complaints about her inattention to her lessons and her chores, Sabrina was dispatched
to a boarding school eight miles away in Sutton Coldfield. If she worked hard, Day told her, she might later be apprenticed into a suitable female trade. Coldly taking his leave, he instructed the schoolmistress to concentrate on teaching his failed pupil to improve her reading, writing and arithmetic but—maintaining his iron grip on her future—on no account to allow her to learn either music or dancing. There would be no revels in Sabrina’s new life. Abandoned by her guardian of the past two years at the school door, just as she had been abandoned at the gates of the Foundling Hospital fourteen years earlier, Sabrina would spend the next three lonely years bent over her books in the little school.

Men, it seemed, could be every bit as fickle as women.

SEVEN

ELIZABETH

  
Sutton Coldfield, spring 1771
  

A
lthough it was just eight miles from Lichfield, Sutton Coldfield might as well have been on the other side of the world. Banished to boarding school in early 1771, Sabrina had exchanged her friends for strangers, her progressive and intimate tutorials for traditional rote learning in a classroom full of girls and the vibrant social life of Lichfield for dreary seclusion. For although it stood just two miles from the busy coaching road between London and Chester, the quiet little town could only be reached by a narrow, winding and lonely track across barren wilderness.

Named Sutton (Old English for South Settlement) because it was the town directly south of its bigger neighbor, Lichfield, and Coldfield for the bleak and inhospitable heath that lay between the two, Sutton Coldfield had acquired a reputation for hard drinking and lawlessness. The expanse of open common that bordered the town was notorious for robberies; travelers who did not meet a highwayman on horseback demanding their money were as likely to meet a dead one hanging from a gibbet. Those who dared to cross the moors on foot ran the risk of disappearing forever into a bog or into an inn. One traveler, a woman peddler laden with jewelry, paused for refreshment at a remote tavern and never reemerged; her bones were discovered years later beneath an enclosed
wooden bench. So while many of the local people worked hard in the district’s mills, producing knives, ax blades and gun barrels for the traders of Birmingham, others made less honest use of those products to earn their living.

It was little wonder that the townsfolk kept mainly within town boundaries. Certainly Sutton Coldfield itself boasted a number of fine houses, a handsome church, a reputable boys’grammar school and even a book club. But the dearth of other diversions—there were no concerts, plays or assemblies—left the inhabitants with little sport beyond drinking. One resident, writing to
The Gentleman’s Magazine
in 1762, boasted that the town’s citizens were such “strangers to gaming and whoring” that there had been only “one kept mistress in the place these forty years.” But he was quickly contradicted by another inhabitant who replied that far from there being a lack of kept mistresses, “I hardly ever knew the town without one.” The controversy was plainly the most exciting occurrence there for decades for the dialogue was published as a pamphlet with a title page containing the wry motto: “Here Dullness, Universal Dullness Reigns, / O’er brainless Heads and desolated Plains.”

For the town’s newest resident, unpacking her clothes in her boarding school, the next three years promised little variation. Since she was sleeping in a dormitory once again, and in all likelihood sharing a bed, with her few possessions stored inside a box, her days would be little different from her former life in the Foundling Hospital. Except that now the routine of lessons, meals and visits to church was not even alleviated by singing or dancing.

Edgeworth described Sabrina’s school as “very reputable.” No doubt her fellow scholars were daughters of the local gentry sent to perfect their skills in writing, arithmetic, needlework, music and dancing. There was a wide choice of such schools, usually run by a schoolmistress and a few assistants, devoted chiefly to preparing young girls for a suitable marriage. They offered precisely the kind of female education that Day professed to despise.

With few opportunities for pleasure, and the specter of the town’s workhouse to remind her of her fate if she did not succeed, Sabrina had little alternative but to work hard at her studies. The monotony of her humdrum
days would be enlivened only by letters and visits from Day on the rare occasions when he broke his journeys between Lichfield and Birmingham or London to cross the forbidding heath and check on the progress of his pupil. Since he paid her school fees and promised her advancement if she progressed, he remained the most significant force in her life. Spending her weekends and holidays incarcerated inside the school, watching out of a window for a glimpse of a tall, stoop-shouldered, lank-haired visitor, she must have felt herself all but forgotten.

Meanwhile, life in Lichfield was anything but dull. Once Day had placed Sabrina out of sight in Sutton Coldfield, he found no trouble in simultaneously putting her out of mind. His trust in the power of education had “faltered,” according to Anna Seward. His trials had all proved “fruitless.” But if he could not fashion an ideal wife through careful tutoring, then he would simply have to fall back on finding one ready-made. As luck would have it, his friend Edgeworth had already found the supreme candidate: Honora Sneyd.

As with all Day’s romantic interests, the relationship began badly. Despite visiting the palace almost daily for the best part of a year, Day had proved impervious to Honora’s fabled beauty and lauded talents. When Anna Seward had eulogized her pupil’s aptitude for learning and graceful elegance, Day had yawned politely. When Edgeworth had poured out his longings for the clever, beautiful woman of his dreams, Day had pompously reminded him of his domestic duties. But after months of listening to Seward and Edgeworth lavishly praising Honora’s accomplishments, Day finally began to perceive her attributes for himself.

For all her slender and bronzed arms, her disconcerting skill at dancing, her troubling pleasure in fashionable clothes and her polished manners, Day now grudgingly admitted that nineteen-year-old Honora might just possess the necessary qualifications to become his preferred partner—provided she underwent a rigorous retraining in the Rousseau manner and subject to passing the usual trials. It was, the lovesick Edgeworth observed, the strangest romance. Utterly confounded by his friend’s indifference to his loved one’s charms, Edgeworth wrote, “few courtships ever began between such young people with so little appearance of romance.”

Edgeworth’s exasperation was understandable. Coming from a family of renowned good looks and substantial means, Honora had already won a string of admirers. A powerful dynasty, the Sneyd family had been established in Staffordshire since medieval times. Honora’s father, Edward Sneyd, was the third son of one branch of the family that owned an estate at Bishton, a village in Staffordshire, near the border with Wales. Since he was unlikely to inherit the family fortune, he had enlisted in the Royal Horse Guards, married the daughter of an Essex vicar, Susanna Cooke, and set up home in Lichfield. Over the next twelve years Mrs. Sneyd gave birth to ten daughters who arrived in unvaried succession followed, finally, by two sons—the rather belated heir and a spare—named Edward and William. Four of the girls died in infancy, but their six sisters—Anne, Lucy, Mary, Honora, Elizabeth and Charlotte—all thrived. Mrs. Sneyd did not. Shortly after William’s birth, in 1757, she died—exhausted—leaving her husband beside himself with grief and surrounded by eight motherless children under the age of eleven.

Just as Honora had been welcomed into the Seward family, her siblings were parceled out among family and friends in the manner of foundling babies being dispersed to foster mothers—albeit into rather more comfortable circumstances. Growing up in their scattered families, the Sneyd sisters attracted widespread sympathy and uniform admiration. Three of the girls—Lucy, Honora and Elizabeth—were acclaimed as “celebrated beauties.” Some—not least Anna Seward—considered Honora to be the most beautiful of them all.

Initially, Honora had basked in Seward’s possessive affection, sharing her love of reading and her ideas on life with slavish enthusiasm. Over time, Honora struggled to escape this suffocating adoration and developed her own ideas of how she wanted to live her life—and with whom. Although she would always maintain a calm and demure exterior, Honora could be just as determined in her quiet, cool manner to get whatever she wanted as Anna with her fiery declamations. Just as Day had discovered with Sabrina, when the beautifully crafted woman came to life on her pedestal, she began to view the world with her own eyes.

Courted by a succession of admirers, Honora had been pursued by a young clerk, John André, a few months her junior, during a summer trip to Buxton in 1769. André charmed Honora and—more importantly—
won the approval of Anna, her ever-present chaperone. The couple became engaged. On his return to London, André struck up a regular correspondence with the palace. In accordance with the usual protocol, his impassioned letters were addressed to Anna, and it was she who replied, rather than his modest fiancée who occasionally scribbled a hurried postscript. As André and Seward competed to extol the virtues of their darling Honora—fashioning together a perfect romance—the object of their enthusiasm barely noticed. Having filled page after page with devoted praises, André lamented that “very short indeed, Honora, was thy last postscript!” Indeed, when Edgeworth returned to Lichfield at the end of 1770 and met André at a palace party, he thought André was paying court to Anna. Obviously Edgeworth and Honora only had eyes for each other. It was plainly a relief—to Honora at least—when the couple’s lackluster engagement was summarily ended by Mrs. André and Mrs. Seward at the beginning of 1771.