Originally written and published February 1, 2009 by Tamara Colloff-Bennett
Towards the end of the eighteenth century when the famous classics author Jane Austen made two long visits to Bath and then when she lived in the city from 1801 to 1806 after her father the Reverend George Austen retired to live in the area, she might have walked in areas of the city that looked like this photograph.
Located in Somerset in the southwest of England about 100 miles west of London, the city of Bath has a population at present of about 80,000.
When Jane moved there in 1801 at the age of 26, Bath had a population of about 33,000 and by the standards of the time it was a large and important city.
Bath’s Natural Hot Springs
Surrounded by hills in the valley of the River Avon, what drew people to Bath at that time and indeed for centuries before was primarily one thing: its natural hot springs.
In fact, Bath is the location of Britain’s only natural hot springs. The springs come from rainwater which fell thousands of years ago over the limestone hills in this area.
The water has made its way deep under the surface, where the hot temperature has turned it to steam and has pushed it back up to the surface in a phenomenon that has been going on for thousands of years right up to the present time.
What this means is that at the site of the Sacred Spring at the Roman Baths in Bath, hot water at a temperature of 115˚F / 460C rises at the rate of 240,000 gallons (1,170,000 litres) each and every day.
The Roman Empire In Bath
Between 43 and 410 AD when the Roman Empire controlled Britain including the area of Bath, this natural phenomenon was beyond human understanding.
The Romans themselves believed it to be the work of the gods, so they built a temple next to the spring and dedicated it to the goddess Minerva, the deity believed to have healing powers.
The mineral-rich water from the spring also supplied a magnificent bath-house which attracted visitors from across the Roman Empire.
After the Romans left Britain in the fifth century, the baths were buried and forgotten.
Bath Becomes A Spa
In 1738, construction started of a hospital that was known as the Royal Mineral Water Hospital.
Once again, people started to come to Bath to look for cures from the waters.
Then in 1800, in what happened to be the year before Jane moved to Bath, the King’s Bath was excavated by archaeologists and the rest of the Roman site was uncovered.
The city then became even more popular at that time as a fashionable spa resort.
The remains of the Roman Baths are still a major tourist attraction today.
Interestingly, public bathing to take advantage of its natural hot springs started again in Bath in the early 1800s when Jane was living there, only stopping in 1978.
If you look all along the right-hand side of the photograph below, you will see a cluster of buildings that comprise the buildings built around those remains.
This area is the centre of Bath. In addition, the building that one can see straight ahead through the pillars is Bath Abbey, the last great Gothic church built in England.
Bath In Jane Austen’s Novels
Bath today in general looks in many ways as Jane saw it when she lived there in what was known in England as its Georgian period.
In her time, such a setting proved grist for her biting social commentary on society and as the backdrop for moments of vanity, snobbery, dissipation, and dullness that she includes in her novels.
In fact, according to Maggie Lane who is the author of many books on Jane Austen, Bath was so much a part of Jane’s mental perspective that she mentions it in all six of her completed novels.
To begin with, two novels that Jane wrote called Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are largely set in Bath.
Beyond having the city as the main location for her novels, Bath is worked into her books in other ways.
For example, at the end of Pride and Prejudice, Jane describes her character George Wickham who marries Lydia, the sister of the book’s heroine Elizabeth Bennet, as leaving his wife quite frequently ‘to enjoy himself in London or Bath’.
In another classic of hers called Emma, Jane’s shallow character Mr. Elton and a vulgar character Augusta Hawkins meet in Bath and then marry after a very short acquaintance.
Even worse than what happens in Bath in Pride and Prejudice and in Emma is the behavior of the character Willoughby who seduces and impregnates a very young girl by the name of Eliza Williams in Bath in Jane’s novel entitled Sense and Sensibility.
From these and other similar incidences where Bath is interwoven into her novels, readers can infer from the behavior of her characters that she believed that people could get away with worse behavior there than in the countryside where their behavior was more scrutinized by their neighbors.
Of course, Bath in modern times does not have the reputation that it did during Jane’s era.
These days it is visited by many tourists who come to see what remains of its Roman baths, its beautiful Georgian architecture that still endures, and to soak in the beautiful countryside that surrounds it.
The city also has a Jane Austen Centre, where its most famous resident is celebrated despite her differences with the city.
Housed in a Georgian town house in the heart of the city, it only a few blocks from where her real home actually stood.
Each year you can see people dressed in the period of Jane Austen for the Bath Festival.
It’s in Bath that crowds gather every year for a ‘Grand Regency Costumed Promenade’ that winds through its streets. The colorful walk is under the auspices of the city’s Jane Austen Centre through its annual Jane Austen Festival.
For ten days this year they participated in its tightly scheduled, hour-by-hour daytime and nighttime events to celebrate the genius author and the special ethos that her literature generates.
Full Regency Clothing
What is unique about the Jane Austen Festival and especially its Promenade is that participants dress the part, in full Regency clothing that was the height of fashion from the late 1790s to 1825.
Having lived from 1775 to 1817, Jane Austen straddled this time period and the characters in her novels like Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and Emma dressed in this fashion:
Etiquette in Jane Austen’s Time
Yes, etiquette from centuries ago can sound very genteel: Our modern lives are conducted so differently.
Still, in this present-day predicament where vulgar ways are ever too much in the public consciousness, it’s interesting to note some of the basic etiquette of previous times.
Here’s what the author Daniel Pool inserted in his primer of sorts called What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist – the Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England, which included the following advice for gentlemen:
– Meeting a lady in the street whom you know only slightly, you wait for her acknowledging bow- then and only then may you tip your hat to her, which is done using the hand farthest away from her to raise the hat. You do not speak to her – or to any other lady – unless she speaks to you first.
– If you meet a lady who is a good friend and who signifies that she wishes to talk to you, you turn and walk with her if you wish to converse. It is not “done” to make a lady stand talking in the street.
– In going up a flight of stairs, you precede the lady (running, according to one authority); in going down, you follow.
– In a carriage, a gentleman takes the seat facing backward. If he is alone in a carriage with a lady, he does not sit next to her unless he is her husband, brother, father, or son. He alights from the carriage first so that he may hand her down. He takes care not to step on her dress.
– At a public exhibition or concert, if accompanied by a lady, he goes in first in order to find her a seat. If he enters such an exhibition alone and there are ladies or older gentlemen present, he removes his hat.
Celebrating Women’s Rights While Restoring Lost Subtlety, Respect, and Grace
Now Lord knows I would never, ever like to live by all of these rules and regulations, and I am sure as heck very glad that I live at a time where women’s rights and the struggle of women around the world towards equality with men in all aspects of life is in our consciousness.
This state of the world had not yet evolved for women during Jane Austen’s era. In fact, she wove many of her plot lines around this essential fact of life and all the limitations that women endured in her world.
However, I think that much too often we have lost subtlety, mutual respect, and grace in our relations between men and women during our 21st century these days.
Even the most basic etiquette in Jane’s sphere would never, ever have permitted even a scintilla of today’s vulgar and boorish speech and behavior.
Jane would be very saddened and profoundly shocked and horrified indeed by this modern phenomenon, I cannot think as the very bright, perceptive, and well-mannered person and woman that she would react in any other way.
Back To The Fun: The Festival’s Guinness World Record And Its 2016 Promenade
The modern world does pop up at least somewhat during the festival, including two years ago at the 2014 festival when Jane Austen fans broke the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people dressed in Regency costume when about 550 strolled through the streets.
My husband David and I could not estimate the exact number of participants in this 2016 event, but the numbers looked substantial this year too on September 10th when the promenade took place.
Nor did the grayness of cloud cover and a steady splatter of a drizzle dissuade the festival goers from their mission at hand, as you can see in this photo:
Aside from some modern-day umbrellas that were at the ready for the weather that day, the scene provides a lovely step back in time.
Stove Pipe and Bonnets
Note how the gentleman here, the jolly-looking fellow with the stove-pipe hat and white gloves who is walking cheerfully with two bonneted ladies past honey-colored Georgian architecture which dominates even modern-day Bath:
It’s That Sense And Sensibility
Importantly above all else, one gets the feeling that it’s the refined sensibility of Jane Austen’s time and that of her characters which attracts the festival participants.
A genteel atmosphere permeates the celebrations.:
Regimental Red
Speaking of being on guard of those rose-colored ‘spectacles’, you can see men dressed in their regimental red uniforms in the front of this same photo – complete with a drummer who is at the head of the promenade.
Although I have lived overseas in various countries including in the UK now for more than 20 years, still my American roots made me instantly recall the similarly garbed ’redcoats’ who fought in the American Revolution.
In fact, Jane Austen herself was born in 1775, the very year that the “American colonies” gained their independence after fighting such soldiers. So many had seen the horrors of war too in that conflict.
However, I assume that not many of the men dressed up in such uniforms were thinking of the sober reality of war as they marched two by two on the modern-day pavement there in Somerset in their vivid red uniforms. Rather, they looked like they were there for the fun of it all:
Stroud Scarlet
During our stay in this Southwest part of England, we went to the nearby town called Stroud. I learned from my trusty travel guide that the striking shade of these red military coats came from Stroud and its famous “Stroud Scarlet” (which is also known as Stroudwater red cloth).
Red, blue, and green cloth was and still is made in and around Stroud as it has been for hundreds of years. Weavers were drawn to the plentiful supply of water in the area, and they produced a very high quality cloth.
That cloth was made into clothing that could well have been worn at assembly rooms around the country. It is to just such assembly rooms that the promenade’s route wound its way via the center of town.
Flocking Together At The Assembly Rooms
Thinking of Jane Austen and her life and the lives of the characters who made up her novels, assembly rooms like Bath’s during the 18th and 19th centuries in the UK and Ireland were gathering places for members of the higher social classes open to members of both sexes.
In an era when most entertaining was done at home, there were not many public places of entertainment open to both men and women save for the theatres (of which there were few of those outside London).
Jane’s Novels In Bath: Persuasion
Jane Austen lived in Bath from 1801 to 1805. Two of her novels, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, are partially set in Bath. She used her own experiences to bring the city to life in her books.
For example, Bath’s Assembly Rooms that are still being used today played a small but important part in Persuasion. Its heroine, Anne Elliot, wants to visit the Rooms in the hope of meeting Captain Wentworth. However, her father’s snobbish attitude prevents here from doing so:
The theatre or the rooms… were not fashionable enough for the Elliots, whose evening amusements were solely in the elegant stupidity of private parties, in which they were getting more and more engaged.
Jane’s Novels In Bath: Northanger Abbey
And in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the heroine Catherine Morland often visits both the Upper and Lower [Assembly] Rooms. She looks forward with great expectation to “the important evening” which was “to usher her into the Upper Rooms”.
Regency Costume Parameters
Back to the fun aspects the festival offers for participants: Here’s a primer the Jane Austen Centre put out in 2014 for members gathering to try and beat the Guinness World Record for the number of people gathered wearing Regency clothing (a feat they were successful in achieving, as I mentioned earlier):
Anyone taking part in the ‘Largest Gathering of People Dressed in Regency Costume’ world record attempt had to comply with seven rules, the first four of which detailed how all participants had to be fully dressed in Regency costume outfit as follows:
2. Males can also be dressed in military or navy uniform of the period.
3. Females in full-length dresses with a high waistline, low cut necks and bonnet.
4. All participants must carry and wear the necessary accessories to complete the costume, e.g. hat or bonnet, reticule, gloves, Spencer jacket, pelisse or shawl. Additionally such items as a parasol, fan, cane or walking stick are not essential but can form part of the outfit.
Last month participants were dressed likewise as you’ve seen, and here’s a group photo of six happy souls congregating in town after the promenade last month who were dressed to the nines in full Regency regalia
People dressed in the period of Jane Austen for the Bath Festival
Tea At Bath’s Elegant Pump Room
Now here’s a look at what this clothing looked like from behind as well. Many of the items have a lovely drape and elegance in the tailoring on the back of the body as well.
I took this photo at Bath’s famous Pump Room, at its present-day restaurant set right next to the city’s worldwide famous Roman Baths.
My husband David and I went for lunch there, and these people just happened to be sitting at the table next to us having their tea:
The Pump Room In Jane Austen’s Novels
Perhaps they were trying to channel Jane Austen’s spirit particularly in this room. This seems likely since she used the Pump Room as a setting in her novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
As she described it, it was the place for fashionable people to meet, where “Every creature in Bath […] was to be seen in the room at different periods of the fashionable hours”, as she said in Northanger Abbey.
For example, Catherine Morland, Austen’s heroine of Northanger Abbey, meets her future husband Henry Tilney at the Pump Room.
In her novel Persuasion, Admiral Croft retires to Bath to ‘take the waters’ because of his gout.
As is only fitting, the Pump Room was used as a filming location in screen adaptations of both of the novels.
Inviting Jane To The 21st Century
If I could wave a magic wand and make it possible for Jane herself to have joined in the festivities this autumn, I would have asked her to join me at the Bath Visitor Information Centre that’s only a stone’s throw away from the city’s awe-inspiring Bath Abbey.
I would be a bit of a wizard and make it possible for her to join me when festival-goers and people dressed in 21st century were clustered there together.
In her eyes, she would see fantastical electric lights; what-in-heaven’s-name-are-those computer tills; wonderful piles of her books from large print runs stacked respectfully all about the shop; men and women in casual clothing that most of them had bought off the peg, including men in just their shirtsleeves and women actually wearing trousers — all of which I bet would fascinate and delight Miss Jane Austen.
I imagine her weaving a plot in her head for a new novel, her eagle eyes soaking in all that new and amazing detail of a world several centuries beyond her own.
Perhaps she would then sit down at her writing table (I can’t envision Jane using one of our computers, can you?), and masterfully piece it all together to write another grand tale – this time set in 2016, warts and all.
Whatever would she make of it all, that I do so wonder!
Trio of Blue-Faced Leicester Sheep Contemplating The World
Bleating Out The Competition
Yessiree, things are surely revving up for sheep right now!
To begin with, a 2015 animated comedy film produced by Aardman Animations called ‘Shaun the Sheep’ has just hit the movie theatres here in the United Kingdom.
Ah, yes, and it’s featuring the wooly wonder Shaun from the fabulous creators of Wallace and Gromit, of course. It’s also getting rave reviews.
You need to know just how beloved its star Shaun is: This past summer, he was voted the United Kingdom’s best-loved BBC children’s TV character in a competition held by Radio Times. (Radio Times is a popular weekly TV and radio program listings magazine that has been in publication in the UK since 1923.)
As Paul Jones reported on the Radio Times website, Shaun “[beat] off competition from Postman Pat and Sooty and Sweep” to be named the most popular BBC children’s character of the last seven decades.
No mean feat, quite impressive, Shaun: I say hats off and thank you very much, Nick Park, for creating this adorable critter!
Now To The Lunar Connection
Sheep come into the spotlight all the more on February 19th this year when the 2015 Chinese New Year will be officially celebrated as the year of the “horned animal” – cited by some as a sheep and by others as a goat.
The Chinese New Year traditionally celebrates the lunar calendar, and every year a different animal gets to take center stage.
According to a BBC World Service report that I heard on the radio this morning, hundreds of millions of Chinese people were pouring into the train stations today heading for their family celebrations around China. The Chinese New Year is an extremely important holiday that everyone strives to celebrate.
Red will be seen in spades since it symbolizes prosperity in China: Processions, dragon dances, street performances and more festivities with red decorations will last for 15 days until the day of the Lantern Festival which falls on March 5th this year.
Equally impressive, sheep rule again (and much as I think goats are wonderful, I’m going to focus here on sheep)!
Where Rams Reign
I’m sticking with sheep because hearing about the Chinese New Year recently reminded me of the huge Cydectin Kelso Ram Sales show that my husband David and I went to back in September.
We’re estimating that there were several thousand people who attended the ram show last September 12th.
Not to be outdone, mind you, there were a staggering 4,964 rams from all over the UK and Ireland who were up for sale then.
So it was a day when those rams’ fates could change. For if they were sold in auction, they would be moving on to pastures new.
However, we saw it as a day with tons of potential ram buddies about to meet — and with nary a female in sight.
Chinese Whispers?
Hey, you never know: Maybe some of those rams back in September were telling one another about the great lunar New Year coming up now this week — evidenced here by these Hampshire rams who are, for all we know, whispering excitedly in one another’s ears about their Asian cousins’ place in this year’s calendar:
All About Mating
For the farmers who were there, it was all about mating: Which of the rams would be best to breed with their ewes back at home?
They had first come the day before the official sales to see what the rams on offer were made of: This meant going from one hay-lined stall to another to check out the rams in which they were most interested.
Then the day of the sale, they were prepared to place their bids on which of the rams would hopefully be the right stuff for their females back home.
So it was a time for work, looking again all the more intently at what was on offer under the 18 big rings that spread over the large site.
Here’s what was happening under one of those rings, as the auctioneer on the raised platform in the middle conducted bidding by the farmers for the rams:
At Their Bidding
To purchase the rams they wanted, farmers had to use their bidding skills since all of the animals were sold through auctions like that one shown above.
There were eight auctioneers participating that day. To successfully whip up business, they had to keep up the stream of information that they yelled out under the big rings to all who might be up for buying one of their rams.
I marveled at how they kept up the patter. When I questioned a farmer near me about this, he said auctioneers start young and they are able to keep up their auctioneering babble for hours.
Kelso and Cydectin
The biggest and most famous one-day sale of rams in the world, this annual ram sales event has been going on for 176 years.
Held in the small town of Kelso on the Scottish Borders, the show runs under the auspices of the Border Union Agricultural Society (BUAS) and various committees and sponsored by the company Cydectin.
Cydectin makes products first launched in New Zealand. Its website explains that “production animals on NZ farms are constantly under pressure from parasitism, resulting in production losses.” It claims that its products have been created to combat parasitism in sheep, cattle, and deer.
I don’t know anything about these products, but my hope is that they make life much better for animals and farmers alike.
Tups On Parade
As outsiders of this agricultural world, my husband David and I attended the ram sales event for one reason only: We adore animals, and what a grand sight it was to see so many beautiful rams under one big sky!
We are also eager to learn new things, including about the business of livestock.
For example, I learned that the rams are called “tups” in the farming community.
Here’s a crew of Suffolk ‘tups’ leaving the auction ring in orderly fashion:
Getting Down To Business
What are these guys talking about in this powwow here?
That’s for us to wonder and them to know – which makes our entrance this week into the Year of the Sheep all the more exciting, I reckon.
