A Visit to Bath
A few days ago now I had the pleasure of visiting Bath with my mother and two sisters on something of a flying tourist visit around the coming 'main event' of our trip to Longleat the following day.
Now I've never been to Bath before, and have to say it seems quite a lovely city. I say seems of course, as the length of time we actually spent in Bath was such that no one on this earth would be able to form an adequate judgement of the place given my mother's tendency to rush through whatever it is she's doing be it eating, driving or in this case, taking in the sights. One attraction we did manage to see in our very short-lived time in Bath was The Jane Austen Centre, and it is this 'attraction' that I intend to discuss for the remainder of this blog.
Before I do however, I think a little bit of background information is in order.
It all started many years back now back when for one reason or another my hyperactive mother roped my good self into playing the part of a downed German fighter pilot for the costume walks that run through my home town of Ramsgate. I've got to say I wasn't very enthusiastic at the time, and was only roped in on the grounds that my mother told the organiser I had quite a good fake-German accent, and well I was approximately the size of the WW2 costume available, so I was signed over to doing costume walks for a few weeks dressed as a German on Ramsgate seafront. As soon as my tenure as a German was up I was pleased to be done with the whole thing, but my mother being my mother decided that she too would quite like to dress up and soliloquize in front of a load of non-English-speaking tourists, and being a middle-aged lady of youthful appearance and pedantic eloquence, was allotted the role of Jane Austen.
This was where the obsession began.
Since that fateful day some five years or so back now, given the very slightest of provocations my darling mother will take every opportunity to indulge in things Austen, even though she has recently admitted to me that she's only actually ever read two of Austen's books (which puts her on a par with me), and found them quite hard going. Regardless of her real lack of enthusiasm for Austen, she does like dressing up nonetheless and so has persisted with the Jane Austen thing ever since she signed up for the costume walks, and still partakes in the activity every summer when she receives the dreaded phone call. As a consequence of this (and perhaps because I was not quite aware of just how little time Austen had actually lived in Bath [more on that later]), when we saw The Jane Austen Centre on our way from car-park to city-centre we were more than obliged to take a look.
Now I don't for one minute have a problem with tourism as a means of generating local revenue per se, but when the links that associate the tourist attraction with the location are as tenuous and unsubstantial as are The Jane Austen Centre and the city of Bath, I do have to question how anyone in their right mind can justify spending the best part of twenty pounds to admit three adults and one fifteen-year-old to such a small and dismal display.
The links my friends are thus (drum roll please...):
- Jane Austen spent a few months living in Bath following her father's death, and didn't like it very much.
- Some of Austen's characters come to Bath in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
And that's it. Really.
Oh, but it gets better. You see Jane Austen lived at number 25 Gay Street (yes that's really the street name), and yet the museum is based at number 40. Not only this, but as far as I can tell, the 'museum' has almost no exhibits that were Jane's possessions or indeed used by Jane at any given time. The highlight of the whole experience was a ten minute talk by a posh Bath University student telling us about Jane's family and a short video by some little-known actress walking up and down Gay Street telling us about how Jane has lived there for a little while and that she didn't really like it.
WHY I ask, is there a centre there at all? WHY I ask, did we spend twenty pounds to see such a poor display as this?
Why: because we were tourists; and like all good tourists we were ignorant as to what we exactly we were letting ourselves in for. Further still, like all good tourists we were suckered in by the nice man standing outside dressed in ye olde clothes with ye olde smile on his face beckoning us in. Funny thing is, ye olde man at ye olde entrance was probably the highlight of the whole affair.
So much for that one eh.