Spas and Seaside Resorts in Kent, 1660-1820
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0 Spas and Seaside Resorts in Kent, 1660-1820 Rachael May Johnson Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds, School of History Submitted September 2013 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2013 The University of Leeds and Rachael May Johnson 1 Acknowledgements My thanks, first and foremost, must go to my supervisor John Chartres for unfailing enthusiasm, encouragement and support. Without his guidance, patience and insightful criticism, this thesis would not have been possible. Financial support has been generously provided by the Beresford PhD Scholarship and research trips have been supplemented by the Economic History Society. I am very grateful to all of those at the University of Leeds who have provided practical and intellectual support, especially those involved in the Eighteenth Century Group and Early Modern Seminar Series. Kevin Linch and Iona McCleery in particular have offered useful advice and academic opportunities. Thanks also to all those at the Brotherton Library for their help and interest. Outside of Leeds, I am indebted to the staff of the British Library, Centre for Kentish Studies, East Kent Archives, East Sussex Record Office, Sheffield Archives, and West Yorkshire Archives Service for guiding me in the right direction and providing practical support. I would like to thank all those whose friendship has helped to make my studies at Leeds so enjoyable, including Alexandra Anderson, Dragan Bakic, Moira Bonnington, Becky Bowd, Cathy Coombs, Danielle Coombs, Thomas Davies, Júlio Decker, Josie Freear, Oliver Godsmark, Nicholas Grant, Vincent Hiribarren, Henry Irving, Alexander Lock, Simone Pelizza, Juliette Reboul, Louise Seaward, Danielle Sprecher, Priscilla Truss, Mark Walmsley, and Peter Whitewood. I would especially like to thank Gina Denton for sharing my love of snickerdoodles, providing endless cups of tea and for introducing me to Mad Men, which has been a wonderful distraction from thesis writing. I would also like to thank Ceara Weston for adventures in Saltaire and Hay-on-Wye, as well as for many evenings spent watching costume dramas. Outside of academia, Nikki Gaiger, Kirsty Horsfield, Jenny Mathieson, Francesca Lee, Simon Smith, and Claire Whetton have offered unstinting encouragement. Thanks also to my family, who for four years have listened patiently to endless accounts of my studies, especially Phillip Johnson, Geraldine Johnson, Simon Pearson, and Philip Pearson. Most of all I would like to thank Mum and Dad: your encouragement and support have been invaluable and this thesis is dedicated to you both. Last but not least, I would like to thank the tough and mighty Jack Millard: I could not have done this without you. 2 Abstract This thesis offers a new approach to the study of long eighteenth-century watering places that combines the precise study of locality with a careful consideration of motivation. Looking at spas and seaside resorts in Kent between 1660 and 1820, the county hierarchy of watering places will be used to argue for the complexity and diversity of the visitor experience. The aim, therefore, will not be to offer a traditional narrative of resort development. Instead, it will explore the use of spas and seaside resorts across a wide range of intersecting axes, focusing on the social, cultural and medical aspects of resort life and considering in particular Margate and Tunbridge Wells as urban and leisure centres. Comparing resorts with national, regional and local catchment areas and exploring the development of watering places across time and between resort typologies, this thesis will look at Kent’s spas and seaside resorts as marriage markets, feminine arenas, centres for polite society, and places in which to be seen indulging in fashionable leisure and pleasure, showing how they reacted to and actively influenced a changing social order. Challenging portrayals of the water cure as an excuse used to justify the pursuit of pleasure and drawing on emerging discourses on fashionable illness, this thesis will argue for the importance of mineral and sea waters as a medical treatment during a period when few effective medicines existed that could treat the vast majority of afflictions. Thus by combining the study of locality with a recognition of the diversity of the visitor experience, this thesis will show how Kent’s watering places not only played an important role as social, cultural and medical arenas but also how they helped visitors navigate some of the most important areas of their lives. 3 Contents Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 1 Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 2 Contents …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 3 Lists of Figures and Tables ………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 5 1. Constructing a Hierarchy of Watering Places ……………………………………………………….. 20 2. Margate and Tunbridge Wells ……………………………………………………………………………… 72 3. Society at Kent’s Watering Places ………………………………………………………………………. 145 4. Taking the Waters …………………………………………………………………………………….……….. 217 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 282 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 291 4 Lists of Figures and Tables Figure 1.1. Map Showing the Location of Kent’s Watering Places …………………………….. 21 Figure 2.1. Margate Bathing Houses, Front (1820) ……………………………………………………. 97 Figure 2.2. Margate Bathing Houses, Back (1820) …………………………………………………….. 97 Figure 2.3. A Sketch on Board a Margate Hoy!! (1810) ……………………………………………..105 Figure 2.4. Subscriptions and Rules for Mitchener’s Assembly Room (1763) ………….. 118 Figure 2.5. Hall’s Library at Margate (1789) ……………………………………………………………. 140 Figure. 3.1. Nash’s Rules as Reproduced in The New Bath Guide ……………………………. 171 Figure 3.2. Venus’s Bathing (1790) …………………………………………………………………………. 198 Figure 3.3. The Pier House at Ramsgate (1821) ………………………………………………………. 212 Figure 4.1. The Hooded Bathing Machine Explained (1765) ……………………………………. 259 Figure 4.2. New Baths, Ramsgate (1821) ………………………………………………………………… 278 Table 2.1. Population of Kent’s Major Watering Places ……………………………………………. 78 Table 2.2. Pigot’s Directory of Kent ………………………………………………………………………… 111 Table 3.1. Patrick Colquhoun, 1803 ………………………………………………………………………… 152 Table 4.1. Ladies Book 1803-05 ………………………………………………………………………………. 241 Table 4.2. Gentlemen’s Book 1803-05 …………………………………………………………………….. 241 5 Table 4.3. Afflictions Suffered by Patients at the Margate Infirmary ………………………. 270 Table 4.4. Cure Rate of the Margate Infirmary ……………………………………………………….. 272 Introduction On 23 July 1629 Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, visited the newly discovered mineral waters at Tunbridge Wells. Recovering after the birth and death of a premature son, Henrietta Maria hoped the chalybeate waters would aid conception and promote a successful pregnancy. Setting up camp on Bishop’s Down, the Queen and her court spent about six weeks at the fledgling spa indulging in ‘masks and dancing’ and they ‘diffused a splendor *sic+ and magnificence over this wild country.’1 The visit proved a success: in the following November, Henrietta Maria was reported to be pregnant and she gave birth to a healthy baby, the Prince of Wales, in May 1630. Nearly fifty years later John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, ridiculed the Tunbridge Wells water’s reputation for encouraging fecundity. Visiting as a prominent member of Charles II’s libertine court, he revelled in the spa’s licentious atmosphere. In a 1675 poem Rochester described the characters he met on the Walks, including women who were drinking the waters in the hope of conceiving. The Earl, however, 1 Thomas Benge Burr, The History of Tunbridge-Wells (London: Printed and Sold by M. Hingeston, J. Dodsley, T. Caslon and E. Baker at Tunbridge Wells, 1766), pp. 24-25. 6 attacked the notion that it was the waters that caused pregnancy: ‘For here walk Cuff and Kick / With brawny back and legs and potent prick, / Who more substantially will cure thy wife, / And on her half-dead womb bestow new life.’ 2 Amabel, Countess de Grey, visiting the spa as a newly married young woman a century later in the 1770s, was received into a strong feminine community which fostered intellectual debate. Keen to participate in fashionable leisure pursuits in the company of polite society, Amabel spent much of her time engaging in the public routine of resort life: dancing in the assembly rooms; shopping for luxury goods along the Pantiles and drinking tea with friends. Alongside this overt motivation, Amabel was also drinking the waters twice a day in the hope of conceiving. Unlike Henrietta Maria, however, the waters did not have the desired effect: despite returning to Tunbridge Wells the following two summers, she remained childless. For Frances Sayer, a young woman from London’s respectable middling sort who visited Sandgate in the early nineteenth century, the curative properties of seawater were seen as little more than a novelty. The focus for her four-week holiday at this emerging seaside resort was instead the enjoyment of the resort’s amenities, particularly the circulating library and exploring the surrounding area through walks and excursions.