Jane Austen Enjoying Bath – Queen Square & Sydney Place
In this month’s Musing, architectural historian Dr Moira Rudolf takes us back to Jane Austen’s Bath.
All letter quotes are Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra and date from 1799 unless otherwise stated. As Jane and Cassandra – her chief correspondent – were mostly together from 1801, when the family moved to 4 Sydney Place, there is far less evidence from this time!
Jane Austen certainly visited Bath in November 1797, when she stayed with her uncle and aunt – James and Jane Leigh Perrot – at 1 Paragon Buildings. She returned, with Mrs Austen, on 17 May 1799, as guests of her elder brother, Edward Austen Knight, who had taken 13 Queen Square for six weeks, in order to enjoy the health-giving benefits of Bath’s naturally occurring thermal waters.
That day, as soon as the landlady, Mrs Bromley, had allocated their rooms, Jane immediately wrote, delightedly, to her sister Cassandra:
‘We are exceedingly pleased with the House; the rooms are quite as large as we expected, Mrs Bromley is a fat woman in mourning, & a little black kitten runs about the Staircase. – Eliz: [Edward’s wife] has the apartment within the Drawing room ; she wanted my mother to have it, but (… ) it is settled for us to be above, where we have two very nice sized rooms, (… ) I have the outer and larger apartment as I ought to have, which is quite as large as our bed room at home, & my Mother’s is not materially less – The beds are both as large as any at Steventon, & I have a very nice chest of drawers and a closet full of shelves – (… ) I like our situation very much – it is far more cheerful than Paragon, & the prospect from the Drawingroom window at which I now write, is rather picturesque, as it commands a perspective view of the left side of Brock [actually Gay] Street, broken by three Lombardy Poplars in the Garden of the last house in Queen’s Parade.’
What Jane saw then is invisible now; the Lombardy Poplars, on the site of the War Memorial, are long gone; Royal Victoria Park (1830)/associated planting in The Gravel Walk did not exist; the gardens at the rear of Gay Street have since matured, and Queen Square was then an infinitely more formal, dignified place than today’s leafy oasis.
I have already mused about Jane’s various (1799) visits to Sydney Gardens, but she also enjoyed window-shopping, discussing the latest fashions; long walks and theatre, as well as occasionally dining out. Although Jane shopped in Bath Street, most of her purchases were made in Walcot Street, the then – as today – ‘artisan quarter’, which was much cheaper. On 2nd June, she commented to Cassandra –
‘I saw some Gauzes in a shop in Bath Street yesterday at only 4s a yard, but they were not so good or so pretty as mine. Flowers are very much worn, and fruit is still more the thing. Eliz: has a bunch of strawberries and I have seen grapes, cherries, plumbs and apricots. There are likewise almonds and raisins, French plumbs and tamarinds at the Grocers, but I have never seen any of them in hats.’
– going on to say:
‘I spent Friday evening with the Mapletons (…) We took a very charming walk from 6 to 8 up Beacon Hill, & across some fields to the Village of Charlcombe, which is sweetly situated in a little green Valley, as a Village with such a name ought to be.’
This would not have been a surprise to Cassandra as she and Jane – a self-styled ‘desperate walker’ – shared many long walks in Steventon, and (from Sydney Place) promenaded around the Sydney Gardens perimeter ride; Jane – at least once – following it up with a two-mile foray to Weston. In 1799, after church on Sunday at St Mary’s, Queen Square (opposite No. 13; demolished on widening of Chapel Row) – Jane loved to walk up the Gravel Walk ‘in search of fresh air and acquaintance’ to Crescent Fields, then rough grazing land, rolling down to the river.
Jane’s theatre visits were confined to the (1750) Old Theatre Royal, Old Orchard Street (the present-day Freemasons’ Hall), which was – from 1767, when it attained the first provincial Royal Warrant – the most important theatre outside London, where many legendary actors, including Sarah Siddons and David Garrick, performed.
In her final letter from Queen Square, 19th June 1799, she told Cassandra,
‘The play on Saturday is, I hope, to conclude our gaieties here’. Although she did not name it, a newspaper report claimed it was: ‘The romance of Bluebeard … preceded by Kotzebue’s admirable drama of “The Birthday Day”’; Kotzebue being the author of Natural Son – published as Lovers’ Vows – which had so scandalised Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park….
In an earlier Musing I detailed Jane’s move to her favourite Bath residence, 4 Sydney Place (1801-1804). It is known that she enjoyed Sydney Gardens and gatherings at the Upper and Lower Rooms (to which the Austens were subscribers) but, as she and Cassandra were almost always together, evidence is scant apart from her letter of 12th-13th May 1801 which refers to a ball at The Assembly Rooms:
‘Before tea, it was rather a dull affair; (…) for there was only one dance, danced by four couple. – Think of four couple, surrounded by about an hundred people, dancing in the upper rooms at Bath! …. After tea, we cheered up; the breaking up of private parties sent some scores to the Ball, & tho’ it was shockingly and inhumanly thin for this place, there were people enough I suppose to have made five or six very pretty Basingstoke assemblies….’
Life at 4 Sydney Place would have been noisy and full of activity; the house was close to a busy corner with a pub, the Pulteney Arms, behind and the entrance to Sydney Gardens opposite. The Pulteney was originally a small mansion house built in c.1759 which, after construction of Thomas Baldwin’s Great Pulteney Street (1788-1793), started trading as a pub in 1796 and is still going strong today.
There would have also been the clatter of carriages entering and leaving Sydney Gardens and the incessant noise of passing tradesmen and pedestrians, rather like in Persuasion when Lady Russell, driving into Bath, anticipates the winter season:
‘Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity. When Lady Russell … was entering Bath on a wet afternoon, and driving through the long course of streets from the Old Bridge [on the site of Churchill Bridge] to Camden-place [Camden Crescent], amidst the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the bawling of newsmen, muffin-men and milk-men and the ceaseless clink of pattens [platforms lifting skirts out of street dirt], she made no complaint. No, these were noises which belonged to the winter pleasures; her spirits rose under their influence; and, like Mrs Musgrove, she was feeling, though not saying, that, after being long in the country, nothing could be so good for her as a little quiet cheerfulness.’
There would have been quieter moments, though, as Henrietta Park (at the rear of Sydney Place) was then pastureland, where Jane could walk, beyond which – close to Henrietta Street – was the large, luxurious Laura Chapel (built in 1792; collapsed c1927), which is probably the one Jane referred to as ‘our chapel’.
A charming description by Austen aficionado Constance Hill in her book Jane Austen: her Home & Friends (John Lane, The Bodley Press, 1901; reissued Dodo Press, 2008), describes Sydney Place as having:
‘A pretty drawing-room with its three tall windows overlooking the Gardens. The morning sun was streaming in at these windows and falling upon the quaint empire furniture which adorns the room, and which pleasantly suggests the Austens’ sojourn there. The house is roomy and commodious. Beneath the drawing-room, which is on the first floor, are the dining room and arched hall from which a passage leads to a garden at the rear of the house. The large, old-fashioned kitchen, with its shining copper pans and dresser, laden with fine old china, looked as if it had remained untouched since the Austens’ day.’
The last time I visited in around 2015, there was still some suggestion of this.
