Thomas Day’s Quest for the Perfect Wife

Eighteenth-century Englishman Thomas Day decided that the only way to have a perfect wife was to create one. So he adopted two orphans and attempted to train them, sometimes in incredibly abusive ways.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by squar Space. Start
building your website today at squarespace dot com. Enter offer
code History at check out to get ten percent off
Squarespace Build it Beautiful. Welcome to steph you missed in
history class from hot works dot com. Hello, and welcome

(00:25):
to the podcast. I'm Holly Frown. I'm Tracy Wilson. Uh So.
In a Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare famously wrote the
Course of True Love never did run smooth. Today's topic
delves into the story of a man who completely gave
up on the idea of love in that very romanticized sense,
and instead he set about cultivating the perfect wife. Uh.

(00:47):
It is not horror in the Bride of Frankenstein sense.
He didn't build a wife from scraps, but it does
involve some really truly unsettling ideas and behaviors. Uh. Englishman
Thomas Day's image in history is generally a pretty positive one.
He was an eighteenth century abolitionist who co wrote the

(01:07):
poem The Dying Negro and also penned the anti slavery
narrative The History of Sandford and Merton. But there is
a troubling section of day's life in which he completely
changed the courses of two young women's lives through a
cruel and ill conceived social experiment. Heads up, This episode
includes abuse that is perpetrated by an adult man on

(01:29):
a preteen and then teenage girl. And this abuse is
not sexual in nature, but it is incredibly cruel. So
if you have sensitivities to hearing about such things, this
might be one to skip. If you think you might
be okay with it, but you aren't really certain, we
will give you a heads up before we get into
the really, really cruel aspects of the story. I will
tell you that as I was working on the research

(01:50):
for this, I became and have stayed mad as hornets.
Like I just I don't remember the last time I
was so agree at a historical subject. And that's I mean,
Singer is going to come out of this looking not
so bad. But you've picked some winners recently. I really
do not mean to be doing a series on histories jerks, right,

(02:15):
but I accidentally did. Uh well. We also, we get
a lot of notes when we especially when we promote
stuff on our Facebook and our Twitter, we get notes
from parents asking something along the lines of would this
be okay for my however, many year old, we normally
listened together. Uh, and I'm gonna say this might be
a good one to pre listen first, because it's really

(02:37):
hard to judge. Yeah, Like the cruel things are not
super graphic in nature, Like I said, they're not sexual
in nature, but they are incredibly mean. Um, really sort
of cruel and one would say sadistic, except apparently this
person didn't take pleasure in it, but felt that there

(02:58):
was a very wrecked point to what he was doing. Uh.
So we'll get there. It's not the most fun ride,
it is uh interesting in it it brings up some
some important concepts that deserve a little bit of a look.
So we will get into all of that. Uh. Talking

(03:21):
about Thomas Day and his quest for the perfect wife.
He was born into wealth on June two, seventeen, and
his mother, Jane, was from a wealthy merchant family. His
father was a government official who worked as a collector
of export taxes and also had quite significant real estate holdings. Yeah,
their family was incredibly well off, and Thomas's father, who

(03:44):
was significantly older than his mother, Jane, died when Thomas
was just a year old, and with his father's passing,
Thomas inherited a significant trust that would vest on his
twenty first birthday, so he was basically set for life.
He never had to work if he didn't want to.
Thomas's father had also left money to more than one
hundred fifty other people, from friends and family all the

(04:06):
way down to the people who rented homes from him.
This gesture really left Thomas Day with a legacy to
live up to, one of using this great wealth that
he had at his disposal to assist people who were
in need. And Jane and her son Thomas, moved north
of London after Thomas sr that his father's name had
also been Thomas died and Jane eventually remarried to another

(04:29):
man named Thomas, this one Thomas Phillips, who was one
of the executors of her husband's will. H Thomas Day
the Sun was devoted to his mother and he considered
her to really be an ideal woman. She was very smart,
she was very strong, and she was entirely able to
take care of herself. Thomas went on to attend boarding school,
where he did very well, and it was there that

(04:52):
he made a lifelong friend and John Bicknell. It was
also where Day's proclivity for going on to diet tribes
really started to awesome. He would talk at great length
about his admiration for stoicism, his distrust of romance, and
his desire to mold himself into the most virtuous man.
He loved to talk, he really did. Every biography of

(05:16):
him goes on about how he would just talk and
talk and talk. It immediately calls to mind people from
my past me to uh, you can imagine how popular
this trait made him. Yeah, he had some friends, but
there was definitely a sense in in the various things

(05:36):
that I read about him that some people found it
sort of amusing and something they could tolerate, and others
were like, oh no, Thomas Day, I'm not going to
hang out with that. And while some of his philosophical
views were very modern and progressive at the time, his
thoughts on women were downright archaic. Women to his mind,
were inherently inferior and weak, both physically and intellectually, and

(05:59):
they needed someone like him to protect them, even in
cases where they claimed they did not want that at all.
Along these same lines, who started developing a theoretical ideal
of the perfect woman, the ideal specimen he thought would
be pure, strong, simple, fearless, unpretentious, above frivolity and above

(06:22):
fussy tastes, and most important of all, entirely obedient and
subservant to her master and teacher Thomas Day bless his heart,
except yuck. Uh. Yeah, it's you know, it's very I
feel like he is the like like, let's just distill

(06:44):
all of the societal expectations about women, just just still
distill it all all into a human form and there
we go. Yeah. So he would meet young women and
sometimes begin to take an interest in but invariably he
would find them flawed, and usually this was because they

(07:04):
did not like him back. Uh. He would in his
writing then often refer to these women in really aggressively
negative terms. There was one woman that spurned him that
he thereafter referred to as a toad, and another woman
that apparently broke his heart that he only referred to
as the B word in his writing thereafter. He had

(07:26):
some aggression issues. At the same time, the work of
Rousseau was having a profound impact on Thomas Day's worldview.
Russo's writing, particularly emil Or on education, asserted that children
are born inherently good, and it is only in passing

(07:46):
into social constructs that evil is introduced into the otherwise
completely benevolent human nature. This work is was also a
skewed traditional ideas of religion, which got it banned in
Rousseau's home country. Yeah, it was quite a controversial work,
but it was very popular with Thomas Day and his

(08:07):
his friends and many of the sort of educated, wealthy
classes of the day that felt that they were very progressive. Uh.
And it really started a lot of interesting conversations about
education and how children should be reared. And in spring
of seventeen sixty eight, Thomas met a young woman named
Margaret Edgeworth, the younger sister of his friend Richard Edgeworth,

(08:29):
while Thomas was traveling in Ireland, and Margaret was, by
all accounts, a lovely young woman at twenty two. She
was attractive, but she was also very smart, smart, and
very capable, uh, things that Thomas claimed he would want
in a lady. But she and Thomas, who tended to
be kind of sloppy himself and really lacked much in
the way of charm, did not exactly have spectacular chemistry.

(08:52):
As they started to spend more time together. Though Thomas
and Margaret slowly became friends, they started to appreciate each
other's unique person ladies, and one thing that the two
of them had in common was that neither of them
was harboring any illusions about romantic love. Both of them
had been in relationships that ended badly, they were a
lot more practical about it. Yeah, And by late summer

(09:15):
of that year, the two had struck a deal that
really sounds like the way a lot of modern romcom start,
which is that if neither of them had found someone
over the course of the following year, then they would
marry one another. But as autumn arrived, Margaret confessed that
over that summer she had really developed some very real
feelings for Thomas. So the pair agreed that they were

(09:35):
going to be married the following summer, and at that
point Day returned to London. He was gonna study law
for a little bit and prepare for the wedding. That winter.
They lived with his friend John Bicknell, and he fell
in with Erasmus Darwin and his circle of friends in
the Lunar Society, which is another thing that could be
a whole episode on its own. Yeah, if you don't

(09:56):
recognize that name. Erasmus Darwin was Charles Darwin's grandfather, but
at this point he was a scientifically interested young gent's
hanging out with all of his school friends. But in
spring of seventeen sixty nine, that plan that Thomas and
Margaret had put together was abruptly halted when Margaret wrote
him to say that she had in fact reconsidered and

(10:18):
she was going to call the wedding off. And Day
was of course sad and terribly embarrassed. But this setback
in his quest to be married, because he really did
want to be married, resulted in a plan for a project.
I just want to interject that people are not projects.
But before, oh, we have so much to get angry

(10:41):
about now, you know, well, and I'm just remembering this,
This whole thing just reminds me of college in so
many ways. Yeah, me too. And I'm remembering the time that,
you know, the dorm would have events and one of
the events was one of the counselors who came to
talk to us about relationships, and she just was like,

(11:01):
I'm just gonna tell you a few things that you
need to understand, and absorbed into your heart and your mind.
She was like people are not projects. Were all like okay,
And of course, twenty some odd years later, I'm like, yep,
people are not projects. We're gonna talk about somebody who

(11:22):
tried to make people projects after a word from sponsor
So to get back to the story. In truth, this
idea that Thomas Day had at this point was not
entirely new. It's one that he had been kicking around
for a while based on his study of Russo's writing
about natural education. So he began to wonder what would

(11:46):
happen if a child were reared entirely outside of the
corruption of society's trappings, and if one were to raise
a girl this way, couldn't the perfect wife essentially be
carefully molded. All of this happen, and just before Thomas's
twenty one birthday. So as he was committing to this plan,
he was also coming into his quite large fortune, which

(12:09):
meant that he had the freedom to pursue his idea.
Knowing that there could be some legal issues to rank
or regarding regarding the idea of taking on award to
raise in the unconventional way that he was planning, he
enlisted the help of Bicknell, who at that point had
studied law for eight years, so to find a girl
who was innocent, healthy and free from any pesky familial ties,

(12:32):
Day and Bicknell traveled north from London to Shrewsbury in
Shropshire to an orphan hospital where Day would select the
girl to be cultivated into his eventual wife. These two
young men who showed up claiming to be lawyers looking
for a maid for a married friend, Edgeworth was actually
named as apprentice master without his knowledge in this scheme.

(12:53):
We're welcomed at the orphanage and all the girls lined
up to see if they would be selected the facility.
That the facility did their best to screen prospective situations
and place children in agreeable and safe homes, but they
were completely duped by these two men. Yeah, I mean
these two guys that are you know, well dressed, show
up and say that their lawyers and that they're doing

(13:16):
this thing and they want to place children, and of
course that yes, you seem lovely, you're fabulous gentleman. Uh
Thomas was overwhelmed at trying to select one of the girls,
but Bicknell pointed out a twelve year old with auburn
hair and brown eyes named Anne Kingston, the Orphanage approved
her placement as a maid for the next nine years

(13:36):
or until she married, which ever came first. While Day
did introduce and to Edgeworth, and Edgeworth, trusting his friend,
seemed okay with having been named as the caretaker of
this girl. This young woman didn't actually move into Edgeworth's home,
as had been part of that legal arrangement, right instead

(13:57):
into a room rented by Day, which was separate from
his own lodgings, and he started tutoring her immediately, and Anne,
who had no idea what was going on but had
been trained throughout her years as an orphan she had
been in the orphanage since she was just a baby
to be obedient, completely went along with Day's lessons, and

(14:18):
she seemed eager to learn. He also renamed her Sabrina,
and he was very enthusiastic about how things were going initially,
but apparently he still had doubts about whether his plan
to create the ideal life would work. His solution was
to adopt a second girl as a backup in case

(14:39):
the first one did not work out. So just a
month after taking on Sabrina, he once again went to
an orphanage, this time one that was in London, allegedly
to select a maid for a married friend, this time
choosing an eleven year old girl named Dorcas car She
was fair and she was much more outgoing than Sabrina.
He changed her name to Lucretia, and in a document

(15:02):
drawn up by Bicknell, Thomas Day agreed that he would
select them more promising of his two young potential brides
within a year, and that the girl he did not
select would be set up in an apprentice ship with
an allowance and a dowry should she marry. There is
actually debate over this particular document and whether or not
it was actually part of the legal workings that Bicknell

(15:23):
did in order for these adoptions to happen, But that
doesn't really hold up to scrutiny because then either of
those those places he adopted from would know he had
adopted two girls with this weird plan. So it seems
much more like this was an agreement that was made
like within their social circle, so everyone could hold him
to this experiment. That he was doing this whole plan.

(15:45):
We should point out it was illegal, in addition to
being distasteful and creepy I feel like we're in the
middle of an accidental mini series of creepers in history. Yeah,
not only was he basically abducting these two girls through
false pretenses, he changed their names, making them almost impossible
for any authorities to track down, and then he shut

(16:06):
them away altogether without supervision when he wasn't there to
tutor them. Yeah, he basically the rooms that he had
found were like a boarding room that he rented from
an elderly widow, and she was apparently around, but not
really involved with the girls. And so they were like
two little girls left by themselves all the time when
this weird guy wasn't showing up to teach them, which

(16:28):
is a terrible life for a child to have. Uh.
Here is one of the new places where I will
get super angry. His friends knew about this crap. They
all knew about it. I think that's the strongest word
we've ever said in the podcast. I want to say
way stronger words because it makes me super angry, Like
there is some really gross complicit behavior going on here.

(16:52):
While these girls were completely unclear as to what was
going on, Bicknoll and other friends of Day all knew
about this experiment. And no stepped in. They all saw
Day as this highly moral, though very odd man who
was trying something really, really unique. And this all speaks
to the attitude of privilege that wealthy aristocrats had at
the time. So while they claimed to disdain titles and

(17:16):
social hierarchy, it was that exact structure that was enabling
him to do what he was doing. I am a
wealthy man who is educated, so my ideas must be
interesting and valid, even if they are horrible and abusive
Holly's romad at this guy. I was mostly thinking how
it's like another layer of societal expectations distilled down into

(17:39):
human form. It's like he's almost a caricature of entitlements completely. Uh.
Soon he moved to Paris so they would be out
of the influence of London. He thought about keeping these
girls in a in a country where they couldn't speak
with anyone, so that that could help maintain their social purity.

(18:02):
I'm kind of baffled that Paris was the place he
decided to go to given the reputation of Paris. Well,
he had never been and it didn't laugh okay, sure,
So he eventually took Sabrina and Lucretia to Avignon, and
they seemed to love Avignon initially, and he was seen
by the locals as this odd but sort of interesting scholar.
They of course did not know what he was up to,

(18:24):
and he found their acceptance of him quite intoxicating, because remember,
he was sort of an odd guy. He wasn't like
the best dressed, he wasn't really all that charming, but
they found him oddly charming because he just seemed like
this odd, bumbling scholar to them. But his charm with
Avignon would wear off quickly. He did not include many
mentions of the girls in his early correspondence at this time,

(18:45):
though it almost reads as though he is so excited
at being socially accepted he kind of forgot about them
for a little bit. However, he did instruct the two
ladies in reading. He ceded the idea that luxury and
fashion and social status were all abhorrent and that an
austere life was far superior to any of that. He

(19:08):
was generally very pleased with their progress initially, and he
was really starting to believe that his plan to mold
them into ideal wives was working. But Thomas, it turned
out hated the French, Uh, particularly French women, at which
point I wrote in My Notes to Kill sapris Uh
he thought that they were all stupid imbeciles and that

(19:30):
they would be bad influences, just as he had thought
Londoners would be. He felt as though French women were
far too dominant over their male counterparts, and so the
entire country became completely distasteful to him. Meanwhile, the girls,
they were going kind of star crazy. They didn't speak
French because he had made every effort to keep them
from learning it, so they had no social interaction outside

(19:53):
of the three of them, and while the two girls
got along, it was still very socially isolating. Yeah, the
his friends that wrote about this time, some of them
talk about the girls bickering and others do not. There's
definitely some embellishment that goes on that makes some of
the accounts of this time, which are pretty much all
written by other people that were not there, a little

(20:17):
bit hard to sort through and find out what was
really going on. But Day, unsurprisingly was really not good
at taking care of children. He once took them out
on a boat which capsized, at which point things became
really perilous because neither of the girls could swim, and
the currents of the Rhone, which is where they were,
threatened to carry them away. And Thomas was a good swimmer.

(20:38):
He was able to swim. He managed to collect both
Sabrina and Lucretia, but the whole ordeal ordeal was really
frightening and upsetting. On another occasion, Day threatened a French
officer and challenged the man to a duel because he
believed that this officer had been too familiar with the
young ladies when they were out walking. Fortunately for Day,
this French domand made it clear that he had intended

(21:00):
no offense and he did not accept the challenge. Yeah,
I couldn't find a clear like account of what exactly
had transpired if he had just said sure, and they
thought that was gross that he had addressed them at all.
It was I'm not sure what exactly had happened there,
But it's good that he didn't take him up on

(21:22):
the duel because French dueling rules at the time were
to the death. I could have gone very very poorly.
One account by a friend of Thomas Day also claimed
that the girls caught smallpox, requiring Day to care for
them around the clock, which he allegedly found irritating, but
that isn't really documented uh, and Lucretia, definitely, looking at
her records from the orphanage, had been inoculated and Sabrina

(21:46):
almost definitely had as well. There's no record of it,
but that was standard practice at orphanages at the time.
Eight months into the France phase of this experiment, Thomas
gave up on raising the girls in a foreign country
and went back to London, and he had to decide
which of the girls to cut loose. Sabrina's devotion to
him was what was winning out in that decision. Yeah.

(22:09):
Day grew incredibly frustrated with Lucretia. While he couldn't decide
if she was just being very stubborn or very stupid
uh in that she didn't always go along with all
of his lesson plans. He just didn't care, so he
got rid of her by handing her off to a
London milliner as an apprentice, along with what was a
very significant sum in the seventy ds of four hundred

(22:31):
pounds uh. Lucretia eventually married a linen draper that she
met while she was working there, and according to the writings,
of his friend Edgeworth was quite happy. And that's kind
of where we lose the thread of what happened to
Lucretia before we talk about what happened to Sabrina. Once
Day had abandoned Lucretia, we will take a break and
have a word from one of our fantastic sponsors. So

(23:01):
getting back to Thomas Day and at this point his
one remaining uh charge, Sabrina. He still had high hopes
for her. She was growing into a really lovely young woman,
and he moved the two of them to Litchfield near
his friend Erasmus Darwin so that he could continue her education.
He decided that the next phase of her training required

(23:23):
that she'd be toughened up so she could become the
stoic woman that he had always dreamed of. And this
is where things are going to become really abusive. So
you're heads up if you might need to be out
at this point. Yeah, no one will judge you. It's
really awful behavior. Uh. He started issuing a series of
pain endurance tests, so poor Sabrina was instructed to bare

(23:47):
her shoulders and roll up her sleeves, and then after
Day told her that she must not move or cry.
He poured hot ceiling wax on her arms and shoulders,
and of course she jumped and cried out frustrated him,
but he continued this over and over, slowly conditioning her
to accept pain. Uh he did the same experiment as well,

(24:09):
but pricking her with needles. He forced her into a
nearby lake, fully clothed, until she was in water up
to her chin. And after the whole incident with the
capsized boat where she had almost been swept away, she
had been really afraid of the water, so this was
already torment. But then he made her lie down in
the grass and her drenched clothing to dry out very slowly.

(24:33):
That would subject her to the varying temperatures, and that
whole drying out process trying to make her body hearty.
She was also taken on occasion out to a secluded
spot and instructed to stand perfectly still while Day fired
his pistol into her skirts. He was doing this allegedly
to make her immune to being startled at loud noises.

(24:56):
This is another one of those things that um when
you read the accounts that his friends wrote, you get
really really mad at all of them. If you are holly,
because some of them are like, oh well, they weren't
even loaded, and others are like, oh no, there were
there was shot in in that pistol. This is like
a metaphor for the internet. It really is okay. He

(25:20):
even gave her a box filled with fine clothing and
then made this poor young woman who had never been
given any but the simplest garments to wear, throw all
the new garments into the fire and watch while they
burned up. Yeah. Uh. He also told her that he
was in danger, and he said that this danger would
become far worse if she told anyone, and he saw

(25:40):
this as a way to test her, and he became
disappointed when she went to the servant of a neighbor's
house and disclosed the information. Their speculation about whether or
not she was just being a blabbermouth or whether she
was concerned and trying to get help. She certainly didn't
share any of the other horrible secrets with this servant,
so it seemed like she was probably trying to get help.
As time went on, it became apparent that she really

(26:04):
wasn't excited by science or books, so Day started to
get increasingly frustrated with her she was having to go
through this endless cycle of lessons and tortures with no
explanation as to why any of it was happening to her,
and that was all starting to really take a toll
on this young woman. Through the entire ordeal, she had
no idea that she was going to be expected to

(26:26):
marry Thomas Day at the end of her education. Additionally,
Sabrina was nearly fourteen at this point, and having a
young woman with no family living in a house with
a bachelor was starting to look really seedy to pretty
much everyone. Uh, And so at the beginning of seventeen
seventy one, Thomas, who had grown tired of her not

(26:46):
enjoying science and apparently not being strong enough to withstand
all of his tests, easily decided that his experiment was
a failure. But of course this was not his failure,
except in so far as he had clearly select the
wrong girl for training. Sabrina was sent to boarding school,
where she became a really diligent student, and once she graduated,
she was given a regular living allowance. By Day. She's

(27:10):
almost universally described as a lovely young woman and incredibly
well liked, so it seems as though this awful treatment
as his ward didn't wind up hindering her social development.
Almost immediately after sending Sabrina away, Day did find a
woman who he felt meant all of his needs, and
that was the writer Honora Snaid. And of course, by
virtue of the fact that she was very strong, very smart,

(27:33):
and had a mind of her own, she did not
want to be with a man like Thomas Day, who
felt that she had to capitulate to him. She in
fact ended up married to his friend Edgeworth, who got
married a lot of times. Next, he fixated on her
sister Elizabeth, who thought she might be willing to marry
Day if he was willing to learn some manners and

(27:54):
correct some of his own defects, and surprisingly he agreed.
He traveled to Leon where he took fence and dancing lessons,
and he even submitted to a torturous sounding contraption that
was designed to correct his knock knees by forcing them outward. Yeah,
he had to sit in this weird chair and have
the screws applied that we're supposed to shift his legs

(28:16):
to a more proper position. And he would just sit
there for hours on end, reading apparently. But after all
of this, when he returned from France, Elizabeth was not
mean to him. Uh. She also ended up married to
Edgeworth after her sister had passed away. He really didn't
he I think Edgeworth had four wives over the course

(28:36):
of his life and something like twenty two children. But
he seemed like a fairly jovial fellow that ladies liked,
and he was not so creepy. Maybe. In seventeen seventy four,
they met wool heiress Esther Milns, who fell in love
with him at first sight. His poem The Dying Negro
had been published the previous year, and Esther, who had

(28:58):
a long line of pretend suitors clamoring for attention, fixated
on this man who's political and social ideas she felt
really closely matched her own. Yeah. She It's one of
those things. I mean, I'm sure you've had this happen
where you have a friend that's kind of a persnicketty
pain and that took us and they meet someone and
that person just thinks they're the most amazing creature on earth.

(29:19):
There's an emmin in my head right now. Yeah, And
it's fascinating to watch that play out and that's exactly
what it is with Esther. She was just full of
incredible praise for him, and it's like she saw his
flaws but still thought he was amazing. And after several
years of Day debating whether Esther was truly right for him,

(29:40):
which go figure. I mean again, this is like one
of the most desired women of their society at the
time going nope, you're the one for me, and he's like,
I don't know, um, it's just fascinating to me. Uh.
But he decided finally that she was the woman for him,
and the pair married in seventeen vnd eight. And the irony,

(30:01):
of course here was that Esther came from everything that
Day hated. She was a woman of wealth, she had
been raised in society, she had been formally educated in
the system that he believed could only corrupt women. And
yet she did meet all of his requirements pretty much,
and she was perfectly happy to live in isolated life
of the mind with him. He just wanted them to

(30:21):
live far away from everyone else and do nothing but read.
As the seventeen eighties arrived, Day was really throwing himself
pretty fully into social and political matters. The first volume
of Sanford and Merton was published in seventeen eighty three,
about to introduce a surprising twist, which is that in
seventeen eighty four Sabrina married Day's best friend, John Bicknell.

(30:46):
Day paid her dowry at this point, uh and in
the period leading up to the wedding, Bicknell confessed to
Sabrina that she had been Day's experiment in bridal education,
and that he, John Bicknell, had been complicit in this scheme.
So was sort of like a confession of laying all
of his cards on the table before they got married,
and doing so seemed to save Bignal from Sabrina's wrath,

(31:08):
but she wrote a really angry letter today demanding that
he explained himself. In response to Sabrina, they wrote quote,
I never thought I had a right to sacrifice another
being to my own good or pleasure. But I thought
myself sufficiently entitled to make an experiment where where whatever
else ensued, you would be placed in circumstances infinitely more

(31:29):
favorable to happiness than before. He also made it clear
to her that the failing of the experiment was her fault,
writing quote, the dislike you soon discovered for every species
of domestic application was one of the first causes of
dispute between us. What a jerk, Yeah, just oh uh again,

(31:51):
it's like he kind of sees her as property, Like, oh,
I adopted a poor orphan so I could abused it
because eventually I would it would be in better situation
than being an orphan. Surely, It's just it's so entitled
and gross. Uh. He also in that writing managed to
get in a really gross dig in the matter of

(32:11):
Sabrina's marriage to Bicknell, telling her that she should consider
herself extraordinarily lucky that John would want to marry her
rather than quote a hundred others, your superior. John Bicknell
died in seven leaving Sabrina a widow with two children,
and they reinstated an allowance for her, but much smaller
than he had been paying before her marriage. She took

(32:32):
She took a job as a housekeeper at a village
school to try to make ends meet, and eventually one
of Bignell's friends created a fund for Sabrina and the
children out of contributions from John's many law associates. Yeah, John,
even though he had come from a good family and
had a good job. He had had some problems handling
money and some gambling issues, and so there really was

(32:54):
not much left when he passed away. Uh. And then
just two years after this, in seventeen eighty nine, at
the age of forty one, Thomas Day died suddenly when
he was thrown from a horse. He had raised the animal,
but had refused to train it in any traditional sense
because he thought that was a form of cruelty, but

(33:15):
he still attempted to ride it, which he did not
think was a form of cruelty. I have a question, yes,
why was it cruel to train a horse, but it
was not cruel to train a woman? Because he's Thomas Day,
and he had some twisted ideas about ladies and how

(33:36):
to treat human beings. And apparently horses have more feelings
than women do. It seems that way and his view.
So after he died, Esther continued Sabrina's allowance. And the
Sabrina issue was one that apparently had come up and
quarrels between the two of them, So Esther recognized that

(33:56):
Sabrina's misfortunes had not been any fault of her. Yeah,
though her writing about it, it's kind of weird because
she again Estra was in love with Thomas for all
of his faults, and so in her eyes, Sabrina really
missed out on being with this amazing person. Everyone in
this story is so gross, Hollywood. They just have such

(34:19):
a weird view of humans and people that are not
part of their wealthy little click. It's very strange. Uh.
Sabrina lived out the rest of her life in relative anonymity,
working for most of it as a housekeeper in a
boys school. She died in September eighteen forty three, at
the age of eighty six. There had been several times

(34:39):
throughout her life where she was a little concerned that
all of this was going to come to light. Many
of his friends wrote about him, you know, he kind
of became, uh, one of those figures against romanticized because
he died so young, and because he did write several
important abolitionist texts, and so she was prepared, actually very

(35:00):
afraid that they were going to out her, that they
would write memoirs about him and then talk about this thing,
and that her honor was really going to get called
into question, even though by all accounts there was no
sexual relationship between the two of them. She still recognized
that it would invite that kind of speculation, and she
was really worried because she had kids at that point,
and even when they were young men and adults, she

(35:23):
just didn't want them to ever have to go through
knowing that this kind of ugly chapter was part of
their family's life. That there were a lot of close calls,
but none of those seemed to come to Fruition. So angry,
and everyone in the story too. You see why I
said I was mad at hornets the whole time. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Do you have some listener mail that will not make

(35:44):
us angry? Not only that, I have one that's a
surprise for you, because Tracy's in the studio this week.
She's visiting Atlanta from Austin, and so one of them
I kept, and it's to make you smile. So you
can't look at that, Okay, well you can. I'm reading
another one first. They're both postcards, sort of. The first
one is a postcard from our listener, Elizabeth, and it

(36:05):
is a postcard from the Crescent Hotel at Eureka Springs.
She says, thanks, thanks for your show on Eureka Springs.
My husband and I are both long times, long time fans,
and we re listened to the tragic tale of Dr
Baker before honeymooning. Here we have seen no ghosts, but
we have met Casper, the hotel's lovely cat. So Kitty, congratulations.
I hope you had a wonderful wedding and honeymoon, and

(36:27):
thank you for telling us about Casper. Okay, and the
next one, well, then I gotta get it out quietly
and carefully here because it is amazing. It is from
our listener Crystal. She painted it herself and it is
um an image that she painted of what I presume
is a rock band. Margie and the love of bon

(36:50):
Tintometer boys. Oh my goodness, so it is. She has
a little note on the back. Tracy's holding it now, Margie,
Mark Grim and Olio and like this amazing. It's the
cutest that host starred ever. She hand painted this postcard

(37:11):
and it's really really awesome. Uh. The boys are named
I think it's Maslow, which Google is telling me is
butter in Check and Olio and it's just adorable. We
will for sure share it because it is the cutest
thing you have ever seen, and it reminds me of
the old You probably did not see this, or maybe
you did. Uh. In Epcot there used to be a

(37:33):
stage show called Food Rocks where food would come out
and sing rock and roll songs about nutrition. Uh, And
it reminds me of the fine see of that that
was not there the one time I have ever been
to Epcot, which was with you. Oh yeah, yeah, I
would have been gone already. Yeah. So it's spectacular. And
she did it in pink tones because of pink Margarine.
I love it so much. I knew you would freak

(37:55):
out with glee when you saw this because it's the
cutest thing on earth. So thank you, thank you, thank you,
thank you, Crystal. It is absolutely beautiful. She wrote us
a letter as well, but I'm not going to read
it all because we've run a little bit long. She
loves cats and she used some awesome washy tape on this,
So thank you, thank you, thank you again. I just
love it. It's darling and it made a smile, so
I saved it for the end of the Horribles. We

(38:20):
will have to talk about it extra times on social media.
For anybody who got to a point in this episode,
they're like I'm out, I can't listen to this angry making. Uh.
If you would like to write to us and talk
about how angry you are a Thomas Day, or about
how awesome Marjarine rock bands might be, you can do
that at History Podcast at house works dot com. If

(38:41):
you want to meet up with us on social media,
you can do that almost anywhere. We're always missed in history,
so that's at Twitter is at mist in History at
Facebook dot com, slash mist in History at pinterest dot com,
slash mist in History at Miston History dot tumbler dot com,
and on Instagram at mist in History, where this beautiful
painting is definitely going. Uh. If you would like to

(39:03):
come to our parents site, which is how stuff works,
you could uh type in the word marriage in the
search bar and you will get lots of articles about marriage,
none of which involve adopting an orphan under false pretenses
and doing horrible things to them, but actually having a marriage. Uh.
You can do that there. You can visit us at
misston history dot com, where we have show notes for

(39:23):
all of our episodes that Tracy and I have worked on,
as well as an archive of every episode of the
show that there has ever been uh and you should
absolutely come of visit us at mist in history and
how Stuff works dot com, thousands of topics. It has
to have works dot