Sabrina Sidney (1757–1843) was a British foundling girl taken in when she was 12 by the author Thomas Day, who wanted to mould her into his perfect wife. As an adult she worked with the schoolmaster Charles Burney, managing his schools. In 1769 Day took Sabrina to France to begin methods of education inspired by Rousseau's Emile, or On Education. When she reached her teenage years, Day's friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth persuaded him that his ideal-wife experiment had failed. In 1783 Sabrina was told the truth about Day's experiment and confronted him in a series of letters. In 1804, Anna Seward published a book about Sabrina's upbringing. In his 1820 memoirs, Edgeworth said that Sabrina and Day made a good match and that she loved him. Sabrina countered that Day had made her miserable, and that she had effectively been a slave. The story of Sabrina's life has been told in Wendy Moore's 2013 book How to Create the Perfect Wife and dramatised in the 2015 BBC Radio 4 play The Imperfect Education of Sabrina Sidney. (Full article...)
... that Canadian-American student Shmuel Schecter finished his four-year high school requirements in three years so that he could go to Poland to study at the Mir Yeshiva at age 17?
... that if the sun anemone shrimp is separated from its host for 24 hours, it loses its immunity to the sea anemone's stinging cells?
In the news
The Leekfrith torcs
Scientists announce the discovery of microfossils within rocks dated between 3.77 and 4.28 billion years old from Northern Quebec, Canada, making them the oldest known fossils of life on Earth.
The discovery of the Leekfrith torcs(pictured), believed to be the oldest Iron Age gold jewellery found in Britain, is announced.
2007 – Fourteen-year-old English schoolgirl Charlotte Shaw drowned on Dartmoor, becoming the first person to die in connection with the annual Ten Tors challenge.
A registration card for Louis Wijnhamer (1904–1975), an ethnic Dutch humanitarian who was captured soon after the Empire of Japan occupied the Dutch East Indies in March 1942. Prior to the occupation, many ethnic Europeans had refused to leave, expecting the Japanese occupation government to keep a Dutch administration in place. When Japanese troops took control of government infrastructure and services such as ports and postal services, 100,000 European (and some Chinese) civilians were interned in prisoner-of-war camps where the death rates were between 13 and 30 per cent. Wijnhamer was interned in a series of camps throughout Southeast Asia and, after the surrender of Japan, returned to what was now Indonesia, where he lived until his death.
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