Fashionable eighteenth-century society demanded two particular nostrums: mineral waters and sea bathing; Southampton could supply both. Beyond the city walls a spring was discovered to produce chalybeate waters impregnated with iron salts, a homoeopathic pot pourri imbued with the power to cure all manner of ills, from leprosy to hydrophobia (although it didn’t prevent an outbreak of the disease in 1807, whose rabid victims thirsted for water they could not bear to drink). For Southampton, as for Netley, water was its great advantage. ‘Bathing has generally been attained with the best effect’, the Southampton Guide informed its readers – affluent citizens most likely to suffer the nervous disorders of their station. For weak constitutions worn down by the stress of modern life, immersion in the sea was a celebrated cure. ‘Relaxation is the common cause of complaints incident to the higher order of persons in England’, the guide continued, ‘and, except in the case of unsound viscera, the cold bath gently braces the solids and accelerates the blood’s motion.’
Below the town’s medieval walls, tidal sea-water baths were built, with elegantly-glazed ‘Long Rooms’ for ‘interested spectators’, and a promenade known as ‘The Beach’ along which, on their visit in the summer of 1755, Horace Walpole and John Chute had ‘walked long by moonlight’. As Walpole noted, the town was already ‘crowded; sea-bathers are established there too’. A month or so later their friend Thomas Gray was complaining,
This place is still full of Bathers. I know not a Soul, nor have once been at the rooms. the walks all round it are delicious, & so is the weather. lodgings very dear & fish very cheap. here is no Coffeehouse, no Bookseller, no Pastry-Cook: but here is the Duke of Chandos …
As with any upwardly-mobile area, the facilities of a fashionable resort soon arrived. Mrs Remacle opened her coffee house in the High Street, and lending libraries and grander assembly rooms sprang up, the voyeuristic spa society and nexus for elaborate masked balls, although their proximity to the less salubrious parts of town encouraged dissent among ‘the rougher elements of the poor, resentful of the amusements of the well-to-do and the fashionable visitors’. At one masque given in 1773, a young man leaving his lodgings dressed as a shepherd was set upon and ‘tossed like a football for some time … [until] some humane persons intervened’.
The contrasts of privilege and deprivation which across the Channel were about to erupt in revolution were just as evident in Southampton’s spa. The following year, 1774, a ‘remarkably brilliant’ masquerade made ‘the mob so riotous that it was with difficulty the company got in and out of their carriages, and the streets were one continued scene of riot and confusion all evening’. As the balls grew more fantastic, so too did local opposition to such aristocratic decadence. One held at the new Polygon Hotel featured costumed revellers as ‘a Jew pedlar, Tancreds, Spaniards, sailors, nosegay-girls and ballad-singers’ – the kind of fancy dress hedonism in which the Bright Young People would engage two centuries later. On this occasion the event was marred by a large stone being lobbed through the window which narrowly missed the Duke of Gloucester.
However disgruntled the locals may have been at the excesses of their betters – against which behaviour their French colleagues sans-culottes would take direct action – the ‘fashionable visitors’ felt secure in the knowledge that Southampton’s reputation as a genteel resort had been sealed by royal approval. In 1750 George II’s son, Frederick Prince of Wales, had visited the town to bathe; by the 1760s, his two younger brothers had eschewed their now reigning brother’s partiality for Weymouth – where the King went to soothe the onset of his madness – and had become Southampton’s social patrons. By the 1780s, Southampton was enjoying the peak of its fashionability, confirmed by the arrival of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as The Times’s man on the spot informed its readers.
Extract of a letter from Southampton, Aug. 2
Fashion and taste have fixed their head quarters at this place, for the season. Dance and song succeed in merry round. The rooms crowded, which, by the bye, is not a little owing to the extreme attention and politeness of the Master of Ceremonies. Lodgings filled with fashionable belles and beaux – and, what is more decisively recommendatory, less extortion and imposition happen here, than at most seabathing places of summer resort.
The beautiful Duchess, with her party, has just left Southampton; her return is expected in a few days.
Newspaper reports grew from single paragraphs listing various lords and ladies to spectacular two-column lists comprising a substantial muster of London’s society. By 1788, the Southampton season was firmly in the social calendar, accompanied by the kind of hype that would be employed to advertise later resorts; the town had become the English equivalent of Antibes, yet more so in an era when European turmoil precluded foreign travel. The Beach and the Long Rooms thronged with dandified men and elegant women craning their necks and fluttering their fans. ‘This place now boasts the most fashionable and numerous company of any of the watering places,’ reported The Times in July 1788. The actor David Garrick had visited, it noted, ‘the Duke of Gloucester will certainly be here, and the Duke of Orleans is so pleased, that he means to pass some weeks at this delightful spot’. The following year the King came with his Queen and Princess, entertained at breakfast by a dutiful, and doubtless grateful, Corporation.
It was the making of modern Southampton, bringing the kind of figures only the age of the ocean liner could entice back to the port. Indeed, not only were many introduced to the area’s charms, some were persuaded to stay there, making it their country residence. ‘If Southampton has decreased in trade, it has increased prodigiously in splendour and elegance’, the 1781 Guide to Southampton could retort to Defoe’s slur on an ‘antient town’, ‘and many gentlemen of fortune have come to settle here, since it has become so polite a place’.
One of those gentlemen, James Dott, lived at Bitterne Grove, the building which was to become my school. Dott was an East India Company surgeon who, having served in the great new colonial acquisition of India, had ended up at Southampton, where his eccentric habits were supposed by local legend to have been the source of the adjective ‘dotty’; in old age, Dott was to be seen being wheeled about town in a basket chair, as if staking his claim to his neologism. He was also remembered for the fact that he had employed as his gardener Touissant-Ambrose Talour de la Cartrie, the Comte de Villienière, an aristocratic casualty of Revolutionary France who had taken refuge in Southampton in 1796 after a series of miraculous escapades worthy of the Scarlet Pimpernel.
At school we were told that among the visitors to the eccentric James Dott were the Austens; legend even embroidered the scene to include Jane seated under the great oak tree on its lawn, writing, although there is nothing to substantiate such a romantic picture. The Austens lived in the leas of Lord Lansdowne’s newly-built gothic folly, with the town walls at the end of their garden. ‘We hear that we are envied our House by many people, & that the Garden is the best in Town’, Jane told her sister, but she was scathing of Southampton’s dressmakers, theatres, and ‘young women without partners, & each of them with two ugly, naked shoulders!’ The town featured just once in her fiction, in her youthful novel Love and Friendship, when it serves to remind her of ‘stinking fish’.
Netley, however, presented a different prospect. She had completed Northanger Abbey four years previously, but it seems it is almost certain that Austen, born and brought up in Hampshire, an afternoon’s ride from Netley, had drawn on its abbey – by now the stuff of novellas, odes and operas – for her gothic satire.
Austen the rationalist had parodied Mrs Radcliffe’s books in her fin-de-siècle novel, in which her heroine Catherine Morland is a young girl who, like Lucy Oakland in Shield’s opera, yearns for the romance she has read about in her gothic novels: ‘As they drew near the end of their journey, her impatience for a sight of the abbey … returned in full force, and every bend on the road was expected with solemn awe to afford a glimpse of its massy walls of grey stone, rising amidst a grove of ancient oaks, with the last beams of the sunset playing in beautiful splendour on its high Gothic windows.’ The reality