“(A) fascinating study of a long-neglected literary curiosity.”
Bath: An Adumbration in Rhyme
A Critical Edition for Readers of Jane Austen
Paperback - $9.50 | Buy Online
Download - Download PDF (Free)
John Matthews’ Bath: An Adumbration in Rhyme is a humorous picture of a typical day in the most fashionable resort town of late Georgian England. For the gouty and the infirm, Bath offered health: its mineral waters, whether bathed in or drunk, were thought to relieve a variety of complaints. For everyone else, there was endless entertainment, from the morning visit to the Pump Room to the famous public balls held four evenings a week.
Bath was also the city that Jane Austen knew best, lived in longest, and wrote most about. Every one of her novels at least mentions Bath, and large portions of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are set there. Published in 1795, Matthews’ poem captures the town just two years before Austen visited it for the first time. The sights and sounds he describes are the very ones that would have greeted a twenty-one-year-old Austen or a seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland.
This edition offers an array of critical resources that use Bath: An Adumbration in Rhyme to deepen readers’ appreciation of Austen’s life and work. The Biographical Essay explores parallels between the lives of John Matthews and Jane Austen. The Contextual Essay introduces readers to the tradition of the “Bath satire,” a popular genre in the late eighteenth century that Austen refined and challenged in her two Bath novels. The notes on the text provide not only historical and cultural information, but images of late Georgian Bath and direct connections between the poem and Austen’s novels.
Author(s)
John Matthews
Editor(s)
Ben Wiebracht, Carolyn Engargiola, Josephine Chan, Kate Snyder, Lauren Stoneman, Macy Maurer Levin, Sophia Romagnoli, Varsha Venkatram
As the edition’s subtitle makes clear, Wiebracht and company are particularly interested in what reading an obscure poem on Bath might tell us about Jane Austen. To this end, the authors have come up with an ingenious, three-column design. The poem appears on the left-hand page, while each facing page includes one column for annotations and a second for Austen-related commentary. Illustrations from Thomas Rowlandson and others provide humorous and helpful images of Bath settings and personages.