Book Launch Day!

Exciting news! My new book A Visitor's Guide To Jane Austen's England has just been published by Pen & Sword; it's available as a paperback, and in Kindle and epub editions. I hope you enjoy exploring the world of Jane Austen, Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet!

Jane Austen and Bath III: The Pump Room

King's and Queen's Baths, Bath.

Bath's warm mineral springs have been renowned for their soothing properties since Roman times. In Austen's day, the four public baths were open-air and surrounded by handsome colonnades to shelter bathers from the weather. The celebrated King’s, Queen’s, Hot, and Cross-Bath were frequented by the common sort. Men and women bathed together, and you would have seen people entering the water with running sores and open ulcers.  Poor people paid 6d for bathing. More genteel folk used Bath Corporation’s private baths on Stall St, adjoining the King’s Bath, and also the Abbey Baths belonging to Earl Manvers.
Invalids sipped their daily internal dose of Bath water at the Pump-Room which opened early in the morning. It cost a guinea per month to drink the water, plus a tip for the ‘pumper’ who serves it from the marble vase on the south side of the room. The recommended dose was a maximum pint and a half (710 ml) per day, but you did not drink all that at once.Invalids took two half-pint doses in the morning before breakfast, and the last portion at noon. American visitor Benjamin Silliman did not enjoy his small sample of Bath’s celebrated water: ‘The taste... is slightly chalybeate, and disagreeably warm, exciting the idea of an emetic’. 

Pump Room, Bath, 1804.

New arrivals to Bath wrote their name in the visitors’ book kept in the Pump-Room. This entitled them to subscribe to the weekly balls and assemblies. 
In Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland was disappointed that handsome Henry Tilney’s name ‘was not in the Pump-room book...He must be gone from Bath’. 

Pump Room Restaurant, Bath.

From mid-day, including Sundays, people crowded together at the Pump Room to meet friends and parade up and down the room while the orchestra played. Catherine Morland and her friend Isabella ‘eagerly joined each other’ in the Pump Room in Bath ‘as soon as divine service was over’. But after discovering that the crowd there was ‘insupportable, and that there was not a genteel face to be seen... they hastened away to the Crescent, to breathe the fresh air of better company’.
Images:
Pump Room, Bath, 1804. Engraving by John Hill from an aquatint by J. C . Nattes. Library of Congress collection, LC-USZ62-134778.
Photos © Sue Wilkes.

Travelling In Style!

The Regulator coach, illustration by Henry Alken.

My feature on coach travel in Jane Austen's day is now live on Historical Honey.

Jane Austen and Bath II

Hetling Pump, Bath.

If you were ill or convalescent during Jane Austen's lifetime, your physician would probably recommend you ‘take the waters’ at one of the many fashionable spas like Bath, Buxton, Cheltenham, Tunbridge Wells, Harrogate and Bristol’s ‘hot wells’. Drinking mineral water, and bathing in it, was thought to relieve many ailments like gout, rheumatism, and the palsy. Your doctor would give you a special diet to follow, and prescribe blood-letting, in addition to taking the waters.  

During Jane's stay in Bath in 1799, her brother Edward tried the waters of the Hetling Pump for his illness,  thought to be gout.  On 2 June, Jane wrote to her sister Cassandra that Edward 'was better yesterday than he had been for two or three days before. He drinks at the Hetling Pump, is to bathe tomorrow, and try electricity on Tuesday'.

A sedan-chair was the most convenient way to reach the baths, and to explore Bath’s busy streets, as Robert Southey explained in his Letters from England (1807): ‘There being in some places no carriage road, and in others so wide a pavement that in wet weather there would be no getting at the carriage, sedan chairs are used instead. They are very numerous, and with their chairmen, who all wear large coats of dark blue, form another distinguishing peculiarity of this remarkable town.’ 
Author photos: 
The Hetling Pump Bath.
A sedan chair and chairmen at Knutsford May Day. 

Jane Austen and Bath I

During the 18^th century Bath was one of Britain’s most fashionable resorts, thanks to its health-giving waters. John Wood the elder and his son created elegant streets like the Circus and Royal Crescent, each building faced with the area’s characteristic cream-coloured freestone from Combe Down. By Austen’s day Bath was perhaps no longer quite as fashionable as formerly, but it was still a bustling, thriving spa.  

Paragon, Bath.

Jane Austen’s first stay in Bath is thought to have been in 1797, when she was about 22 years old. A visit to her aunt and uncle, Mr and Mrs Leigh-Perrot, at No 1 Paragon, is mentioned in a letter to her sister Cassandra (17 May 1799), ‘Our first view of Bath has been just as gloomy as it was last November twelvemonth’.

13 Queen's Square, Bath.

On her 1799 visit, she was accompanied by her mother, and her brother Edward and his wife Elizabeth. 

They stayed at 13 Queen Square: ‘We are exceedingly pleased with the house’, Jane continued in her letter, ‘the rooms are quite as large as we expected. Mrs Bromley [presumably the landlady] is a fat woman in mourning, and a little black kitten runs about the staircase...we have two very nice-sized rooms, with dirty quilts and everything comfortable...There was a very long list of arrivals here in the newspaper yesterday, so we need not immediately dread absolute solitude; and there is a public breakfast in Sydney Gardens each morning, so we shall not be wholly starved...The prospect from the drawing-room window, at which I now write, is rather picturesque, as it commands a perspective view of the left side of Brock Street, broken by three Lombardy poplars in the garden of the last house of Queen’s Parade ’.

Brock St, Bath.

Jane may well have had this stay in mind, and was probably smiling to herself, when she added a little family in-joke to Persuasion (written during 1815–1816). 
The young Musgrove ladies tell Anne Elliot and their parents: ‘We hope we shall be in Bath in the winter; but remember, papa, if we do go, we must be in a good situation: none of your Queen-squares for us!’

Illustration from the author’s collection: Fashionable eighteenth century folk on the Parade in Bath. Engraving by E Gascoine, from a drawing by Hugh Thomson, English Illustrated Magazine 1883–4, (Macmillan, New York, 1884).

Photos © Sue Wilkes.