How to Create the Perfect Wife (48 page)

22
   
At one point, as a seventeen-year-old:
Keir, pp. 21–22.

23
   
During the long university holidays:
Keir, pp. 32–33.

24
   
Day judged that by the “manly exercise of walking”:
Kippis.

24
   
Alone on these country expeditions:
TD, Commonplace book, Essex RO, D/DBa Z40.

25
   
Day was “wounded by the caprice”:
Seward (1804), pp. 20–23. Seward reproduces the elegy to Laura. Day’s friend at Oxford, William Jones, was also inspired by Petrarch to write an elegy entitled Laura. Cannon, ed., pp. 26–27.

25
   
“O gentle Lady of the West”:
TD, Commonplace book, Essex RO, D/DBa Z40; the poem is reproduced in Keir, pp. 42–44.

26
   
“the Habits of the Mind”:
TD to JB, n.d. [c. September–October 1768] Essex RO, D/DBa C10.

26
   
As the second eldest son:
Baptism register, St. Andrew’s Holborn, July 28, 1746. John Bicknell was not baptized with the middle name Laurens, as is commonly stated; this is a confusion with his son John Laurens Bicknell. General family background is from Bicknell, although this is inaccurate in places.

27
   
Originally the base for the Knights Templar:
Williamson, J. Bruce,
The History of the Temple
(London, 1925);
Middle Temple Hall: Notes Upon Its History
(London, 1928); and
Notes on the Middle Temple in the Nineteenth Century
(London, 1936); Bellot, Hugh H. L.,
The Inner and Middle Temple: Legal, Literary and Historic Associations
(London, 1902); Herber, Mark,
Legal London: A Pictorial History
(Chichester, 2007); Blackham, Robert James,
Wig and Gown, The Story of the Temple
(London, 1932).

27
   
Bicknell duly enjoyed his dinners:
Buttery Book, 1759–1772, MT archives, MT7/BUB/2.

27
   
James Boswell, the lawyer, diarist and notorious libertine:
Boswell, James,
Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763,
ed. Pottle, Frederick A. (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 234 and 49.

27
   
One female acquaintance would later:
AS to George Hardinge, March 5, 1789. Seward (1811), vol. 2, p. 250. The Buttery Book for the time shows Hardinge dined at the same time as JB. Buttery Book, 1759–72, MT archives, MT7/BUB/2.

28
   
Born in 1744, the second son:
Edgeworth, RL and M, vol. 1, pp. 21–22. Details of Edgeworth’s life are from his memoirs unless otherwise stated. Other sources include Butler, Harriet Jessie and Harold Edgeworth; and Clarke, although the latter is mostly culled from the memoirs.

29
   
So Edgeworth was packed off: Alumni Oxonienses, 1715–1886,
p. 408.

29
   
She was pregnant:
Black Bourton parish records, February 21, 1764. Edgeworth and Anna Maria were married by license with the consent of her parents. She was then 20. The baptism register shows Anna Maria was born on October 20, 1743. In 1761, when Edgeworth arrived in the household, her sisters were aged 16, 15, 7 and 6. Dick was “received” into the parish church on December 25, 1765, having been “previously privately baptised,” according to the baptism register.

30
   But although she was “prudent”: Edgeworth, RL and M, vol. 1, p. 179.

30
   
Anna Maria as “always crying”:
Butler, Marilyn (1972), p. 37. The description was crossed out of the original manuscript of Edgeworth, Frances Anne,
A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth,
which was edited by her stepmother and sisters.

30
   
The tireless inventor bombarded the newly founded Society for the Arts:
Letters RLE to the RSA, RSA archives PR.GE/110/14/134; 22/146; 23/7 and 32 and 54; 24/86; 26/75; 30/136 and 137. The society is now the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, known as the RSA. RLE was awarded the silver medal in 1768 and the gold medal in 1769.

31
   
Having heard that Darwin shared his interest:
Edgeworth, RL and M, vol. 1, pp. 156–58.

31
   
They took the name the Lunar Society:
Edgeworth, RL and M, vol. 1, pp. 180–81. For more information on the Lunar Society see Uglow; Schofield; Robinson; Herbert L. Ganter, “William Small, Jefferson’s Beloved Teacher,” in
The William and Mary Quarterly,
4 (1947), pp. 505–11; King-Hele (2007). Dr. Small taught mathematics to Thomas Jefferson when he was professor of natural philosophy at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. More background on Darwin can be found in King-Hele (1999).

32
   
Dashing off a letter:
ED to Matthew Boulton, n.d. [summer 1766], in King-Hele (2007), p. 74. Darwin meant Edgeworth’s father-in-law’s home at Black Bourton when he referred to Oxfordshire.

32
   
Into Edgeworth’s exhilarating:
Edgeworth, RL and M, vol. 1, pp. 175–79; vol. 2, p. 102.

32
   
Edgeworth would later compare:
Edgeworth, RL and M, vol. 1, pp. 175–77.

34
   
“calculating the vibrations”:
TD to RLE, Nov 1769, from Avignon, in RLE,
Memoirs,
vol. 1, p. 214.

CHAPTER 3 : SOPHIE

35
   
Enjoying a stroll in the gardens:
The story of Darwin’s ruse to meet Rousseau is told by his grandson, the naturalist Charles Darwin, in Darwin, p. 47. The story is also described, slightly differently, in Howitt, p. 513. Background on Rousseau generally and his visit to England specifically is from Edmonds and Eidinow; Damrosch; Broome; and Rousseau (2008). Letters between JJR, Hume and Davenport are in Rousseau (1965–2012), vols. 29–33. Born in Geneva in 1712, Rousseau was brought up by his father, a watchmaker. He enjoyed no formal education until the age of 10, when he was sent to live with a pastor in a nearby village. Although he was apprenticed to an engraver, he ran away at 16, and for the next 14 years he traveled Europe and drifted from one menial job to another with no apparent ambition until settling in Paris at the age of 30. He was 38 when he was suddenly propelled to literary and philosophical acclaim by winning first prize in a provincial writing competition for his essay
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.

36
   
“All the world are eager to see”:
Quoted in Edmonds and Eidinow, p. 120. Rousseau was called “John James Rousseau” in
London Evening Post,
January 31, 1766.

36
   
Thérèse Lavasseur until she was escorted across the Channel:
During the 10-day journey to Dover, Boswell enjoyed intimacies with Thérèse on 13 occasions—or so he would boast in his diary. Edmonds and Eidinow, pp. 144–45.

36
   
Rousseau rightly suspected:
In typically paranoid fashion, Rousseau had decided that Hume’s efforts to negotiate a pension for him from George III was a trick to humiliate him and that Hume and Davenport were both involved in a spoof letter published in London in the
St. James’s Chronicle
of April 1–3, 1766. The letter, purported to be written by the king of Prussia, was actually concocted by Horace Walpole. Walpole confessed himself the author in a letter to Horace Mann. Rousseau (1965–2012), vol. 30, p. 83.

37
   
As a father, who gave up all five children:
Rousseau (2008), p. 335. The children were born in the late 1740s and early 1750s. Rousseau would later try to justify giving away his offspring, but it was an act that would haunt him all his life.

37
   Émile
has been described as the most important work:
Wokler, p. 2; Darling, p. 17. Darling offers a clear and inspiring exposition of the evolution of educational systems from Rousseau to the present day.

37
   
at birth children’s minds resemble “white Paper”:
Locke, John,
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
(London, 1693) p. 261.

37
   
“Everything is good”:
Rousseau, (2010), p. 161. I have used the most recent translation of
Émile,
edited by Bloom and Kelly and published in 2010, for quotations except in a few places where the Boyd translation, which is an abridged version, seemed more expressive.

38
   
“I hate books”:
Rousseau (2010), p. 331.

38
   
Although
Émile
was not the first parenting manual:
Rousseau’s visionary belief in placing children at the center of education and his advocacy of teaching through demonstration and experiment—essentially “learning by doing”—have remained pillars of educational theory. After his death, early Rousseau disciples set up pioneering schools based on his methods across Europe. Their ideas crossed the Atlantic to America in the twentieth century and were exported from the US to Asia. Then two centuries after his memorable visit to England, during the 1960s Rousseau’s teaching methods were adopted in Britain and remain—despite countercampaigns—the prevailing educational system. The Rousseau vision of children as innocent individuals with distinct characteristics and rights is still the dominant world view. See Darling; Jimack; and Moncrieff.

39
   
The Prince and Princess of Wurtemberg:
Douthwaite, pp. 134–45. Douthwaite also describes the experiments by Edgeworth and Day as well as the story of Madame Manon Roland, who brought up her daughter Eudora, born in 1781, according to the Rousseau system. The letter from Prince Louis-Eugène to JJR, October 4, 1763, is in Rousseau (1965–2012), vol. 18, pp. 13–16.

39
   
Another enthusiast, a Swiss banker
: Rousseau (1965–2012), vol. 46, pp. 235–37. The notes in Rousseau’s
Correspondance Complète
identify one of the girls, the source of the story, as Marie de Bourdeille (née Roussel) who was born in 1758 and married le comte de Bourdeille in 1781. She related the story to a friend of Rousseau’s, Mme de Gauthier, in 1790.

39
   
When
Émile
was published in English:
Background information on the changes in children’s education and upbringing can be found in Stone, pp. 254–99; Fletcher; Cunningham; and Jimack.
Émile
was published in English in two rival translations:
Emilius, or an essay on education by John James Rousseau,
translated by Thomas Nugent, and
Emilius and Sophia, or a new system of education,
translated by William Kenrick. Both books give 1763 as their date of publication although one at least was in the shops by late 1762.

39
   
In one painting,
An Experiment on a Bird: Wright,
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump,
1768. The figure in the foreground with a stopwatch is thought to be Darwin and the two boys his eldest sons, Charles and Erasmus. See Daniels, Stephen,
Joseph Wright
(London, 1999), pp. 37–39, and King-Hele (1999), p. 83.