18th Century life in the Orchard Street Theatre Bath and its impact on everyone, including Jane Austen, through its involvement in the transport of letters

Love Letter by Thomas Rowlandson

A taster;

‘Every day at Longbourn was now a day of anxiety; but the most anxious part of each was when the post was expected. The arrival of letters was the first grand object of every morning’s impatience. Through letters, whatever of good or bad was to be told would be communicated, and every succeeding day was expected to bring some news of importance.’ Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen.

As Jane Austen says letters were the only form of communication beyond verbal interaction in the 1700 and 1800s and therefore transport was pivotal.

This last story springing from the old Theatre Royal Bath will tell a little more about an actors/actresses life in the 18^th and 19^th Century and how they travelled, and how this then affected the establishment of a postal service with reference to Jane Austen’s experiences as recorded in Pride and Prejudice.

Once John Palmer had successfully transformed the Theatre Royal and established entertainments to rival London’s Drury Lane and Covent Garden, he was not satisfied to simply sit back and glory in his success, he turned his eyes on Bristol, fifteen miles further South. Bristol was a busy port then and a hub of international business. Consequently it could support another high calibre theatre. John Palmer leased a theatre in King Street in 1778 and then used this to help him in developing the quality of the shows in Bath and Bristol by offering theatre companies shows in both venues, to double their income. They would literally play back-to-back shows; perform in Bath and then race off to Bristol to perform again and vice versa.

To enable this he needed to not only be able to transport actors and actresses between the venues but also stagehands and props. To do this in the speed he needed he ran a daily coach between the venues pulled by four horses.

There is a fascinating quote from the actress Sarah Siddons, who I discussed in my last blog, describing this hectic acting life;

‘After the rehearsal at Bath, and on a Monday morning, I had to go and act at Bristol on the evening of the same day; and reaching Bath again, after a drive of twelve miles, I was obliged to represent some fatiguing part there on the Tuesday evening. I wonder that I had strength and courage to support it, interrupted as I was by the cares of a mother, and by the childish sports of my little ones, who were of the most unwillingly hushed to silence from interrupting their mother’s studies.’

One of my abiding themes when I think and write about characters from history is that they lived in a different time, with a different way of life to support them but within themselves they were the same as us. Human thoughts and human feelings are unchanged going right back to certainly beyond the medieval era. Life about them may have set different boundaries for wrong and right, but they still felt, joy, fear, courage, uncertainty, pain, love, infatuation, hardship, embarrassment… The list is endless. However even I am surprised to discover a woman expressing the views any working mother might feel today and especially an actress.

When I think of actresses in the 1700s and 1800s I think of the green room where they entertained wealthy adoring men following their performance, I did not imagine a woman surrounded by young children clamoring for attention, “Look at this, Mama.” “Pick me up.” And yet the quote above describes a life like that. When Sarah first began performing in the Bath and Bristol Theatres she was married with two young children and her children were part of the reason she made the decision to settle at Bath because she no longer wanted to continue touring in a Theatre Company. This was what most actors and actresses did, changing towns frequently to establish a new audience and acting in halls and barns.

I shall not put a picture in of Thomas Rowlandson’s image of a theatre dressing room, which is more inline with my previous view, it’s a bit rude, but here’s the link if you’d like to see it,

http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_237216/Thomas-Rowlandson/Actresses-Dressing-Room-at-Drury-Lane

How many mothers today choose to change from a job which makes it harder to be a parent? Many of us I’m sure. And then you can imagine she took them with her in the carriage as she learnt her lines travelling between Bath and Bristol and clearly from the quote above she felt guilty for telling them to be silent while she studied and mentally rehearsed. Now how many mothers feel like that? I have had a similar conversation regularly with my friends who are authors. ‘Childish sports‘, you can imagine them climbing all over the carriage and back stage, picking things up they should not touch and playing with them. It’s a fascinating concept to discover the same tribulations of a working mother written in the life of an 18^th Century actress. She definitely did have the children in the theatre at times we know because there are records of her using the children as characters on stage at times.

Anyway, back to travel and John Palmers carriage. He used the same carriage to take him to London to visit the Theatre Companies there and bring actors and actresses back to Bath and he could do this journey in less than a day.

In comparison the mail system transporting letters at the time took three days for a letter to reach London if posted in Bath. The difference was because post was transported by single riders in a chain, a bit like a relay they would ride their stretch and then pass the post bag on to the next rider for the next stretch.

John Palmer took it upon himself to change this. He knew he could do it much quicker in a coach so he encouraged, not without resistance, for the mail service to be run by coach instead. William Pitt, Chancellor of Exchequer at the time, agreed to John Palmer funding his own trail. It took place in 1784 and it ran from Bristol to London. John Palmer’s coach racing the mail. Well it was hardly a race was it, the coach arrived in half the time and the Bristol to London Mail Coach Service was established. The same was implemented initially on four other routes and within a year these routes had tripled. In 1786 John Palmer became the Comptroller General of the Post Office and gave up managing the theatre’s, selling them on to his former manager.

Jane Austen used this postal service to exchange letters with her sister Cassandra during her life and describes this experience of communicating through letters in her books.

‘She was engaged one day as she walked in reperusing Jane’s last letter, and dwelling on some passages which proved that Jane had written in spirits.’ Elizabeth walks in Lady Catherine De Bourgh’s park and meets Colonel Fitzwilliam.

‘When they were gone, Elizabeth, as if intending to exasperate herself as much as possible against Mr. Darcy, chose for her employment the examination of all the letters which Jane had written to her since her being in Kent.’ Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

‘Elizabeth opened the letter, and, to her still increasing wonder, perceived an envelope containing two sheets of letter-paper, written quite through, in a very close hand. The envelope itself was likewise full.’ Darcy hands Elizabeth his letter in Pride and Prejudice.

Many of Jane’s scenes in her books begin with or include letters and this only shows how pivotal letters were in peoples’ lives before phones and computers were invented. There is also Lydia’s letter to the family when she eloped and Mr Collins’s to Jane’s father explaining his opinion on the elopement. I think there was perhaps more emotion carried and poured in to letters and certainly when waiting for their arrival with expectation, excitement or concern and disappointment when they did not come. Everyone’s lives would have revolved in some way around these bits of paper and the feelings they engendered in the 1700 and 1800s, so when John Palmer introduced the faster postal service you can then imagine how precious a thing it was to be able to write a letter and know it would be received in half the time.

Think of the urgency of such letters as the one Jane sent to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice about Lydia’s elopement.

‘Elizabeth had been a good deal disappointed in not finding a letter from Jane on their first arrival at Lambton; and this disappointment had been renewed on each of the mornings that had now been spent there; but on the third her repining was over, and her sister justified, by the receipt of two letters from her at once, on one of which was marked that it had been missent elsewhere. Elizabeth was not surprised at it,a s Jane had written the direction remarkably.’ Elizabeth received Jane’s letter informing her of Lydia’s elopement.

Before John Palmer’s postal system it was often days before people knew either good or bad news and often far too late to have any affect on its outcome. Jane Austen must have received the news of her Aunt’s Mrs Leigh-Perrot’s arrest for theft in Bath with equal panic to the upset she describes in Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice.

Of course once the postal system was established it was not only mail which travelled on the coaches, they carried people too, giving poorer people in the parishes a far easier way to travel across Britain. By purchasing tickets for a seat on the mail coach anyone could travel anywhere in stages and the mail coaches would stop at Inns along routes to change horses, meaning passengers could disembark and stop overnight if they wished. The postal service became a big business on which most people were reliant in some way.

Below is an image of the Mail Coach depot in London which I found in a house I visited recently, it’s a bit difficult to view because of the glare on the glass, so there is a closer shot in the slideshow at the bottom of this blog.

The London Mail Coach Depot

You might think that Lady Catherine De Bourgh spoke of the mail coaches in following exert from Pride and Prejudice, ‘I cannot bear the idea of two young women travelling post by themselves. It is highly improper. You must contrive to send somebody. I have the greatest dislike in the world for that sort of thing. Young women should always be properly guarded and attended, according to their situation in life.’ She was not referring to the mail coaches though. If people of gentlemanly birth could not afford their own carriage they hired carriages called a postchaise and I think this is the reference in Pride and Prejudice because following the above scene Jane Austen describes, ‘At length the chaise arrived, the trunks fastened on, the parcels within and it was pronounced to be ready.’

These hired carriages were painted yellow and sometimes called the ‘Yellow bounder.’

A Yellow Bounder Postchaise

Because it came to the door, it cannot have been a mail coach, and in the description of its arrival and loading, I am making the assumption it was not a coach owned by Mr and Mrs Gardiner and sent to fetch Lizzie, but a coach hired from the postal-inn to transport Elizabeth.

English Travelling, or The First Stage from Dover by Thomas Rowlandson 1785

When later in the book, Jane describes the visit made by Lady Catherine, she says, ‘their attention was suddenly drawn to the window, by the sound of a carriage; and they perceived a chaise-and-four driving up the lawn. It was too early in the morning for visitors, and besides, the equipage did not answer to that of any of their neighbours… The horses were post; and neither the carriage nor the livery of the servant who preceded it, were familiar to them.’ From this passage we can see another impact of the postal service. Lady Catherine clearly had her own carriage, we know from the previous descriptions of her consequence she could afford it and the servant is in livery so must be her own. Therefore we can assume the carriage is hers. However, Jane describes the horses as ‘post’ I’d love to know how she could tell by looking, they must have borne some mark or branding, but this implies a length to Lady Catherine’s journey, she travelled a long enough distance to call on Elizabeth that the journey had tired her horses and to continue she’d had to hire a change of horses from a postal-inn. So even those who could afford carriages benefited from the postal service in other ways than through it just transporting letters. You can therefore imagine the effect the establishment of the postal service had on Britain, our islands instantly became smaller, and picture the impact on transporting of information between the hubs of business like Bristol and London, two of the ports through which the East India Company operated.

The Kings Arms, Dorchester by Thomas Rowlandson

You’ll notice in the two last pictures above, of postchaises painted by Thomas Rowlandson, that there are riders on the horses and people did employ postillion riders to urge the horses on and make a journey faster.

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

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The Theatre Royal, Orchard St, Bath, was the Theatre Jane Austen attended – I’ll tell you more about it today

The Exterior of the Theatre Royal, Orchard St, Bath by T Woodfall

In my last blog I spoke about how the Theatre was established in Bath in the 1700s and now I’ll tell you a bit about the Theatre Royal itself. It was opened on 27^th October 1750 but at the time it had no boxes. When it opened the space was simply a stage and the audience watched from a sloped floor which rose by roughly seven feet from the front of the Theatre to the back.

The elite who visited Bath must have still thought the then new Theatre a bit less than genteel in comparison to the venues they frequented in London. They could not reserve a space nor escape the local less well born who might attend. But still they managed to engineer an improvement to their Theatre visit. They would send their servants to the Theatre early and have them reserve a space and then arrive once the play had commenced. Of course that meant disturbance for everyone else as people forced a path through the crowd to get in and their servants forced back through the crowd to get out. And let’s remember there were probably at least two dozen or more aristocrats or gently born patrons reserving spaces.

Comedy in the Country and Tragedy in London, by Thomas Rowlandson

But then a Theatre excursion was very different in the 1700s and 1800s, it was quite normal for people to talk through a whole play and the servants reserving spaces in Bath were often known to shout across the hall to one another if they were bored with waiting for their employers to arrive. In London those who occupied boxes would move between them, visiting each other and socializing, and sometimes pay no mind to the play at all. In the pit and on the floor level as in Bath, the audience were known to regularly converse with the actors too, shouting things up at the stage. The courtesan’s in London hired out boxes for a season solely to hold court there. As the play progressed they entertained gentlemen visitors as it was the fashion for men to be seen with the priciest of courtesans and vie for her favours. It was the age of romance, or what the gentlemen of the era called romance, which was to pine and write poetry and say pretty words to a woman.

A scene in Harriette Wilson’s Memoirs which were published in 1825 describes a Theatre excursion. Harriette was a courtesan as were two of her sisters – I wrote a blog about one of her sisters who ended up marrying a Duke previously– see Attingham family tales, Sophia Dubochet and the 2nd Lord Berwick . Anyway Harriette used to share a box with other courtesan’s in London and to earn a little extra money they would resell the seats for the box, yet people who purchased them did not have space in the box but room in the pit below. On this occasion a couple who were from the country misunderstood the purchase, took the seats in her box and would not move unaware they shared it with a courtesan. Harriette describes their growing agitation as she continued to speak with the one gentleman in her company that night.

Harriette describes how the young man she was with, ‘A little Captain Chruchill’ called for the box-keeper to through the squatters out and they asked the box-keeper to force Harriette to be silent. He said ‘that he really could not take upon himself to request me or my friend to be silent, when we were inclined to converse or laugh in my own box, as it was what everybody did, and many went there for no other purpose but to chat with their friends.’

She describes the other parties reaction too ‘turning up their eyes and throwing out contemptuous remarks on the man for having attempted to impose on them with such an improbable story as that of people putting themselves to the expense of going to the King’s Theatre, when they only wanted to converse.’

I should imagine many similar arguments occurred in Bath. But on that occasion Harriette tried to force them from the box by talking louder and laughing more and when that did not work she cleared them from it by telling them who she was and that they appeared her friends.

The interior of the Theatre Royal, Orchard St, Bath, by Nixon

So anyway, back to Bath. Not only would the elite in the audience arrive late they may also dip in and out of the play and only attend for a particular scene which their favorite actor or actress played in. And of course the actors and actresses were as human then as they are now and treated their late arrivals and early leavers in the same manner a comedian would treat a heckler now, welcoming them or bidding them goodbye in a range of responses dependent on their mood.

There is one instance of an actor in Bath becoming thoroughly outraged with a member of his audience. The favored elite could sit on chairs at the side of stage during a performance as there were no boxes, and on this occasion the gentleman was so bored he walked across the stage to speak to his friend on the other side. Swords were drawn over the issue. Even other actors could be disrespectful of the play. When their part finished they would sit on stage, not in the wings, and an actor with an ego was known to make faces and deliberately look bored through another’s performance.

Perhaps you can imagine the atmosphere in the Theatre too. There were no windows and no air vents. It would have been hot with so many people crowded in and the air would have smelt of sweat and been quite thin by the end of a performance, probably not a comfortable or pleasant experience – really it’s no wonder they only stayed for elements of a play. The Theatre was lit with tallow candles, both burning on the stage and about the auditorium which meant members of the audience had hot wax dripping on their clothes and heads.

The stage, Theatre Royal, Orchard St, Bath

It is not surprising then that improvement commenced quite quickly, boxes were added along both edges of the Theatre, you can see on the photographs of the walls as the Theatre is today the markings in the plaster where the boxes once were. And boxes were added at the side of stage too so the chairs could be removed from the stage itself. Also a dome was placed in the middle of the ceiling and decorated with a picture of Apollo and the Muses in 1767 to add beauty and grandeur, which it did, it was described as ‘esteemed, in fancy, elegance and construction, inferior to none in Europe,’ except that it was a dreadful addition as it ruined the acoustics. It was later taken out.

In 1768, once the beautifying dome had been added, the Theatre’s manager of the time, John Palmer Junior, the son of the John Palmer who helped build it, presented a petition in London for a Royal Warrant for the Theatre. It was granted by special Act of Parliament and the Orchard Street Theatre became the Theatre Royal, Bath. It was the first provincial theatre to receive the accolade, prior to this only Drury Lane and Covent Garden held the honor.

This picture shows one of the boxes built at the side of the stage, which is still in situ, look up to the left

Then in 1774 an entrance lobby was added on the front of the building and a crush room serving refreshment, and above this seven more grand boxes facing the stage, there are no signs of these now. The boxes stretched back in a fan shape and had five rows of benches, seating five occupants on each bench. It cost three shillings for a box seat and two shillings for the pit.

The other addition was a carriage forecourt in which the elite might be deposited at the door easily without needing to walk through the street. The steps down to the carriage forecourt can be seen at the far right of the picture of the exterior by Woodfall.

We know Jane Austen definitely visited the Theatre Royal and occupied one of the boxes on a visit to Bath, but more about this in my next blog.

http://www.oldTheatreroyal.com/

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

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