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This Jane Austen blog brings Jane Austen, her novels, and the Regency Period alive through food, dress, social customs, and other 19th C. historical details related to this topic.

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The Comforts of Bath, 1798: Thomas Rowlandson

November 22, 2009 by Vic

In 1798, the famous caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson drew The Comforts of Bath, a series of satiric drawings. The cartoons were used to illustrate the 1858 edition of the New Bath Guide, written by Christopher Anstey and first published in 1766.* Rowlandson depicted both the social and medical scene in Bath just before the period described by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and by Georgette Heyer in her Regency romances.

The Portrait, Comforts of Bath, 1798, Thomas Rowlandson

In this post I combined Rowlandson’s images with excerpts from an 1811 guidebook, A new guide through Bath and its environs By Richard Warner. The scenes depict the use of mineral water therapy for the invalids who flocked to Bath, a city whose fashionable post-Nash reputation was already well past its prime and whose medical men were generally regarded as quacks or, worse, “potential murderers”. The rotund gentleman in front and center of all these scenes (who undoubtedly suffered from gout, a painful rich man’s disease), was conjectured to be based after Tobias Smollet’s Mr. Bramble. In the pictorial’s subtext, notice how “Mr. Bramble’s” young wife (companion or daughter) flirts with the young officer who boldly woos her (Image above). Even while satirizing them, Rowlandson gets the social details just right. Underneath each image sits a quote from the guidebook.

King Bladud's Bath, Comforts of Bath, Rowlandson

It is fit for the patient when he goeth into the bath to defend those parts which are apt to be offended by the bath, as to have his head well covered from the air and wind and from the vapours arising from the bath, also his kidneys if they be subject to the stone, anointed with some cooling unguents as rosatum comitiffs infrigidans Galeni Santo linum &c. Also, to begin gently with the bath till his body be inured to it, and to be quiet from swimming or much motion which may offend the head by sending up vapours thither at his coming forth, to have his body well dryed and to rest in his bed an hour and sweat, etc.” – A New Guide Through Bath, 1811

The Pump Room, The Comforts of Bath, 1798, Rowlandson

The new Pump Room supplied water from a covered pump. Before the room was built, the populace drank the waters in the open air. But the new rooms allowed them to

…  take the exercise prescribed to them sheltered from the inclemency of the weather. The work was accordingly begun in 1704, finished two years afterwards, and opened for the reception of the company under the auspices of Mr Nash, who had just then become the Arbiter Elegantiarum of Bath…A New Guide Through Bath, 1811

Black and White detail of above print

In the year 1751 [The Pump] Room was enlarged. Accommodated with a beautiful Portico stretching from it in a northern direction in 1786, and adorned with superb Western Frontispiece in 1791, The Corporation further beautified the city in 1796 by taking down the old Pump Room entirely and building on its site the much larger and more magnificent edifice known at present by that name…A New Guide Through Bath, 1811

Public Breakfast, The Comforts of Bath, 1798, Rowlandson

Pertaining to the construction of  the Harrison rooms and the Assembly Rooms:

Temporary booths had hitherto been the only places in which the company could drink their tea and divert themselves with cards, but Mr Harrison, a man of spirit and speculation, perceiving that a building of this nature was much wanted and would probably make him a very suitable return, undertook at the suggestion of Mr Nash to erect a large and commodious room for the purpose of receiving the company.  The succes of this attempt induced a similar one in the year 1728, when another large room was built by Mr Thayer.  A regular system of pleasurable amusements commenced from this period, and the gay routine of public breakfasts, morning concerts, noon card parties, evening promenades, and nocturnal balls rolled on in an endless and diversified succession. – A New Guide Through Bath, 1811

Company at Play, The Comforts of Bath, Rowlandson

Rules card games:

That no persons be permitted to play with cards left by another party;  That no hazard or unlawful game of any sort be allowed in these Rooms on any account whatever nor any cards on Sundays...A New Guide Through Bath, 1811

The Concert, Bath Chambers, Rowlandson

For music sweet music has charms to controul; And tune up each passion that ruffles the soul; What things have I read and what stories been told; Of feats that were done by musicians of old – The New Bath Guide, 1779

Dinner, Comforts of Bath, 1798

Bath has little trade and no manufactures; the higher clafles of people and their dependents conftitute the chief part of the population, and the number of the lower clafles being but fmall…A New Guide Through Bath, 1811

Bath Races, Rowlandson

More on the topic:

  • Thomas Rowlandson’s “The Comforts of Bath”  (1798)
  • New Bath Guide, Christopher Anstey, 1779, Google book
  • *From Hogarth to Rowlandson,medicine in art in eighteenth-century Britain By Fiona Haslam, 1996,  p 174
  • In the bowels of the novel: The exchange of fluids in the Beau Monde
  • Beechen Cliff, the Arts and Natural Surroundings
  • The Lower Assembly Rooms and Bath Society
  • Dancing in Regency Bath
  • The Pump Room: Little-Known and Well-Known Facts

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Posted in art, Bath, jane austen, Jane Austen's World, personal hygiene, Regency Life, Regency Period, Regency style, Regency World | Tagged 19th century medicine, 19th century physician, Bathing in Regency Bath, Regency Bath, Regency Medical treatment, Regency physicians, Thomas Rowlandson | 5 Comments

5 Responses

  1. on November 23, 2009 at 02:09 Tamara Morgan

    I’ve always been horrified by the thought of all those sickly people sharing the same warm water. I imagine bits of scabby flesh everywhere – and who knows what other bodily fluids.

    Do you know if the waters they drank and the waters they bathed in were kept separate at all, or if they came from different springs?


    • on November 23, 2009 at 02:31 Vic

      Good thought. The mineral waters that are drunk in the Pump Room come from the King’s Spring and are fresh. Click here to see the fountain. http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/299203760/

      More about the springs can be found in this document: http://geoheat.oit.edu/bulletin/bull21-3/art5.pdf

      Neither link addresses your concern, but I suspect that fresh waters keep bubbling up.


  2. on November 23, 2009 at 13:41 Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

    I love Bath, it’s one of my favorite places in England. I wonder Tamara, since at least the women wore clothing while they bathed if there were less bits of scabby flesh from them.


  3. on November 25, 2009 at 17:04 Leslie Carroll

    I’ve always adored the Rowlandson prints; they made for delicious research material when I wrote BY A LADY, which was predominantly set in Bath in 1801. It’s one of my favorite places in the world and I was lucky enough to participate in the Jane Austen Festival there in 2006 doing a costumed reading and signing from BY A LADY.

    I also researched the history of the baths themselves and what the Georgians wore to bathe in them. According to my research the men and women wore brown shifts and the baths were not segregated by gender. Consequently, people gave eyewitness accounts of people copulating right there in the open-air baths.

    It’s also amazing how they thought a few pomanders would remove the communal stench (of filth, not minerals) from the waters!

    I have a drink of the sulphurous stuff whenever I visit the Pump Room, even though I don’t like the taste. When in Bath …!


  4. on March 17, 2010 at 14:50 A Walk With Jane Austen in Bath « Jane Austen's World

    […] The Comforts of Bath: Thomas Rowlandson […]



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