Online magazine: A Year in Bath

May in Regency Bath

We are now fairly into springtime - the only pretty ring-a-ding time, as Shakespeare said, or as Jane Austen put it- Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

This month, let’s whirl with Catherine Morland through the regular pleasures of a Bath day. It may well be a progress more natural than heroic, more breathless than elegant - but at all costs, my dearest creature, let us avoid being affected or insipid!

It’s broad, bright day. The Pump Room clock says it’s just gone one - and the weather’s as fresh and changeable as youth itself. Outside, on the Abbey’s west face, the stone angels climb and fall on their ladders, as flesh and blood angels climb and fall in each others’ regard in the world of friendships below. Isabella Thorpe has been waiting these ten ages at least - in other words, about five minutes - when our heroine, all eager delight and animation, scampers in to meet her friend.

The morning’s studies have been literary - a systematic reading scheme, provided by Miss Thorpe, to cover ten or twelve monstrous horrid novels. "Oh, my dear Isabella, do not tell me what is behind the black veil! I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton!". She needn’t worry, for her dear Isabella is eager to exchange talk of "The Mysteries of Udolpho" for the book of life, or at least the visitors’ book in the Pump Room, which is merely a cover for her sly perusal of certain odious young men. They have been ogling her this half hour, and have put her quite out of countenance. Ah! Now they have just quitted the Pump Room, and can be seen swaggering across the crowded Abbey Churchyard in a perfectly insufferable manner. The only way to teach them a lesson, she tells her dear Catherine, can be to show them supreme indifference - by hurrying after them directly.

And so the two young ladies, with their white muslin gowns and orange bonnet ribbons flapping in the breeze, thread their way through the mid-day throng to the archway that leads out of the churchyard into Union Passage. They are moving with the crowds in the general upward direction of Milsom Street, to Edgar’s Buildings - the Thorpe ladies’ lodgings. Isabella links arms with her friend, but still follows with her roving eye the backs of the two young idlers, way up ahead.

She rattles on breathily. Her dearest Catherine must see her sweet new hat or is it that her sweetest Catherine simply must see Isabella’s dear new hat? Amazingly dearer - more expensive certainly - and sweeter than her mother’s new hat, which makes her look such a quiz! Why, Mamma looks like an old witch in it, but she and her sisters would not, for all the world, be the first to tell her so.

What man, indeed! Conversations from Catherine’s happy dance through the last few days still linger in her memory. "Do you understand muslins sir? You must be a great comfort to your sister". Oh, where is the bewitching Mr Tilney on this fine May day? But our Catherine, despite her reading diet, has too much common sense to pine away for a young man she may never see again, especially when the present is so full of people and bustle.

"Good heavens, ‘tis James!" she cries, greeting her brother with the liveliest pleasure, as he jumps down from the passenger seat of Thorpe’s gig. Soon the quartet are planning a jaunt to Blaize Castle, "the finest old castle in the kingdom" - well, to the young, everything over thirty years old is ancient- "worth going fifty miles to see". Nothing ruins horses so much as rest, as John Thorpe says, so let us not waste a minute of a precious day of a six weeks’ stay in Bath.

A brisk walk up Milsom Street will take us up past Mollands’ the pastrycook’s, and on to triumph at the Assembly Rooms at the top of the town. Tonight there will be a Cotillion Ball until past midnight, and Catherine will be dancing in her sedan chair all the way home.