The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700-2000: Towns, Heritage, and History. (Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus).

MacKay, Lynn

Peter Borsay. The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700-2000: Towns, Heritage, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. viii, 434. Illustrations, maps, tables, bibliography, index.

In this book, Peter Borsay sets out to examine the history of the image of Georgian Bath. Covering the period from 1700 to 2000, Borsay looks at the genesis of the image, at its characteristics, and how they have changed over time, and finally, at the uses to which the image has been put during the last three hundred years. Obviously, this is not a standard local history of a particular English town. Borsay charts the rise, fall, and resurrection of Bath's image as a primarily Georgian city. Clearly influenced by post-modernism, Borsay argues that

sources were not (more or less) transparent windows on a real world, but images, and that if there was any reality to be discovered, it was in the images themselves rather than in what purportedly lay behind them. (p. 5)

The questions Borsay explores are interesting ones: Why and how has Bath come to be known as the Georgian city par excellence? And why has this period become so crucial in the city's reputation and identity? In answer, Borsay begins by discussing contemporary Georgian perceptions of Bath as a desirable place for the fashionable elite to live, visit, and restore its health. Bath's Roman past was celebrated during the eighteenth century, but did not diminish the contemporary image since the Georgians saw themselves as the heirs to the Romans, carrying on the great classical tradition. In the nineteenth century this "classical duopoly" (p. 66) constituting the image of Georgian Bath suffered an eclipse, however. The Victorian fascination with the Gothic and the Medieval, their disapproval of Georgian morals, their faith in progress, and their sheer proximity to the Georgian period all contributed to the decline of Bath's image as a Georgian city. In the twentieth century, in turn, as Victorianism fell out of fas hion, the idea of Georgian Bath again grew popular, especially after World War I. After the Second World War, "an enthusiasm for the present and future and their cultural manifestation, modernism, temporarily reduced the spa's deference" to its classical past (p. 96). Britain's relative decline in the 1970s called this optimism into question, however, and with the conservative resurgence classicism re-emerged triumphant, dominating the city's notion of itself and its past and providing the basis for an extremely profitable tourist industry.

In the second section of the book, "Forms and Media", Borsay outlines characteristics of Bath's classical image and the means by which it was developed, maintained, and transmitted. He identifies two key constituents of Bath's Georgian image: biography (accounts of Bath's Georgian celebrities) and architecture (the classical buildings inherited from the eighteenth century).

The book becomes more interesting when Borsay turns to the uses the Georgian image has served, that is, to the commercial, social and political, and psychological contexts in which Bath's Georgian image operated. The image has been used to sell the city, especially to tourists, and as justification for intervening in and attempting to control the city's political processes-the twentieth-century conservation battles being a prime example here. Bath's image as a Georgian city has also been used to confer social status on middle-class aspirants, and psychologically

It provided an opportunity to escape from the pressures of the present, to establish a sense of continuity and therefore of personal and collective identity, and to celebrate several of the defining myths of western culture. (p. 348)

In his conclusion Borsay focuses on the wider significance of his study. He sees late twentieth-century Bath as an exemplar of a number of trends. Aside from meeting the needs just identified, it has also been part of a "heritage boom" (p. 369) and has provided ammunition in the debates surrounding the relationship of heritage with conservativism and class. Finally, Borsay says the study of Bath's image has implications for the understanding of history. It is a case study both for the complex and dynamic relationship between past and present and for the way in which meaning and identity are constructed not only through what is said but also through what is left unsaid.

In the last two sections of the book-on the uses of the Georgian image and in his conclusion-Borsay makes many thoughtful points and intriguing arguments that one wishes were more thoroughly discussed. For all his cavils against the orthodox historical pursuit of the objective and the real, the book is weighed down by the masses of empirical evidence Borsay feels compelled to supply throughout. Consigning some of the detailed accounts of the historiographical literature to footnotes, for instance, would have been a kindness to readers. It is a pity the editing could not have been tightened throughout to allow for a fuller exploration of the fascinating uses of Bath's image and its wider significance. It is ironic, surely, that a book firmly espousing a post-modernist stance with respect to reality should be criticised for evidential over-kill.