Jane Austen at Home_A Biography by Lucy Worsley

Author:Lucy Worsley [Worsley, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473632202
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2017-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

21

Green Park Buildings East

‘Surely you may suppose that I have suffered now.’

Sense and Sensibility

IN PERSUASION, THE heroine Anne Elliot’s arthritic friend Mrs Smith has fallen on hard times. Mrs Smith lives at a cheap address in Bath, Westgate Buildings, which is too far west to be fashionable. ‘Westgate Buildings must have been rather surprised by the appearance of a carriage drawn up near its pavement!’ observes Anne’s snobbish father when he hears that she has been dropped off there for visits.

The inhabitants of Westgate Buildings could not afford such things. They occupied an area of Bath that had not been desirable since the 1730s, and which had come down heavily since. The Buildings were ‘quite in the lower part of the town’, as Jane herself put it. One resident in nearby Avon Street complained to the Bath Corporation that ‘all kinds of nastiness’ were thrown down into the thoroughfare, and that wandering pigs made it ‘a perfect dung muckson from one end to the other’.1

And yet, in 1804, when the Austens came back from their autumn holiday in Lyme, they did not return to Sydney Place. Their new house was even further west than Westgate Buildings. It was to Green Park Buildings that they went: the very street rejected in 1801 as too damp.

Their precise address was no. 3, Green Park Buildings East. These houses, down by the river, were built upon a platform, for the land flooded often, and they stood rather near to the slums of the city’s southern fringe. In 1801, the Austens had rejected a house here because of ‘the Dampness of the Offices’ and because of ‘reports of discontented families & putrid fevers’.

The Austens had probably failed to renew their lease on Sydney Place when it expired because the rent had been rather a strain upon their finances. They regretted the loss of that house. As Jane fumed, their successors the Coles ‘have got their infamous plate on their door.’

The cost of living was always on the Austens’ minds. Jane wrote with information that she hoped might persuade Mrs Lloyd, mother of her friend Martha, to come to live at Bath. ‘Meat is only 8d per pound, butter 12d & cheese 9½d’, she explains. But then again, Martha must carefully conceal from her mother ‘the exorbitant price of fish’. Indeed, a single cucumber, a highly desirable item, cost the same as a whole pound of butter. The Austens hadn’t had to worry about such things when they grew their own cucumbers at Steventon. As Mrs Allen says in Northanger Abbey, ‘we are sadly off in the country’ but in Bath ‘one can step out of doors and get a thing in five minutes’. Very true, but such convenience had its cost.

On the other hand, Green Park Buildings – as the name suggests – also had some compensations. There was green space nearby, both between the eastern and western rows of houses, and in the adjacent Kingsmead Fields bordering the river.

The eastern part of Green Park

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