A Kind of Bath

My favourite scene in Sheridan’s The Rivals is the one in which Lydia Languish hides her books.   When she hears that Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute are coming up the stairs, she and her maid, Lucy, panic and try to disperse the tell-tale volumes around Lydia’s small room in the lodgings she shares with her aunt.  This gives Sheridan the opportunity for some racy jokes and some unusually physical humour:

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books – quick, quick – fling ‘Peregrine Pickle’ under the toilet – throw ‘Roderick Random’ into the closet – put ‘The Innocent Adultery’ into ‘The Whole Duty of Man’ …

Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony are appalled by the corruption offered by Bath’s circulating libraries, which,  Sir Anthony says, are trees ‘of diabolical knowledge!’

Sheridan’s play rests on the idea that Lydia’s head has been turned by these romantic and rather Gothic tales.  She does not want a conventional lifestyle with a conventional husband:  she wants glamour and excitement.  Her lover, Captain Absolute, realising this, disguises himself as a low-ranking soldier and proposes elopement.  Lydia loves this.  She is prepared to forgo her fortune and her prospects – she says – for the sake of romantic thrills and a night ride on a horse, or whatever it is she has in mind.  As it turns out, the man her aunt and Sir Anthony have in mind for her is no other than her lover out of his disguise.  The joke of the title is that the two main rivals for Lydia’s love are one and the same man. 

In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen follows Sheridan in creating a heroine who seeks romantic and Gothic love, but ends up ironically content with a conventional husband and conventional wealth.  Catherine, too, is obsessed by Regency novels, and Austen promotes a number of key texts, notably The Mysteries of Udolpho by Mrs Anne Radcliffe.  For Lydia and for Catherine, Bath is a city of romantic attachments and glamour.  It was, after all, the Benidorm of its day, with speculators flinging up trendy looking buildings in order to capitalise on the fashionable popularity of spring-water, ballrooms and gambling.

The ballrooms and the gambling may have changed beyond recognition, and health scares may have put an end to the popularity of the attraction of the springs:  but the circulating library survives. 

Or sort of.  If you walk down Milsom Street, one of Bath’s main shopping strolls to this very day, near the bottom, on your left, is a building whose façade continues to advertise, in rather faded, but distinctively eighteenth century, lettering the promotion of a Circulating Library.  It is, for a minute, as if you could glimpse the world of The Rivals just there, behind the modern façades; as if you could see, for a second, the very den of iniquity which so appalled Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute.

Of course, Bath remains an attractive meeting place and resort, even though the activities offered are very different from those enjoyed by Lydia Languish and Catherine Morland.  The last time I went to Bath, for example, I visited an art exhibition which featured a set of moon rockets made out of recycled baked bean cans, a shrine to the babies lost in the medical scandal at Bristol Royal Infirmary, a well-made chair hanging on the wall, and a set of large sheets of paper on which writing was overlaid, illegibly but beautifully.  I hung around for a bit, sipping wine and hoping to make something of the meeting with a tall, elegant female artist in tight black clothes. 

Then I went to an event on the Bath literature festival programme.  About twenty of us turned up to listen to three writers speak about their recent volumes of autobiographical fiction.  One was dry and smug, and wrote about camping holidays in the nineteen sixties;  another wrote about the rivalry she had shared with her sister;  the third smiled genuinely at the audience and discussed the values of interweaving the past and the present.  Nothing could be further from the romantic work which Catherine and Lydia would die for:  they’d have been bored to tears.

I don’t know what they’d have made either of the pub I went to afterwards with a chum I’d bumped into at the reading.  She knew where to go, my chum, and where to go was a pub down Walcott Street where a band was playing music which was part tango, part Dexy’s Midnight Runners (the Come on Eileen phase) and part Django Reinhardt.  They wore the sort of clothes you usually only see on the characters in a Samuel Beckett play, by the way.  We had half a pint and a roll, and jolly good chat with a couple who were reading the papers and getting tipsy on Belgian beer. 

Bath may have changed, but it remains the same.  Opposite the shop which continues to advertise the Circulating Library is a branch of Waterstones with a coffee shop, where you can meet your mates and try to chat up the talent.  Or you can order Roderick Random at £5.99, The Mysteries of Udolpho at £7.99 or The Man of Feeling at £5.99.  

The Whole Duty of Man is no longer available.