Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations

by Caroline A. White

‘I spent a whole day with him at Hampstead. He was in the Long Room half the morning, and has parties at cards every night. Mrs. Lepell and Mrs. Saggione and her sons and two daughters are all with him.’

In the March following Dr. Arbuthnot died, as he believed he should on his return to London.

‘Poor Arbuthnot, who grieved to see the wickedness of mankind, and was particularly esteemed by his own countrymen,[252] is dead, to the great regret of everyone who had the pleasure of knowing him intimately.’

Of him Swift wrote to Pope, referring to his humanity and benevolence, ‘Oh that the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it! I would burn my travels’ (‘Gulliver’); and when a lady asked the satirical Dean for the Doctor’s character, he summed it up in a sentence, ‘He has more wit than we all have, and his humanity is equal to his wit.’

The presence of such an invalid at the Wells is a proof that faith in the potency of the regimen observed there, and in the health-giving air of the Heath, was by no means withdrawn from them. Indeed, we read that at this date and during the previous season, more company had been seen in the walks than had visited the village for years—a fact not lost upon Dr. Soames, the friend of, and possibly the successor to, Dr. Gibbons, whose treatise afforded him the literary material and groundwork for his pamphlet on the ‘Hampstead Mineral Wells, with Directions how to Drink the Waters’—an essay calculated to impress his patients, and even the general public, with the sanitary combinations of the rural resort. It was published in 1734, and is not without interest. He repeats the description of the older writer and physician, that Hampstead ‘is situated somewhat romantic, but every way pleasant, on several little hills, on high ground of different soils.’

‘That here persons may draw in a pure and balmy air, with the heavens clear and serene, at that season of the year that the great and populous City of London is covered with fogs and smoke. And what adds,’ observes the doctor, ‘to the blessings of the place is the salubrious water of Hampstead, which may be justly called the Fountain of Health.’

He describes the chalybeate as breaking out from the declivity of the hill, to the east of the town, near the chapel and bowling-green, and tells us that it was conveyed through a pipe to a marble perforated bowl or reservoir adjoining the chapel. Dr. Soames, as his predecessor had done, notices the views from the Heath, its soils, and the number of aromatic plants growing on it, and adds that the Apothecaries’ Company seldom miss coming to Hampstead every spring to have their botanizing feast.[253] ‘As for walks and shady groves,’ he continues, ‘we have our share, and those are very delightful.’ But his praises of the spring which trickled till within the last few years into its basin on the left-hand side of the walk on entering it from the Heath, and his regimen for the water-drinkers, are the most amusing part of his treatise. He assures his readers that ‘the chalybeate, though as strong, if not stronger, than that of Tunbridge Wells of the iron mineral, is not at all unpleasant; that if well corked and sealed down, and kept in a cellar for one or two years, when you have drawn the cork it will be most ready to fly, and when poured into a glass, will sparkle and knit up like a glass of champagne or Herefordshire cider.’

He recommends the drinking of this water in cases of defective digestion, in preference to the drinking of drams (a thing too common in his day), which he hopes ‘may not spread its contagion beyond his own sex.’ At the same time he greatly hopes that the inordinate drinking of thea may be retrenched, which, if continued in, will infallibly ‘cause the next generation to be more like pigmies than men and women.’[254] The best time to take the waters is from June to Michaelmas; the time of day an hour after sunrise (no wonder music began in the Long Room at 6 a.m.). He allows his patients balm, or sage tea, with a little orange-peel in it for breakfast; or chocolate, milk, porridge, or mutton-broth, with bread-and-butter. An hour after taking the water, coffee may be used—the less the better—but as for the green or bohea thea, that ‘ought to be banished.’

Smoking appears to have been allowed, for Dr. Soames observes that those who take tobacco ‘may do so with all safety’; only he politely suggests, ‘let them not offend the company, especially the ladies, who cannot well relish that smoke with their waters.’ He recommends his patients a ride of four or five miles one hour after drinking them, or, where there is an objection to riding, to divert themselves with the amusements of the place. These, as we have said, had considerably contracted since the days when the members of the Kit-Cat Club had mingled with the visitors in the walks, and exchanged smart repartees together, as was the fashion of the day, when the last bon-mot at Button’s was set against the newest scandal at the Wells.