Bath, in Jane Austen's day, was a thriving, fairly new city that drew the fashionable to its quarters to partake of the supposed life-giving waters that flowed there. The Pump Room was certainly a place to see and be seen.
But the Austens had been used to a quieter country life, so Bath must have been a jarring change. Indeed, why Jane Austen's father would choose to retire to such a setting could be questioned, but Bath was his choice. The bustling city certainly made a strong impression on Jane Austen.
Bath in Jane Austen’s Novels
Bath features prominently in Jane Austen’s novels.
- Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, makes her social debut in Bath and is quite captivated by the city. “‘Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?’ … Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.”
- Bath plays an important role in Persuasion , as Sir Eliot decides to relocate there when financial problems force his family out of their ancestral home, rather as Jane Austen and her family was uprooted, though the situations were different. It is in Bath where Anne Eliot declares her undying love for Frederick Wentworth, and he does the same. They are reunited, making Bath, though reluctantly travelled to, a city ultimately of great worth to them.
- Bath and nearby coastal areas also play roles in Sanditon and Love and Friendship. Mr. Heywood, intent on founding a seaside resort in Sanditon, gives a lament that perhaps still rings true with modern developers: “Every five years, one hears of some new place or other starting up by the sea and growing the fashion. How they can half of them be filled is the wonder! Where people can be found with money and time to go to them!”
Shadows in Bath
For the Austen family, Bath would turn from a lazy resort town with no real meaning to them to a place of sorrow and even tragedy.
- For Jane Austen and her family, perhaps the greatest sorrow associated with Bath was that her father died there in 1805. The family relocated shortly thereafter to Southampton in early 1806. Even though the attitude toward death in those days was more stout than today, simply because it was faced more often, the grief when a loved one died was no less heartfelt that it is today. Jane might have dealt with death with her particular style of dry wit: “We met … Dr. Hall in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife or himself must be dead.” But losses were keenly felt, and when she herself died, her sister Cassandra said: “I have lost such a sister, such a friend as can never have been surpassed … She was the sun of my life.”
- Another bad experience in Bath came to Jane Austen and her family when her aunt, Mrs. Leigh Perrot, was falsely accused by a Bath shopkeeper of stealing a card of fine lace, in those days, a capitol offense for which she could have been hanged. She spent eight months in custody before she was cleared of any wrongdoing.
Bath as it was in Jane Austen’s Day
The city of Bath itself was neither good nor bad; it was simply a fashionable place to live and to visit to partake of the natural waters there that many thought were beneficial to health.
- Bath was a fairly new city, with freshly cut stones that had not yet mellowed to the gentle colours of today. Jane writes to her older sister Cassandra in May of 1801: “The first view of Bath in fine weather does not answer my expectations; I think I see more distinctly through rain. The sun was got behind everything, and the appearance of the place from the top of Kingsdown was all vapour, shadow, smoke, and confusion.”
- Occasionally Jane Austen would partake in visits to friends in London, but she spoke of the vices of that city in letters and through characters in her novels. It seems she preferred life in a smaller city. “We do not look in great cities for our best morality.” – Edmund Bertram, Mansfield Park
The family moved from Bath in early 1806, and that must have been a relief to Jane Austen to leave a city where she did not spend many happy times. But she also allows one of the characters in Northanger Abbey, where Bath plays such a prominent role, to speak of the virtues of home life.
And indeed, this is wherein Jane Austen’s great genius lies, in making the ordinary and plain shine with glamour and excitement.
Sir Walter Scott wrote, in 1826, that she “had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with… (she had an) exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment…”
Perhaps the values of home in the classic “Wizard of Oz” took a cue from Jane Austen’s writing when she has Catherine Morland’s mother say, in Northanger Abbey: “Wherever you are you should always be contented, but especially at home, because there you must spend the most of your time.”
Good advice, no matter what century one lives in.
Sources:
The Wicked Wit of Jane Austen, compiled by Dominique Enright, Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 2002, 2007.
Jane Austen, by Victor Lucas, Pitkin Guides, Jarrold Publishing, 2005.
Pamela Mooman - Pamela Mooman I am an award-winning writer and editor. I have more than 19 years of experience working in a variety of subjects and ...
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