Jane Austen (16 page)

There are no surviving letters between February and the following May. Jane made herself useful to her father by copying baptisms and burials into the registers at Steventon and Deane. Few parish registers have been recorded by a hand so distinguished.

O
N 4 MAY
1801 Mrs Austen and her daughter Jane set off for Bath in their hackney chaise. Jane at least must have cast several longing, lingering looks behind at the tall elms and sycamores and the meadows full of wild flowers.

The journey from Steventon in Hampshire to Bath in Somerset, about eighty miles, took all day. They lunched on beef but could only eat a small portion. The second part of the journey from Devizes to Paragon took more than three hours and they arrived at half-past seven. They were kindly received with cups of tea. Hardly had she been in the dining room two minutes when Jane’s uncle interrogated her about the naval careers of Frank and Charles.

Next day she wrote to Cassandra, who was at Godmersham:

All in Bath was noise, dust and busde with numerous dashing equipages, barouches and curricles, passing and repassing, carts and drays, with sedan chairs for invalids, the gouty and ladies with no carriages. Traffic jams were frequent. In the season, on a Sunday in the Crescent, a contemporary was mildly shocked to see young women walking alone or in groups with neither servants nor chaperones, talking and laughing at street corners, and, worst of all, sometimes walking alone with young men. Street cries of milkmen, muffin men and sellers of newspapers rang out. In wet weather the clatter of pattens could be heard. When it rained people could take their exercise in the Upper or Lower Assembly Rooms with the view from the ballroom of the River Avon winding among green meadows and wooded hills.

Bath lies about a hundred and twenty miles to the west of London. It is famed for its natural hot springs. According to legend a British prince called Bladud was cured by the waters of leprosy before the Romans set foot on the British Isles. The magnificent Roman bath and two pagan temples near the Abbey churchyard were not excavated till 1871. After the Romans left Britain the Saxons built a new town and their own church, which was rebuilt by the Normans. This building was destroyed by fire in 1137 and the Abbey dates from the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century Queen Elizabeth granted Bath a charter. The city expanded to include Barton Fields to the West and Walcot in the east. Jane Austen’s parents had married at Walcot parish church. It was demolished in the mid 1770s and a new church built.

Neo-classical Bath as we have it, Britain’s earliest and arguably most successful example of town planning, was built between 1705 and 1810. During those years the streets were paved and lit. Formerly a small dirty town infested with muggers, then called footpads, Bath rose in importance as a provincial centre of fashion second only to London during the eighteenth century and reached its peak in the 1750s. The novelist Fanny Burney described it as a city of palaces, a town of hills and a hill of towns’. The town was attractive to people in reduced circumstances because living was cheaper there than in London. Jane wrote to Cassandra when she had been three days in Bath that meat was only eightpence a pound, butter twelve pence and cheese nine-pence halfpenny. She was shocked however at the exorbitant’ price of fish: a whole salmon cost two shillings and ninepence. Food in Bath was not as fresh as their own produce had been, and needed ready cash. Bath offered luxury shops, though: England’s first ice-cream parlour was opened there in 1774.

Bath is beautiful, even today, surrounded by sprawling suburbs. In Jane Austen’s day it nestled among wooded hills and the view from Beechen Cliff, mentioned in
Northanger Abbey
, must have been glorious. The architect John Wood, who died in 1754, designed Queen Square, the North and South Parades, and the beautiful Circus built by his son of the same name. The Circus, dating from 1754, is a circle of houses with classical columns of the three orders, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, supporting a continuous frieze. The Royal Crescent, Bath, is a neo-classical monument to the age of reason. It was built of local stone, a soft creamy colour, though to Anne Elliot in
Persuasion
Bath offers merely a ‘white glare’. Jane’s feelings of exile from and nostalgia for the country home where she was born are projected onto her sad and lonely heroine. Anne finds the clatter and yells of Bath exhausting.

By the time Jane Austen went to Bath to live it was less of a social magnet than a retirement town. It was noticeably inhabited by single people, especially, as a foreign visitor ungallantly put it, ‘superannuated females’. On the other hand, it offered advantages to those with cultivated tastes, with some possibility of congenial society concentrated in a small area instead of widely scattered as in country districts. There were concerts and other entertainments, and a theatre where David Garrick, Sarah Siddons and other great actors had appeared. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s
The Rivals
, which had been coldly received in London, was a runaway success in Bath. Kotzebue’s
Lovers’ Vows
, the play rehearsed but never performed in
Mansfield Park
, was played six times at the Theatre Royal while Jane Austen was living in Bath. The city offered excellent shops, circulating libraries, a hospital and ‘the waters’. There were numerous inns and ample stabling, as important an amenity then as parking space today. A contemporary writer observed that lodgings in Bath were elegant and plentiful. He suggested that a ten-minute walk was adequate to find somewhere suitable. But the Austens had great difficulty in finding a comfortable place to live. They soon confirmed that the fashionable streets such as the Royal Crescent and the Circus were well beyond their means. The houses in King Street were too small.

In her first letter from Bath Jane writes of walking with her uncle to the famous Pump Room, where he had to drink a glass of the waters, then believed to be medicinal. On the way they passed down Broad Street and High Street, past the magnificent west front of Bath Abbey, flanked by a pair of Jacob’s ladders, angels ascending and descending, carved in stone. The new Pump Room, built in 1795, and now a restaurant, has four tall fluted pillars crowned with Corinthian capitals supporting a sculptured pediment, and the clock by Thomas Tompiondating from 1709. Inside, the Pump Room is a lofty oblong space with tall windows, and a semicircular arched recess at each end. At the western end the gallery for musicians is still in occasional use today, though nowadays there is a stage where music is played by a trio. In the eastern apse still stands a statue of Beau Nash, arbiter of Bath fashion, which Jane must have seen.

Richard Nash was born in 1674 and died in 1762, thirteen years before Jane was born. But his edicts lingered. In 1705, when the first pump room was built, he became master of the ceremonies at Bath and made it the leading fashionable watering place. He wrote new rules for balls and assemblies, abolished the wearing of swords in places of amusement, forbade duelling, persuaded gentlemen to abandon boots for shoes and stockings, tamed refractory sedan chair men, and laid down a tariff for lodging. On one occasion, when an uncouth country squire attempted to enter the ballroom in boots, Nash asked him disdainfully why he had not brought in his horse as well, since ‘the beast was as well shod as his master’. Nash’s influence was a civilizing one, polishing the rough manners of the provincial gentry.

Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey
, drafted originally in the 1790s, goes to public assemblies and is introduced to her partner Henry Tilney by the master of ceremonies, a Mr King. Mr King was a real person, Master of the Ceremonies at the Lower Rooms from 1785 to 1805, when he became Master of the Ceremonies for the Upper Rooms. His regime was as strict as that imposed by Beau Nash.

Balls at the Assembly Rooms (destroyed by fire in 1820) began at six o’clock and ended at eleven. About nine o’clock the gentlemen were expected to treat their partners to tea and at the end of the evening hand them into the conveyances which were to take them home. Monday’s balls were devoted to country dances. At the 'fancy-ball' on Thursday, when strict evening dress was not required, two cotillions were danced, one before and one after tea. The cotillion was a French dance with elaborate steps, figures and ceremonial. To perform the dance ladies wore shorter skirts than usual with their overdresses picturesquely looped up. Overdresses eventually went out of style when the high-waisted straight-skirted gowns came in. In Jane Austen’s time cotillions were presided over by a French prisoner of war, Monsieur de la Cocardière.

Henry Tilney in
Northanger Abbey
says a country dance is ‘an emblem of marriage’. Catherine disagrees. She says, ‘People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.’ Catherine enjoys the gaieties Jane Austen tasted as a teenager. Anne Elliot in
Persuasion
, unrevised when Jane Austen died in 1817, attends only private parties. The heyday of public mixing was over. Anne finds Bath society as dull and insipid as Jane did, mixing with her uncle and aunt’s elderly friends. For all Jane’s dislike of the town she kept in touch with developments.
Persuasion
is set in 1814 during the brief lull in the French war. The penultimate chapter of
Persuasion
takes place partially in Union Street, which was not built till after Jane had left Bath for Chawton. Queen Square had become unfashionable by the time Jane wrote her last novel. Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove look down on it.

Jane soon noticed the warmer climate in the west of England: she was warmer in Bath without a fire than at Steventon with an excellent one. She hoped to persuade Mrs Lloyd to settle in Bath, for this would bring Martha’s companionship and Jane loved Martha. Jane was having her new dress made by Mrs Mussell the seamstress and for once has left a detailed description so we know exactly what it was like. It was to be:

Cassandra was making Martha a bonnet and Jane asked her to make Martha a cloak of the same materials. ‘They are very much worn here, in different forms - many of them just like her black silk spencer, with a trimming round the armholes instead of sleeves; some are long before, and some long all round like C Bigg’s.’ Later Jane undertook to order a gown for Cassandra but warned that although Mrs Mussell had made the dark gown very well she did not always succeed with lighter colours: ‘My white one I was obliged to alter a great deal.’

Jane and her mother had ordered a new bonnet apiece, both white straw trimmed with white ribbon. Jane was perhaps relieved to find her bonnets looked very much like other people’s and quite as smart. Cambric muslin bonnets were being worn and some of them were pretty but Jane was not going to buy one till Cassandra turned up. Bath was ‘getting so very empty’ that there was small need to exert herself. She drank tea, played cribbage and walked by the canal.

News of the Steventon sale arrived from Mary: sixty-one and a half guineas for the three cows pleased Jane but to get only eleven guineas for the tables was a blow. Eight guineas for her pianoforte, she told Cassandra, was about what she had expected. She was more anxious to hear about her books as she had heard they had gone well. She was impatient to hear the rest, as all she had learned anything about was the cows, bacon, hay, hops, tables and her father’s chest of drawers and study table.

The Austens looked at a house in Seymour Street but the rooms were cramped, the biggest being fourteen feet square. Jane dressed up and went with her uncle and aunt to the Upper Rooms. Before tea four couples danced while a hundred people watched. Jane thought the gathering ‘shockingly and inhumanly thin’. It was at this dance that she spotted Miss Twisleton the adultress. Jane planned to have another gown made in case they should go to the rooms again the following Monday, though she did not enjoy these occasions. She was soon bored and irritable. Next day, after just a week in the city, she was already writing to her sister, who was with the Lloyds at Ibthorpe:

These people were all strangers and Jane did not easily attach herself. Nevertheless she was about to accompany Mrs Chamberlayne and Miss Langley to the village of Weston, then a mile and a half from