Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare

the grounds of his new home, Cranbury Park, near Winchester, where it was reassembled as an authentic gothic folly. Dummer’s vandalism was a fashionable act of ‘improvement’: seven years later, Fountains Abbey, the great Cistercian foundation in Yorkshire, was bought by the local squire, who surrounded it with smooth lawns, subsuming it into his artificial landscape and ‘providing its owner with an aesthetic object on the scale of the Roman Forum or the Colosseum’.

      Yet despite Dummer’s depradations, his eye for the picturesque was credited with the presentation of Netley’s ruins as a sublime location – as though he himself had been directed by the Committee of Taste. Francis Gosse, the artist who recorded the still intact abbey in 1760 and 1761 for his Antiquities of England and Wales, praised Dummer for having ‘greatly improved the beauty and solemnity of the scene by a judicious management of the trees which have spontaneously sprung up among the mouldering walls’. From its selection by the Cistercians as a wild site, through their civilisation and subsequent dissolution, Netley, recaptured by Nature, was now being subtly relandscaped, both physically and aesthetically, by the romantic imagination, its stones ‘so overgrown with ivy, and interspersed with trees, as to form a scene, inspiring the most pleasing melancholy’. The abbey’s ruins were ‘discovered’ in the same way as were the classical remains of the ancient world. Engulfed by Nature and aged by Time, the abbey was like Rome, ‘an immense garden ruin, a hortus conclusus, in which nature and civilisation had reached a kind of harmony’. It spoke of intangible eternities on an English shore, rising out of the vegetation like the Colosseum, or like an Egyptian temple emerging from the sands, a Hampshire version of the ‘vast desolation’ which greeted Shelley’s traveller as he gazed on the lifeless works of Ozymandias.

       Netley Abbey, 1776

      With Continental unrest curtailing Grand Tours, the English imagination was turned in on itself and its own past. The search for the sublime had to be sated nearer to home, and Netley fulfilled this desire. By 1765 the effect of Thomas Gray’s antiquary elegies was being felt in popular literature, with the publication of the pamphlet/tour guide, THE RUINS OF NETLEY ABBEY A Poem in Blank Verse, prefaced by a quote from Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi:

       I do love these ancient Ruins:

       We never tread upon them, but we set

       Our foot on some reverend History

      And continuing anonymously,

       High on the summit of yon verdant plain,

       Beneath whose falling edge, the pebbled shore,

       Swept by the billows of the Western flood,

       Repels the rage of Neptune; there behold

       The scattered heaps of Netley’s ancient fane

       Through many centuries in record fam’d:

      At length her stately fabric is no more.

      With Thomas Dummer’s death, Netley’s ruins passed, via his widow, to Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland, himself an artist who, acknowledging the growing taste for the picturesque, allowed public access to the ruins. A flattering – if not obsequious – contemporary guide noted: ‘It is fortunate for the lovers of antiquities that these beautiful ruins are now in the possession of a gentleman, whose regard for the arts, elegant taste, and practical as well as theoretic skill in picturesque matters, ensure to the public every care in the preservation of them.’ Thus opened up and extolled, Netley’s fortunes rose like the moon over its ruins by night, casting its medieval stones in a glamorous new light. In 1790, the poet William Sotheby, who lived nearby at Bevis Mount, just up the Itchen, produced his ‘Ode, Netley Abbey; Midnight’:

       Within the sheltered centre of the aisle,

       Beneath the ash whose growth romantic spreads

       Its foliage trembling o’er the funeral pile,

       And all around a deeper darkness sheds;

       While through yon arch, where the thick ivy twines,

       Bright on the silvered tower the moon-beam shines,

       And the grey cloister’s roofless length illumines,

       Upon the mossy stone I lie reclined,

       And to a visionary world resigned

       Call the pale spectres forth from the forgotten tombs.

      Such was its power that Netley Abbey began to acquire national status, admired even in the fashionable metropolis, seventy miles away. In 1794 William Shield staged his Netley Abbey – A Comic Opera at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Its plot revolves around the Oakland and Woodbine families, representatives of the Georgian gentry who had settled on Southampton Water. Mr Oakland – played by Joseph Munden – is a modern man, and like William Chamberlayne seeks to capitalise on the nearby ruins, creating an improved landscape by clearing ancient woodland. In the first scene of act one, he is confronted by his daughter, Lucy, played by Miss Hopkins:

      Lucy: Dear sir, in that case all the country about us, will appear desolate. I shall really fancy myself to be ‘Zelinda in the Desart’.

      Oakland: I know it will seem desolate – but you must be sensible ’tis done by way of improvement. How else can I open the vista, to command a fuller view of Netley Abbey?

      Lucy: And is the sweet embowered cottage belonging to Mrs Woodbine, where I used to read the ‘Dear Recess,’ indeed to come down?

      Oakland: Yes, it is; for you must find some other nook to be miserable in … How else are the improvements to go on? All to the Westward must immediately be cleared; and by the fall of the leaf, I hope not a tree will be left standing.

      Lucy: Cruel as the office is, I must prepare Miss Woodbine for this event: the information may else come with a severity she cannot sustain. [Exit]

      Oakland: That girl gathers all her absurd notions, from silly romances – and while I go on improving, she, as if in direct opposition, goes on reading …

       NETLEY ABBEY

       an Operatic Farce in two acts,

       as performed at the Theatre-Royal Covent Garden.

      If Oakland is a vested member of the squirearchy, then it is equally evident that the passionate young Lucy is probably addicted to Mrs Radcliffe’s gothic novels. Her proto-environmentalism is set against her father’s use of the code-word of Whiggery – ‘improvement’; they are also a symbol of the eighteenth-century generation gap. In the succeeding scenes Lucy’s bosom friend, Ellen Woodbine, suffers a grievous loss when her family’s cottage is burnt down and her fortune is lost, only for the hero – Lucy’s brother, the dashing Captain Oakland (Charles Incledon) – to discover that Miss Woodbine’s bonds were in fact stolen. In the final dramatic moonlit denouement, he uncovers them hidden in the ruins of the abbey. Even under these sublime stones, decency and rationality triumph.

      The opera is also very much the product of Southampton’s late eighteenth-century reputation as a spa resort, and the great influx of the fashionable who came to visit it and its tourist spots. Catering to that spa culture, the opera draws on sentimental whimsy and rousing patriotism, such Captain Oakland’s stirring number:

       Should dangers e’er approach our Coast

       The inbred Spirit of the land

       Would animate each heart

       Would animate each head