Thomas Day, Victim of Theory

 One of the Lichfield luminaries featured in Anna Seward's wildly eccentric biography of Erasmus Darwin (which I wrote about here) is Thomas Day, whose History of Sandford and Merton, one of the first novels written specifically for children, was a big bestseller at the time, and later blighted many a Victorian childhood. Day had strong views on the raising of children – views which were, alas, coloured by his worship of Rousseau, who had cheerfully abandoned all five of his own children to a foundling hospital, leaving him free to tell the rest of the world how to bring up their offspring. Thomas Day, for one, was hugely impressed by Rousseau's writings, and joined another worshipper, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (father of Maria), in bringing up Edgeworth's son Dick in the manner prescribed in Rousseau's Emile.
  Judging this project a success, Day then went on to make his own Rousseauvian experiment: to train up a girl to be his wife. At this point the story gets decidedly creepy. Day applied to the Foundling Hospital in London to take two suitable girls to be, he said, servants in the Edgeworth household – a fact unknown to Edgeworth until several months later. The girls were aged 12 and 11, and Day immediately changed their names to Sabrina and Lucretia. After a short stay in London, Day took both girls to France – a move that put him out of the reach of English law and enabled him to isolate the girls, refusing to hire English-speaking staff or to teach them French. He soon decided that Lucretia, then aged 12, lacked wifely potential, so returned to England and placed her with a milliner's family in London – a lucky escape for her. Sabrina he took with him to Lichfield, where he leased Stowe House (a fine Georgian building which still stands overlooking Stowe Pool). Keeping Sabrina in ignorance of his plans for her, he set about giving her a thorough Rousseauvian training, which among other things involved conditioning her not to fear pain or physical privations. To this end, he would drip hot candle wax onto her arms, make her wade into cold water up to her neck, and shoot at her skirts with a pistol (which might or might not have been loaded; accounts differ). All of which sounds more like a case study in psychopathy than an experiment in philosophy. Fortunately, a year after bringing her to Lichfield, Day abandoned this Rousseauvian project and packed Sabrina off to a boarding school. 
  Day went on to write a heartfelt and influential anti-slavery poem, 'The Dying Negro', as well as his History of Sandford and Merton and the less successful History of Little Jack. He met his end putting another theory of his to the test – that the breaking-in of horses was a harsh and unnecessary practice. Thrown by an unbroken colt at Barehill, Berkshire, in September, 1789, he died almost instantly, perhaps having just enough time to wonder if he might have got that one wrong.