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He trained an orphan to be his perfect wife. She married his friend.

Sabrina Sidney began life as an abandoned baby in London, passed through the Foundling Hospital system under a string of temporary names before ending up at an orphanage in Shrewsbury. At twelve she was picked out, along with another orphan girl, by the writer Thomas Day and his friend John Bicknell, who told the orphanage she was being sent into domestic service but in fact intended her as the raw material for an extraordinary experiment. Inspired by Rousseau's ideas on education, Day meant to raise a girl from childhood into his ideal wife, obedient yet capable of philosophical conversation, and indifferent to luxury. He took both girls to France to educate them in isolation, eventually judging the other child unsuitable and sending her off to a milliner's apprenticeship while keeping Sidney for further moulding.

Back in England, Day subjected Sidney to increasingly strange trials meant to toughen her character, firing blank pistol shots at her skirts, dripping hot wax on her skin, making her wade into a cold pond, and burning a gift of silk clothes in front of her to test her indifference to finery. These methods produced mixed results, and she still screamed at the gunfire even as she learned to endure the wax without flinching. Friends eventually convinced Day that living alone with a young unmarried woman was improper, so he shuttled her between a boarding school, a dressmaking apprenticeship, and various households, all while secretly still considering her as a potential bride. When he finally proposed, he called the engagement off in a rage after she wore the wrong outfit one day, and he sent her away, declaring he would have nothing more to do with her.

Years later Bicknell, the very friend who had helped select her as a child, tracked Sidney down and proposed marriage, revealing the truth of Day's scheme. She confronted Day by letter, and though he admitted everything, he refused to apologize, grudgingly consenting to the match and paying the dowry he had promised in the original contract. Sidney married Bicknell and had two children, but he died a few years later, leaving the family in financial difficulty after squandering much of their money on gambling. She rebuilt her life managing schools for Charles Burney and lived into her eighties, having asked friends not to discuss her unusual past for fear it would damage her reputation. Later writers, including one of Day's own friends, disputed how she had felt about her upbringing, with Sidney herself insisting she had been treated like a slave, and her story has since been linked to works such as Shaw's Pygmalion and several Victorian novels.

Day selected two girls for the experiment and discarded one partway through, deciding she was unsuitable. Sabrina outlived him by decades and died in 1843, aged about 86.

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