While eighteenth-century Bath is chiefly remembered for its famous and fashionable characters, it is also a place that was notorious for its beggars and vagabonds. Christopher Anstey’s poem “Liberality, or the Decayed Macaroni,” written anonymously in 1790, gives a humorous but satirical look at what Anstey calls “the frequent artifices of very unworthy petitioners for pecuniary assistance.” Although Anstey was known for his critically acclaimed satire, The New Bath Guide, published in 1766, little has been written about his life or his other works. Most of what has been written recently has drawn its information from his son John Anstey’s, The Poetical Works of the Late Christopher Anstey Esq. with Some Account of the Life and Writings of the Author (1808).
Anstey was born at Brinkley on October 31, 1724, where his father was rector. According to John, Christopher’s father was completely deaf by the time his son was born, causing Chris to feel alienated and deprived of his father’s instruction. At a very young age, he was sent away to school where he excelled in Latin. He finished his Bachelor’s degree in 1746 and although he nearly completed the degree of Master of Arts, he was denied it in 1749 after refusing to give a Latin oration, which was newly required for graduation. After his mother and father died in the1750s, he inherited his father’s estates and married Ann Calvert. He lived happily with his wife and children in Cambridgeshire until his only sister’s death in 1770, when, according to John Anstey’s account, Christopher was “over whelmed with the deepest sorrow and affliction…The visible decline of his health in consequence of a bilious fever, partly occasioned by his severe affliction, was the cause of his visiting Bath for the benefit of the waters” (xiv). After his recovery in 1770, Anstey decided to move his entire family from the country to Bath where he became one of the first inhabitants of the Royal Crescent. Although he wrote throughout his lifetime, few of his other works were published, and he remained “a man of one book.” Until his death at the age of 81, Anstey continued to write poetry in the facile broad humor that was characteristic of his New Bath Guide. All in all, he seems to have been blessed with a leisurely life and an overall “contented and comfortable existence.”
During his residence at Bath,
Anstey, like many other wealthy residents, contributed to the city’s charities
with a “charitable benevolence that was part of Bath’s self-image.” He
wrote many poems occasioned by the declining state of funds of the General
Hospital at Bath in order to persuade the rich to donate money to the institution.
At the time “Liberality, or the Decayed Macaroni” was written, the poor
and the sick were flooding Bath’s streets searching for cures and alms.
Despite all of its wealth and frivolity, Bath was a place without industry
or trade, and unemployment rates for the lower classes were extremely high.
According to Graham Davis’ Bath: A New History, “Between 1790
and 1811 fourteen new charitable organizations were founded in the city.
The most important was the creation of the social elite of Bath:
‘The Society for the Suppression of Common Vagrants and Imposters, the
relief of Occasional Distress, and the Encouragement of the Industrious
Poor’”(50). As the title suggests, the wealthy were suspicious and
felt the need to distinguish those who truly needed help from the imposters.
Many of those who applied for relief were in honest need of help, but there
was a small minority vagrants who felt that they could get as much in a
day’s begging as they could from a week of honest work (51). According
to his introduction to the poem, Anstey was also afraid that the wealthy
and humane people of Bath would be taken in by “unworthy petitioners.”
In fact, the poem is intended as a warning for all the charitable individuals
of Bath:
The eighteenth-century saw the Macaroni as a young effeminate man of fashion who lived well above his means. Although the term originally referred to wealthy and well-traveled youths who affected trends in fashion, by the time “Liberality” was written, poems such as William Madden’s “The Bath Macaroni” (1781) and the anonymous “Drawings from Living Models taken at Bath,” used the term to evoke laughter from their readers. As opposed to the youthful Macaronis chronicled in previous poems, Anstey decided on a much older specimen to illustrate the type of person who, after depleting their pecuniary resources, decided to go to Bath to appeal for financial support from the rich under the guise of charity.
Concerned with real and pressing issues in Bath’s society, the poem, while keeping with its whimsical style, provides the reader with a look into the moral and political arguments associated with the dangers of excessive gambling. Much of Anstey’s light-hearted poem is devoted to how his “Macaroni” squanders “the plum” that his father bequeath’d him upon his death (lines 14-17). According to Thomas Hinde, “By 1739 the personal tragedies which gaming was causing had become so many and notorious that an Act of Parliament was passed, aimed at forcing out of Bath characters who acted at the tables as ‘decoy ducks’” (99). In fact, gaming affected Bath’s inhabitants to such an extent that, the Guardian, Bath’s newspaper, reported “the ladies of bath…described how they would go directly from the church to the gaming tables” (99). By the time Anstey wrote his poem, many games that his Macaroni “liberally” played were illegal. One of the Macaroni’s favorite games, Faro, was particularly known for “speedily making a man or undoing him” (100). After years of gambling and carousing with anyone and everyone, Anstey’s Macaroni finds himself, like many of Bath’s avid gamblers, old and penniless, “unskilled in a Trade or Profession—Too feeble for taking the Road” (lines 123-24). It is at this point, towards the end of the poem, that the Macaroni decides, much to the dismay of Anstey, to try his luck in Bath by appealing to the rich for money and living “genteelly” for “the rest of [his] days” (lines135-36).
While “Liberality, or the Decayed Macaroni” has been little known and almost forgotten, its importance as a piece of social commentary should not be overlooked by researchers and enthusiasts of Bath. Anstey’s satirical examination of gambling and charity provides, for both hobbyists as well as serious students, a historical framework in which to place political, social, and economic issues essential for understanding eighteenth-century Bath.
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Davis, Graham and Penny Bonsall. Bath: A New History. Straffordshire: Keele U Press, 1996.
“Drawings from Living Models taken at Bath.” n.p.: n.p.
Hints for a Reform, Particularly in Gambling Clubs. London: Printed for R. Baldwin, no. 47, Pater-Noster Row, 1784.
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