‘IN THE NEWEST MANNER’: SOCIAL LIFE IN LATE GEORGIAN DEVIZES 7 
Fig. 1 The Town Hall, Devizes, built between 1806 and 1808, was designed by Thomas Baldwin of Bath. Its Assembly Room in 
the Adam style provided an elegant venue for social events. 
c. 1730 in Plymouth, Portsmouth, Reading, and 
Salisbury, with dramatic companies making a 
regular circuit of towns. Between 1760 and 1820 at 
least 100 provincial theatres were erected and every 
town of any pretence had one. In 1788 Mr Baker, 
‘master of a company of comedians from Devizes’, 
applied for a licence to perform in Salisbury,’* while 
from that city came Shatford and Lee’s touring 
company, playing a Spring season in a small theatre 
in Monday Market Street, Devizes in 1790. 
Performance of The Rivals by Sheridan three times 
weekly ‘procured the patronage and respect of 
many of the first families in the town and 
neighbourhood’ .” Attendance was so encouraging 
that a new theatre, costing £300* and ‘on a scale 
equal to any County Theatre in the kingdom’,*' was 
built in record time in 1792 by local builders, 
Whichcord and Gamble, a circumstance ‘ doubtless 
very pleasing to the numerous genteel residents in 
that polite town and neighbourhood’. The first 
performance in May included Don Juan, The Road 
to Ruin, and various short farces. Subscriptions of 
10 guineas entitled fifteen persons to free admission 
every night ‘to a place of liberal and rational 
amusement’ during the season for twelve years; no 
doubt there was some competition to acquire such 
distinction or to sponsor a performance. Attending 
the theatre provided an arena for social life and the 
diffusion of fashionable attitudes, as well as an 
opportunity for personal display, particularly for 
women. In a note to Mrs Stephen Hillman, Mrs 
Spalding esteemed it a pleasure ‘ to join Mrs 
Hillman’s party if she intends going to the Play 
tonight ... Dr and Mrs Spalding mean to shew 
themselves at the Theatre, if only for an hour’.** 
Perhaps the same desire to be part of the haut 
monde influenced guests at a_ glittering 
entertainment on 2 August 1819 when William 
Salmon staged an elegant féte champétre at Drew’s 
Pond near Devizes. One of the guests, Irish poet 
Tom Moore of Bromham, described the evening: ‘a 
beautiful place, and everything gay and rant. . .a 
boat on the little lake, musicians playing on the 
island in the middle of it, tents pitched ’. Such 
