Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ to the market, commercial artists provided visitors with a memento of their visit, a keepsake to take home with their guidebooks (after they had carefully cut their initials into the stones in eighteenth-century graffiti). But serious painters were also drawn to the site: the watercolourist Francis Towne made a series of pictures between 1798 and 1809; and in 1816 John Constable spent his honeymoon sketching at Netley, Weston Shore and Southampton. For the meteorologically-obsessed Constable, the sea-swept clouds and the abbey’s setting below such changing skies were a large part of its appeal. The ruins seemed to evoke dark memories for the artist: after the death of his wife, Maria, from tuberculosis in 1828, he used a sepulchral sketch of the abbey for one of his nocturnal watercolours, issued as a popular engraving in 1829.

      Directed by artistic and literary taste, a visit to Netley stirred deep passions. ‘Few people, perhaps, who think at all’, declared the 1796 pocket guide to Southampton,

      can visit the remains of these ancient religious fabrics, without expressing a sensation, which, as it arises from a combination of different emotions, is hardly to be described … the reflection that we are treading over ground peopled with the remains of our fellow-creatures, who were once young and vigorous like ourselves, inspires the awful idea of our own mortality – that we ere long must be like them, silent, neglected, and forgotten.

      Such reveries were a symptom of the age. It was a century which began, as Isaiah Berlin wrote, ‘by being calm and smooth … rationality is progressed, the Church is retreating, unreason is yielding …’ But suddenly these clear skies were clouded by ‘a violent eruption of emotion, enthusiasm. People become interested in gothic buildings, in introspection. People suddenly become neurotic and melancholy; they begin to admire the unaccountable flight of spontaneous genius.’

      It was the Industrial Revolution that had darkened the horizon and produced the transition in which the goths of Netley, Cobbett’s radicalism and Chamberlayne’s Whiggish improvements were all caught up in their own ways. ‘… Under the surface of this apparently coherent, apparently elegant century there are all kinds of dark forces moving’, wrote Berlin. The mystic necromancers, the experimenters in occult sciences, Dr Mesmer’s ‘animal magnetism’, the Illuminati and William Blake’s fantastic visions became the mysterious obverse to improved landscapes and scientific theorems. Superstition and alienation in a world of enclosure and transportation gathered in the clouds that gave gothic its darkness, and shaded the tourists’ mock-pagan worship of Netley’s Christian ruins with something more atavistic, something more than mere spectacle. It may have been a tourist site, but Netley also expressed a dissatisfaction with the age; its ancient stones spoke of modern concerns.

      Like the plague culture of medieval times, gothic became almost entirely concerned with the grandeur of decay itself, obsessed with morbidity and decrepitude, passion and death. Its cult heroes were the heroes and creators of the sensational novels which the Reverend Warner’s book imitated: Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe’s pulp fiction, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, with its pregnant nuns and rapist monks (followed by his Crazy Jane, a poetic encounter with a madman using material gathered from his visits to asylums). Its aficionados were drawn to extreme expression of their own self-questioning: young men such as Shelley, whose restless life, riven with disputed inheritance, suicidal lovers and psychological instability, seemed to live out gothic sensation. At eighteen, he wrote a gothic novel, Zastrozzi, in which the hero encounters a castle in the woods, ‘a large and magnificent building, whose battlements rose above the lofty trees’, just as Netley’s ruins were hidden and revealed by its own verdure. And in 1818, his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey caricatured Shelley and his circle: the poet ‘Scythrop Glowry’ living in a mystical tower by the sea, like Netley, ‘ruinous and full of owls’, and Mr Flosky (based on Coleridge) for whom ‘mystery was his mental element. He lived in the midst of that visionary world in which nothing is but what is not. He dreamed with his eyes open, and saw ghosts dancing round him at noontide.’

      Netley had entered its most public phase, a spectacle as romantic, thrilling and sensational as any attraction in London’s Oxford Street Pantheon. Tourists took the ferry from Southampton to Netley’s shore to sample its sublime charms – the experience given a further piquance by the fact that their time there was proscribed by the tides upon which their return to civilisation depended. This special access made the abbey’s ruins that much more wondrous and magical, as if it were a vision revealed at Nature’s whim. And among the many who came across the water was one writer who had newly taken up residence in Southampton’s fashionable spa: Jane Austen.

      At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Southampton had been in decline, suffering the after-effects of the revisited plague of 1665, imported to the town when a misguided humanitarian gave sanctuary to an infected child from London. On his 1724 tour of the country, Daniel Defoe announced, ‘Southampton is a truly antient town, for ’tis in a manner dying with age; the decay of the trade is the real decay of the town; and all the business of the moment that is transacted there, is the trade between us and the islands of Jersey and Guernsey, with a little of the wine trade, and much smuggling.’ But like Netley’s abbey, Southampton had reinvented itself, and within twenty years its fortunes had been turned around.

      Fashionable eighteenth-century society demanded two particular nostrums: mineral waters and sea bathing; Southampton could supply both. Beyond the city walls a spring was discovered to produce chalybeate waters impregnated with iron salts, a homoeopathic pot pourri imbued with the power to cure all manner of ills, from leprosy to hydrophobia (although it didn’t prevent an outbreak of the disease in 1807, whose rabid victims thirsted for water they could not bear to drink). For Southampton, as for Netley, water was its great advantage. ‘Bathing has generally been attained with the best effect’, the Southampton Guide informed its readers – affluent citizens most likely to suffer the nervous disorders of their station. For weak constitutions worn down by the stress of modern life, immersion in the sea was a celebrated cure. ‘Relaxation is the common cause of complaints incident to the higher order of persons in England’, the guide continued, ‘and, except in the case of unsound viscera, the cold bath gently braces the solids and accelerates the blood’s motion.’

      Below the town’s medieval walls, tidal sea-water baths were built, with elegantly-glazed ‘Long Rooms’ for ‘interested spectators’, and a promenade known as ‘The Beach’ along which, on their visit in the summer of 1755, Horace Walpole and John Chute had ‘walked long by moonlight’. As Walpole noted, the town was already ‘crowded; sea-bathers are established there too’. A month or so later their friend Thomas Gray was complaining,

      This place is still full of Bathers. I know not a Soul, nor have once been at the rooms. the walks all round it are delicious, & so is the weather. lodgings very dear & fish very cheap. here is no Coffeehouse, no Bookseller, no Pastry-Cook: but here is the Duke of Chandos …

      As with any upwardly-mobile area, the facilities of a fashionable resort soon arrived. Mrs Remacle opened her coffee house in the High Street, and lending libraries and grander assembly rooms sprang up, the voyeuristic spa society and nexus for elaborate masked balls, although their proximity to the less salubrious parts of town encouraged dissent among ‘the rougher elements of the poor, resentful of the amusements of the well-to-do and the fashionable visitors’. At one masque given in 1773, a young man leaving his lodgings dressed as a shepherd was set upon and ‘tossed like a football for some time … [until] some humane persons intervened’.

      The contrasts of privilege and deprivation which across the Channel were about to erupt in revolution were just as evident in Southampton’s spa. The following year, 1774, a ‘remarkably brilliant’ masquerade made ‘the mob so riotous that it was with difficulty the company got in and out of their carriages, and the streets were one continued scene of riot and confusion all evening’. As the balls grew more fantastic, so too did local opposition to such aristocratic decadence. One held at the new Polygon Hotel featured costumed revellers as ‘a Jew pedlar, Tancreds, Spaniards, СКАЧАТЬ