If you want to learn how to create the perfect wife, you should not read this book. You should make an emergency appointment with reality and remain under self-imposed house arrest until help arrives. If you are a man in search of a tolerably compatible partner, just keep looking. If you are a woman, read Caitlin Moran’s timely How to be a Woman (it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking for anyone or not — just read it).
In 1769 Thomas Day was a single man (aged 21), in possession of a good fortune who (therefore) must be in want of a wife. Though Day was charitable to the poor, opposed slavery and refused to kill a spider, these appear to have been his only merits. Slovenly in his dress, tedious in his conversation (‘Mr Day always talked like a book,’ one contemporary attested), intolerant in his social dealings and demonstrating an ‘undisguised contempt for the female mind’, he found future Mrs Days were hardly forming an orderly queue.
Nevertheless, Thomas Day rationalised his lack of luck in the wife-finding department by attributing it to the general failings of the female sex.
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