A History of Britain, Volume 3 Read Online Free Page B

his heart had been smitten in 1770 by the daughter of an army major, on whom he had struggled to make any kind of impression. To improve his chances, Day had taken himself off to France for a drastic makeover: dancing masters, fencing teachers, tailors, fine wigs, even subjecting himself to the torture of a painful mechanical contraption designed to straighten out knock-knees. It was all to no avail. The object of all these efforts at personal enhancement took one look at the new Day and laughed even harder than she had at the old Day. Stung by his rejection, Day turned his back on the Quality. What did they know of sincerity, of the burning, beating heart? He eventually found an heiress to marry but salved his social conscience by inflicting a Jean-Jacques regime on her: no servants and no harpsichord, for he deemed it wicked to wallow in such luxuries ‘while the poor want bread’.
    None of these follies and disasters inhibited Thomas Day from imparting his wisdom about childhood in a three-volume novel,
The History of Sandford and Merton
(1783), which, as an extended parable of ‘natural instruction’ was almost as important in Britain as Rousseau’s
Emile
. The book recounted the clash between the spoiled bully Tommy Merton and the quieter epitome of rustic virtue, Harry Sandford, who cries when he realizes he has inflicted pain on a cockchafer. Now deservedly forgotten except in university seminars on the sentimental novel,
Sandford and Merton
was a huge publishing success in its day. Reprinted 45 times after the initial appearance of the first volume in 1783, it was
the
book young parents read when they wanted to savour the victory of natural over unnatural childhood. As for Day himself, his peculiar life ended abruptly in September 1789 in his 42nd year, during an experiment to test his pet theories about taming horses with gentleness rather than breaking them. An unbroken colt he was riding failed to respond to the tender touch, and threw Day on his head.
    The problem with Day’s experiment, some of his friends might have told him, was that virtuous conditioning could only go so far. Perhaps the damage to Sabrina’s and Lucretia’s natures had already been done by the time that Day got to them, beginning with the contamination of their mother’s milk. For it was another of Rousseau’s axioms that virtue began at the nursing nipple, from which moral as well as physical sustenance was imparted. Nothing was more harmful to the prospects of raising true children of nature than the habitual practice of farming babies out to wet-nurses who had no interest in their charges except that of commerce. Not surprisingly, babies from more ordinary families packed off to country women died in thousands. But if fashionable mothers could afford to see their infants better cared for, they had no means of knowing what kind of sustenance was being fed along with the breast milk. Who knew how many innocents had been poisoned and corrupted out of their true nature, from their nurseling months, by women whose milk was already tainted with drunkenness and sexual disease? Breast-feeding began to play a conspicious role in sentimental novels, especially those where both men and women could be redeemed by recognizing the simple power of natural instinct. Men for whom the tantalizing glimpse of nipple was an invitation to lechery could be converted by watching the act of nursing. Women who had flaunted their decolletage, like the wicked wife in Samuel Richardson’s novel
Sir Charles Grandison
, could advertise their conversion to virtue by making a spectacle of the same act. ‘Never was a man in greater Rapture!…’ the wife narrates: ‘He threw himself at my feet, clasping me and the little varlet together in his arms. “Brute!” said I, “will you smother my Harriet?…” “Dear-est, dear-est, dear-est Lady G… Never, never, never saw I so delightful a sight!’”
    Assuming newborns had been given the healthiest possible