How to Create the Perfect Wife (8 page)

It was not all fun and games, of course. There were hardships to bear and hard knocks to withstand. Just as Rousseau recommended that his Émile should enjoy the bounties of nature, so he must endure the miseries nature could unleash too. Dick therefore had to be inured to hunger, thirst and tiredness, to suffer pain and to withstand extremes of climate. Likewise he had to be conditioned to be afraid of nothing. Rousseau proposed that a child must be introduced early to darkness, loud noises and strange creatures, such as spiders. With his practical, no-nonsense manner, this
approach appealed to Edgeworth, although he did not record precisely how he accustomed Dick to creepy crawlies and night terrors.

Naturally, of course, books played no part in Dick’s educational program, since Rousseau had pronounced reading “the plague of childhood” and books “the instrument of greatest misery.” Only if Dick himself picked up a book and demanded to learn how to read should he be taught, the master had decreed. It was this aspect of the Rousseau creed that Edgeworth found hardest to accept. Having himself learned to read by the age of five and enjoyed books avidly all his life, he worried that Dick would suffer by this lack of formal teaching. But Day, Dick’s eager assistant tutor, was quick to reassure him. “Never trouble yourself about Dick’s reading and writing,” he wrote in one letter, “he will learn it sooner or later if you let him alone.” Devoid of books, therefore, Dick must learn from observation and experience.

So Dick grew up brave and tough, bright and inquisitive under his father’s indulgent eye. “He had all the virtues of a child bred in the hut of a savage,” wrote Edgeworth, “and all the knowledge of
things,
which could well be acquired at an early age by a boy bred in civilized society.” Dick, of course, had more opportunities to learn about
“things” than
most children. Standing on tiptoe beside his father’s elbow at his workbench, Dick could watch wide-eyed as his father constructed his latest magical contraption or performed astounding tricks with magnets. The crowded workshop with its vibrating horse and half-built carriages was a perfect playroom, a small child’s paradise. There was always something new to see.

Inspired by conversations with Darwin, who was in correspondence with the Scottish engineer James Watt, Edgeworth was currently engrossed in building a wagon powered by steam, effectively a prototype train, and had fathomed the principles of a tank with caterpillar tracks. In 1768, Darwin told a friend, Edgeworth had “nearly completed a Waggon drawn by Fire—and a Walking Table which will carry 40 Men.” Observing these fire-breathing wonders, Dick became fascinated by mechanics and skilled at invention. He would later become one of the youngest-ever recipients of a medal from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, winning a silver medal when he was just fourteen.

And yet, to Edgeworth’s bewilderment, young Dick proved totally impervious to authority. Free to do exactly as he pleased, indulged in his toddler tantrums and handed everything he demanded, the “child bred in the hut of a savage” was becoming a perfect monster. There was only one person whom Dick felt any inclination to obey, and that was his father. Having spent barely any time in Edgeworth’s presence during his first three years, Dick was now reveling in the full glory of his brilliant father’s undivided attention.

Although Edgeworth was surprised that Dick’s inborn goodness should express itself in such a rebellious manner, he plowed on regardless with Rousseau’s program, with Thomas Day as his chief cheerleader. Just like other parents who were valiantly attempting to apply the Rousseau method with literal exactness, Edgeworth was discovering not only that his son failed to match his particular vision of perfection but that the creature he was bringing to life was proving almost impossible to control.

Rousseau himself was generally bemused when zealous parents tried to apply his educational system to living subjects and professed himself largely indifferent to their success or failure. He did discuss baby Sophie’s welfare in letters exchanged with the Wurtembergs, and he would later take pride in Phoebe Davenport’s progress. But when other enthusiasts wrote to him for endorsement or advice he responded by saying that
Émile
was simply a philosophical text supporting his doctrine that humans were born naturally good, and not a practical manual for child rearing. “I cannot believe that you took the book which bears this name for a real treatise on education,” he exclaimed to one puzzled parent. “You are quite right to say it is impossible to create an Emile.” And in truth his response was perfectly just since the book is best understood as a general theory with illustrative examples. Taken as a broad approach toward a child-centered education based on learning through discovery, Rousseau’s treatise was—and is—a powerful force for good; taken literally it could become a recipe for producing little savages.

Many of those watching Dick’s laissez-faire education from the sidelines did their best to warn his father of impending disaster. Edgeworth met with “opposition” from friends and relatives and “ridicule” from “all quarters,” he admitted. But if ever Edgeworth voiced any doubts about
the practicality of the system, Day always encouraged him to continue with it. For even as Edgeworth was beginning to perceive some flaws in a literal interpretation of the Rousseau approach, Day was becoming more and more enthusiastic.

The educational program had been progressing for about a year when Edgeworth decided to take Dick on a visit to the family seat in Ireland. Naturally he invited Day, his assistant tutor, to join them. Still thwarted in his desire to travel the Continent by his stepfather, Day readily agreed. He had scoured the West Country and Wales for a suitable candidate for his wife-training scheme—his “gentle Lady of the West”—but perhaps, he considered, he had not been looking far enough to the west. Setting off in early summer 1768, the trio left behind Anna Maria, who had given birth to a daughter, baptized Maria, at Black Bourton, on January 1 that year. There would be no attempt to subvert the education of Maria Edgeworth, the future novelist, to her lasting gratitude. With Edgeworth at the reins of his customized phaeton and Day and four-year-old Dick seated behind, the trio hared off on the main road north for Chester to embark for Ireland.

Eager to provide some light entertainment to break the tedium of the road trip, Edgeworth suggested a practical joke based on the Restoration comedy
The Beaux’ Stratagem,
in which two young men attempt to ensnare an heiress by posing as a wealthy gentleman and his servant. Day, it was agreed, would pretend to be “a very
odd
gentleman”—a role that did not demand great acting skills—and Dick—in an equally undemanding role—would play his son, “a most extraordinary child.” Edgeworth, meanwhile, would pretend to be a servant who was slimily obsequious to his master’s face but rude and arrogant behind his back. In the stage play, the two young rakes enact their deceit when they break their journey at an inn in Lichfield. In Edgeworth’s version, the curtain rose on the farce when the three travelers stopped at an inn in the town of Eccleshall in Staffordshire.

Thundering up to the door of the inn, Edgeworth screeched to a halt and employed his innovatory device to release the horses from the carriage with a nonchalant flick of the wrist. As a crowd gathered to ogle the
strange vehicle and its equally strange passengers—“sitting composedly in the open carriage without horses”—Edgeworth lifted down the peculiarly attired Dick—in his trousers and bare feet—and then gave his arm to Day. Gleefully entering into the spirit of the jest, the fearless Dick performed several acrobatic feats, such as leaping from the carriage into his father’s open arms, as the curious crowd grew.

Strutting into the inn, Edgeworth ordered a meager supper for his master and a lavish spread for himself. But just as Edgeworth was devouring his banquet in the kitchen, the ruse was exposed. A familiar voice hailed him from the dining room, and Edgeworth turned in embarrassment to see Erasmus Darwin, who had arrived at the inn with his friend John Whitehurst, a clockmaker from Derby. The game was up. A sheepish Edgeworth had to confess the whole scam, and the two parties joined company for a more conventional meal in the dining room.

As Edgeworth, Darwin and Whitehurst launched into an animated discussion on the latest developments in mechanics, Day sat silently nursing his water and frugal supper. Making no attempt to join the conversation, since the topic was not to his taste, he remained aloof throughout the meal. Gregarious and effusive as ever, Darwin assumed that Edgeworth’s gruff young friend was truly the misanthrope he had played in the drama. It was only when the diners got up to leave and the conversation turned to a more philosophical topic that Day suddenly sprang to life and launched into one of his monologues. Darwin was impressed by the knowledge and eloquence of the nineteen-year-old youth and extended an open invitation to visit him in Lichfield. A new recruit had been drawn into the orbit of the Lunar group.

For now, Edgeworth, Day and Dick pressed on to Ireland. When the three weary travelers finally dismounted from the phaeton in front of Edgeworthstown House, the family’s mansion on the edge of the village of Edgeworthstown in County Longford, they created quite a spectacle—certainly in the eyes of Edgeworth’s reserved father and sophisticated sister. Having last seen Dick as a one-year-old, they discovered that he had turned into an unruly, spoiled little boy who answered to none but his father. Returning home after more than three years’ absence, Edgeworth was evidently as unconventional and rebellious as ever. And then there
was the pocked, shy, ungainly and disheveled youth whom Edgeworth brought with him. Of the three odd houseguests it was Day, of course, who would create the most upsets.

Quite why Day came to the conclusion during the course of that summer that Margaret might slip smoothly into the role of his ideal wife is beyond comprehension. With her aristocratic manner, her busy social calendar and her taste for fine clothes and fine food, Margaret was not only the complete opposite of the humble country maiden he had been seeking, she was also utterly different from the meek and simple girl that Rousseau had conjured as a soulmate for Émile. Nonetheless, with Rousseau’s
Émile
as his trusty manual, Day came to believe that he could mold Margaret to suit her allotted role.

Rousseau had recognized as he wrote
Émile
that the free-thinking young man he created would need a very special partner to share his life. In typically contradictory style, he warns his readers not to imagine “a model of perfection who cannot exist” and then he tantalizes them by doing just that. “It is not good for man to be alone,” he writes, in a direct reference to the story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis, then adds, “We have promised him a companion. She has to be given to him.” And with a playful nod to his fellow philosophes, he names his ideal woman Sophie, from the Greek word for wisdom.

In the quest to find Sophie, Rousseau sends Émile into polite urban society, to spend a year amid the despised temptations of Paris, before he airily reveals “we have looked for her where I was quite sure she was not to be found.” Instead Émile must scour the countryside to track down Sophie. Tramping over hills and fields on foot, Émile finally finds the girl of his dreams living with her parents in a modest mountainside house in the heart of provincial France. “Let us give Émile his Sophie,” announces Rousseau. “Let us bring this sweet girl to life.” Four years younger than Émile, sixteen-year-old Sophie belongs to a well-born family living a simple but virtuous pastoral life. Bright but not overly intelligent, Sophie is sweet-natured, hardworking and chaste. Pleasing to look at but not exceptionally beautiful, Sophie dresses modestly, sings sweetly, cooks plainly and dances tolerably well. Émile, of course, falls in love with her
immediately. But before she can assume her destined role in life—as a household drudge in a country hovel devoted to her husband’s whims—Sophie obviously requires a customized education of her own.

Rousseau has no hesitation in asserting that women are born equal to men. “In everything not connected with sex the woman is man,” he declares. “She has the same organs, the same needs, the same faculties.” Indeed his own preference for intelligent and forthright women to whom he could kneel in happy subservience suggests he regarded women as superior beings. But in the fictional world that Émile and Sophie inhabit, women are created only to please men. No matter that they might be just as clever and capable as boys, girls must be shaped from infancy to fulfill their subservient role.

So while Rousseau outlines the most radical and progressive education for young Émile, he proposes the most banal and regressive education for Sophie—even by the standards of his most reactionary critics. Instead of being encouraged to run free and indulge her curiosity like Émile, little Sophie plays passively indoors with her dolls, for, according to Rousseau, “the time will come when she will be her own doll.” Instead of learning through discovery, Sophie is taught to draw, sew, count and—at a later stage even than Émile—to read, since “almost all little girls learn to read and write with repugnance.”

But the most important lesson that girls must learn as they grow up is to submit their will entirely to male figures of authority. Sophie must therefore get used to performing whatever pointless chore her tutor might suggest and then break off in the middle whenever he instructs her to do a different task. “From this habitual constraint comes the docility that women need all their lives,” Rousseau explains, since once Sophie is married “she ought to learn early to endure even injustice and to bear a husband’s wrongs without complaining.”

Not surprisingly, Rousseau’s antiquated ideas about women met with fierce opposition from some of the leading women of his day. The poet and socialite Frances Greville praised
Émile,
a friend reported, “but she and several others don’t like what he says of women, nor his notions about them.” Mary Wollstonecraft would later condemn Rousseau’s ideas in her pioneering manifesto
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
in 1792. Girls
were conditioned to play with dolls—it was nurture not nature—Wollstonecraft would insist: “As for Rousseau’s remarks . . . that they have naturally, that is from birth, independent of education, a fondness for dolls, dressing, and talking—they are so puerile as not to merit a serious refutation. . . . Girls and boys, in short, would play harmlessly together, if the distinction of sex was not inculcated long before nature makes any difference.” Tellingly, most parents who were inspired to educate their daughters according to Rousseau’s ideas chose to emulate the education of Émile rather than Sophie. But for Day, it all made perfect sense.