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

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      Netley had become the equivalent of a night club, a fashionable venue for young people dressed in the extravagant spirit of the times, like their cousins across the Channel with their impossibly high collars, cutaway coats and sheer muslin dresses worn revealingly dampened. The French dandies wore thin red ribbons around their necks in a mocking gesture to the ‘holy mother Guillotine’; their English counterparts sported black velvet collars in a similarly ironic gesture of mourning for their fellow aristocrats. While the unrest which threatened to import revolution to England required more troops to quell it than Wellington had under his command in the Peninsular War, their protest against industrialised society consisted of an obsession with neck ties and the latest gothic novel.

      ‘The reading public …’, Nightmare Abbey’s Mr Flosky complains, ‘requires a perpetual adhibition of sauce piquante to the palate of its depraved imagination. It laid upon ghosts, goblins and skeletons … till even the devil himself … became too base, common, and popular for its surfeited appetite.’ Like any other cult, gothic moved from creative originality to commercial exploitation. Soon unrestricted fêtes champêtres dispelled any notion of solitude at Netley’s ruins. By 1815, when Mary Brunton visited the site, the proliferation of toy stalls, gingerbread sellers and common rabble of picnickers in the abbey’s precincts had become an offence to the aesthetic eye, making romantic reverie all but impossible. Netley’s popularity destroyed the very spirit that had generated it, and the gothic commodification begun by Walpole and his Committee of Taste became part of a popular culture to which its sexy sensationalism proved more appealing than Enlightenment rationalism.

      By the time William Cobbett wrote his eulogy to Netley, Walpole’s refined aesthetic had long been subsumed by its popularised version. On another ‘rural ride’, Cobbett encountered a certain Mr Montague’s estate in north Hampshire, a man of new money who had enthusiastically decorated in the gothic fashion. ‘Of all the ridiculous things I ever saw in my life this place is the most ridiculous’, blustered Cobbett. ‘The house looks like a sort of church … with crosses on the tops of different parts of the pile …’ One gothic arch

      was composed of Scotch fir wood, as rotten as a pear; nailed together in such a way as to make the thing appear, from a distance, like the remnant of a ruin! I wonder how long this sickly, this childish taste is to remain? I do not know who this gentleman is. I suppose he is some honest person from the ’Change or its neighbourhood; and that these gothic arches are to denote the antiquity of his origin!

      Cobbett’s polemic harked back to St Bernard of Clairvaux’s pronouncements; the gothic style which had meant to replace excess had become imbued with it. As a reactionary refuge from a modern era of industrial unrest and protest, gothic was a symbol of conservatism, and rapidly becoming Britain’s ‘national style’. In the process, Netley became a place of common, if not uproarious entertainment. ‘On Mondays, the Fountain Court presents a singular scene of gaiety’, wrote an observer in the 1840s. ‘It has long been the custom for people from Southampton and the neighbourhood to meet at the Abbey on that day, and to hold a kind of festival. Tea and other provisions are furnished by the inhabitants of a neighbouring cottage, and this is followed by music and dancing.’

      The abbey had lost its edge. Its thrills debased, by 1840 Netley’s reputation was such that it became a subject of Richard Harris Barham’s satirical Ingoldsby Legends. A minor canon at St Paul’s, and an eccentric figure himself (having been crippled as a young man in a carriage accident which left him with a twisted arm) Barham produced his ironic ode, ‘Netley Abbey, A Legend of Hampshire’ as a parody of all those verses that had gone before. His alter-ego ‘Ingoldsby’ imagines the abbey in its medieval heyday, with nuns winking at ‘gardener lads’ and consequently finding themselves ‘Wall’d up in a hole with never a chink,/No light, – no air, – no victuals, – no drink!’, and provides an antiquarian footnote to his tale: ‘About the middle of the last century a human skeleton was discovered in a recess in the wall among the ruins of Netley. On examination the bones were pronounced to be those of a female. Teste James Harrison, a youthful but intelligent cab-driver of Southampton, who “well remembers to have heard his grandmother say that ‘Somebody told her so’”.’ But the poet’s reverie is broken by ‘the popping of Ginger Beer!’ dispensed to the modern crowds at Netley by ‘a hag surrounded by crockery-ware’, while chimney sweeps play ‘pitch and toss’, and

       Two or three damsels, frank and free,

      Are ogling, and smiling, and sipping Bohea.

       Parties below, and parties above,

       Some making tea, and some making love.

      In a gentler echo of Cobbett’s sardony, Barham ends his verse with a visitor

       scandalized,

       Finding these beautiful ruins so Vandalized,

       And thus of their owner to speak began,

       As he ordered you home in haste,

       NO DOUBT HE’S A VERY RESPECTABLE MAN,

      But – ‘I can’t say much for his taste.’

      The term ‘vandalized’ was itself a witty play on words, as the original Vandals who ravaged Rome in 455 were a Teutonic tribe like the Goths after whom the movement had been ironically named. The new barbarians had consigned Netley’s gothic idyll to the fashions and taste of another time.

      In Southampton, meanwhile, questions of taste were paramount, the barometer by which its fortunes could rise or fall. The island’s waters still beckoned, but now the age of the spa had been superseded – in royal and aristocratic fashionability – by the age of the yacht, and attention had moved down Southampton Water to the Isle of Wight and Cowes, and eventually to Osborne, where Victoria would set up her holiday home. The ‘gentry of the first rank and fashion’ – that fickle bunch – were now only passing through the town en route for the island, hardly long enough for its tradespeople to make a profit, or its destitute to chuck a brick. By 1817 the Spa Gardens were virtually deserted, and by 1820 the town’s tonic waters available only in bottles from local chemists. If it were to survive in the modern world, Southampton would have to change again. To this task its intrepid, waterside population proved equal. Once more its waters would rescue it, and within a generation, this geographically-blessed place – with its double high tides and safe harbour yet more accessible in the age of steamships and the railway line that now linked it to London – had entered a new period of success.

      Like the rest of England, everything changed with the coming of the railways. Populations became mobile, and expanding towns were connected by this powerful new web of communication. As a result, Southampton had to cede its role as a ‘retreat for retirement’ to Bournemouth and Brighton, its decline as a seaside resort ironically sealed by the social mobility which elsewhere had made coastal towns accessible, but which in Southampton ran between the beach and the town, separating the citizens from their seaside with its iron rails and belching smoke. To the east, the line ploughed through Chamberlayne’s improved landscape, gouging out its way with high embankments and brick viaducts, seeding the land with new suburbs like fireweed as it went.

      In the process, it too, like Netley, grew a little commoner, as though it had been contaminated down the railway line with a Cockney accent. The Whitehall Review noted that in the town ‘slowly, but surely, has been established the reign of Genteel Vulgarity’ and that in the high street ‘the talking is very СКАЧАТЬ