The Image of Gerogian Bath 1700-2000: Towns, Heritage, and History

While Bath is the titular focus of this study, the author's over-arching concern appears to be "the way that the past is constructed and images of it created … a response … to the practical activity of making history" (1). Borsay's original intent was to present Bath as a case study within the fashionable post-Restoration culture he had examined in The English Urban Renaissance (1989). His goal was confounded by the enduring vitality of "Georgian" Bath which, refusing to fade at any convenient chronological point, survived gothicizing Victorians and internationalist moderns alike to profit (in every sense) from historicizing post-moderns, remaining simultaneously ever-Georgian and ever-contemporary.

Locating this paradox in the city's creative marketing of its eighteenth-century character to tourists and residents alike, Borsay dissects, examines, and analyzes a "matrix of issues"--health, environment, society, consumption, morality, and order--as it has evolved into "a plurality of often contradictory [representations]" (9) over the last three hundred years. Some parts of his ambitious agenda are treated more explicitly than others. For instance, chronology is broken into six clearly delineated eras: Georgian, Victorian, Late Victorian/Edwardian, Inter-War, Post-War, Post-Modern. Issues, however, are subsumed under broader rubrics (e.g., Section III, "Uses," considers "Commerce," "Society and Politics," and "Psychology"), each of which recapitulates pertinent periods within the chronological sequence. The scheme is further complicated by the individual objectives set not only for each chapter, but also for sections within chapters. In the conclusion, for example, "Heritage" is divided into five themes: definition, typology, competition, conservation, and valuation" [369], while "History" addresses yet another sub-set of five areas: representation and reality, the practice of history, periodization, the balance between past and present, and the relationship between popular and academic history [379]. Way-finding is facilitated by immaculately posted intersections (e.g., "The previous section … sought to demonstrate….This section will focus on…" [99]); but although we are told where we are going, and why, the journey can seem both circuitous and repetitious.

Perhaps it is inevitable that a work so sweeping in scope can disappoint in the particular. Readers seeking information, rather than opinion, about spas and spa society, for example, will be amused by the jaundiced views of Smollett, Rowlandson, Austen, et. al., extensively excerpted in the first chapter, but will learn little about the spa as a civilizing process, and even less about the renaissance of hydrotherapy that returned the baths to vogue in the late nineteenth century (on both topics, cf. Douglas Mackaman's Leisure Settings [1998]). Similarly, those interested in architecture will find that neither of the two long chapters devoted to the topic relates Bath's typifying fabric to Neo-Palladianism in general, or describes any structure in detail; on the other hand, these chapters do address how Georgian architecture has been received and preserved by subsequent generations. (The interesting question of why the Georgian architectural prototype remains popular, and not only among Anglo-Saxons, is addressed, briefly, in Section III.)

Borsay, admirably well read, peppers his analysis with scholarly references. But his foray into conceptual history also immersed him in sources he had been academically programmed to distrust, among them guidebooks, local histories, posters, puff pieces, newspapers, and novels. Although he began his research in the 1970s, his introduction and, especially, his conclusion imply that even three decades have been insufficient to reconcile him to the use of such materials. He frequently attempts to justify his approach to his fellow historians as is evident in the following passage: "If one of the results of this study has been a recognition of the need to examine sources historians have traditionally shied away from, another has been a skepticism about what often appears an article of faith within the historical profession: the distinction drawn between primary and secondary sources. If it is accepted that both types of source materials are a form of representation, then it becomes difficult to sustain the view that the two are fundamentally different" (382). Even if those of us who routinely consult The Tatler or L'Almanach du voyageur à Paris wonder what the fuss is about, it is evident that Borsay experienced a crisis of historical conscience. In many ways, his historiographical musings are one of the most appealing aspects of this dense, but in no way opaque text.