Paintings of Thomas Day and Sabrina — from later in life, after she married another man. (
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How to Create the Perfect Wife
Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and His
Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate
by Wendy Moore
Basic Books
In a radio segment called “Creepiest Celebrity Betrayals,” Howard Stern ranked stars by the cringe-worthiest affair — among the top contestants were Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards and Newt Gingrich.
“Woody’s still the worst,” Stern concluded. “Right?”
Ever since Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn officially became an item in 1992 — he, then a 56-year-old Academy-Award winning director and she, the 21-year-old adopted daughter of his girlfriend Mia Farrow — every comedian has used the bizarre May/December pair as a punch line.
Even Allen’s son Ronan took a stab at his dad last Father’s Day with this cutting tweet: “Happy father’s day — or as they call it in my family, happy brother-in-law’s day.”
Yet Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi is not entirely without precedence, nor is it the most disturbing. A little over 200 years ago, abolitionist and children’s author Thomas Day outdid the director when he set out to raise the perfect wife.
Yes, raise her.
Day embarked on a “Pygmalion”-esque mission — now revealed to all in a new book “How to Create the Perfect Wife” by journalist Wendy Moore — to adopt a 12-year-old orphan and shape her into his idea of the ideal mate, using physical as well as emotional torture to get the job done.
Top that, Woody.
Thomas Day was born on June 22, 1748 in London’s East End. His father, a prosperous government official, died a year after his birth, leaving him with a young, magnanimous and larger-than-life mother, who would embody Day’s “pinnacle of female perfection.”
“There is an anecdote about her being able to stare down a bull who was charging toward her,” Moore tells The Post. “No woman could ever hope to match this ideal.”
Even she couldn’t. By Day’s 7th birthday, his mother had remarried, which turned Day’s insular momma’s boy world “upside down.” He never got along with his stepfather and was shipped off to boarding school.
From here on out his view on the fairer sex — which Moore sums up as “woman-hating” — was bred.
Day was a smart, if odd, student. He was drawn to the anti-materialistic philosophy at the time and took a stand against excess and societal norms. He refused to brush his hair, kept a slovenly appearance, exhibited terrible table manners and never learned the latest dance steps or how to make small talk. His face was pockmarked by a childhood case of smallpox. He was “stooped” and “fleshy” and had already started to develop signs of a double chin.
All the money and the land in the world couldn’t help him with women. And he took the rejections hard. (In writings, he referred to two of the women who rebuffed him as “the Bitch” and “the Toad.”)
Day read philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise on education “Emile,” a radical book that called for a more natural way to bring up children that didn’t involve classrooms but a return to the wild. Though it was “not meant to be a child-rearing manual,” Day adopted it as such and began to expand its philosophies to his wife-seeking mission.
He decided to focus his search on lower-born women of peasant stock and made a list of all the requirements for his future wife.
“She would be young and beautiful like a Greek or Roman goddess. She must be pure and virginal like a simple country maiden. Hardy and fearless, she would possess the physical constitution of a Spartan bride. Artless and unaffected, she would have the plain tastes in clothing, food and lifestyle of a humble peasant girl,” the list goes on and on.
But the most important tenet was this: “Above all, she would regard Day as her master, her teacher, her superior.”
But where to find such a creature?
When Day turned 21 — becoming the owner of his estate — he and a close friend embarked on a journey to the Foundling Hospital in London, where Day believed he could find the blank canvas on which to imprint the perfect mate. It was, as he described it, his “experiment.”
Under the guise that the two young men were searching for an apprentice maid for a married male friend in London (unmarried men could not take on an orphan maid), they convinced the hospital to let them examine the orphans at their institution.
The girls were lined up side-by-side in matching brown woolen dresses, white cotton aprons and white linen caps, as the two men assessed them. One girl immediately stuck out. She was “beautiful” with “chestnut tresses” and dark, sweet eyes. She was 12.
The girl had been abandoned at the gates of the Foundling Hospital when she was just an infant. Without so much as a background check, the hospital left the girl in the possession of the two men.
Day set the child up in lodgings near his home and renamed her Sabrina. He signed a contract with his friend ensuring that he would not defile her in any way (and Moore believes that he didn’t; he seemed to her more “asexual.”)
Every day, he would visit and tutor her. He found her to be a “quick and enthusiastic pupil” but to cut his losses, he decided to return to the Foundling Hospital again and bring back a second girl, just in case the first turned out to be a lemon.
During the same ritual, he found an 11-year-old blond-haired beauty, took her to the same home as Sabrina and named her Lucretia. Now he tutored both girls side-by-side, telling them that he was training them to be apprentice maids.
Shortly after, he brought the two orphans to France, where he continued his studies in a country that he abhorred. In addition to reading and writing, he also lectured the girls about the corrupt vices of the Parisians.
By the end of their Parisian excursion, one of the girls was the clear winner. With Sabrina “all of his projects were completely successful;” but Lucretia demonstrated “not a single bit of progress in any study.”
Day dismissed Lucretia when they returned to London, placing her in a milliner’s shop and leaving her with the equivalent of $96,000.
“She went on contentedly,” a friend of Day’s wrote about Lucretia, “was happy, and made her husband happy, and is, perhaps, at this moment, comfortably seated with some of her grandchildren on her knees.”
It was a lucky escape — but the same cannot be said for Sabrina.
With Lucretia out of the way, Day devoted himself entirely to Sabrina’s betterment. Now that she could read and write, he expanded her studies to philosophy, mathematics, history and even logic and metaphysics. Sabrina also was expected to manage the four-story house.
Despite the challenges, Sabrina progressed well. But Day’s curriculum was about to get a lot more sadistic.
Rousseau believed that children should be accustomed to hardship and suffering. So Sabrina must too, Day decided. He began pouring hot wax on Sabrina’s shoulders, entreating her not to flinch or cry out.
To train her to be conditioned to all extremes of temperature, Day forced Sabrina to wade out into the freezing cold lake by their home up to her chin (even though she could not swim) and dry out on the banks in the sun before going home to change.
To harden her nerve, he would often take Sabrina out to his garden and aim a pistol at her.
“Whether the pistol had been charged with gunpowder and loaded with ball Sabrina had no idea,” Moore writes. “She was expected to react with perfect calmness as he repeated the firearms test on a regular basis.”
One person even witnessed this scene and wrote that a shot fired at her: “The ball went through her cloaths but without injury.”
So that she would actively shun materialism, Day would buy her gifts like handmade dresses and then throw them in the fire and make her watch as the silks turned to ash.
Finally, when Sabrina turned 18, Day revealed his true motives. He proposed.
The discovery came as a “devastating shock.” Sabrina expected to be his loyal maid, not his wife. A friend noted that Sabrina “became serious, silent and sad.”
“Sabrina had looked on Day as her guardian, her teacher and her employer, as a benevolent father figure and a well-meaning philanthropist — but never as a husband,” Moore writes.
Though it’s unclear exactly what happened next — Moore believes it was Sabrina’s attempt to sabotage the nuptials — the union fell apart. Sabrina, letters at the time say, wore something that disagreed with Day’s tastes and he “flew into a rage” and canceled the wedding, dispatching her to a local boarding house and never interacting with her again.
Sabrina would go on to marry and produce two sons — a “lucky escape,” Moore says. Though her reputation would never quite recover from the experiment, she spent the rest of her life working at a well-respected boarding school.
Day married, too, but to a woman of his social station. The couple never produced children and often fought, Moore writes. Day made his name later with a Rousseau-inspired children’s book “The History of Sandford and Merton” that became a runaway success.
Day would only get his comeuppance after his death. Several novelists, many of them female and many of them acquaintances of his, fictionalized Day’s story, and a few years after his death a biography (by a woman and friend of Day’s) revealed the whole sordid tale.
“With regard to Mr. Day,” one critic at the time wrote in response to the biography, “language is deficient in terms to express his character: that he was either a madman or a fool is more probable; that he acted infamously is beyond contradiction.”