“Of all the gay places the world can afford,
By gentle and simple for pastime adored,
Fine balls, and fine concerts, fine buildings and springs,
Fine walks and fine views and a thousand fine things,
Not to mention the sweet situation and air,
What place, my dear mother, with Bath can compare?”
There is little reason to doubt that Jane would thoroughly enjoy the change afforded by such constant opportunity for diversion, such delightful mingling with a crowd in which her bright humour must have found frequent opportunities for indulgence.
As we have seen, she had written her first Bath book, Northanger Abbey, many years before, and while she sat in the Pump Room, awaited a partner in the Assembly Rooms, or shopped in Milsom Street, she must have recalled her own creations, Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe, Henry Tilney and Mrs. Allen, quite as vividly as if they were real persons of her acquaintance.
The second Bath book, Persuasion, was not written until many years after, yet these two, chronologically so far apart, topographically so near each other, have always been, owing to conditions of length, bound together.
This is Jane’s own account of her first ball after coming to live at Bath: “I dressed myself as well as I could, and had all my finery much admired at home. By nine o’clock my uncle, aunt, and I entered the Rooms, and linked Miss Winstone on to us. Before tea it was rather a dull affair; but then tea did not last long, for there was only one dance, danced by four couple, think of four couple surrounded by about an hundred people dancing in the Upper Rooms at Bath! After tea we cheered up; the breaking up of private parties sent some scores more to the ball, and though it was shockingly and inhumanly thin for this place, there were people enough, I suppose, to have made five or six very pretty Basingstoke assemblies.”