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Jane Austen Society of Australia

A few words about Ramsgate …

Let me start with a passage we all know well…

I must now mention a circumstance which I would wish to forget myself, and which no obligation less than the present should induce me to unfold to any human being. Having said thus much, I feel no doubt of your secrecy. My sister, who is more than ten years my junior, was left to the guardianship of my mother’s nephew, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and myself. About a year ago she was taken from school, and an establishment formed for her in London; and last summer she went with the lady who presided over it to Ramsgate. And thither also went Mr Wickham, undoubtedly by design, for there proved to have been a prior acquaintance between him and Mrs Younge, in whose character we were most unhappily deceived; and by her connivance and aid he so far recommended himself to Georgiana, whose affectionate heart retained a strong impression of his kindness to her as a child, that she was persuaded to believe herself in love, and to consent to an elopement…

Ramsgate is in Kent, and was a seaside resort and port. It is 78 miles SE of London, 20 miles from Dover, 17 miles from Canterbury and four miles from Margate – which will place it for those who know England (and have a sense of direction. For the rest or us, a sketch map is provided on p 3). It is apparent from Austen’s descriptions that she knew the place, and though no letters from 1803 survive,

it is known that Jane visited Ramsgate in that year, when her brother Frank, later Admiral Francis Austen, was stationed there. On the renewal of war with France after the brief peace, Frank had been appointed to raise and organise a corps of ‘Sea Fencibles’ to defend that strip of the Kentish coast. He subsequently married a local Ramsgate girl, Mary Gibson (Smithers 1981:67; Selwyn 1999: 51).

Ramsgate’s most prominent role in Jane Austen’s fiction is in the passage above. It is the setting in which Wickham’s true character is revealed in Pride and Prejudice both to Elizabeth and to the reader. I have always felt this passage to be very significant. That Darcy would reveal to Elizabeth such an intimate family secret indicates how well he has assessed her character: he knows that he can trust her – and not only with this knowledge. In revealing this episode to Elizabeth, Darcy also reveals himself in a personal and even vulnerable light.

The other mention of Ramsgate in the novels is in Mansfield Park, and I’ll return to that in a moment. Then there are some further mentions of Ramsgate in the Letters, mainly about other people’s journeys to the resort, or visits from people on their way there. For example, Jane Austen writes in September 1813, to Cassandra,

Edward Bridges unexpectedly to breakfast with us in his way from Ramsgate where is his wife, to Lenham, where is his church (Bridges had the living at Lenham)... They have been all the summer at Ramsgate for her health, she is a poor Honey – the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well – and who likes her spasms and nervousness and the consequences they give her, better than anything else’ (Letters, #90, p.231)

Maggie Lane, in her work Jane Austen’s England, claims (1986:70) that Jane Austen’s references to Ramsgate indicate that she disliked the resort. And it is true that somehow, in that passage just quoted, Ramsgate does appear to reflect, and share in, the unadmirable character of Mrs Bridges – this is the place in which such a feeble creature chooses to languish! In another letter to Cassandra later in that same year, when Jane hears that a friend of her brother Edward was thinking of moving there, she remarks (Letters, p. 239):

Ed. Hussey talks of fixing at Ramsgate – Bad Taste! – He is very fond of the Sea however – some Taste in that – & some Judgement too in fixing on Ramsgate, as being by the Sea.

Ramsgate is also, in Mansfield Park, where Tom Bertram’s fashionable friends, the Sneyds, are staying, whom he goes to visit. And, once again, Ramsgate is the setting for an occasion of social impropriety. Here Tom Bertram relates his experience when he first happens upon his friends at the resort:

You have heard me speak of Sneyd, Edmund; his father and mother and sisters were there, all new to me. When we reached Albion Place they were out; we went after them, and found them on the pier. Mrs. and the two Miss Sneyds, with others of their acquaintance. I made my bow in form, and as Mrs Sneyd was surrounded by men, attached myself to one of her daughters, walked by her side all the way home, and made myself as agreeable as I could; the young lady perfectly easy in her manners, and as ready to talk as to listen. I had not a suspicion that I could be doing anything wrong. They looked just the same; both well dressed, with veils and parasols like other girls; but I afterwards found that I had been giving all my attention to the youngest, who is not out, and had most excessively offended the eldest.

I find this passage very interesting in that Tom, in relating what is really no more than a social gaffe, reveals a much more serious indication of impropriety in that casual line, ‘Mrs Sneyd was surrounded by men’. This is a situation, surely, that no lady would seek! Maggie Lane, however, singles out another line from that passage: ‘when we reached Albion Place they were out; we went after them, and found them on the pier’ and she asserts (1986:70) that in these few words, ‘the flavor of Ramsgate as a smart and heartless place is established’. I must say that I feel this is stretching things a bit – nevertheless, we could surmise that placing Tom Bertram in Ramsgate for his holiday and his associating there with such unselect company is meant to indicate, again, not merely a failing in his character but in that of the resort.

As a seaside resort, Ramsgate always suffered in comparison with Margate, which was closer to London and therefore easier to get to. And, despite the indications in those passages quoted from the novels, Ramsgate was actually regarded as a little more respectable than Margate, boasting, as its 1803 guide reminded visitors, ‘even more select company’ than that other resort - for Margate had ‘a reputation for easy-going gaiety’. The poet Cowper, whose work was a favourite of Jane Austen’s, much preferred Ramsgate, writing once

You think Margate more lively (than Ramsgate)? So is a Cheshire cheese full of mites more lively than a sound one; but that very liveliness only proves its rottenness

(Manning-Sanders 1951: 77).

Although I could find few specific references to just exactly what Ramsgate offered, one can surmise that it had a circulating library, assembly rooms, bracing sea air, and of course bathing for the hardy, even if it apparently lacked the more elaborate amusements of its more popular rival. David Selwyn claims, in Jane Austen & Leisure (1999: 50), that Margate was the first resort to have a pier specifically designed for promenading, opened, he says, in 1815. But we can see in the passage from Mansfield Park that Ramsgate too had its pier – so perhaps in this one instance it had trumped its rival. I came across a wonderful passage about how the sea bathing actually took place at the end of the 18th century, referring, I’m afraid, to Margate, but no doubt reflecting what was standard practice:

The bathing-houses opened at six o’clock in the morning, and for the next three hours the bathers’ names would be called out in turn as machines became vacant and dippers available. The fleet of white-painted machines entered the water some thirty or forty strong, the occupants undressing as they were drawn into the water, and dressing, after their dip, as they were drawn out again.

(Manning-Sanders, 1951: 25)

This image makes me smile. Less amusing is the idea of bathing at the English seaside at six o’clock in the morning! The passage refers to ‘dippers’ being available: these were robust men and women whose task it was, as the name indicates, to assist the bathers to their refreshment by dipping them into the water. They stood for hours in the sea in sodden clothing in order to perform this service. Some dippers attained a degree of celebrity, like the fellow who went by the name of Old Smoaker, who was dipper to the Prince of Wales (later of course George IV) at Brighton. Old Smoaker took no nonsense from anybody. When the Prince ventured out too far in a rough sea, Old Smoaker ordered him back and when he disobeyed, he seized His Royal Highness by the ear and dragged him back to shallower water, remarking that

he wasn’t going to let the King hang him for allowing the Prince of Wales to drown hisself (Manning Sanders 1951:28)

But it was the ministrations of a Mrs Nash, operating indeed at Ramsgate, that were actually celebrated in verse:

Oh! A Guide when I name let me sing Mrs Nash,
Who so many folks in salt water did wash;
Who rose with the lark and whose heart was all glee
If she saw but a calm and a smooth bathing sea
Who encouraged the tim’rous with praise of the water
Assuring ’twould cure them, what e’er was the matter
Whose prate has made many a little one bellow
When she tapped on the door and said ‘Come, little fellow’.

(Manning-Sanders, 1951: 27)

Joanna Penglase

References:

Jane Austen, Letters, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park.
Maggie Lane, Jane Austen’s England, Robert Hale, London, 1986.
Ruth Manning-Sanders, Seaside England, Batsford, London, 1951.
Christopher Marsden, The English at the Seaside, Collins, London, 1947.
David Selwyn, 1999, Jane Austen and Leisure, The Hambledon Press, London.
David Waldron Smithers, 1981, Jane Austen in Kent, Hurtwood Publications, Westerham UK

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05 July 2003