How to Create the Perfect Wife (3 page)

One of about a hundred boarding pupils, young Thomas quickly learned his place in the school pecking order. Within the picturesque medieval quadrangles and sprawling grounds, thuggery reigned—among masters and pupils alike—as in any such school of its day. The headmaster, Dr. Lewis Crusius, had carved out a reputation for “ability and discipline,” and the latter skill was studiously copied down the school hierarchy. So the masters administered regular floggings to erring pupils, the prefects beat the boys under their command and the older boys felt free to batter the younger ones in their turn.

Surviving this ritualized violence was regarded as an integral part of an upper-class boy’s education. School floggings were public spectacles in which both the victim and the spectators were expected to withstand the experience with courage and stoicism. Customs such as tossing newcomers in a blanket or “roasting” small boys in front of a fire and the numerous inducements and punishments that surrounded the practice of “fagging”—in which younger boys were forced to work effectively as slaves for older pupils—were tolerated and indulged by the school administration. Along with these beatings and torments, the boys had to endure extreme physical hardship. Their meals were meager and unpalatable, the dormitories were draughty and crowded and the days were long. At Charterhouse, the boys were dragged from their shared beds at five each morning and only allowed to crawl back under the covers late at night.

Thrown into this brutal and austere regime, Thomas—the mollycoddled infant—not only survived but thrived. Rising early in the chilly dormitory to a breakfast of cold gray porridge, he drew strength from the philosophy and lifestyle expounded by the Stoics. As he was being pushed and shoved on packed classroom benches, he was inspired by the legendary heroes of classical literature and history and their feats of physical and mental courage. Like the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus, young Thomas aspired to treat luxury and ease with contempt; like the former slave Epictetus, who became a Stoic philosopher, he steeled himself to accept adversity. If other boys grumbled at the discomforts, Thomas took pride in enduring hardship and relished the simple life.

Progressing through the forms, Thomas outpaced his schoolfellows in height and strength. He even gained a reputation as a champion at boxing
in the officially sanctioned boxing ring where boys gathered to jeer at scuffles in the dust. Just like his mother facing down the charging bull, he learned to stand his ground against bigger and stronger opponents. In one match, the boys cheered Thomas on as he pounded another pugilist mercilessly with his bare knuckles. But just on the point of pummeling his rival into submission he suddenly dropped his fists and helped his opponent to his feet, announcing that the match was an uneven contest. Pride in his hardiness and physique would always compete with his sense of fair play.

No doubt his fame helped in attracting the admiration of older schoolboys. Thomas formed strong friendships at school that would last all his life and help to compensate for the lost intimacy with his mother. In particular, he made friends with John Bicknell, the clever son of a London law family, who was two years his senior, and with William Seward, the only son of a London brewer, who was a year above him. Indeed one version of the boxing story had Seward as the sorry loser of the bout. Sharing a passion for literature and classical history, as well as a youthful compulsion to right injustice, these three forged a firm bond.

A pale youth with delicate features, Bicknell left Charterhouse two years before Day to follow in the family tradition and embark on a career in law. Without the luxury of an independent income waiting for him, Bicknell needed a profession to earn his living. At sixteen he enrolled at Middle Temple, one of the four ancient Inns of Court between Holborn and the Thames, which trained young men to become barristers. Studying his law books just a short stroll from his old school, he remained Day’s closest friend and confidant.

Together they nursed literary ambitions and dreamed of publishing success. With typical teenagers’ contempt for convention and an urge to put the world to rights, they wrote a poem, “The Triumph of Politeness.” A witty satire poking fun at vanity and fashion, it was published in a London newspaper in 1764, under the pseudonym Knife and Fork, when Day was still a schoolboy and Bicknell a law student.

Although Day left Charterhouse for Oxford University before he reached sixteen in 1764, at the same time as Seward, it was Bicknell with whom he remained close. As one contemporary put it,
Bicknell was “in the strictest sense, the friend and companion of his youth.” Ever ready to humor Day’s increasingly strident views, whether on conduct he despised or individuals he disliked, Bicknell would always be willing to fall in with his plans. Like a knife and fork, they were a well-matched pair.

From the summit of Shotover Hill on the approach from London to Oxford, the first sight of the city’s white spires glittering in the summer sunshine suggested a tranquil haven perfect for industrious study and philosophical contemplation. Arriving at Oxford in the summer of 1764 eager to indulge his love of the classics, Day soon discovered that appearances could be deceptive.

Like its rival, Cambridge, Oxford had become virtually moribund by the middle of the 1700s. With student numbers at their lowest-ever level and college funds almost depleted, academic study was notable by its absence. The colleges were half-empty, the professors were halfhearted and lectures and tutorials had become a rarity. Edward Gibbon, who would later write
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
had been admitted to Oxford in the decade before Day’s arrival. Gibbon described the few classes he attended as “devoid of profit or pleasure” and summed up the fourteen months he spent at the university as the “the most idle and unprofitable of my life.”

The decline and fall in standards at Oxford was indeed so profound that most students spent their days in an endless, carefree round of drinking and carousing. For students in the top two tiers of the university hierarchy—the nobles and the gentlemen-commoners who paid the highest fees—the day began at a leisurely hour when a servitor—a poor student on the lowest rung—brought breakfast to their rooms. The rest of the morning was devoted to dressing for dinner, which was served in the college dining hall at one or two in the afternoon. This was generally followed by several further courses—a gargantuan spread of puddings, cakes, fruit and cheese washed down with copious amounts of wine—which were usually consumed in a friend’s rooms over the space of several hours. What remained of the day and night was spent in a spree of drinking wagers and drunken brawls in the coffeehouses and taverns that abounded within the city walls. With little time for study in this demanding timetable, any
spare hours were generally taken up with private lessons to acquire social graces such as dancing, fencing and horse-riding, or with seducing women of the town in the lanes and parks that were notorious for lewd scenes.

For a healthy, normal, vigorous teenage boy, released from the austerity and discipline of an all-male boarding school, such temptations might have proven overwhelming. But not for Thomas Day. Arriving in Oxford in his black silk gown and velvet mortarboard a few weeks before his sixteenth birthday on June 1, 1764, Thomas enrolled at Corpus Christi College as a gentleman-commoner and looked forward to some serious study and philosophical enlightenment.

One of the oldest and smallest of the Oxford colleges, Corpus Christi provided a calm sanctuary of sunlit quadrangles and cool cloisters nestled in the shelter of the city’s medieval walls. But the college’s serene surroundings belied a reputation for misbehavior as outrageous as that of its rivals. One undergraduate had recently been forced to leave the university after lighting a bonfire of books and furniture in the Fellows’ Common Room. Another student had been caught smuggling a woman into his rooms by disguising her in a scholar’s black gown. And in the not-too-distant future, the college chaplain would be reprimanded, albeit mildly, for “misbehaviour, drunkenness, extravagance, and other irregularities.”

Settling into his suite of rooms in the Gentlemen Commoners’ Quad after the cramped and spartan regime of Charterhouse, Thomas could have been forgiven for succumbing to the pleasures of university life. As a gentleman-commoner, paying hefty fees to the college, he was entitled to all the privileges of his rank including the services of a personal servitor to bring him coffee and rolls each morning and to wait on him at dinner in the dining hall. To cover his expenses at Oxford, Day most probably received a quarterly allowance provided out of his trust fund. Although his future inheritance remained in the grip of his penny-pinching stepfather, these college funds would still have totaled what Edward Gibbon described as “more money than a schoolboy had ever seen.” But despite all his newfound liberty and spending power, he made no attempt to indulge in university diversions, for the excesses Day encountered at Oxford only reinforced his distaste for the trappings of wealth and luxury. His enthusiasm for the stoical way of life remained as steadfast as ever.

Although he fraternized with his old school chum Seward and made some new friends among the more serious students, Thomas trod a singular path and cut a pompous figure. While his fellow scholars squandered their parents’funds on fine clothes, gourmet food and vintage wines, Day lived sparingly. While other students were fitted for embroidered silk garments and spent hours at the barbers being coiffed and powdered, Thomas wore dowdy and outmoded clothes and grew his hair long. He drank water instead of wine, dined on the plainest food, rarely ate meat and even considered vegetarianism.

Most controversially of all, Thomas liked to study. As other students caroused into the night, he pored over his books. And in the absence of lectures by tutors, Thomas spouted long speeches on any conceivable topic to anyone prepared to listen. He certainly could talk. Day liked to “descant at large and at length upon whatever became the subject of conversation,” said one long-suffering friend. “From the deepest political investigation, to the most frivolous circumstance of daily life, Mr. Day found something to descant upon.” As another acquaintance put it, “Mr. Day always
talked like a book.”

In male company Day’s diatribes were grudgingly tolerated. In mixed company, his imperious lectures seemed discourteous and absurd. In particular, Day’s insistence “even in the company of women, to descant on the evils brought upon mankind by love” did him no favors with the opposite sex. Childhood confusion at his mother’s apparent betrayal in submitting to his despised stepfather had seemingly festered into suspicion of women in general. Like a brooding Hamlet, separated from his mother by a malevolent stepfather, Thomas was both enthralled and repelled by women. So while his fellow students smuggled girls into their rooms, Day was disgusted by their lascivious antics and felt awkward and uncomfortable with women.

Alone in his rooms, he poured his jumbled emotions into long, rambling letters to John Bicknell. Writing early in the morning with his hair wild and his stockings around his ankles before his servitor brought breakfast or late at night when the candle had almost burned down, Day complained about the shallowness of mutual friends and yearned for some deeper meaning in life. “An University is the finest thing in the World to compleat the Coxcomb & the Fool,” he declared after meeting a friend
of Bicknell’s who was newly arrived at Oxford. “I ask’d him to drink Tea with me tomorrow. ‘Sir I will do myself the Pleasure of waiting upon you but I never drink Tea,’” Day mimicked his friend’s friend and then exclaimed, “surely Heaven never created a greater Poppy.” Doubtless Bicknell regretted asking him to help a friend settle in.

Yet Day was easily hurt by supposed slights and craved companionship. “Explain the mystery of Seward’s breaches,” he demanded of Bicknell. When Bicknell tried to excuse their friend by blaming his aloofness on a quirk of character, Day curtly replied, “it is this Coldness of Disposition which I complain of.” He shed few tears when Seward soon after left Oxford prematurely to travel abroad.

Instead Day made friends with other misfits. One of them was Richard Warburton-Lytton, a brilliant scholar and eccentric aristocrat who had inherited a late Gothic country mansion, Knebworth House, in Hertfordshire. Shy and nearsighted—he once mistook a statue on Oxford’s Magdalen Bridge for a woman he thought was staring at him—Warburton-Lytton helped found the university’s Grecian Club, which met to debate topical matters. A lifelong friend who venerated Day’s “uncommon abilities,” he would be inspired by Day’s ideas on female education. Another new friend was William Jones, an expert linguist who would soon earn the nickname Oriental Jones. Having taught himself Hebrew and Arabic while still at school, he was busy translating the
Arabian Nights
back into its original tongue. Fellow radicals, both Jones and Warburton-Lytton were spellbound by Day and his eccentricities.

At Oxford, Day took charge of his own education. Without a set syllabus or the pressure of exams—for Day had no intention of taking his degree—he devised his own reading list. For lack of tutorials to discuss points of scholarly interest, he exchanged views with Bicknell. The pair fed their appetite for free thinking by snapping up the most controversial works of the moment. Day obtained an English translation of Voltaire’s inflammatory
Dictionnaire Philosophique
soon after its publication in 1764. Back in his room, he devoured the
Philosophical Dictionary
with its dozens of entries on everything from adultery, kissing and love to tolerance, tyranny and tears. Burned in Paris and Geneva and banned elsewhere for its criticism of the Catholic Church, it was staunchly defended by Day. “I cannot say I think it calculated to do so much Harm, as to deserve a public
Execution,” he told Bicknell. When he overheard a student in an Oxford bookshop applauding rumors that the book was to be banned in London too, Day angrily challenged him. In the manner of many censors, it turned out that the student had not read a word of the book.