Chapter 5: Fashionable heyday

Thus Matthew Fagg had built first Exmouth House and then Exmouth Cottage, and one imagines that, like Mr Parker in Sanditon, he was a bit of a ‘Projector’, who appreciated the growing demand for fashionable accommodation by the seaside; perhaps he also indulged in rhetoric like Mr P.’s about the virtues of sea air and sea bathing.29 Clearly Exmouth Cottage was always intended for the rental market, and this seems also to have been the case at least in part with Exmouth House itself, since both properties were evidently available for rent in the 1820s, being included in the lists of Lodging Houses which form a feature of Hastings guidebooks in these years. Among the earliest of these is the second edition of Powell’s Hastings Guide, dating from 1819 or 1820, in which the Exmouth House appears under Hill Street, marked with an asterisk for having a view of the sea. It is there described as having three sitting rooms and eight beds.30

Powell's Hastings Guide (left) and Advertisement for Exmouth House (right)

The third edition, which evidently dates from a couple of years later, adds Exmouth Cottage to the entry, while the fourth edition, which is dated 1825, has an identical entry.31 Both the third and fourth editions subdivide the Hill Street entry to give a discrete, capitalised section devoted to ‘West Hill House, Exmouth House and Cottage’ described as: ‘On the West Hill, near Hill Street, [which] command a very extensive view of the country and Sea’ (West Hill House, incidentally, was stated as being owned by Edward Wenham, whom we encountered in chapter 2). The fourth edition is the last one to contain such detailed information about lodging houses: in subsequent editions of the guide the information given is more general and non-specific.

As for the likely rental, unfortunately this information is not given in the guidebooks, and the significance of the figure of £22 given in the 1822 poor relief assessment referred to earlier is unclear. However, there are certain clues. One comes from Sanditon, which at one point refers to how Diana Parker had ‘by walking & talking down a thousand difficulties at last secured a proper House at 8 guineas per week for Mrs Griffiths’.32 Further information comes from the chapters on Hastings and Brighton in A.B. Granville’s The Spas of England and Principal Sea-bathing Places of 1841, which explain how, at Brighton, ‘a whole house on the east and west cliff cannot be had for less than from 8 to 15 guineas a week’, subsequently commenting that Hastings prices were a quarter less than Brighton ones.33 Allowing for this, and for the size and prime position of Exmouth House, might one postulate a rental of about 8 to 10 guineas a week, thus -- allowing for a season of perhaps twenty-five weeks -- giving a total annual rental of £200 or £250, with a proportionately smaller rental for Exmouth Cottage?

29 Austen, Fragment, pp. 24-6, 130.

30 P.M. Powell, Hastings Guide (2nd edn,, ?1819-20; date suggested by the map of the environs of the town facing p. 89, dated 1819), p. 79.

31 3rd edn., pp. 81-2. The addition of Exmouth Cottage in this edition implies that the 2nd edition predated the construction of Exmouth Cottage: see above, n. 28. 4th edition (1825), p. 83. In the 5th edition (1828?), of which I own a copy, the information about lodging houses ceases to be so specific and this also true of later editions of the guide.

32 Austen, Fragment, p. 134.

33 A.B. Granville, The Spas of England and Principal Sea-bathing Places: The Southern Spas (London, 1841), pp. 579, 596.