Jane Austen in the City of Bath

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.

WWT

Originally published December 22, 2008

The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) is a conservation organisation dedicated to saving wetlands for wildlife and for people.

It was founded in 1946 by Sir Peter Scott, a naturalist and an artist. He bought the first wetland site for the trust and for many years he hosted a TV programme about wildfowl and habitat preservation. The programmes were a great hit, and an entire generation of English lovers of wildlife and the countryside owe their interest in part at least to those programmes.

But as Sir Peter Scott recognized, it is not enough to see wildlife on television, and it was always part of his vision that Trust sites should not only be areas of conservation but also places where visitors could see wildlife.

The WWT now has nine visitor centres in the UK and has captive wildfowl collections from all over the world. Flocks of wildfowl, some in their tens of thousands, also visit.

The Trust also does essential work internationally for the preservation of wetlands under the Ramsar Convention, an international treaty signed in Ramsar in Iran in 1971. Under that convention, various national agencies cooperate to preserve wetlands and the wildlife that depend on wetland ecosystems.

Martin Mere Wetland Centre is a WWT site about five miles from the coast in Lancashire in the North of England, facing the Irish Sea.

It is formed around a series of meres or shallow lakes, which are home for the season to thousands upon thousands of wildfowl.

At the moment (December 2008) there are over 6,000 Pinkfoot Geese and over 1,000 Whooper swans overwintering at Martin Mere. The photo here is of a greylag goose, which is a close relative of the Pinkfoot.

The Whooper swans will leave in March and fly to Iceland for the summer. It is well known that they fly the same route year after year, but their precise route is not known.

Wind Farms

Because there are more and more wind farms being built along their route, the swans are colliding with them. So the WWT and the wind farm development companies are working together to work out where the wind farms should be sited to minimise the risk of collisions.

To find out the route of the migrating Whooper swans, for example, the WWT fitted transmitters to the backs of some swans.

For their flight at migration time, every bit of extra weight puts the swans at risk. So in order to be at their optimum weight for the flight, Whooper swans stop drinking for a period before they begin their annual migration.

Some birds weigh 12kg (26lbs) or more, and I guess that like me, you would think that bigger birds are stronger and more likely to make a successful flight. The staff at the Wildlife Centre know, however, that a bird that weighs about 10kg (22lbs) is most likely to make the journey successfully.

Now WWT has feedback from the journeys to enable it to work with the wind farm operators to site the wind turbines with least risk to wildlife.

Cardinal’s Wharf

Originally published November 18, 2008

By the south bank of the river Thames in London, close to the Globe Theater and just across the river from St Paul’s Cathedral, there is pretty house, painted a creamy white.

Above the door, the name Cardinal’s Wharf is written. And to the side of door on the front of the building is a plaque that reads –

Here lived Sir Christopher Wren during the building of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Here also, in 1502, Catherine Infanta of Castille and Aragon, afterwards first Queen of Henry VIII, took shelter on her first landing in London.

One can easily imagine Sir Christopher Wren getting up in the morning and looking out of one of the upper windows to see, across the river, his creation rising out of its foundations as the work progressed from the laying of the first stone in 1677 to the completion of the cathedral in 1708.

The St Paul’s Cathedral that Wren designed is the ‘new’ building that replaced the old St Paul’s that was gutted in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Today, Wren would not have a clear view of St Paul’s because it is hemmed in by later buildings. But from the pedestrian bridge that spans the Thames the cathedral commands the skyline.