In September 1781, Thomas Hughes, then 22, visited Brighton for what he hoped would be a restorative holiday. It was not his first trip: such sojourns were common for Hughes. But on this occasion something was different. As Hughes recorded in his journal, ‘launched into a sea of gaiety and dissipation’ he nevertheless felt ‘out of my element’. Though he admitted to being naturally of a somewhat ‘reserved disposition’, this had never previously stopped the young man from enjoying polite company. But as he wandered among Brighton’s gaming tables and ballrooms, he found ‘little pleasure in a concourse of people whose only amusement was the exhibition of their sweet persons and a laborious attendance on the toilette’.
What had happened to Hughes? Why did he feel alienated by pleasures and pastimes that he had once enjoyed? The answer was that he had spent the previous five years as a British soldier fighting in the American Revolutionary War, some 3,000 miles away in an environment which, it had seemed, was determined to destroy him. And, he reckoned, the American wilderness had accomplished its aim with gusto. Arriving in Brighton two months after returning from America, where he had endured bloody battles, months of captivity as a prisoner of war, bouts of disease, and lingering thoughts of suicide, Hughes realised that his ‘long stay’ had ‘quite rusticated’ him: ‘I have never enjoyed my health since my return from America.’ He spent much of his time in Brighton on ‘solitary morning walks on the side of the sea’, where he may well have looked west, towards the land across the Atlantic which, he felt, had irrevocably altered his constitution.
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