Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (36 page)

Bath was the model that every spa aspired to - or, when it became unfashionable, that every spa reacted against. The springs at Bath had been considered medicinal for over a hundred years: Charles II had brought Catherine of Braganza to Bath in the hope that the waters would promote fertility; his brother James repeated the pattern with Mary of Modena. Queen Anne went there looking for a cure for her gout and dropsy. One had to be ill or unhappy to ‘take the waters’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when ‘bathing’ consisted of sitting in a coarse smock in tubs of heated chalybeate, or iron-rich, spring waters. By the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this had been modified, and now drinking a glass or two of the waters was said to produce the same results. As this could be done while fully clothed, and in a social setting, it was a far more attractive proposition. But what made Bath successful was not that its waters were more potent than other chalybeate springs. It was instead that from the eighteenth century canny entrepreneurs (including John Palmer, pp. 128-9) had arranged for the judicious building of public and private spaces, to create an environment in which the pleasures of aristocratic social life could be enjoyed while the medicinal water-drinking was undertaken. This building boom was facilitated by concurrent new transport links. There was the Avon Navigation scheme between Bristol and Bath, which saw the first barge navigate the river in 1727, and, more to the point for the fashionable, which brought Princess Amelia from Bristol to Bath in 1728. By 1740, two daily passenger boats augmented the stagecoach service, which between 1740 and 1777 averaged from 32 to 46 coaches a week along the new turnpike road; by 1800, there were 147 weekly runs scheduled, and the travel time to London had dropped from 36 hours in 1750 to just over 10 in 1790.
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Between 1660 and 1750, the population of Bath rose from 1,500 to 6,000 permanent residents; by 1801 there were 33,000 permanent residents, and as early as 1750 another 12,000 visitors crowded into the town during the season.
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A leisure town needed visitors, of course, but
it also needed a support system to service them. By 1744 there were 120 licensed chairmen to carry visitors about Bath in the then-fashionable sedan chairs; by 1800 there were 340.
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Inns, shops and coffee houses needed staff to do the heavy work such as carrying coals and water, and mucking out stables, as well as serving staff. The luxury-goods trades needed tailors, seamstresses, jewellers, leather tanners and others to produce their goods, as well as those whose job it was to sell them. The extent of these luxury trades in Bath can be seen from the apprentice records. Within the small permanent population of the 1720s and 1730s there was just one single apprentice who signed his indentures to a cabinet-maker in those decades; fourteen did so between 1741 and 1760. In the same years, the number of apprentice jewellers went from one to six. There were no lacemaker or milliners’ apprentices at all in the earlier period, but eleven were indentured in the latter.
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Between 1724 and 1769 the most common apprenticeships were in shoemaking, carpentry, tailoring, barbering, wig-making, baking, grocery and provisioning, chandlery and similar trades: the service industries. They were there to provide for the visitors, whose business was consumption: consumption of the waters, consumption of entertainment, of leisure, of shopping. Milsom Street, the main fashionable shopping street, supplied ‘the real or imaginary wants’ of everyone, wrote Pierce Egan.
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Many shops either started in these spa towns or quickly established branches there. Marshall and Snelgrove, the London draper, opened its second branch in Scarborough, then moved on to a third in Harrogate. Messrs Clark and Debenham, also of London, bought an interest in a shop in Cheltenham, and then opened on their own in Harrogate by 1844. James Jolly, of ‘Jolly’s of Bath’ fame, had opened his shop year round in Milsom Street by 1838. He too saw the retail importance of spa towns, extending shortly thereafter to Margate.
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By the early nineteenth century, Bath was double the size it had been in the sixteenth century, and it was, apart from London, the town with the largest commercial entertainment market in the UK. It had the Pump Room, where the waters were dispensed and the elite gently socialized, and it had three assembly rooms, a theatre, and an unknown number of libraries and reading rooms, coffee houses and shops. Its first pleasure gardens were created in 1709. These were a form of entertainment enjoyed throughout the century, providing the middle and upper classes with a place to meet, listen to music and walk in pleasant surroundings,
while the working classes could attend too, in unsegregated pleasure. The most famous pleasure gardens in Bath, Spring Gardens, opened in the 1730s, and by the 1760s it routinely staged public and private breakfasts, teas, evening events, concerts and fireworks. Admission was 2
s.
6
d.
for the season, and for that one could walk through the gardens, admiring the artificial cascade and listening to the orchestra. By the 1790s, as private entertainment began to supersede public pleasure (see below), Spring Gardens found itself in a death struggle against strong competition. It joined forces with Grosvenor Gardens, which had added the enticements of a bowling green, archery competitions, a maze, fishponds and pleasure boats. In 1801 Sydney Gardens trumped them both by adding a grotto, winter opening times, horse riding and illuminated walks - and, as a knockout blow, the Prince of Wales had attended a concerts there.
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(For more on pleasure gardens, see pp. 276-81.)

Concerts had become an important part of Bath life (for concert life in general, see Chapter 9). In 1704 there had been only ‘half a dozen’ musicians in the town, on temporary contracts with private entrepreneurs and paid by the week; then the Pump Room engaged musicians to play for the season both during the morning promenade at the Pump Room, and in the evenings at the assembly rooms. By 1766 William Herschel had become the organist at the Octagon Chapel, and he soon had so many private pupils among the visitors and residents that more than twenty private concerts a year were necessary to display their abilities - augmented by yet more professional musicians.
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Herschel’s concerts were rivalled by those of Thomas Linley and his eight musical children. Linley ran the concerts at the New Assembly Rooms from 1766, and made a point of featuring, in particular, his daughter Elizabeth - a soprano of surpassing beauty - until her marriage to the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan ended her public performances. Her fame was rivalled by her brother Thomas, a promising composer, who had produced twenty violin concertos, an oratorio, several sonatas and a
comic opera by the time of his early death in a boating accident aged twenty-two.

But the main entertainments of the spas were for the moment the public entertainments, the subscriptions balls and assemblies. These were sponsored either by the civic authorities or by the owners of private assembly rooms, and a seasonal subscription cost enough to exclude all but the ‘select’. While the promoters made a nice profit, for much of the eighteenth century a polite fiction was maintained that the subscription was merely a token payment, rather than a fee for a commercial service.
The Original Bath Guide
of 1811 listed a typical week’s entertainment for the visitor during the season: on Mondays there was a dress ball, Tuesdays a card assembly, Wednesdays a concert, and Thursdays a fancy-ball. In general, the visitor paid for a series of balls or entertainments. The dress-ball or fancy-ball subscription cost 14
s.
for a man on his own, or 26
s.
for a man who could then escort two women to twenty-eight dress balls. These began at seven, and ended ‘precisely at eleven, even in the middle of a dance’. Concerts cost 5
¹
/
₂
guineas for tickets to nine concerts, giving entry to one man and two women, or £4 10
s.
for two tickets for nine concerts, ‘including two choral nights’. Just as with the entertainment, the card assemblies were on a subscription basis, with men paying 1 guinea for the season, and women 5
s.
for access to the card rooms when one evening a week it was ladies’ night.
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With the end of the French wars, however, and the revival of travel to the Continent for the wealthy, Bath began to run into trouble. By 1815 the public balls were attracting fewer than 400 ‘residents and visitors’, and the order of those words was important. The residential aspect of Bath was now replacing the seasonal influx. The fashionable were beginning to turn their backs on public leisure, preferring to enjoy their entertainment in private, where they would not have to mix with the newly arriving middle classes. As early as 1779,
The New Prose Bath Guide
had worried that ‘the Upper Town [or fashionable] inhabitants seem to have…a strong tendency to withdraw themselves’, while in 1830 another observer dated this phenomenon even earlier, suggesting that it was from the 1760s that ‘Late dinners began, by little and little, to interfere with the regular early attendance at the Upper and Lower Rooms: and fatal “at homes” on the ball nights, to prevent that attendance altogether…Taste and fashion…chose for solace and display, the private rather than the public arena.’
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The fashion, from the 1790s,
for visitors to take a house rather than simply lodgings added to the opportunities to entertain at home. Bath had become a place where the ‘genteel’ resided elegantly, and probably rather inexpensively. In
Persuasion
, the Eliot family move to Bath because Sir Walter ‘might there be important at comparatively little expense’.
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By the early nineteenth century the aristocratic level of society was no longer pouring into Bath for a few months at a time, but instead the prosperous middle classes were making it their home. When the Lower Assembly Rooms burned down in 1820, rather than a similar place of public amusement being put up on the site, a scientific and literary institution was built there instead. A decade later, the fashionable shops remained open all year, instead of only in the winter season - a further sign of how the residents had become the primary consumers in the town. But while they were prosperous, they were not necessarily expecting to pass their time in a round of frivolous leisure, as they thought the upper classes whom they had replaced had done: in 1833 the Bath races were reduced from three days to two.
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In a similar shift, the updated version of
The Original Bath Guide
of 1811, which was published sometime around 1870, had no information at all about balls and only the briefest mention of concerts, and the list of Pump Room activities was replaced by a list of parks. The guide contained pages on schools, on hospitals and on churches - on the civic structure required by residents, not visitors.
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‘Rational recreation’ had taken over from what many now regarded as frivolous idleness.

As early as 1815 a small spa in Wiltshire had tacitly recognized Bath’s decline: it hoped, it advertised, to ‘vie in every desirable convenience with Cheltenham and Leamington’ - it didn’t trouble to mention Bath. Cheltenham and Leamington were, in the nineteenth century, the competition. At the height of the spas’ reign there had been at one time or another about 175 spas across the country (although not all operating at once). By 1815, with competition from both Continental travel and the seaside, smaller spas with no entertainment began to close; in the early nineteenth century only about forty remained operational.
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Cheltenham had first promoted its spa waters in the 1730s, but the spa element of the town had not flourished until George III came there to take the waters in 1788; this comparative neglect may have helped in the long term, because in the meantime it had become a prosperous market town. By the early nineteenth century both Cheltenham and
Leamington had assembly rooms, hotels, baths, theatres and inns. Yet, unlike Bath, both towns had other economic activities to rely on, and other pastimes to draw visitors and residents alike. Leamington was helped by its development in the nineteenth century as a hunting town - Lord Middleton installed his hounds there in 1811, and within a year there were another four hunts in the neighbourhood. Cheltenham from 1818 had a race meeting in August which drew thousands - in 1819 as many as 20,000 spectators may have come for the races - and when the flat racing died away, a popular steeplechase event replaced it in 1844.
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Robert Elliston, who was one of the main economic movers of Leamington as a spa, demonstrates how, by this time, the spa was a predominantly leisure-based, rather than health-based venue. Elliston, an actor and theatre manager, had started his career performing in Bath. Although he had moved successfully to London by 1804, he knew how profitable entertainment could be in towns where the main occupation was leisure. In 1817 he held the lease to the theatre in Leamington as well as having a circuit of theatres elsewhere. In 1821 he added a ballroom to his Leamington theatre, and downstairs he opened a tea room, a reading room and the rather elaborately entitled ‘County Library of Research’ (which claimed to have 12,000 volumes), as well as, behind the building, a garden with promenades. Elliston attempted to cover the leisure market in several of the places where he had theatres - he also owned the Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens Exotic Nursery in London, which had walks, a bandstand for military concerts, gala nights, fireworks and fêtes.
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The next big change came with the first railway into Leamington, which arrived in 1844, with six trains a day between Coventry and Milverton, a small village halfway between Leamington and Warwick. In its first week of operation it carried 2,500 passengers. There was also a ‘Shakespeare Coach’ to ferry passengers onward from Milverton to Stratford.