By Jan Ashton, author of A Hopeless Business
The grounds were declared to be highly beautiful... They contained a noble piece of water; a sail on which was to a form a great part of the morning's amusement; cold provisions were to be taken, open carriages only to be employed, and every thing conducted in the usual style of a complete party of pleasure.
-Sense and Sensibility, Chapter 12
Two of Jane Austen’s brothers were high-ranking naval officers and her books make frequent reference to the sea and the Royal Navy, yet there are few references to her characters enjoying England’s lakes and ponds.
Of course, we all know that Elizabeth Bennet’s trip to the Lakes with the Gardiners is most fortunately shortened and redirected to Derbyshire and Mr Gardiner gets to fish at Pemberley, but do we all remember that Pride and Prejudice never actually features Mr Darcy’s dive into the pond? It is a nice scene to imagine, for swimming, fishing, and recreational boating (rowing, though sometimes called sailing as in the above quote) were common pursuits on private estates.
Until the middle of the 19th century, most residences and major businesses were built alongside the Thames because of the safety and ease of transportation by boat. The nobility travelled the river in their own craft, often a ‘shallop’ rowed by up to eight men. In the 17th and 18th centuries, these barges were the limousines of the lower Thames. These boats were sheltered in commercial multi-boat barge-houses.
Smaller, private boat-houses also dotted the land inward from the Thames, for many of England’s estate owners owned rowing boats and a boat-house if their land included a natural body of water such as a pond or stream. Those without such access often dug or dammed ornamental waters to create pools for bathing, fishing, and ice-skating. Thomas Hibbert is one example; after he purchased Chalfont House in 1794, he commissioned Humphry Repton to not only add a boat-house and icehouse, but to widen the River Misbourne to form a lake.
Boat-houses were designed for the storage of rowing boats or punts, and often built with stone walls and timber roofs; the end closest to the water would be either open or provided with sturdy doors. The floors would be a simple continuation of sand or rock, and might be dug down to permit a boat to float into the shelter.
Some boat-houses were small enough to hold little else than a rowing boat, exactly the sort of structure likely found at Longbourn. Although Austen mentions no ponds or brooks in Meryton—only Pemberley’s stream in Derbyshire is mentioned—geography tells us a tributary of some sort ran through her imagined town in the county of Hertfordshire. The New River, dug by Hugh Myddleton and opened in 1613 to bring fresh water to London, flows there from Chadwell and Amwell Springs in Ware. Creative license allows us (me, anyway) to suppose Longbourn has a small tributary forming its boundary, and a small, fairly rudimentary boat-house to allow Mr Bennet and his steward to traverse the stream and deal with any obstructions.
Somerset has a number of boat-houses, and the description of a fairly utilitarian one led to my sense of Longbourn’s structure. Erected in the mid-18th century, the slate roof covers a ‘boat chamber in a square rubble built structure, frontage of quarry-faced ashlar with a broad open archway facing the water’.
The Regency-era sketchbooks of Diana Sperling, a young woman living with her family at Dynes Hall, an Elizabethan mansion on the Essex-Suffolk border, portray a more casual side of life on a country estate. The wealthy Sperling family extended and altered Dynes Hall, adding new stables, laying out drives around the park, and creating a lake. Miss Sperling’s sketches of the lake show a tiny rustic building on the bankside, which appears to have been a boat-house—although, like the boat-house I envisioned for the Bennets, it was large enough only for something like a rowing boat—and shows it being used for bathing, fishing, and ice skating in the winter.
The boat-house on the Belton estate in Lincolnshire is one of many designed in the style of a Swiss cottage, a style popular in mid-Victorian England. The structure is timber-framed and plastered, with a roof made of Collyweston slate tiles in a fish scale pattern.
Of course, the grander the estate, the grander the boat-house and its purpose. Some aristocrats stored the boats they used for staging mock naval battles on their lakes, a fashionable fad in an age of British naval victories. Others, like the boat-house at Fonthill, also contained a plunge bath. In the 1720s, Dr George Cheyne—who eventually would become England’s leading expert on the treatment of hypochondria among the wealthy—prescribed regular immersion in cold plunge pools as a way of curing disease. His advice was followed by 18th- and 19th-century estate owners, who built cold water baths and plunge pools in their gardens and parks, often linked to a lake or river.
The boat-house in Hyde Park was built for purposes beyond pleasure. When the Serpentine was icy or frozen over, people flocked to enjoy it, skating or walking on the surface. Unsurprisingly, there were accidents, and many deaths. The Humane Society, established in 1774 to assist injured humans, was granted by George III a spot on the banks of the river to build a boat-house and receiving-house. In addition to small boats, the house was fitted up with ‘apparatus for employing every possible means to restore life’.
No matter how little Jane Austen wrote of inland water and boats, we do have evidence, by her own hand, that she enjoyed at least one boat ride. In 1807, she wrote of taking the ferry across the River Itchen to Netley Abbey with her brother, Edward Austen Knight, his wife, Elizabeth, and three of their children.
‘We did not take our walk on Friday, it was too dirty, nor have we yet done it; we may perhaps do something like it to-day, as after seeing Frank skate, which he hopes to do in the meadows by the beech, we are to treat ourselves with a passage over the ferry.’
Hopefully Jane won’t mind me ‘treating myself’ by adding a boat-house to her lovely Longbourn.
Sources:
William Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters
Kate Felus, The Secret Life of the Georgian Gardens
Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen, The Letters of Jane Austen
Geraldine Edith Mitton, Jane Austen and Her Times
David Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure
Image Sources (all public domain):
Boat-house at Lyme Hall Lake
The Bath house/Grotto at Wrest Park
The top floor of the Boat-house, once the Royal Boat Keeper’s lodgings
Branston Hall in Lincolnshire
The Remains of the Boat-house, Stockgrove Park
Boat house of the Royal Humane Society, from The Story of the London Parks by J Larwood
Chris Eilbeck, Boat-house on River Thames
James Rutter, Delineations of Fonthill, 1823 (drawing)
Comments