A Particularly Fucked Up Momcore History Book
Reviewing How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore
It often seems most history books intended for the general audience are written with moms in mind, unless they’re about World War II or Abraham Lincoln. Nothing else could tempt a sixty-something dad out of his beer garage. Mom history often concerns the interpersonal dramas of old-timey people of money and influence, and a book I recently finished reminded me that that shit is so fucked up.
Forget the fellas at Omaha Beach: their suffering only lasted seconds. In 1770 Marriage is forever, or until the TB takes you.
In her book How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate, Wendy Moore tells the sordid tale of one Thomas Day, dickhead extraordinaire, and how proto-incelism drove him to remove a twelve-year-old girl from a foundlings home and spend years tormenting her under the Rousseau-derived belief that he could train her to be his perfect wife. You can derive the basic facts of this narrative from the relevant Wikipedia pages, but Moore’s detailed research and obvious passion for centuries-old gossip elevates the quality of the book’s exposition as Day’s scheme spirals out to touch the lives of numerous eighteenth century luminaries, not one of whom reports him to CPS.
I jest: of course CPS did not exist back then. Furthermore, as Moore illuminates, Day’s contemporaries all possessed their own sexual and romantic indiscretions which hindered them from throwing stones out of their glass houses. While most of these indiscretions are no longer particularly electrifying to our dulled modern sensibilities, they do affirm what we already knew: the existence of strict and oppressive social norms in the past did not in any way correspond to people’s ability or willingness to live within them. People have always fucked around and found out, and they have always wriggled out of the obligations which displeased them, no matter how strident the social pressure upon them.
Though Moore released her book back in the halcyon days of 2013, this theme stands as an appealing rebuttal to the endless tide of nauseating incels and right-wing revanchists who swell up hourly from the lowest pits of the internet and the highest offices of the US government. Thomas Day, though he is wealthy, influential, lauded for his intellect, and a man in a deeply misogynist society, gets dumped four times because he’s just not remotely likable. He’s a dickhead that even a seventeen-year-old could see through. The driving force behind today’s incels is the seething desire to get back to a time where no woman could say no to them. Moore reminds us that time is imaginary. The incels are lying to themselves and everyone else.
Like every incel, Thomas Day responds to rejection by doing something batshit. Luckily, he lived before automatic weapons. Unluckily, he also lived before social services. When the ladies in his social circle don’t respond to his shambling, grungy affect and one-sided diatribes on the day’s social issues, he comes up with a wacko scheme which leads to him hauling multiple young girls around Europe and isolating them from any other adults and ultimately abandoning one while keeping the other, Sabrina, as his captive for multiple years. He literally tortures Sabrina so as to make her hardy enough to be his wife, dripping hot wax on her bare skin, pricking her with pins, and shooting unloaded guns at her to terrorize her. He also makes her do all his housework.
You’ll be shocked to hear that he and Sabrina don’t get married in the end. Unsurprisingly, Day eventually marries a woman from his same socio-economic background, who possesses a similar background and had been interested in him for years while he ignored her despite professing his constant desperation to be married. He ruins her life too. What a dickhead.
Throughout the book, Moore strikes a careful balance in describing the travails of Day and Sabrina. While she enumerates Day’s crimes and general shit-ass behavior, she holds up certain moments of humiliation or romantic disappointment for Day which make him momentarily sympathetic. I found this approach more effective than wall-to-wall condemnation. I too am replete with unattractive qualities, including an uncompromising idealistic mental frame over which modern psychiatrists might clamor diagnostically. I too don’t wish to change everything about myself to become attractive, especially where I think those changes would be morally or physically degrading. But in reviewing Day’s conduct Moore inspired me to reflect on why that’s still not an excuse to be a dickhead. One can only be small-mad about these things. When, like Thomas Day, one has everything else going for them, one should only be small-mad about these things. Dude was literally so rich he could do whatever he wanted, and he threw years away on bullying a little girl because girls bullied him. You had every other choice, man. Every single one of us has every other choice than hurting people, at least 90% of the time.
The most provocative thread of Moore’s book is one I haven’t discussed yet: her account of Thomas Day’s political activism. Despite his total inability to engage with women as human beings, Day was otherwise wildly progressive for his time. He wrote fervently against slavery, believed in animal rights, and gave away a large part of his fortune to the poor and working class tenants of his estate. He established a basic welfare system for his laborers and kept paying them in the winter when other landholders would lay off all their workers.
He also, I reiterate, tortured a girl for years in the hopes of inducing compliance in her to ease a future sexual relationship between them.
Thomas Day’s progressive politics failed to guide him into an actually moral life. No amount of speech-making and polemic-writing, the posting of his time, made him a good person because he ensured it sucked to be around him. We are in an ongoing period of struggle right now to reconcile the actions of many prominent people with the causes they have espoused. Day reminds us that’s just how people are, and that no amount of right thought cancels out wrong action. Only right action, and Day remained a jerk long after he let go of Sabrina.
Moore lifts up the last part of the book by giving it over to Sabrina and other interesting women in Day’s orbit. After Day dies in a rather apropos and satisfying fashion, Sabrina outlives him by a long time. Her life is not easy and she encounters more obnoxious dudes, but she endures and makes good on what she’s able to get. Her story becomes juicy material in the hands of contemporary female authors, who manage to get some serious dunks on Day.
Therein we find the ultimate lesson of Moore’s book. Despite her delicate touch in crafting the narrative, she leaves no ambiguity about what a loser Day is. In this case, history was not written by the victor: Day may have gotten away with his crimes back then, but what’s left of his memory has been eaten up by them. Keep this in mind when you’re thinking about how likely it is for your own brilliance to be vindicated by history. You may end up the villain of momcore nonfiction instead.
