… Northanger turned up an abbey, and she was to be its inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.
In September 1807 the Austens arrived on Netley’s beach, clambered out of the ferry and set off to explore the site. Moving through the oak trees which still lined the shore, the sense of discovery and anticipation – and the limits of tidal access – made their expedition to this laetus locus yet more thrilling. Linger too long in this haunted, ruin-strewn wood, and they might end up having to spend the night there.
As the party came upon the abbey itself, the prospect of its grey stones and trees was almost too much for Jane’s impressionable fourteen-year-old niece. Like Catherine Morland and Lucy Oakland, Fanny Austen was a girl of her time. Attempting to capture the effect Netley had upon her that afternoon, she wrote to her governess in the astonished, breathless tones of a gothic aficionado (which her aunt so excelled at parodying), her bosom all but heaving with the gushing tribute:
Never was there anything in the known world to be compared to that compound of everything that is striking, ancient and majestic: we were struck dumb with admiration, and I wish I could write anything that would come near to the sublimity of it, but that is utterly impossible as nothing I could say would give you a distant idea of its extreme beauty.
Carried away by reverie, Fanny could only sink into Netley’s dream-like state, thrown into a medieval mystery, suspended from reality and Southampton’s stinking fish.
Fanny Austen’s reaction to the abbey ruins was characteristic of the day-trippers from spa-town Southampton. They sought the same kind of sensation from Netley as a modern audience would from a horror movie, and Netley catered to them with aplomb. It was a thrilling place. With its many chambers, galleries, arched windows and doors, some opening strangely into mid-air and all overhung with ivy in the shade of great trees, the very asymmetrical, twisting layout of the abbey and its outbuildings created an enchanted realm for visitors to explore, somewhere between an eighteenth-century theme park and a chamber of horrors. Around any crumbling arch might lurk the ghost of ‘Blind Peter’, jealously guarding the abbot’s buried treasure.
Now the gothic thirst for sensation created a new Netley experience: the abbey by moonlight. Excited goths could set out, in keen anticipation of the abbey’s morbid charms, on midnight tours accompanied by guides bearing flaming torches. Moving in procession through the dark trees and looming stone piles, startled by dancing shadows on ancient walls, young ladies in thin dresses clutched tightly to their gratified consorts’ arms and affected to faint away at the thrill of it all.
Netley had become the equivalent of a night club, a fashionable venue for young people dressed in the extravagant spirit of the times, like their cousins across the Channel with their impossibly high collars, cutaway coats and sheer muslin dresses worn revealingly dampened. The French dandies wore thin red ribbons around their necks in a mocking gesture to the ‘holy mother Guillotine’; their English counterparts sported black velvet collars in a similarly ironic gesture of mourning for their fellow aristocrats. While the unrest which threatened to import revolution to England required more troops to quell it than Wellington had under his command in the Peninsular War, their protest against industrialised society consisted of an obsession with neck ties and the latest gothic novel.
‘The reading public …’, Nightmare Abbey’s Mr Flosky complains, ‘requires a perpetual adhibition of sauce piquante to the palate of its depraved imagination. It laid upon ghosts, goblins and skeletons … till even the devil himself … became too base, common, and popular for its surfeited appetite.’ Like any other cult, gothic moved from creative originality to commercial exploitation. Soon unrestricted fêtes champêtres dispelled any notion of solitude at Netley’s ruins. By 1815, when Mary Brunton visited the site, the proliferation of toy stalls, gingerbread sellers and common rabble of picnickers in the abbey’s precincts had become an offence to the aesthetic eye, making romantic reverie all but impossible. Netley’s popularity destroyed the very spirit that had generated it, and the gothic commodification begun by Walpole and his Committee of Taste became part of a popular culture to which its sexy sensationalism proved more appealing than Enlightenment rationalism.
By the time William Cobbett wrote his eulogy to Netley, Walpole’s refined aesthetic had long been subsumed by its popularised version. On another ‘rural ride’, Cobbett encountered a certain Mr Montague’s estate in north Hampshire, a man of new money who had enthusiastically decorated in the gothic fashion. ‘Of all the ridiculous things I ever saw in my life this place is the most ridiculous’, blustered Cobbett. ‘The house looks like a sort of church … with crosses on the tops of different parts of the pile …’ One gothic arch
was composed of Scotch fir wood, as rotten as a pear; nailed together in such a way as to make the thing appear, from a distance, like the remnant of a ruin! I wonder how long this sickly, this childish taste is to remain? I do not know who this gentleman is. I suppose he is some honest person from the ’Change or its neighbourhood; and that these gothic arches are to denote the antiquity of his origin!
Cobbett’s polemic harked back to St Bernard of Clairvaux’s pronouncements; the gothic style which had meant to replace excess had become imbued with it. As a reactionary refuge from a modern era of industrial unrest and protest, gothic was a symbol of conservatism, and rapidly becoming Britain’s ‘national style’. In the process, Netley became a place of common, if not uproarious entertainment. ‘On Mondays, the Fountain Court presents a singular scene of gaiety’, wrote an observer in the 1840s. ‘It has long been the custom for people from Southampton and the neighbourhood to meet at the Abbey on that day, and to hold a kind of festival. Tea and other provisions are furnished by the inhabitants of a neighbouring cottage, and this is followed by music and dancing.’
The abbey had lost its edge. Its thrills debased, by 1840 Netley’s reputation was such that it became a subject of Richard Harris Barham’s satirical Ingoldsby Legends. A minor canon at St Paul’s, and an eccentric figure himself (having been crippled as a young man in a carriage accident which left him with a twisted arm) Barham produced his ironic ode, ‘Netley Abbey, A Legend of Hampshire’ as a parody of all those verses that had gone before. His alter-ego ‘Ingoldsby’ imagines the abbey in its medieval heyday, with nuns winking at ‘gardener lads’ and consequently finding themselves ‘Wall’d up in a hole with never a chink,/No light, – no air, – no victuals, – no drink!’, and provides an antiquarian footnote to his tale: ‘About the middle of the last century a human skeleton was discovered in a recess in the wall among the ruins of Netley. On examination the bones were pronounced to be those of a female. Teste James Harrison, a youthful but intelligent cab-driver of Southampton, who “well remembers to have heard his grandmother say that ‘Somebody told her so’”.’ But the poet’s reverie is broken by ‘the popping of Ginger Beer!’ dispensed to the modern crowds at Netley by ‘a hag surrounded by crockery-ware’, while chimney sweeps play ‘pitch and toss’, and
Two or three damsels, frank and free,
Are ogling, and smiling, and sipping Bohea.
Parties below, and parties above,
Some making tea, and some making love.
In a gentler echo of Cobbett’s sardony, Barham ends his verse with a visitor
scandalized,
Finding these beautiful ruins so Vandalized,
And thus of their owner to speak began,
As he ordered you home in haste,
NO DOUBT HE’S A VERY RESPECTABLE MAN,
But – ‘I can’t say much for his taste.’
The term ‘vandalized’ was itself a witty play on words, as the original Vandals who ravaged Rome in 455 were a Teutonic