In Southampton, meanwhile, questions of taste were paramount, the barometer by which its fortunes could rise or fall. The island’s waters still beckoned, but now the age of the spa had been superseded – in royal and aristocratic fashionability – by the age of the yacht, and attention had moved down Southampton Water to the Isle of Wight and Cowes, and eventually to Osborne, where Victoria would set up her holiday home. The ‘gentry of the first rank and fashion’ – that fickle bunch – were now only passing through the town en route for the island, hardly long enough for its tradespeople to make a profit, or its destitute to chuck a brick. By 1817 the Spa Gardens were virtually deserted, and by 1820 the town’s tonic waters available only in bottles from local chemists. If it were to survive in the modern world, Southampton would have to change again. To this task its intrepid, waterside population proved equal. Once more its waters would rescue it, and within a generation, this geographically-blessed place – with its double high tides and safe harbour yet more accessible in the age of steamships and the railway line that now linked it to London – had entered a new period of success.
Like the rest of England, everything changed with the coming of the railways. Populations became mobile, and expanding towns were connected by this powerful new web of communication. As a result, Southampton had to cede its role as a ‘retreat for retirement’ to Bournemouth and Brighton, its decline as a seaside resort ironically sealed by the social mobility which elsewhere had made coastal towns accessible, but which in Southampton ran between the beach and the town, separating the citizens from their seaside with its iron rails and belching smoke. To the east, the line ploughed through Chamberlayne’s improved landscape, gouging out its way with high embankments and brick viaducts, seeding the land with new suburbs like fireweed as it went.
In the process, it too, like Netley, grew a little commoner, as though it had been contaminated down the railway line with a Cockney accent. The Whitehall Review noted that in the town ‘slowly, but surely, has been established the reign of Genteel Vulgarity’ and that in the high street ‘the talking is very loud, the laughter very loud, and the ladies’ dresses for the most part to match. So, too, the garb of the Southampton youth is fearfully and wonderfully made, and he has a way of looking around him which seems to say, “See here – what a dog I am!”.’
The railway also brought a new class of admirer to Netley. Picnickers now besported themselves in the ruins, as did their metropolitan counterparts at the Crystal Palace, where Paxton’s gigantic greenhouse enclosed ancient elms growing in Hyde Park, just as mature trees grew up in the abbey’s roofless nave. The Great Exhibition celebrated industry, progress and the future; Netley – with its own aspirations to being a crystal palace, its technologically innovative tracery windows having collapsed into decrepitude – represented the past. Gothic itself was turned from its effete, decadent eighteenth-century incarnation into a more rigorous, muscular nineteenth-century aesthetic. To Augustus Pugin, a Catholic convert, the championing of gothic was nothing less than ‘an answer to current social and cultural crises’. From aesthetic spectacle gothic had returned to utilitarian function, although Pugin’s crusade would culminate in suburban villas and terraces, their scaled-down gothic porches appealing to some atavistic sense of the mythic English past. It was a long way from Strawberry Hill’s Committee of Taste, and even further from Abbot Suger’s opus modernum.
Once more Netley’s ruins would respond to the spirit of the times. Just as gothic changed its meaning, so did the abbey. In 1861, Punch noted that ‘The place has been cleared and cleaned without having been Cockneyfied; it has been furnished with convenient and inconspicuous seats, and rendered permeable throughout.’ At the same time it lamented the fact that when the Lady Chapel had been cleared of ‘rubbish’ and revealed ‘a piece of encaustic tile pavement near the altar … several pieces have been stolen by some robbers who procured admission in the disguise of respectable-looking people’; the magazine called for police patrols of the area. Three years later, William Howitt noted the same reservations which Barham had satirised; the conflicting pressures of popularity and access with art and intellectual demands which the newly-mobile modern world had created:
The visitors and tourists of to-day are just as much charmed with the ruins of Netley as the monks and Walpole were. They crowd there in summer to picnic amongst the ruined walls and lofty trees, and are not always careful to avoid desecrating these delightful spots with their relics of greasy paper, and of shrimps and sardine boxes. But the grounds are carefully kept, and these unsightly objects daily removed, to be only in fine weather daily left again; a strange desecration that one would think every lover of the picturesque would feel instinctively aware of.
These were egalitarian times, and romanticism – like the great unwashed – had to be kept in check. The rigours of Victorian technoculture had settled on the world, and fey imagination took a backseat. Howitt noted that ‘Horace Walpole, in his days of gothic enthusiasm, was enchanted with Netley, and seems to have contemplated restoring at least enough of it for a house. What an escape it had of being Strawberry-hilled!’ Sentimentalised on tinted postcards of picnic scenes and the ordinary people at play, Netley had lost its sense of subversion. Accepting their latest role, the abbey ruins gave up their sensational past and slipped back into sleepy indolence.
The sky looks as though someone has been dropping ink in it. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, rain-dark clouds seem almost to touch the trees around the ruins. Each year, the lowering stratosphere descends a little more, shrouding every horizon with an industrial gothic legacy.
In the 1880s, Ruskin, the champion of the Gothic Revival, lectured on The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century and his ‘obsession with black skies and plague winds’: ‘I believe these swift and mocking clouds and colours are only between storms’, he wrote. ‘They are assuredly new in Heaven, so far as my life reaches. I never saw a single example of them till after 1870.’ Edging nearer to madness – as though those clouds precipitated his insanity – Ruskin had become obsessed by the effect of industrialisation on the climate, writing in his diary, ‘By the plague-winds every breath of air you draw is polluted, half round the world.’ Like Pugin, who, overworked by his final commission to design the ‘medieval court’ for the Great Exhibition, had been admitted to Bedlam, Ruskin too became insane. After attacks of mania which left him remote from the world for his last ten years, Ruskin died in an influenza epidemic in 1900, watching the skies over his Lake District home.
Beauty had become a problem for the modern world. In his prose-poem ‘A Phenomenon of the Future’ – written in 1864, the same year as Howitt’s antiquarian tribute to the abbey – the Decadent poet Stéphane Mallarmé envisaged ‘A pale sky, over a world ending in decrepitude, will perhaps disappear with the clouds: faded purple shreds of sunsets dying in a sleeping river on a horizon submerged in light and water … in an age that has outlived beauty’, ‘une epoque qui survit à la beauté’. Victorian champions of progress like T. H. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ and coiner of the term ‘agnostic’, vigorously challenged such decadent romanticism. In 1886 Huxley rebuked the regressive aesthetics of the Wordsworthian ‘Lake District Defence Society’. ‘People’s sense of beauty should be more robust’, snorted the rationalist, ‘I have had apocalyptic visions looking down Oxford Street at a sunset before now.’
Blakean revelation had little place in the reality of the new world, and Netley’s romantic visitors – Walpole, Gray and all who came in their wake – could not have imagined the overcast world of their descendants, threatened by new storm clouds. Heavy rain floods the beach road, making it impassible, as if to revert Netley to the Cistercians’ ‘horrible’ site. Passing the sign that marks the city’s boundaries, you turn into the gateway beyond, where an older metal plate announces that ‘Netley Abbey, the property of the Chamberlayne family, was placed in the guardianship of the Commissioners of Works under the Ancient Monuments Act 1913 by Tankerville Chamberlayne Esq. of Cranbury Park Winchester August 1922’.
The reforming, reconstructing twentieth century had a new use for Netley. It repaired