Male-order bride

If you want to learn how to create the perfect wife, you should not read this book. You should make an emergency appointment with reality and remain under self-imposed house arrest until help arrives. If you are a man in search of a tolerably compatible partner, just keep looking. If you are a woman, read Caitlin Moran’s timely How to be a Woman (it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking for anyone or not — just read it).

In 1769 Thomas Day was a single man (aged 21), in possession of a good fortune who (therefore) must be in want of a wife. Though Day was charitable to the poor, opposed slavery and refused to kill a spider, these appear to have been his only merits. Slovenly in his dress, tedious in his conversation (‘Mr Day always talked like a book,’ one contemporary attested), intolerant in his social dealings and demonstrating an ‘undisguised contempt for the female mind’, he found future Mrs Days were hardly forming an orderly queue.

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Nevertheless, Thomas Day rationalised his lack of luck in the wife-finding department by attributing it to the general failings of the female sex. There was no woman good enough for him. The only solution was to create one.

Influenced by Rousseau’s theories on education, which viewed the infant as a tabula rasa, which could be left to ‘civilisation’ to write upon (and corrupt) but which the careful parent could cultivate by ‘natural education’, Day decided that if he could only get hold of a female child of the right age, isolate her from negative cultural influences and monopolise her education for a few years, he could manufacture the ideal wife the more usual channels had failed to supply.

With astonishing ease (and the aid of a few barefaced lies), Day succeeded in acquiring 12-year-old Ann Kingston from an orphanage (she had been left as a baby at the London Foundling Hospital), renamed her Sabrina and enthusiastically embarked on her training.