Sabrina's Story

Who was Sabrina - Billet 1757 - child number 4,579

Sabrina was born in May 1757. Named Manima Butler at birth, she was found at the doors of the London Foundling Hospital at only a few months old, just one of the hundreds of poor, mostly illegitimate children who were abandoned daily. The foundling hospital had been set up by Thomas Coram in response to the ever-growing numbers of babies being left to die on the streets of Georgian London. With the population becoming more urbanised, there had been a breakdown in family structures which had acted to pressure couples to marry, along with this there were no poor laws to support single mothers, so women were left with few choices. These Illegitimate children and their mothers were viewed as a flagrant challenge to social morality as well as an economic burden. Coram’s hospital allowed women to leave their babies anonymously so that both could survive.

With her arrival at the hospital Manima was renamed Anne Kingston. This would be the second of three names she was given in the first 12 years of her life. At this period the number of children being left daily was becoming unmanageable, so Anne was sent out to be nursed out of London and then onto another site of the foundling hospital in Shrewsbury. Here she was to be educated to understand, that as a product of disgrace, she needed to be humble, deferential and subservient. it is from here that she was selected by Thomas Day for his experiment.

Who was Thomas Day

Thomas Day was 21 when he selected Sabrina for his grotesque social experiment. He was a man, who despite having great wealth was unable to secure for himself a wife by traditional means - unattractive, ungainly, of quick temper and puritanical - he was not deemed a suitable husband. This rejection made him increasingly bitter and resentful towards females of his class whom he vehemently despised for what he interpreted as their decadent mores. He wanted a wife who was pure as a country maiden, hardy and fearless with the constitution of a spartan bride. He felt that this ideal woman would be demure and subservient to his every whim and idea.

He decided the only way to get an ideal wife was for him to create one. For this, he needed a young untarnished girl with the potential to be moulded. What better place to look for her than at the Foundling Hospital where there were no families to interfere in his design and he had only the Foundling Hospital authorities to deal with. He journeyed to Shrewsbury in August 1769 taking with him another man, John Bicknell. Day knew that any girl he chose could not be indentured to him, a bachelor, and so he claimed he was securing her for a position with his married friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth. As Day was a member of the elite class and the renowned Lunar Society his social standing elevated him above the men who ran the hospital. Combined with this, girls were considered a problem in finding apprenticeships, so any questions or doubts were ignored.

Thomas Day by Joseph Wright, 1770 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

The painting was commissioned by Day's life-long friend, Richard Lovell Edgeworth who called Day 'the most virtuous human being he had ever known'. The composition is intended to portray Day as a man of feeling, with a meditative and melancholy air.

Rodin’s ‘Pygmalion & Galatea

Where the ideas for creating a perfect wife originated from

Ovid wrote of the myth of Pygmalion who was so appalled at the wickedness of real women that he decided to carve himself the perfect woman out of ivory marble and name her Galatea. He prays to Aphrodite the Goddess of love to bring the statue to life, which she does, and Galatea throws herself willingly into Pygmalion’s arms. She never utters a word; she is but an extension of Pygmalion himself. The idea that a woman is a ‘signifier for the male other. in which a man can live out his fantasies and obsessions’ has a long history. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ wrote a poetic drama on the subject in 1762, giving the statue a name, Galatea, and the myth was later retold in poetry, opera, and drama.

Day was particularly influenced by Rousseau’ whose progressive education principles were laid down in his book ‘Emile, Or Treatise on Education’. Rousseau proposed that the child should no longer be viewed as they had been done in the medieval period, as the source of original sin to be controlled, but should be seen instead as a blank canvas to be developed and to be free. However, this citizen child was male. The female counterpart was merely an adjunct of him, just like Galatea. Although she was to be encouraged, her domain would be restricted to the domestic and so she would be restricted to tending to her dolls, to play indoors, to be docile and to learn to obey her masters. In effect, she must grow up to be a perfect, compliant living doll.

Events Unfold (not forgetting Dorcas Carr)

Thomas Day was well aware he had done an outrageous and scandalous thing even for Georgian England, but he belonged to the Lunar group, which was made up of mainly middle-class men of enterprise and ambition, and they both enabled Day and were complicit in his experiment

Day initially took two girls from the hospital to see which two would make the better wife. Anne was renamed Sabrina Sidney and Dorcas Carr (originally named Ann Grig) the other girl who was only 11 was renamed Lucretia. It isn’t known whether she was given a surname. By bestowing a new name on the girls he signified his power, his sense of ownership and his wish to obliterate their former identities. He abruptly displaced them from the environment they had known, an environment in which they were segregated from men and threw them into an environment in which their only other companion was a man. At no point did he consider their needs or wishes, nor did he inform them that he was grooming them for marriage. They both thought they were there to train as domestic servants.

Aware of the danger of gossip in London, Day took the girls to France thus ensuring they were cut off from all that they had known and of what he saw as society's corrupting influences. He made sure they couldn’t be understood, nor could they converse with anyone but himself. He planned to begin their education of indoctrination in earnest and here they were a captive, compliant and willing audience. He taught them the classics, natural history and maths, but also lectured them on the evils of fashion and the frivolities of society. After 8 months, homesick and tired of looking after the two girls he decided to take them back to England. He had concluded that Lucretia was ‘invincibly stupid’ and so on their return he placed her in an apprenticeship to a milliner in Ludgate Hill. He provided her with a considerable sum and in due course she went on to marry a draper.

Her terrible life in England

Life in England

‘He resolved also that she should be simple as a mountain girl, in her dress, her diet and her manners, fearless and intrepid as the Spartan wives and Roman heroines.".

One of his friends, Anna Seward

Once they were back in England, Day relocated himself and Sabrina to his four storey mansion, Stowe House, in Lichfield to be near his ‘Lunar’ group of friends. He was keen to introduce Sabrina to them and it brought her into proximity with a range of intellectuals, artists, businesspeople and writers, both male and female. She was well received being considered both charming and beautiful.

The harsh education of 13-year-old Sabrina continued, but Day now also expected her to carry out the majority of the domestic duties in his large house on her own, to dress plainly, to only consume bland and simple food and never to dance or listen to music. Ironically he did believe in the importance of female education, but purely in the interest of men.

‘If women are in general feeble both in body and mind, it arises less from nature, than from education; we encourage a vicious indolence and inactivity, which we will falsely call delicacy, instead of hardening their minds by the severer principles of reason and philosophy, we breed them to useless arts which terminate in vanity and sensuality. We seem to forget, that is upon the qualities of the female sex, that out own domestic comforts, and the educations of our children, must depend.’

As part of of Sabrina’s ongoing education he introduced her to several hideous and cruel trials and ordeals to test her fortitude. This was based loosely on Rousseau's theory that children should be taught to withstand adversity by exposing them to hunger, and thirst and to experience fear in the form of spiders or thunderstorms. Day subverted this theory to his own ends. He insisted Sabrina stay still and not cry out while he heated and poured molten goblets of wax onto her shoulders, put pins into her arms or fired pistols at her skirts or close to her ear. She was regularly made to take cold baths or to wade into a cold, murky lake fully clothed and up to her chin even when he knew she couldn’t swim. This abuse was followed up by then being made to walk to the nearby marshes and to lie until the sun had dried her clothes. To test her resistance to luxury he gave her a trunk of beautiful clothes and then made her burn them. When visiting his friends, he forbade her from eating any delicacies or dancing as others did.

After a year in which Sabrina had been systematically enslaved and put through a horrific series of ordeals and on the encouragement of Edgeworth, Thomas Day decided to abandon his experiment deciding that Sabrina had been a failure. She had been unable to prevent herself from crying out when he hurt her, he also felt she had lost interest in her schoolwork and her domestic duties. He decided to distance himself from her and so sent her to a boarding school in Sutton Coalfield for three years. He yet again abruptly disrupted her life and any connections with the friends she had made and the life she believed she was living; that of a domestic servant in training.

She returns

After 3 years at school in 1774 Day found her an apprenticeship, ironically making fine dresses, still maintaining his control over her life and overseeing what she could and couldn’t do. This business went bankrupt and so Sabrina began boarding with friends of Day’s, close to where they had lived together. He became intrigued to hear from his companions how charming and gracious she had become. He decided he might try again to refine her into becoming his perfect wife, and so aged 17 Sabrina was brought back to Letchworth.

Day now began to speak openly of his intentions to marry Sabrina to all their friends, and it was therefore not long before she heard about it too and confronted Day. She was shocked and horrified, but felt unable to turn his request down as he stressed to her that his happiness was dependent on her. In light of this, he proceeded to make plans for their wedding.

It is unclear what happened after this to halt the plans. Day was away for a short time, but beforehand had had left detailed instructions on precisely what Sabrina should wear while he was away. On his return, it appeared she had not followed his instructions accurately and so he flew into a rage and she in terror took flight. On her return, he told her the marriage was off and he would never see her again as she had failed his obedience test. He was enraged having considered

‘this circumstance as a criterion of her attachment, as a proof of her want of strength of mind, quitted her forever!

Sabrina’s Life after Thomas Day - he keeps control

Thomas Day never saw Sabrina again. It is difficult to imagine the trauma she would have now experienced following this abandonment and expulsion from his life, having endured so much already. Although in 1776 Day did make a small provision of fifty pounds a year to her, which would be the equivalent of approximately £10,000 a year today, it was with the proviso that she would still need his authority to make decisions. He was concerned that his education would not be wasted and that she should not become indolent or idle.

Georgian society made it an imperative that women from the labouring classes earned their living and equally an imperative that middle-class girls should not. Sabrina no longer fitted into either position. Over the next few years, she led a peripatetic life in various boarding houses, but she did continue to see friends from her Lunar Society days, in particular, Thomas Day’s friends John Bicknell and Richard Edgeworth.

In 1783 John Bicknell asked to marry her and as she was obliged to, she sought Day’s approval which he declined. However, Bicknell now told Sabrina the truth about Day’s intentions, that from the moment he had removed her from the foundling hospital he had been training her to become his ‘perfect wife’. She wrote to him in dismay seeking an explanation, but Day still refused to apologise, and although he then agreed to give her permission to marry Bicknell, he also made a decision never to have contact with her again. Sabrina married and went on to have two sons, but she was to be widowed in 1787 after only three years of marriage leaving her yet again without means. Again, she found herself placed in a position of having to reconstruct her life. . Richard Edgeworth, whom Day had named as her legal guardian during his original foil to abduct her, chose to financially support her and her sons ensuring she was not penniless.

In 1789 Thomas Day was thrown from his horse and died almost instantaneously. On hearing the news Sabrina was distraught and went into mourning for this coercive, narcissistic man who had systematically groomed her as a child. The two men she had relied upon had now both died and she was wholly dependent on the benevolence of others.

Her story is never her own

Following Day’s death, a number of his friends and associates began to write about his life, and they included their interpretation of the Sabrina story in their biographies. So though still only in her middle age and with children to support she was also constantly obliged to defend her reputation and honour. These literary and public constructions of her life did not end with her death. Her relationship with Thomas Day was repeated and re-told in the biographies, histories and readings of the lives of the Lunar men, but never from her viewpoint.

Her legacy

Sabrina’s story persists today in romcoms and literature, from My Fair Lady to Pretty Woman. These stories continue to be the the same ones - where men who by the measure of their affluence and social ranking maintain patriarchal control over women who have none. They are about women being helpless before being constructed and transformed into that which the male desires. In biographies, Day is described as eccentric, a great thinker, and even a romantic. Sabrina was a mere adjunct, just a part of his story.

Sabrina was able to continue to make a living by working for the Reverend Charles Burney as a ‘housekeeper and general manager’ of his school in Greenwich. In 1843 at the age of 86, she died in Greenwich leaving an inheritance for her son's future.

Sabrina’s history is pieced together through the history of others. She was moulded by the expectations of what it was to be female in 18th century England, the binary opposite of what it was to be male. From her early life it was drilled into her that she was a by-product of immoral behaviour and to make herself worthy she must be humble, grateful and submissive. Day’s experiment further tested her ‘femaleness’ and he found her wanting. And yet it was those characteristics so valued as female, gentleness and demure obedience which enabled her to continue to survive and to do well, to be loved and to be appreciated in such an unforgiving and hierarchical society.

She was a truly remarkable woman.