Jane Austen hated Bath, but it’s hard to see why. She lived there for six years, and during that whole time she never wrote a word, which is too bad. She only lived to the age of forty one, so to loose six years of productivity was a tragedy (though of course, she would have had no way of knowing that then). To be fair, her father did die while the family was staying in Bath, and she was forced to live on a greatly reduced income, moving into smaller and smaller houses, and snubbed by most of her former acquaintances. So I guess she may have had a reason to hate the people of Bath, but I can’t imagine anybody hating the city. It’s ironic, in the middle school English class sense of the word, that Austen hated Bath so much because it’s the place that I think is most associated with her legacy. And it was for that reason that I decided to take a day trip there last Thursday—I was on a Jane Austen pilgrimage.
As a reward for having (barely) completed our end of term papers, my friend and I decided to spend a day in Bath, which is a convenient hour and a half train ride away from London. I could barely sleep the night before because I was so excited, but because the train left at eight I managed to get to bed early so that I could wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed for the day ahead. When I arrived at the station to meet my friend I was practically jumping up and down with excitement, but I noticed Allison, my friend was looking decidedly lack luster. She’s almost as big an Austen admirer as I am, so I was perplexed by her lack of enthusiasm. I asked her what was wrong, and she explained that somebody in her dorm had decided that it would be cute to spray the fire alarm with gasoline and light it on fire at two in the morning. Consequently, the building had to be evacuated, and she was not allowed back into her dorm until four something. Under the circumstances I suppose I could grudgingly allow for her lack of enthusiasm, but as she convinced me it was nothing a nap on the train and a double mocha couldn’t cure I wasn’t going to let her exhaustion dampen my excitement.
The train ride to Bath was amazing. Allison dozed and I amused myself by listening to that mornings NPR podcast and staring out the window at the passing countryside. British countryside is gorgeous by the way. All of that rain keeps everything nice and green, and as we were experiencing one of the few sunny days allotted to the British isles every month that just barely keep the natives from committing suicide, it was more than pleasant to count the sheep and let the train rock us towards Bath.
When we arrived there were signs pointing us towards the center of town. We secured a caffeine IV for Allison, and then made our way to the central square. One of the things we found about Bath is that every major attraction comes equipped with a little old lady (usually somewhere in between fifty five and eighty) with an upper class accent who is more than thrilled to share with you her knowledge about local history. This was the case at our first stop, Bath Abbey, which I recognized from the cover of my copy of Northanger Abbey. We went inside to pay our respects, and were promptly greeted by the requisite little old lady, who handed us a pamphlet about the history of the church, and then stood meaningfully by the donation box and cleared her throat. After we deposited the “suggested” two pounds fifty, we headed into to explore. I glanced at the pamphlet she had handed us, and noticed that they had printed a timeline for the history of the Church, beginning in 0 AD with the birth of Jesus Christ. I admired their thoroughness. The Abbey was a bit like a smaller version of Westminster—there were plaques all over the walls and inscriptions on the flagstones under our feet. I again got the uncomfortable feeling that comes with treading on the dead.
We wandered silently around the Abbey, and Allison saw a plaque whose inscription she found particularly amusing. She stopped for a minute to copy it, and I wandered on. Seeing me unaccompanied, the little old lady wandered over to me and started asking where I was from, and what I was doing in Bath. When she heard I was American, she took me over to a place she called the “American Corner” which housed a number of plaques for Americans that had been buried in the Abbey. There was a flag hung in the corner, and she pointed out that it only had forty-eight stars, confiding that it was from “Before the War,” which I guessed meant World War two. I asked her if she had a favorite plaque, and she lead me to a corner passed a couple truly garish designs replete with Angels and ivey, to a small marble carving hung on the wall which was decorated with music notes. This was the plaque for a Bath native who had been an opera singer, who had traveled to Europe, where he met Mozart. I’m not sure the details of the story, but he persuaded Mozart to come to Bath when Mozart toured England. I thanked the woman for showing it to me, and asked her if she had read every engraving in the church. “Not yet” she replied, and I liked the way she said “yet.”
After I thanked the guide, Allison and I met up and headed back out onto the square—there was still a whole day of Jane related tourism yet to come!
Two of the six novels take place directly in Bath—her first full length novel Northanger Abbey and her last Persuasion. Though one was written before her disastrous experience there and one afterwards, and there’s a marked difference in the way the city is portrayed in the two novels. But in both novels she mentions all of the Bath attractions, many of which I saw on my trip there.
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