Bath – the headquarters of Satan?

While I have been enjoying the current vogue for the Georgians, it does seem to be very gentry and metropolitan focussed.  Far from everyone at this time experienced either grinding poverty or, if wealthy, had a pragmatic secular outlook and engaged in frivolous pastimes like dancing, card games and music.  The trading and nascent industrial wealth of the country was largely the work of a different class – merchants, bankers and manufacturers in the Midlands and the North of England – often, though not exclusively, Protestant non-conformists.  They practised an austere lifestyle in the manner of their Puritan forebears and were devoutly religious, hard working, honest, philanthropic and plain of speech and manner.  Their work left little time for recreation of any sort and the Sabbath was spent attending religious services or in private devotion.  My Burnley ancestors in Yorkshire were among them.

John Wesley, founder of Methodism

That other famous Georgian, John Wesley led a huge religious revival in the mid-18th century, and there were many evangelical Anglicans who shared his mission.  While their primary concern was salvation in the next life, they also preached the values of thrift, sobriety and hard work in this one.  Evangelical Anglicans eschewed music, cards, ostentatious dress, gambling and certain blood sports like cock fighting – the latter lost them support among the lower classes.  Wesley himself thundered against the mostly innocent amusements of a spa town like Bath, calling it ‘the headquarters of Satan’.  Card games, though perhaps innocuous in themselves, he considered ‘murderers of time‘.  We might smile today at such extreme views but they proved not only enduring, but very influential in the following century and helped fuel all manner of political campaigns, for example the temperance and anti-slavery movements.

It would be a grave mistake to imagine there was only ‘one’ Georgian society, or that its behaviours and values were universal.

Margaret