The Doyle Engaging Difference Program - Georgetown University

Jane Austen lived in Bath 200 years before I did and, according to most historians, didn’t enjoy herself nearly as much. That most likely had to do with her family’s reduced circumstances and the English city’s severe lack of cafes and bookstores in the early nineteenth century. At least, that’s my guess.

Despite all this, Bath still claims her as a town mascot. Each year in September, Austenites flock to the city in their Regency-era garb, ready to celebrate one of the most influential writers in English literature. Once the festival is over, there’s the year-round Jane Austen Centre, where fans can learn more about the author from costumed actors posed as her characters.

For an Austen fan like myself, studying creative writing in Bath was the dream: four months of living, reading, and creating in the city that looks as distinctive and beautiful now as it did then. The River Avon still cuts a path through the busiest part of town; the buildings are still made of Bath Stone, a unique local limestone that’s gold in color and nearly glows at sunset; visitors still find their way to Pulteney Bridge, a row of shops suspended above the river’s cascading weir.

Living in Bath meant constantly stepping through time. As I passed by Laura Place each morning, I tumbled into Austen’s city of Pump Room teas and society spectacles. During my trips to Kingsmead Square I’d slip into the later years of World War II, after the Germans bombed Bath, destroying the buildings near my favorite Kingsmead cafe. In living in Bath I encountered endless cultural differences—not just differences between the United States and England, but between then and now, past and present.

The study abroad office had warned me and every other student traveling this fall about culture shock— the discordance you feel going to a new place and seeing the big and small differences from your home country. I’d felt prepared to face the biggest shocks of English culture: cars driving on the opposite side of the road, a national obsession with Paddington Bear, and the mystery that was and still is mincemeat. But I spent less time overwhelmed with culture shock and more time captivated by what I guess I could call temporal shock—that strange awareness of every footstep that had come before mine, walking the same or similar paths, leaving an invisible mark in its wake. If my semester in England taught me anything, it’s how to listen for the echoes of these past footsteps.

It wasn’t until early November that I could really appreciate this. Every year, on the fifth of that month, Great Britain celebratesBonfire Night—an evening of revelry, fireworks, and, of course, bonfires. It’s an event also known as Guy Fawkes Day, with origins in the early seventeenth century. The story of the holiday goes like this: in 1605, a group of insurrectionists, angry at the monarchy for discriminating against Catholics, crafted a plan to bomb the Houses of Parliament and kill the king. When officials got wind of the plot on November 5, they searched the building and found conspirator Guy Fawkes with barrels of gunpowder in the basement below the Houses. The king declared November 5 a holiday in celebration of the foiled plot.

If I had tried to guess at the holiday’s historical context based on my Bonfire Night experience, I would’ve told a very different story. On the fifth of November, I took the bus up to Bath City Farm with some friends to attend a free Bonfire Night celebration. As dusk settled, we followed hordes of visitors to the gates surrounding a field, which was empty except for the giant pile of brush and old wood at its center. We were some of the only young adults there. Most of the attendees were kids, wearing bauble hats and clinging with mittened hands to their parents, trying like the rest of us to see their next step in the growing dark. Once night had truly fallen, the farm’s staff lit the pile of brush in the center of the field. It took at least 10 minutes to fully catch, but each time another bit of flame roared to life, we all cheered like we were watching a trapeze swinger perform death-defying acts.

The mood was festive, joyful, and entirely at odds with the holiday’s grim origins. Visitors drank cups of hot cocoa and said hello to the farm’s collection of alpacas and goats. When the city’s fireworks show started, we all found places to sit or stand as we watched the bursts of color light up the sky. The bonfire and fireworks were certainly tongue-in-cheek nods to the bombing that never was, but beyond that, there was no hint of the darkness that surrounded the holiday’s origins.

There was the echo of the past I could hear walking around Bath or rereading my favorite passages from Austen’s Persuasion; then there was a loud undercurrent that sought reconciliation between a bleak past and the little pocket of peace and happiness we’d found in the present. In studying abroad, I had unintentionally traveled through time.

When we visit a new country, we don’t entirely leave behind the place we came from. It stays with us, written over our faces and into the way we talk and act. The two places, new and old, are always bound to confront each other.

Traveling in time is no different. The past doesn’t stay put in the past: it touches everything that comes after, so that every moment is a palimpsest, layered with centuries of memories. And by remembering that past, whether as a fan of Austen novels or participant in cultural traditions, I got to explore the space between then and now. While I’ll never get a stamp on my passport for it, it’s the journey I’ll remember most from my time abroad.