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The World of Brighton
Brighton, during the half century prior to the arrival of Dean Mahomet and his family, had been growing into a fashionable seaside spa. A series of popular medical texts drew public attention to sea bathing and the reputedly healthful marine environment of Brighton.[56] Sea bathing increased in popularity despite the fact that relatively few Englishmen or women actually knew how to swim. A growing number of English families could afford, and felt they deserved, a holiday by the seashore. Nevertheless, these same families were also developing a bourgeois mentality about revealing the body in public. To accommodate their interests and concerns, horse-drawn bathing machines, segregated by sex, sprang up along the Brighton shore to convey the bather into the water. Professional “dippers” stood at the foot of these machines to encourage the occasionally terrified bathers, via the dipper's arms, into the shallow seawater.
In addition to outdoor sea bathing, Brighton emerged as distinctive for its indoor activities as well. A series of medical promoters popularized their particular water treatments: indoor bathing in, or drinking, various types of waters as highly therapeutic for a broad range of maladies. In 1769, Dr. Awsiter established a hot and cold bathing institution at the foot of the Steine (the open area that ran down the middle of Brighton).[57] Other indoor bathing establishments followed, each with its own special method.[58] Thus, long before Dean Mahomet and Jane's arrival in Brighton, a range of bathhouses flourished there.
The flamboyant George IV—as Prince of Wales and then King—added a significant element of social prestige, and much income, to the expanding town. From his first visit in 1782 or 1783 onward, George's almost unbridled expenditures and increasing notoriety focused attention on the resort. For example, in 1784 he dramatically demonstrated his own prowess and the accessibility of Brighton by riding on horseback from Brighton to London and back in ten hours on one day.[59] Brighton offered George release from the social and moral restrictions of London and his father's court. Over the years, George remodeled a rented house into the striking Brighton Marine Pavilion.[60]
The Pavilion's major theme became eclectic Oriental exotica. A gift to George of Chinese-style wallpaper (c. 1802) led to extensive decoration and redecoration of the Pavilion in what George and his architects believed was “Eastern luxury.” While chinoiserie had been fashionable long before, a new amalgamation of putatively “Indian” themes made the Pavilion a striking expression of England's rapidly expanding eastern Empire, with India as its crown jewel (see figures 7 and 8). The Pavilion's final reconstruction into its current “Indian” form took place between 1815 and 1823, during Dean Mahomet's rise to fame in Brighton. He contributed a further fillip of the exotic to Brighton, which proved more receptive to his Indian offerings than London.
