How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore: review Thomas Day, the villain of this disturbing tale, was a creepy, charmless and by all accounts rather smelly 18th-century Professor Henry Higgins. Determined, aged 20, that no woman alive was virtuous enough to share his high-thinking, plain-living world, which involved washing neither his clothes nor his hair, he set out to create his ideal wife. Repulsed by the perfumed femininity he found in fashionable drawing-rooms and dismissing the concept of love, Day sought a mate who cared little for superficialities such as affection, who could discuss philosophy and literature, and who had the physical stamina to withstand a life of gloomy frugality and noble fortitude. He was applauded by his liberal friends - including Erasmus Darwin, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and the poet Anna Seward - for the advanced state of his feminism, but what Day was looking for had nothing to do with equality. While Wendy Moore suggests he wanted "a woman who would be more like a man," everything in this well-researched but under-analysed treatment of the case points to the conclusion that what Day wanted was a man who would be more like a woman, but what he settled for was a slave. This was a complicated requirement for someone who became famous as an early abolitionist. Day's much admired poem "The Dying Negro" brought home to many the misery of the slave-trade, and the depth of his compassion could further be seen in his extravagant philanthropy: Day's considerable fortune was donated, penny by penny, to the homeless and the hungry. It was supposedly in the spirit of charity that he "saved" from the Foundling Hospital, although it was closer to kidnapping, two 12-year-old orphans called Ann and Dorcas. Changing their names to Sabrina and Lucretia, Day's aim was to mould them, in accordance with the views of Rousseau on the "natural education" of children, into wifely servility. Obviously he couldn't marry both girls, and so the plan was to select as his bride the one who most satisfied the job requirements, and to throw the other away. It was Dorcas/Lucretia who didn't make the grade, and Sabrina who became the unhappy focus of Day's experiment. Rousseau's radical views, expounded in his novel Émile, on the benefits of raising children away from the corrupting influence of civilisation, were all the rage. Richard Warburton-Lytton rolled his baby in the snow and the Prince and Princess of Württemberg bathed their four-month-old daughter in an ice-cold fountain before leaving her naked outside until bedtime. Day, an admirer of Émile, decided to transpose the author's ideas about children onto the training of women. He dripped hot wax on Sabrina's arms and back until she stopped reacting to the pain, he had her wade, fully clothed, up to her chin in freezing water before lying on the grass to dry out, and on one occasion he delighted her - a girl who had never received a present in her life - with a box of new dresses which he then threw on the fire. Conceding his education of Sabrina to have been a failure, Day discarded her when she reached adulthood and she was saved from destitution only by marrying one of his friends, who then died leaving her penniless with two young children. When Day did nothing to help her, she was taken in by Charles Burney, the brother of the novelist Fanny Burney. Day, meanwhile, secured his perfect wife in the masochistic Esther Milnes, a prefiguration of Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke. The marriage was unsurprisingly childless and when he died, aged 41, after being thrown from a horse he had reared and tamed in accordance with his views on animal rights, Esther remarried and began a family. Moore narrates all this in buoyant rather than reflective prose, and her historical observations are both bland and sweeping: "First impressions spoke volumes in Georgian society," "In Georgian Britain money and status opened doors and closed eyes," "The Georgians were not noted for their kindness to animals and children," "For the vast majority of people in Georgian England marriage literally meant "till death us do part"." While it is curious that she says nothing about Day's sexuality, which was evidently homosexual, Moore uncovers for the first time the full story of Sabrina, and it is to the original Eliza Doolittle that this book belongs. How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore 336pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, t £16.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £18.99)