Wendy Moore's How to Create The Perfect Wife

 

In my last blog entry I mentioned Thomas Day, poet and intellectual of latter 18th Century England. He wrote a series of abolitionist texts for which he is rightly praised. No sympathizer to the American Revolution, he cannily pointed out the weeping-blood hypocrisy of a screed that cries liberty when so many on its soil are enslaved, hostages in chains to the greed of those who would trade in human flesh. If he is known to the larger public today it is through tweets and memes that take snippets of his works and circulate them through social media. Thus far, thus well. Thomas Day, however, for one who punctures the hypocrisy of others, or even for one who doesn’t, is a far more ambiguous and even dark figure in his own personal life.


A brilliant book, Wendy Moore’s How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate relates Day’s search for his dream wife. The ladies of his class – the uppercrust- were too decadent for him he would claim, too spoiled by privilege. This led him to “adopt” (yes) two young girls – he simple picked them out from a lineup at the Foundling Hospital and brought them home with him. His intention was to train them up by Rousseauist principles with one of them bound to succeed in the marathon of tests inflicted upon them and so come to bear the honor of becoming his wife.

What marathon of tests might these be? Suffering extreme hunger and cold were among them, proving her boundless faith in him and loyalty. Another was not flinching when he shot a pistol into her skirts. I’ll save the rest of them, as well as the fates of Sabrina and Lucretia, for your reading pleasure, for Wendy Moore does not disappoint.

So whilst admirably decrying enslavement based on skin color, he seemed utterly unaware that he was also abusing the most vulnerable members of his own English society based on gender, for his whims and caprices, which completely denied the agency and humanity of his victims.

I agree that the snippets taken from Day’s writings are timely, salutary, and welcome in the present state of affairs in the US and the world at large as well. Day knew already that Black Lives Matter. In so far as we quote him, however, we should also be aware of the larger biography of whom we are taking as an authority on the freedom and the dignity of each human being. Sabrina and Lucretia most likely did not come away from their intimate knowledge of him as a champion for the downtrodden when it came to his own will and desires.