The Rhetoric of Landscape in Mary Chandler's "A Description of Bath"

Caryn Chaden

 for 1996 ASECS, Austin, Texas
 

Like every other realm of knowledge, writers' views of landscape are situated in their particular moment in history. This commonplace of contemporary criticism is especially helpful in considering the work of Mary Chandler, "the Bath poetess," who would likely not be remembered were it not for her 1734 poem, "A Description of Bath."  Any information we have about her life comes from "Cibber's" 1753 Lives of the Poets, a biography which Oswald Doughty in 1925 attributed to her brother Samuel Chandler, a bookseller and Presbyterian minister.  Born to a dissenting minister in 1687, she developed a curvature of the spine as a child, never married, and supported herself by owning and operating a millinery in Bath until not long before her death in 1745.  She had little if any formal education but read and wrote in her limited spare time.  Her only volume of poetry, in which "A Description of Bath" is the first and most complex poem, was published in 1737.  According to her brother, she went through a period of religious turmoil as a young adult, but basically lived a devout life, enjoying her solitude but also developing solid friendships with people across the social spectrum.

Given this account of Chandler's personal history, it is not surprising that the only section of "A Description of Bath" that has received any critical attention is her address to Temperance.  After listing the various illnesses that people come to the baths to cure, Chandler describes them as the "Fatal Effects of Luxury and Ease" and looks to Temperance for an alternative way to live. Here are the final lines of a twenty-line section:
 

For social historian R. S. Neal, as well as Doughty, this is the heart of Chandler's poem, and they attribute the poem's success--it went through eight editions between 1734 and 1767--to what they see as its focus on moral instruction.  Yet these lines comprise only a short section of a 322 line poem and are hardly unique.  What such an analysis overlooks is the historical moment at which the poem was written, and Chandler's own involvement in that moment.  For Chandler wrote "A Description of Bath" when the city was in its full excessive glory--booming construction in response to a growing tourist trade on the one hand, decadence and all manner of licentious activity on the other.

Thus what is much more interesting than the moral instruction Chandler provides is the rhetorical context in which it appears.  The lines I have quoted could easily be part of a poem that laments the changes the city has undergone, and predictably associates economic progress with moral decay.  But "A Description of Bath" does the opposite.  Her depictions of the region's landscape, both rural and urban, show us a world in which conflict and change are entirely natural and can even offer the hope of renewal.  Rather than scolding or frightening readers away from this burgeoning vacation spot, Chandler defines a space where everyone, from the profligate to the pious, is welcome.

So let me say a few words about the changes Chandler saw.  The Bath she knew as a child in the last decade of the seventeenth century was still a medieval, walled city.  The springs which gave the city its name had drawn ailing visitors for centuries, but the baths were old and crumbling, and the city had few other diversions to offer.  Those wonderful creme-colored Georgian buildings that give the recent film of Austen's Persuasion such texture and grace had not yet been built.  Beau Nash had not arrived, and no one had ever heard of the men who would transform the city--financial tycoon James Brydges, architect John Wood and Postmaster cum quarry owner Ralph Allen.

When Chandler opened her millinery in 1705, she was riding the first wave of change.  In 1692 then Princess Anne first visited Bath, and she liked it so much that she returned as Queen in the summers of 1702 and 1703, now, historian Barry Cunliffe reports, "amid great celebrations, stage-managed by a city Corporation eager to make it a glittering occasion" (114).  Bath had become the place to be, and the idle rich, and later, the would-be rich, flooded in from London for "the season" and brought their money and gaming tables with them. That's when the landscape really began to change.  In 1706 John Harvey built the first Pump Room, in 1707 the Turnpike and Improvement Act improved the roads leading to Bath, by the late teens, Beau Nash was influential enough to persuade builder Thomas Harrison to create the Assembly Rooms, and in the early twenties Brydges arranged the financing and hired John Wood to design the buildings that would transform the city. By 1728 Kingsmead Square and the Beaufort Buildings were complete, and Queen's Square was underway.  From the windows of her millinery, Mary Chandler witnessed these changes and to some degree became part of them herself as the influx of visitors brought customers into her store.

The first clue that "A Description of Bath" is not simply a moral treatise is the fact that Chandler dedicated it to Princess Amelia, daughter to George II, who embodied the most spirited energy of Bath.  In The Life of Richard Nash, Oliver Goldsmith tells the now legendary story of how Amelia took on Beau Nash's famous rules of etiquette, and lost:  "The princess Amelia once applying to [Nash] for one dance more, after he had given the signal to withdraw, he assured her royal highness, that the established rules of Bath resembled the laws of Lycurgus, which would admit of no alteration, without an utter subversion of all his authority" (Works, III:305).  Apparently Amelia relented, but not without winning the lasting affection of many Bath citizens, including Mary Chandler.  Thus when Chandler opens her poem with an address to Amelia:
 

she signals to her readers that her description of "the TOWN where balmy Waters flow/ To which AMELIA's Health the Nations owe" (10-11) will embrace the very energy that Amelia herself brought to Bath.

In Chandler's poem, that energy is characterized by productive conflict, a conflict that has its source in the healing waters themselves.  Early in the poem, she describes the water's violent, yet ultimately productive and healing movement, and she compares it to the relationship among competing political parties:
 

Contrast these lines with the following passage from Pope's "Windsor Forest":
  While Pope sees the different elements of Nature only "seeming" to be at strife in a world whose natural order appears most profoundly in this kind of "harmonious confusion," Chandler's Nature has productive conflict at its source.  Indeed, she characterizes the bath's healing powers coming about as a direct result of "combat" between different elements in the waters that "heat" them to a "boil."  While both passages result in a shared vision of the public good, that vision takes on different meanings:  for Pope, it was always there if unrecognized, but for Chandler, it is something hard won, an achievement resulting from what she suggests is necessary conflict.

The difference between these visions of Nature reflects differences in the writers' politics.  In "Windsor Forest," published in 1713, Pope celebrates the Peace of Utrecht and Queen Anne's reign.  Chandler, on the other hand, raised in a family of dissenters, alludes at once to the Civil War and the Bloodless Revolution.  Later in the poem, she describes an obelisk recently constructed to honor "the great NASSAU," Prince of Orange (son-in-law to George II), who had come to the waters to be healed.  She equates this relatively private figure with another, more famous Prince of Orange, William III, who, along with Mary, took the throne once James II fled, and she lauds William as a "hero", "ready to defend / Fair Liberty oppres'd, and trampled Laws, / Or die with Pleasure in the glorious Cause" (203-205).  Thus Chandler suggests that the turmoil England experienced was not a blot on its history as Pope suggests in "Windsor Forest" (see lines 319-328), but was ultimately beneficial, allowing a greater range of thought and belief.  Indeed, by associating political conflict with combating waters, she suggests that such conflict is entirely natural, and so an enduring part of the political as well as the natural landscape.

The most pressing conflict playing out in Chandler's immediate surroundings is the debate over gaming, or as we call it, gambling.  Were it not for gaming, Bath would not have become prominent enough for Chandler to write this poem, let alone maintain her millinery, but of course that new prominence came with a high moral price.  By 1739, Methodist leaders George Whitfield and John Wesley would have impressed the consequences of gaming so strongly on public opinion that the practice would be outlawed in Bath, though, of course, not stopped.  But when Chandler writes this poem in 1734, gaming was at its height, bringing with it all the other accompanying vices that money can buy--drinking, whoring, lewd behavior, etc.  And for Chandler, much like Swift, this moral decay has its complement in physical decay, more striking here as people come to the waters for cures:
 

Given her window on Bath, it is not surprising that she would see these illnesses as the "Fatal Effects of Luxury and Ease," and it is at this moment in the poem where her extended appeal to Temperance appears.  Yet the seriousness of the problem she describes makes it all the more surprising that she sees the healing properties of the waters as powerful enough to offer a remedy: "Our Waters wash those numerous Ills away; / And grant the trembling Wretch a longer Day" (70-71).  Hence the springs gain a kind of sacred status to Chandler, for
  Indeed the springs, circled by hills, create a region where even  "The Plague but gently touch'd within their Sphere" (78-83).  Coming immediately after her discussion of the conflict at work within the waters themselves, this whole section of the poem not only admonishes the intemperate to change their ways, but also provides a larger, more forgiving context within which to view that behavior.  You may have come to Bath to gorge your vices, she suggests to any reader ready for the hint, to take part in a moral plague every bit as contagious as the physical one, but this place, with its "healing Streams" surrounded by "friendly Hills," can offer you something more, something better--an opportunity to heal yourself, both physically and morally.

That possibility for renewal continues into the last section of her description of the natural landscape, where Chandler depicts natural history itself as a cycle of decay and renewal.  Standing on the highest hillside, Chandler predictably surveys the "boundless Prospects" before her and uses the occasion to think about history.  She sees in "the pendant Rock's majestic Shade . . . the Ruins conqu'ring Time has made" (92-93) and wonders how it all began:
 

Here Chandler alludes to Thomas Burnet's influential 1690 two-volume treatise, The Sacred Theory of the Earth:  Containing an Account of the Original of the Earth, And of all the General Changes which it Hath Already Undergone, or is to Undergo till the Consummation of all Things, a work that attempts to give geological support for biblical descriptions of the creation, the flood, and the apocalypse.  Burnet argues that the earth, "when finish'd, was Oval, and the inward Form of it was a Frame of four Regions encompassing one another [fire, minerals, water, earth], where that of Fire lay in the Middle like the Yolk and a Shell of Earth inclos'd them all" (I:374).  Before the flood, the earth was uniformly smooth, Burnet explaines, but when the Deluge broke the shell, it left hills and mountains like these in its wake.

Thus when Chandler looks at the rocky hillside, she sees the entire myth of creation and demise play out before her:
 

Chandler may well see mother Nature in "decay," but she also depicts the old girl looking pretty good for her age.  For Chandler, decay itself becomes part of Wisdom's plan, and if the earth is headed for burn-out, that only makes the Phoenix's rise more imminent.  Chandler's vision of natural history presents no single idea that would be new to any of her readers.  But by combining the Christian myth of consuming fires with the Arabian story of the phoenix, she presents a remarkably cheerful vision of the apocalypse.  And it is in this largest of contexts that we are asked to view the vices of the intemperate.  From this prospect even the worst vices appear manageable, or at least not threatening to the natural order, which not only runs its own course, but ensures that change will ultimately bring about the most positive of transformations.

Only after offering this comprehensive view of constant change in nature does Chandler move to her discussion of the urban landscape, whose changes in the last generation must have seemed to many of her readers to be as monumentous as the phoenix's rise from ashes.  Indeed, she locates the city nestled within this natural landscape:  "Surrounded by the AVON's winding Streams, / Beneath the Hills a people'd Island seems" (113-114).   At the center of town stands the Abbey, first built in the 8th century and rebuilt in the 16th century through what Chandler describes as "the labour'd Work of superstitious Hands" (116).  Her ten line description becomes an attack on Catholicism and its former prominence, a time, she asserts, when "Idol Gods were worshipp'd as the true" (124).  The details she points out only confirm her view, and give her an opportunity to express gratitude for the way times have changed:
 

With "artful Priests" now gone, the Church should be free "for pure Worship," but Chandler laments, "O that the Muse cou'd say to that confined."  For now a different kind of idolatry occurs as the Church becomes a prime site for flirting--"Ev'n there, by meaning Looks, and cringing Bows, / the Female Idol her Adorer knows!" (136-137)

One could argue that this depiction of a once and always corrupt place of worship at the center of town reflects what Chandler suggests is Bath's fundamental moral corruption.  But if her goal in this poem is to present the city's changes as positive, then this section proves that moral corruption came to Bath long before gaming did. And in her description of the new Bath, this Abbey, for centuries the heart of the walled city, is now only the first stop on a tour of more than a hundred lines that will offer a far greater variety of attractions and activities.  Wending her way through the city, she points out the "spacious Portico," constructed not "Of Perian, nor Aegyptian Marble vain," but from the stone from Ralph Allen's local quarry, depicted here as a natural resource, "proud to show, / In neigh'bring Hills what beauteous Pillars grow" (150-152).  Indeed, while the new buildings have obviously replaced more natural settings, those changes are themselves consistently depicted as natural:
 

No lament here for times gone by!  Within the context of a natural world in which waters unite in combat, rocks remain beautiful while they decay, and the earth itself is set to burn and rise again, this new construction simply becomes part of the natural order.

The activities that take place at the different sites she describes vary as much as the buildings, and so do the participants.  In the Assembly rooms in particular, "Pagan, Turk, the Papist, and the Jew, / And all Mankind's Epitome you view" (227-228).  They engage in gaming (218-20), of course, and bathing in the newly restored Kings and Queen's Baths (153-176)--and all sorts of flirting, whether in church, on the Portico (145-149), or in the Assembly rooms (213-226) (She of course fails to mention what went on in the Baths themselves).  But others who prefer more intellectual activity can head for Mr. Leake's Book Shop, where "Heroes of antient, and of modern Song, / The bending Shelves in comely Order throng" (233-34).  And if none of those activities please, then one can join Chandler and leave the social scene behind for a walk among the trees:  "A cool Recess, the Muses chosen Seat, / From Crouds, and empty Noise, a blest Retreat! / The lovely Landscape, and the silent Stream, / Inspire the Poet, and present the Theme" (247-250).  This section appears to present the natural landscape in direct opposition to the urban scene Chandler has just described, but in this very place where, she tells us,
 

What Chandler waxes romantic about as she looks out into the hills is the "wonderful Machine" that brings down the rocks from Ralph Allen's quarry to make more buildings!  Modern environmentalists would likely scorn Chandler's utilitarian view of nature, but hers are standard eighteenth-century English aesthetics, and she clearly has Bath's prosperity in mind.  (Anthony Walker depicts this conveyer in his 1750 etching, "Prior Park.")

Chandler's retreat becomes an occasion for tribute to Ralph Allen, the man she sees representing the best hope for leading Bath into a future of economic, aesthetic, and moral integrity.
 

So begins a tribute that will go on for the final sixty lines of her poem.  Like Pope in tribute to Richard Boyle at the end of "Epistle to Burlington," Chandler praises Allen for the design of his own estate, where fruit trees offer not only beauty but produce, and where tactful landscaping shows off his woods and all the grounds, "Not Nature tortur'd, but by Art improv'd" (281-82).  And this man, Chandler suggests, whose impeccable taste in creating this estate mirrors the Wisdom of the first creation, has extended his influence to Bath:  "from the Mountain's rocky Sides he drew / A thousand shining Palaces to view:/ Temples, and Hospitals in ev'ry Land, / From Age to Age, his Monuments shall stand." (309-312).  Though there were certainly other men who figured prominently in Bath's growth, Chandler leaves us with this tribute to Ralph Allen, for it is he alone who joins natural beauty with urban prosperity in a city that she presents as a monument to the best in both.

Chandler's commentators may have wanted to limit our view of her to a devout if enterprising spinster and our view of her poem to a moral tract, but the poem reveals a multi-faceted mind at work.  She has serious concerns about the moral welfare of her city, to be sure, but she also displays genuine excitement about the growth she sees.  By describing those changes against the background of constant change in nature, she invites readers of all sorts to embrace change as well, whether in the city or in themselves.  That is why this poem went through eight editions over thirty-three years, I would argue: because it offers a natural and urban landscape in which all readers, whether visitors or long-time residents, bathers, flirters, gamblers, readers, walkers, or poets, can each find a place.
 
 

Works Cited


 

    Burnet, Thomas.  The Sacred Theory of the Earth:  Containing an Account of the Original of the Earth, And of all the General Changes which it Hath Already Undergone, or is to Undergo till the Consummation of all Things.  London, Presented by R. Norton, for Walter Kettilby,  at the Bishop’s Head in St. Paul’s Church Yard. 1690.

    Chandler, Mary.  "A Description of Bath.  A Poem.  Humbly Inscribed to her Royal Highness the princess Amelia." London: J. Leake (1734).

    Cunliffe, Barry.  The City of Bath.  New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1986.

    Doughty, Oswald.  "A Bath Poetess of the Eighteenth Century." The Review of English Studies, I. 4:404-420 (1925).

    Goldsmith, Oliver. The Life of Richard Nash, Esq; Late Master of the ceremonies at Bath. Extracted principally from his Original Papers (1762), in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, Vol III., edited by Arthur Friedman.  Oxford:  Clarendon Press (1966).

    "Mrs. Chandler" in "Theophilus Cibber." The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol V. London: R. Griffiths, 1734, rpt by Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, Germany: Herstellung, 1968, pp.345-354.

    Neal, R.S.  Bath 1680-1850:  A Social History OR A Valley of Pleasure, Yet a Sink of Iniquity.  London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

    Pope, Alexander.  “Windsor Forest” in The Oxford Authors:  Alexander Pope.  Oxford; New York:  Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 49-62.
 
 

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