ENGLAND ENGLAND ENGLAND
… Our isles best rampart is the sea
The midnight mark of Foes it braves
And Heav’n that fenc’d us round
That fenc’d us round with waves
Ordain’d the people to be free
Ordain’d the people to be free
ENGLAND, &c
Such robust sentiment, the eighteenth-century equivalent of a football chant, was hardly resonant with the fey subversiveness of gothic, although its fears of imminent (French) invasion concorded with Southampton’s vulnerable position in the patriotic body and the dangers that might indeed approach its coast – a sense of insular adversity elsewhere represented in the recently-composed and equally stirring ‘Rule Britannia’.
William Shield, born in County Durham in 1748, was a well-known and prolific composer, and his popular tune Rosina would become the melody for ‘Auld Lang Syne’. A republican with ‘sympathies with the Godwin circle’, his opera-pantomime of 1784, The Magic Cavern, ‘anticipated the Gothick Horrors of Mrs Radclyffe’; he died, presumably in London, in 1829. But Netley Abbey is also credited in contemporary texts to William Pearce, ‘a pretty successful dramatist’ working in the last quarter of the century, ‘of whose life we have not been able to learn any particulars’, as an early Victorian source notes. This intimate pair seem to have co-operated as composer and librettist – a list of Pearce’s works appears identical to those attributed to Shield: The Nunnery, 1785; Arrival at Portsmouth, 1794; Windsor Castle, 1795 – or perhaps they were one and the same, two sides of a prolific eighteenth-century Lloyd-Webber, teasing me with their identity down the years. On opening a bound collection of Shield’s operas, the title page of his ‘musical farce’ The Lock and Key declared it to be ‘Composed and Selected by Mr Shield. The Words by P. Hoare Esq.’
Displayed on the London stage in replica, Netley’s ruins had become a gothic commodity. In 1795 the Reverend Richard Warner wrote his Netley Abbey, a Gothic Story in Two Volumes, another opportunist conflation, printed by the Minerva Press (‘the most famous house of sensational fiction’, publishers of Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels). Warner’s morality tale – translated into both German and French editions – conflates Netley’s myths in its medieval hero, Edward de Villars, who rescues an imprisoned nineteen-year-old girl, the beautiful, auburn-haired Agnes, from a cell in the abbey in which she was confined by the wicked Abbot Peter, in the pay of the yet more evil Sir Hildebrand Warren who has already murdered her father, and whose ghost comes back to haunt him. In the final scene both the Abbot and Sir Hildebrand meet a bloody end, allowing Agnes to be reunited with her brother and the author to draw his moral conclusion on ‘persecuted virtue’.
As well as inspiring such sensational literature, Netley also prompted a healthy trade in cheap prints. Tourists could have the romantic ruins as seen through its woods, thrillingly overgrown, or from the shore, jauntily contrasted with the modern traffic of Southampton Water. Catering to the market, commercial artists provided visitors with a memento of their visit, a keepsake to take home with their guidebooks (after they had carefully cut their initials into the stones in eighteenth-century graffiti). But serious painters were also drawn to the site: the watercolourist Francis Towne made a series of pictures between 1798 and 1809; and in 1816 John Constable spent his honeymoon sketching at Netley, Weston Shore and Southampton. For the meteorologically-obsessed Constable, the sea-swept clouds and the abbey’s setting below such changing skies were a large part of its appeal. The ruins seemed to evoke dark memories for the artist: after the death of his wife, Maria, from tuberculosis in 1828, he used a sepulchral sketch of the abbey for one of his nocturnal watercolours, issued as a popular engraving in 1829.
Directed by artistic and literary taste, a visit to Netley stirred deep passions. ‘Few people, perhaps, who think at all’, declared the 1796 pocket guide to Southampton,
can visit the remains of these ancient religious fabrics, without expressing a sensation, which, as it arises from a combination of different emotions, is hardly to be described … the reflection that we are treading over ground peopled with the remains of our fellow-creatures, who were once young and vigorous like ourselves, inspires the awful idea of our own mortality – that we ere long must be like them, silent, neglected, and forgotten.
Such reveries were a symptom of the age. It was a century which began, as Isaiah Berlin wrote, ‘by being calm and smooth … rationality is progressed, the Church is retreating, unreason is yielding …’ But suddenly these clear skies were clouded by ‘a violent eruption of emotion, enthusiasm. People become interested in gothic buildings, in introspection. People suddenly become neurotic and melancholy; they begin to admire the unaccountable flight of spontaneous genius.’
It was the Industrial Revolution that had darkened the horizon and produced the transition in which the goths of Netley, Cobbett’s radicalism and Chamberlayne’s Whiggish improvements were all caught up in their own ways. ‘… Under the surface of this apparently coherent, apparently elegant century there are all kinds of dark forces moving’, wrote Berlin. The mystic necromancers, the experimenters in occult sciences, Dr Mesmer’s ‘animal magnetism’, the Illuminati and William Blake’s fantastic visions became the mysterious obverse to improved landscapes and scientific theorems. Superstition and alienation in a world of enclosure and transportation gathered in the clouds that gave gothic its darkness, and shaded the tourists’ mock-pagan worship of Netley’s Christian ruins with something more atavistic, something more than mere spectacle. It may have been a tourist site, but Netley also expressed a dissatisfaction with the age; its ancient stones spoke of modern concerns.
Like the plague culture of medieval times, gothic became almost entirely concerned with the grandeur of decay itself, obsessed with morbidity and decrepitude, passion and death. Its cult heroes were the heroes and creators of the sensational novels which the Reverend Warner’s book imitated: Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe’s pulp fiction, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, with its pregnant nuns and rapist monks (followed by his Crazy Jane, a poetic encounter with a madman using material gathered from his visits to asylums). Its aficionados were drawn to extreme expression of their own self-questioning: young men such as Shelley, whose restless life, riven with disputed inheritance, suicidal lovers and psychological instability, seemed to live out gothic sensation. At eighteen, he wrote a gothic novel, Zastrozzi, in which the hero encounters a castle in the woods, ‘a large and magnificent building, whose battlements rose above the lofty trees’, just as Netley’s ruins were hidden and revealed by its own verdure. And in 1818, his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey caricatured Shelley and his circle: the poet ‘Scythrop Glowry’ living in a mystical tower by the sea, like Netley, ‘ruinous and full of owls’, and Mr Flosky (based on Coleridge) for whom ‘mystery was his mental element. He lived in the midst of that visionary world in which nothing is but what is not. He dreamed with his eyes open, and saw ghosts dancing round him at noontide.’
Netley had entered its most public phase, a spectacle as romantic, thrilling and sensational as any attraction in London’s Oxford Street Pantheon. Tourists took the ferry from Southampton to Netley’s shore to sample its sublime charms – the experience given a further piquance by the fact that their time there was proscribed by the tides upon which their return to civilisation depended. This special access made the abbey’s ruins that much more wondrous and magical, as if it were a vision revealed at Nature’s whim. And among the many who came across the water was one writer who had newly taken up residence in Southampton’s fashionable spa: Jane Austen.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Southampton had been in decline, suffering the after-effects of the revisited plague of 1665, imported to the town when a misguided humanitarian gave sanctuary to an infected child from London. On his 1724 tour of the country, Daniel Defoe announced, ‘Southampton is a truly antient town, for ’tis in a manner dying with age; the decay of