up with a little sea bathing’ in Brighton.
An engraving by R. and D. Havell from an original by George Walker: bathing at Bridlington, 1813
The supremely healthy Charlotte Heywood agrees with Dr Trotter: she enjoys sparkling Sanditon but has no need for any ailment, and by the end of the fragment has not tried sea bathing. Robust Lady Denham avoids doctors, blaming them for killing off her second husband, and is never rhapsodic about the sea. She too of course wants to benefit from sickness in others: offering her remedies of asses’ milk and an exercise chamber horse left over from her first husband.
Indeed, almost everyone in Sanditon aims to profit from the invalid or healthy body. Mr Parker seeks a doctor as a tourist attraction for his seaside resort, though, unlike Lady Denham, he does believe in the therapeutic value of sea air and bathing: he expects good breathing and ‘immersion’ to put him to rights after his carriage accident. Visiting Mrs Griffith, allowing modest sea bathing for her richest young lady, prescribes only those pills and drops in which a cousin has a commercial interest. In poems and puffing medical manuals, medicinal sea bathing could even sound useful for seduction; albeit praising the waters of the Hudson River, Samuel Low declared that ‘the fair from thy embrace more lively shall retire/And that which cools their own, their lovers’ breasts shall fire!’ Had the manuscript been longer, perhaps the egregious Sir Edward would have had time to find amorous profit from female bathing, and tune his compliments accordingly.
‘Venus Bathing in Margate’ attributed to Thomas Rowlandson. Nude swimming was in fact very uncommon for ladies
The seaside resort
Today, with so many rundown resorts around the coast of England, it is tempting to glamorise the earlier quaint fishing-village with its heroic night fishermen and welcoming wives in tidy cottages, and grow nostalgic for an older way of life – the sort epitomised for the upper orders by the stay-at-home Heywoods. The poet William Cowper, a favourite author of Jane Austen’s, looked on the new developments through conservative eyes. He believed such jumped-up places ruined old crafts through a fashion for novelty, making visitors prey to shoddy amusement, to morbid restlessness and to quacks:
But now alike, gay widow, virgin, wife,
Ingenious to diversify dull life,
In coaches, chaises, caravans, and hoys,
Fly to the coast for daily, nightly joys.
And all impatient of dry land, agree
With one consent to rush into the sea.
from ‘Retirement’
Contemplating the mushrooming sea resorts, the reforming journalist William Cobbett drily remarked that they had no commerce or agriculture, no purpose beyond catering for migrants’ pleasure and so were ‘very pretty to behold; but dismal to think of’ – all metaphorically built on shifting sand, all sanditons. The money to sustain them must derive from outside, from other parts of Britain or from the Empire. More sustained ridicule came from Thomas Skinner Surr: in The Magic of Wealth (1815), he described a rich banker Flimflam creating ‘Flimflam-town’ to become ‘a magnet of Fashion’, with the help of sidekicks Puff and Rattle. The book mocks the ‘trafficking spirit of the times’ that has replaced the stationary gentry values of Mr Oldways. The resort project crumbles and Mr Flimflam goes bankrupt – rather of course like Henry Austen.
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