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

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СКАЧАТЬ would engage two centuries later. On this occasion the event was marred by a large stone being lobbed through the window which narrowly missed the Duke of Gloucester.

      However disgruntled the locals may have been at the excesses of their betters – against which behaviour their French colleagues sans-culottes would take direct action – the ‘fashionable visitors’ felt secure in the knowledge that Southampton’s reputation as a genteel resort had been sealed by royal approval. In 1750 George II’s son, Frederick Prince of Wales, had visited the town to bathe; by the 1760s, his two younger brothers had eschewed their now reigning brother’s partiality for Weymouth – where the King went to soothe the onset of his madness – and had become Southampton’s social patrons. By the 1780s, Southampton was enjoying the peak of its fashionability, confirmed by the arrival of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as The Times’s man on the spot informed its readers.

       Extract of a letter from Southampton, Aug. 2

      Fashion and taste have fixed their head quarters at this place, for the season. Dance and song succeed in merry round. The rooms crowded, which, by the bye, is not a little owing to the extreme attention and politeness of the Master of Ceremonies. Lodgings filled with fashionable belles and beaux – and, what is more decisively recommendatory, less extortion and imposition happen here, than at most seabathing places of summer resort.

      The beautiful Duchess, with her party, has just left Southampton; her return is expected in a few days.

      Newspaper reports grew from single paragraphs listing various lords and ladies to spectacular two-column lists comprising a substantial muster of London’s society. By 1788, the Southampton season was firmly in the social calendar, accompanied by the kind of hype that would be employed to advertise later resorts; the town had become the English equivalent of Antibes, yet more so in an era when European turmoil precluded foreign travel. The Beach and the Long Rooms thronged with dandified men and elegant women craning their necks and fluttering their fans. ‘This place now boasts the most fashionable and numerous company of any of the watering places,’ reported The Times in July 1788. The actor David Garrick had visited, it noted, ‘the Duke of Gloucester will certainly be here, and the Duke of Orleans is so pleased, that he means to pass some weeks at this delightful spot’. The following year the King came with his Queen and Princess, entertained at breakfast by a dutiful, and doubtless grateful, Corporation.

      It was the making of modern Southampton, bringing the kind of figures only the age of the ocean liner could entice back to the port. Indeed, not only were many introduced to the area’s charms, some were persuaded to stay there, making it their country residence. ‘If Southampton has decreased in trade, it has increased prodigiously in splendour and elegance’, the 1781 Guide to Southampton could retort to Defoe’s slur on an ‘antient town’, ‘and many gentlemen of fortune have come to settle here, since it has become so polite a place’.

      One of those gentlemen, James Dott, lived at Bitterne Grove, the building which was to become my school. Dott was an East India Company surgeon who, having served in the great new colonial acquisition of India, had ended up at Southampton, where his eccentric habits were supposed by local legend to have been the source of the adjective ‘dotty’; in old age, Dott was to be seen being wheeled about town in a basket chair, as if staking his claim to his neologism. He was also remembered for the fact that he had employed as his gardener Touissant-Ambrose Talour de la Cartrie, the Comte de Villienière, an aristocratic casualty of Revolutionary France who had taken refuge in Southampton in 1796 after a series of miraculous escapades worthy of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

      At school we were told that among the visitors to the eccentric James Dott were the Austens; legend even embroidered the scene to include Jane seated under the great oak tree on its lawn, writing, although there is nothing to substantiate such a romantic picture. The Austens lived in the leas of Lord Lansdowne’s newly-built gothic folly, with the town walls at the end of their garden. ‘We hear that we are envied our House by many people, & that the Garden is the best in Town’, Jane told her sister, but she was scathing of Southampton’s dressmakers, theatres, and ‘young women without partners, & each of them with two ugly, naked shoulders!’ The town featured just once in her fiction, in her youthful novel Love and Friendship, when it serves to remind her of ‘stinking fish’.

      Netley, however, presented a different prospect. She had completed Northanger Abbey four years previously, but it seems it is almost certain that Austen, born and brought up in Hampshire, an afternoon’s ride from Netley, had drawn on its abbey – by now the stuff of novellas, odes and operas – for her gothic satire.

      Austen the rationalist had parodied Mrs Radcliffe’s books in her fin-de-siècle novel, in which her heroine Catherine Morland is a young girl who, like Lucy Oakland in Shield’s opera, yearns for the romance she has read about in her gothic novels: ‘As they drew near the end of their journey, her impatience for a sight of the abbey … returned in full force, and every bend on the road was expected with solemn awe to afford a glimpse of its massy walls of grey stone, rising amidst a grove of ancient oaks, with the last beams of the sunset playing in beautiful splendour on its high Gothic windows.’ The reality of the fictional Northanger is a house furnished in the modern taste, although Catherine discovers that, like Paulet’s palace, it is partly housed in a medieval abbey:

      … Northanger turned up an abbey, and she was to be its inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.

      In September 1807 the Austens arrived on Netley’s beach, clambered out of the ferry and set off to explore the site. Moving through the oak trees which still lined the shore, the sense of discovery and anticipation – and the limits of tidal access – made their expedition to this laetus locus yet more thrilling. Linger too long in this haunted, ruin-strewn wood, and they might end up having to spend the night there.

      As the party came upon the abbey itself, the prospect of its grey stones and trees was almost too much for Jane’s impressionable fourteen-year-old niece. Like Catherine Morland and Lucy Oakland, Fanny Austen was a girl of her time. Attempting to capture the effect Netley had upon her that afternoon, she wrote to her governess in the astonished, breathless tones of a gothic aficionado (which her aunt so excelled at parodying), her bosom all but heaving with the gushing tribute:

      Never was there anything in the known world to be compared to that compound of everything that is striking, ancient and majestic: we were struck dumb with admiration, and I wish I could write anything that would come near to the sublimity of it, but that is utterly impossible as nothing I could say would give you a distant idea of its extreme beauty.

      Carried away by reverie, Fanny could only sink into Netley’s dream-like state, thrown into a medieval mystery, suspended from reality and Southampton’s stinking fish.

      Fanny Austen’s reaction to the abbey ruins was characteristic of the day-trippers from spa-town Southampton. They sought the same kind of sensation from Netley as a modern audience would from a horror movie, and Netley catered to them with aplomb. It was a thrilling place. With its many chambers, galleries, arched windows and doors, some opening strangely into mid-air and all overhung with ivy in the shade of great trees, the very asymmetrical, twisting layout of the abbey and its outbuildings created an enchanted realm for visitors to explore, somewhere between an eighteenth-century theme park and a chamber of horrors. Around any crumbling arch might lurk the ghost of ‘Blind Peter’, jealously guarding the abbot’s buried treasure.

      Now the gothic thirst for sensation created a new Netley experience: the abbey by moonlight. Excited goths could set out, in keen anticipation of the abbey’s morbid charms, on midnight tours accompanied by guides bearing flaming torches. Moving in procession through the СКАЧАТЬ