Georgian Stories | Author, Jane Lark's stories

The assembly rooms in Bath had their heyday in the 1700s. I say assembly room’s’ because there were three in Bath, which was a popular social retreat of the time. The Bath season ran from October to June, and occupancy of Bath increased from 3000 in 1700 to 35,000 in 1800. Jane Austen’s first visit to Bath was in 1797 and it is after this visit she wrote the first draft of Northanger Abbey which includes descriptions of assemblies in the Upper Rooms.

The New Rooms or the Upper Assembly Rooms were completed in 1771. They were considered necessary as the two other assembly rooms were thought old fashioned, too small for the crowds which now flocked to Bath and too far from the now more fashionable areas of Bath, the Circus and the Crescent. The other assembly rooms were originally Harrisons (later Haye’s, Hawley’s and then Simpson’s which was built in 1708) and Lindsey’s (later Lovelace’s and then Wiltshire’s designed in 1728). Some of these various proprietors were women.

These assembly rooms provided visitors with a number of entertainments, dancing, card playing, music, theatre, billiards and refreshments. Harrison’s also had gardens where patrons could walk and take tea. However once the New or Upper Rooms opened, on the 30^th September 1771 at 7 o’clock, both Simpson’s and Wiltshire’s suffered, Wiltshire’s soon closed and Simpson’s burnt down in 1820.

At the time the upper rooms opened it cost ‘One Guinea to admit One Gentleman and two ladies at seven shillings each.’

An ‘assembly’ was described in 1751 as ‘a stated and general meeting of the polite persons of both sexes for the sake of conversation, gallantry, news and play’. Festivities in the Upper Rooms included a Dress Ball on Mondays, a Concert on Wednesdays and a Cotillion Ball on Thursdays. However the rooms were open every day for people to walk and play cards. Each room had a main purpose a Ball Room, Card Room and Tea Room, but their uses did vary.

The Ball Room as described in 1772 is ‘105ft 8in long’ and in the 18^th Century it would have been packed with 800 dancers. Between 6-8 the 11 musicians who sat in a first floor balcony played minuets. A stately dance for couples. ‘It is often remarked by Foreigners that the English Nation of both sexes look as grave when they are dancing, as if they are attending the solemnity of a funeral.’ However more energetic country dances followed between 8-9, until refreshments were provided, and again after refreshments when country dances continued until 11. The term country dances comes from the French ‘contra-dance’ describing the fact that these dances commenced with one line of gentlemen facing a line of women, the pairs and lines then danced in a variety of patterns. The dancers were observed by others at the edge of the room talking, flirting, walking or seated on a three tiered structure.

Jane Austen describes the commencement of an evening in the ballroom in a letter dated 12^th May 1801, ‘Before tea it was a rather dull affair; but then before tea did not last long, for there was only one dance, danced by four couple. Think of four couple, surrounded by an hundred people, dancing in the upper Rooms at Bath! After tea we cheered up; the breaking up of private parties sent scores more to the Ball and though it was shockingly and inhumanely thin for this place, there were people enough I suppose to have made five or six very pretty Basingstoke assemblies!”

The Ball Room was clearly busy in 1771 however, as rules established at the time insisted women were not permitted to dance the country dances wearing hoops, due to lack of space, a separate room was made available where serving maids assisted ladies who wished to dance in removing their hoops.

Refreshments were served in the Tea Room, which was also the room used for concerts. This location was used in the 2009 film ‘The Duchess’ in the scene where Georgiana is introduced on the balcony in Bath, and in the 2007 version of ‘Persuasion’ When Anne attends a concert which she has encouraged Frederick Wentworth to attend.

Meals were served in the Tea room throughout the day from ‘public breakfasts’ onwards, but during balls a buffet was laid out on side tables, including ‘sweetmeats, jellies, wine, biscuits, cold ham and turkey.’ Jerry Melford’s depiction of the point when the bell rang to announce supper during a tea party in Humphry Clinker is not perhaps as we might imagine genteel society dining. ‘The tea-drinking passes as usual, and the company having risen from their tables, were sauntering in groupes, in expectation of the signal for attack, when the bell beginning to ring, they flew with eagerness to the dessert, and the whole place was instantly in commotion. There was nothing but jostling, scrambling, pulling, snatching, struggling, scolding and screaming.’

Jane Lark is a writer of authentic, passionate and emotional love stories.

See the side bar for details of Jane’s books, and Jane’s website www.janelark.co.uk to learn more about Jane. Or click ‘like’ on Jane’s Facebook page to see photo’s and learn historical facts from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian eras, which Jane publishes there. You can also follow Jane on twitter at @janelark

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Old Wardour Castle near Salisbury was built in the 14^th Century, but I am not writing about its medieval beginnings, or its development into a fabulous Tudor residence; I am exploring it as an example of the Georgian fashion for blending romantic ruins into a landscape garden. After all not everyone has a real ruin in their garden and the fashion for follies meant others were building mock equivalents, aspiring to a former stately ‘keep’. It was the 8^th Lord Arundell who asked ‘Capability Brown’ to incorporate the ruins into his new garden design.

The Arundell family were forced to leave Old Wardour Castle when it was damaged during a siege in the Civil War in 1644. They built a smaller house beside it in the 1680’s, outside the wall, and began developing the grounds. The early garden was established in 1730. It was formal and terraced, with a bowling green. It was not until the later 18^th Century that the garden reached its romantic peak after the 8^th Lord Arundell married an heiress in 1763 and set about building both a new house and a new garden.

The new house was quite deliberately perched upon the slope of a facing hill, so that it looked down on the romantic ruins, painting a picturesque view as the family would have seen sunlight shining back from the fallen walls of their ancestral home, framed by woodland.

The mock gothic Banqueting House which nestles beyond the castle’s curtain wall, was built in 1973-4, while New Wardour was still under construction. It is a place where guests may stop and dine after a visit to the ruins.

To add entertainment to the developing pleasure garden of course it had to have a Grotto, which was placed facing the ruins on the far side from the Banqueting House, on top of the old terrace which was still lined by a yew avenue. It was built in 1792 by Josiah Lane of near by Tisbury, a well known local builder of garden ornaments. And you can see like Pope’s Grotto, and that at Prior Park, it is eclectic, containing ammonites and stalagmites. It has twisting, turning tunnels, and numerous little niches in which the explorer might perch and a frightening aura about it, to inspire the fashionable gothic imagination.

Staying in the gothic style is what survives of Lord Arundell’s stone ring. To add even more authenticity and age to his pleasure garden he transported a 4,000 year old prehistoric ring of stones from Tisbury, and added two seats to it for his guests to idle away their afternoons upon, reading poetry, or painting. In these stone alcoves he incorporated decorated stone from the fallen ruins.

I can easily imagine a house party riding out from New Wardour to the ruins for an afternoon of adventure and exploration, for their entertainment. Running through the grotto tunnels, and climbing up through the ruined tower’s rooms to reach the highest point and there carving their names to remember the visit. They would have dined lavishly in the banqueting hall, enjoying their host’s hospitality and then perhaps sat in the alcoves of the stone ring or the grotto, flirting, resting, talking, painting or reading.

And yes there is Graffiti, some from the days of these house parties, and some from later days in the 1800’s when in 1830 the ruins were opened to the public and the banqueting hall became a place for visitors to obtain refreshment, including one private dining room for the more influential. Though in some places it is hard to tell the old graffiti from the new, where it has been worn away by rain and carved over again.