by Paula Byrne
And yet the pale, sickly appearance of the woman gives the portrait an aura of melancholy. To some observers, her thinness and the oddly distended bone-structure suggest the onset of an attritional disease such as Addison’s.
18
The Bathing Machine
It looks like a beach hut on wheels, a small roofed and walled wooden or canvas cart with four wheels. The bather entered in her street clothes, changed into her swimming costume and put her outdoor clothes on a high shelf. The bathing machine would be wheeled down to the water, and the bather would descend the small steps and enter the sea, completely concealed from the public view. Female bathers would wear a cotton or flannel dress of the kind seen in this evocative caricature ‘Mermaids at Brighton’, executed by William Heath, one of the leading satirical cartoonists of the 1820s.
As shown here, most seaside resorts employed ‘dippers’, burly local females who would push the lady bathers into the water and then help them out again.1 It could be a bumpy ride to the water’s edge if the beach was of pebbles. If the bather could not swim, the dipper would tie a strong rope around her waist and lower her into the water. After ten or fifteen minutes of splashing and paddling, the dipper would haul the client back and perhaps earn a gratuity for their pains.
The best literary description of a bathing machine is given by Tobias Smollett in his epistolary road novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, published in 1771 when the contraption was very new-fangled:
Image to yourself a small, snug, wooden chamber, fixed upon a wheelcarriage, having a door at each end, and on each side a little window above, a bench below. The bather, ascending into this apartment by wooden steps, shuts himself in, and begins to undress, while the attendant yokes a horse to the end next the sea, and draws the carriage forwards, till the surface of the water is on a level with the floor of the dressing-room, then he moves and fixes the horse to the other end. – The person within being stripped, opens the door to the sea-ward, where he finds the guide ready, and plunges headlong into the water. – After having bathed, he re-ascends into the apartment, by the steps which had been shifted for that purpose, and puts on his clothes at his leisure, while the carriage is drawn back again upon the dry land; so that he has nothing further to do, but to open the door, and come down as he went up. – Should he be so weak or ill as to require a servant to put off and on his clothes, there is room enough in the apartment for half a dozen people.2
Though Smollett writes here of ‘he’, bathing machines were designed primarily for women. At the seaside it was acceptable for men’s bodies to be seen.
If you bathed for health reasons, many doctors believed the winter months were the most beneficial time of year. Eliza de Feuillide and her son Hastings spent December 1790 through to January 1791 in Margate, one of the most popular south-eastern resorts. The poor little boy was forced to endure bathing in the severe conditions of frost and snow:
I had fixed on going to London the end of this Month, but to shew You how much I am attached to my maternal duties, on being told by one of the faculty whose Skill I have much opinion of that one month’s bathing at this time of the Year was more efficacious than six at any other and that consequently my little Boy would receive the utmost benefit from my prolonging my stay here beyond the time proposed, like a most exemplary parent I resolved on foregoing the fascinating delights of the great City for one month longer … Was not this heroic? … Hastings grows much and begins to lisp english tolerably well, his education is likewise begun, his Grandmamma having succeeded in teaching him his letters. The Sea has strengthened him wonderfully and I think has likewise been of great service to myself, I still continue bathing notwithstanding the severity of the Weather and Frost and Snow which is I think somewhat courageous.3
The doughty Scottish lady Elizabeth Grant gives an account of the sensation of being immersed in the cold North Sea water of Margate and Ramsgate:
The shock of a dip was always an agony: that over, we would have ducked about much longer than the woman let us. It was rather frightful bathing when the waves were high, at least to the timid ones. Some people went into the sea when they really might have been carried away by it, when they and the women had to keep hold of the ropes while the waves went over them.4
Sea-bathing in combination with the drinking of sea water became fashionable as the cure for many and varied diseases. It was also a source of relaxation and entertainment. In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Bennet longs to visit Brighton: ‘A little sea-bathing would set me up for ever,’ she says in anticipation of the sea, using imagined ill-health (her poor nerves) to achieve her real aim of novelty and pleasure.5
Before long, most seaside resorts boasted rows of brightly coloured bathing machines. Royalty were responsible for popularizing the devices. George III holidayed in Weymouth, and Fanny Burney recorded in her diary an amusing account of his being dipped into the sea:
The bathing-machines make it [‘God Save the King’] their motto over all their windows; and those bathers that belong to the royal dippers wear it in bandeaus on their bonnets, to go into the sea; and have it again, in large letters, round their waists, to encounter the waves. Flannel dresses, tucked up, and no shoes or stockings, with bandeaus and girdles, have a most singular appearance; and when first I surveyed these loyal nymphs it was with some difficulty I kept my features in order.
Nor is this all. Think but of the surprise of His Majesty when, the first time of his bathing, he had no sooner popped his royal head under water than a band of music, concealed in a neighbouring machine, struck up ‘God save great George our King’.6
Some of the dippers became quite famous, particularly if they had dipped members of royalty. Two of the most famous were at Brighton, Martha Gunn and Old Smoaker. One imagines them looking very like the burly figure on the left of Heath’s caricature. In August 1806 the Morning Herald reported:
The Beach this morning was thronged with ladies, all anxious to make interest for a dip. The machines, of course, were in very great request, though none could be run into the ocean in consequence of the heavy swell, but remained stationary at the water’s edge, from which Martha Gunn and her robust female assistants took their fair charges, closely enveloped in their partly coloured dresses, and gently held them to the breakers, which not quite so gently passed over them.7
Both Martha Gunn and Old Smoaker dipped the Prince Regent. On one occasion Old Smoaker had to persuade him not to bathe because the sea was too dangerous:
‘I shall bathe this morning, Smoaker.’
‘No, no, Your Royal Highness, its too dangerous.’
‘But I will.’
‘Come, come, this won’t do … I’ll be damned if you shall bathe. What do you think your royal father would think of me if you were drowned?’
‘He would say, “this is all owing to you, Smoaker. If you had taken proper care of him, poor George would still be alive.”’8
In the late summer of 1804, Jane Austen and her family visited Lyme Regis with her family. They were undertaking an extensive tour of Devon and Dorset. While at Lyme, Jane caught a fever – ‘it has been all the fashion this week in Lyme’ – and as part of her recovery she took to the bathing machines. ‘I continue quite well,’ she told Cassandra, who had taken off to Weymouth with Henry and Eliza, ‘in proof of which I have bathed again this morning.’
Jane Austen enjoyed the experience of being dipped so much that she continued to take advantage: ‘The Bathing was so delightful this morning and Molly so pressing with me to enjoy myself that I believe I staid in rather too long, as since the middle of the day I have felt unreasonably tired. I shall be more careful another time, and shall not bathe tomorrow, as I had before intended.’9 Molly appears to have been her dipper.
Emma Woodhouse, for all her privileges, has never seen the sea, but her honeymoon is two weeks by the sea. Jane Austen herself was never happier than when beside the sea, or even in it. We have seen that one of the compensations of her removal to Bath
in 1801 was the prospect of summer holidays by the sea. Then the Southampton years gave a period of residence in a seaside town. She had got to know Lyme, Dawlish and Colyton and also Teignmouth, Sidmouth and Charmouth. Her nieces recalled that she even went as far as Wales, staying at Tenby and Barmouth.
Barmouth’s location on the west coast of North Wales, on the mouth of the River Mawddach, lying between a mountain range and the sea, is one of the most beautiful in a land of beauties. It has a glorious sandy beach. William Wordsworth described it thus: ‘With a fine sea view in front, the mountains behind, the glorious estuary running eight miles inland, and Cadair Idris within compass of a day’s walk, Barmouth can always hold its own against any rival.’10 Assuming that the nieces’ memories did not fail them, this was the most sublime country that Jane Austen ever saw.
The holiday in Sidmouth was probably in the summer of 1801. ‘Sidmouth’, she had written in a letter to Cassandra in January of that year, ‘is now talked of as our summer abode.’11 Following a visit from the King in 1791, this small, secluded East Devon seaside village suddenly and unexpectedly found itself a place of minor fashion. Though Cassandra later recalled a young clergyman falling in love with Jane there, the real story is that Jane fell in love with the sea.
Sidmouth is a lovely unspoilt seaside town nestling beneath majestic red cliffs and the green hills of the glorious Sid Valley. Austen, always a keen walker, could climb up Peak Hill and see the panoramic views of Sidmouth’s two beaches, Clifton and Jacob’s Ladder. The latter stretches for a mile and is set in a beautiful sheltered bay. The sea at Sidmouth is a shimmering blue and pink, a peculiar effect of the red sand. The inns and lodging houses were set on the wide sweeping esplanade to command the finest sea views.
The soft, clear air at Sidmouth, and its warm climate, added to its attractions, as noted in a contemporary guide: ‘The inhabitants are remarkable for their healthy appearance and for their longevity. Such, indeed, might be naturally expected from the suitability of the air, the fine dry soil and a situation most delicious, open to the ocean yet not subject to fogs, and screened from all but the southern winds.’12
Thanks to its newly fashionable status, the town had a good library, public rooms, an elegant ballroom and bathing machines lining the beach. According to a guide of 1803 it was a particularly good place to enjoy the ‘fashionable rage for bathing’.13 It was only a few miles from Lyme Regis – in Persuasion William Elliot travels to Lyme via Sidmouth.
The Austens were invited to East Devon at the request of Richard Buller, one of George Austen’s Steventon pupils, who was now married and settled in the village of Colyton where he was vicar. Colyton, with its magnificent rural views, nestles between Sidmouth in Devonshire and Lyme Regis and Charmouth in Dorsetshire, making it an ideal location from which to make a tour of the seaside.
Jane Austen also hoped that visiting the Bullers would ‘assist with the Dawlish scheme’.14 They may have discovered that Dawlish, on the south coast of Devon, was too far to travel on that occasion, but they spent a holiday there in 1802, when they also visited Teignmouth. Teignmouth was a quaint fishing port, which became a fashionable resort around the turn of the century. A major attraction, apart from the mild climate, were the ‘Amazons of Shaldon’ – muscular women who pulled fishing nets while ‘naked to the knee’. Shaldon was a small village on the opposite bank of the river. Teignmouth also boasted a theatre, a tea house and public rooms. Balls were held, usually once a fortnight, and there was an excellent local market.15 Fanny Burney, a regular visitor, took her first dip in the sea here, and John Keats would stay for several weeks, completing his long poem Endymion (‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’). According to family tradition, the Austens stayed at a house called Great Bella Vista.16
Dawlish was Teignmouth’s smaller neighbour, its name derived from ‘Devil’s water’ because the water that ran from the red cliffs into the water looked like blood. It was known for its pure air and its long sandy beach, lined with bathing machines.17 In 1800 John Nash built Luscombe Castle here for the banker Charles Hoare, with grounds laid out by Humphry Repton, commanding fine coastal views. Odious Robert Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility loves Dawlish and chooses it for his honeymoon destination. He mistakenly believes that the Dashwoods’ cottage is located there: ‘it seemed rather surprising to him that anybody could live in Devonshire without living near Dawlish’. Jane Austen clearly knew it well, as her niece Anna, who set her novel there, asked her aunt to fact check for her. ‘I am not sensible of any Blunders about Dawlish,’ Jane wrote reassuringly, before adding, ‘The Library was particularly pitiful and wretched 12 years ago and not likely to have had anybody’s publication.’18
It was, of course, Lyme Regis, ‘the pearl of Dorset’, that truly captured Jane Austen’s imagination, as we know from Persuasion. Strikingly, she sets her Lyme episode off season, in November, the very month in which she first visited Lyme in 1803: ‘the rooms were shut up, the lodgers almost all gone, scarcely any family but of the residents left’; the beach is not as in the summer ‘animated with bathing machines’, but it is perhaps even more beautiful out of season; it is a ‘very strange stranger’, she tells us, ‘who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better’.19
Lyme had Assembly Rooms, where Jane Austen danced, and her mother played cards. The principal inns were the Three Cups and the Royal Lion, but there were many lodging houses to accommodate the tourists.
A great fire broke out in November 1803, which Jane Austen and her family witnessed.20 It began at Crossman’s, the bakers, near the George Inn on the evening of 5 November. A little boy had called at the bakers in the hope of buying furze for his bonfire. A female servant took a candle to the attic in search of the furze, but to her horror the flame made contact with the dry furze and a fire broke out. Instead of calling for help, she panicked, left the fire and ran off to fetch water. In the meantime, the roof went up. Unluckily, a gale was blowing and the house next door was soon ablaze. At that point chaos broke out, the flames quickly spread as far as Mill Green and a clothing manufactory, which was burnt down. Efforts were made to save the chapel, but forty-two houses were destroyed.21
The destroyed houses belonged to the poor, so a subscription was started to help feed them. A soup kitchen was set up in the chapel. The fire did not put the Austens off, as they returned to Lyme Regis the following year with Henry and Eliza Austen. They may have stayed on Broad Street at Mr Pyne’s Lodgings House before moving to Hiscott’s Boarding House.
After Cassandra, Henry and Eliza had gone on to Weymouth, Jane wrote to tell Cassandra that she had been bathing and dancing at the Assembly Rooms, where a young man was ‘eyeing’ her:
The Ball last night was pleasant, but not full for Thursday. My Father staid contentedly till half-past nine – we went a little after eight – and then walked home with James and a Lanthorn, tho’ I beleive the Lanthorn was not lit, as the Moon was up. But this Lanthorn may sometimes be a great convenience to him. My Mother and I staid about an hour later. Nobody asked me the two first dances; the next two I danced with Mr Crawford, and had I chosen to stay longer might have danced with Mr Granville, Mrs Granville’s son, whom my dear friend Miss Armstrong offered to introduce to me, or with a new odd-looking Man who had been eyeing me for some time, and at last, without any introduction asked me if I meant to dance again. I think he must be Irish by his ease, and because I imagine him to belong to the Hon Barnwells, who are the son, and son’s wife of an Irish Viscount, bold queer-looking people, just fit to be Quality at Lyme.22
Her remark about the ease of the Irish is interesting, given her experience with Tom Lefroy.
Constance Hill, the early twentieth-century biographer who went on a pilgrimage to all the places associated with Jane Austen, saw the Assembly Rooms before they were destroyed:
The ball-room is little changed since Miss Austen danced in it that September evening nearly a hundred years ago. It has los
t its three glass chandeliers which used to hang from the arched ceiling, but these may still be seen in a private house in the neighbourhood. The orchestra consisted, we are told, of three violins and a violoncello. We visited the room by day-light, and felt almost as if it were afloat, for nothing but blue sea and sky was to be seen from its many windows. From the wide recessed window at the end, however, we got a glimpse of the sands and of the harbour and Cobb beyond.23
This is an image to cherish: Jane Austen dancing with nothing but blue sky and sea visible through the high Georgian windows.
The Cobb at Lyme, as drawn in Constance Hill’s Jane Austen: Her Homes and her Friends
It is in Persuasion that she brings together her literary art and the lure of the sea, with its mesmerizing charm – ‘lingering only, as all must linger and gaze on a first return to the sea’.24 Her picture of Captain Harville’s cottage – a disabled sailor, living so close to the sea – is poignant. Anne wakes early to walk by the sea before breakfast. She is joined by Henrietta: ‘they went to the sands, to watch the flowing of the tide, which a fine south-easterly breeze was bringing in with all the grandeur so flat a shore admitted. They praised the morning; gloried in the sea; sympathized in the delight of the fresh-feeling breeze.’25
