18th-Century Bath History

One of the striking features of the 18th century England is the rapid growth of urban society – in both the metropolis and provincial towns.The eighteenth century was the century of hot springs cities, namely Epsom, Islington, Buxton and Cheltenham.Yet it cannot be denied that they were not as famous as the city of Bath. Bath is the most representative city to depict the striking urban and social development of hot springs in England at that time.
As a matter of fact, we must remember the fact that from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth century, Bath developed from a small provincial spa to being the most fashionable place, outside of London. The spa was famed for its healing springs, but little else. From the visits of Queen Anne in 1702 and 1703 and throughout the Georgian period (the reigns of King George I, II, III and IV) Bath was the 'valley of pleasure' where fashionable society came for the season to take the waters, enjoy good society, shops and gambling.Yet at the end of the eighteenth century, Bath will fall from its pinnacle and will no longer be the rival of London.
Thus we can wonder what can explain the tremendous
growth of hot springs cities such as Bath and what lead to its decline .First of all ,we can account for the rise and fall of Bath by focusing on the extraordinary architectural and social revolution that transformed bath into a fashionable resort, attracting people of all kind. Then i will describe the seamy side of the city and its decay in the early nineteenth century.

Three figures are credited with making Georgian Bath into the place to visit. The Architect John Wood who planned and built the palatial streets, the entrepreneur Ralph Allen who provided much of the money and stone to build them with, and Richard 'Beau' Nash, the master of ceremonies who managed the balls in the buildings they built; including the Assembly Rooms and the Pump Room
The massive expansion of the city in Georgian times was a response to the continuing demand for elegant accommodation for the city's fashionable visitors, for whom Bath had become a pleasure resort as well as a spa.
During the 18th century Bath served as an extremely fashionable cultural hub attracting members of the middle and upper classes from all over the country. This provided the city with the finance and incentive to undertake large cultural developments. It was during this time that Bath's Theatre Royal was first built; as well as Georgian architectural triumphs (Georgian architecture is the name to the classic architectural styles current between about 1720 and 1840 , named after the four British monarchs ) including The Royal Crescent, The Circus by the builders John Wood.

This Georgian period was undoubtedly the most prestigious period of Bath's history. It was transformed from a market town with defensive walls to a fashionable metropolis, largely through the designs and plans of the son of a humble Bath builder, architect John Wood Snr, who followed the 16th Century Italian architect, Andrea Palladio. The onset of industrialisation across the country brought greater disposable income to certain sectors of society, and "leisure" became a popular way to spend it. Bath became the place to be seen in, with many eminent people choosing it as their primary residence.

With Ralph Allen, who provided a great deal of his personal fortune and the Master of Ceremonies, Richard Beau Nash, the organising mind behind Bath's social life and balls, they exerted their influence on the town's development.
Something that was to have a greater impact on Bath society in general was Richard Nash's advocacy of greater social integration. By 1706 "Beau" Nash had become the city's Master of Ceremonies of Bath.He established a new code of conduct for more respectability in public places, which banned swearing and relaxed the unwritten rules of integration. He was so successful in levelling society that people could be found creating friendships across the classes that would not have been dreamt of in London. Bath had become the platform for of social change.He transformed Bath into the resort of choice not just for the rich, but for the whole of "polite society". His rules encouraged sociability between the growing gentry class and the aristocratic elite, who had traditionally kept themselves apart from the rest of society. Nash forbade hard drinking and the wearing of swords, which often led to duels.
In Georgian days, The Master of Ceremonies would arrange "society's social life" - balls, dances and social gatherings and ensure their smooth running.
Nash introduced a new code of conduct within the social scene and this in turn created a new set of behavioural rules. It had always been customary for men to wear calf length boots, but Nash thought them vulgar and clumsy so he advocated the adornment of shoes and stockings for men, which were very quickly adopted and found to be far more agreeable at balls and other social functions. He set out a common dress code and rules of etiquette that made the less fashionably minded feel at home.
Nash favored public mingling and discouraged private entertainment so, naturally, the growing population of fashionable socializers needed places to meet and be entertained, to dance and play cards, to visit and gossip, to dine or simply to be seen. One of the most amazing of the public gathering places to be built were the Assembly Rooms -"assemby" being defined as the ìa stated and general meeting of polite persons of both sexes, for the sake of conversation, gallantry, news and play."
Guests amused themselves at cards, drank tea or just walked around talking and flirting. These pursuits were not new in themselves, but hitherto they had taken place in a sequence which everyone had to follow. The guests did one thing at a time and they did it all together. At an assembly, dancing, tea-drinking and cards went on at the same time spread through different rooms, if possible. The Assembly rooms at Bath had been constructed for this purpose. Each principal room had a specific function, but they could all adapt for other functions.

Women
The combination of leisure, entertainment and hot springs took eighteenth-century women out of the house and into society. Bath was a kind of school of good manners and a marriage market for the young girls and boys.They could rejoice in assembly rooms, concert series, theatre seasons, circulating libraries, day-time lectures, urban walks and pleasure gardens, as well as long-standing sporting fixtures.

The new cultural institutions significantly broadened the social horizons of privileged women in the provinces.
In fact, the mingling of the sexes was the raison d'etre of many of the new cultural trend. For many, the principal aim of a trip to town was the making of matches. In the 1720s, Defoe sneered that the daughters of the gentry 'carry themselves to market' at the newly established assemblies. And certainly a man in want of a wife could take his pick in the ballroom.
Public venues were notorious sites of sexual spectatorship, both male and female. Lonely heart advertisements in the newspapers appealed to young men and women spotted in public to allow or encourage further advances. Comparatively unconstrained social intercourse between the unmarried was one of the tantalising possibilities that public venues promised. With such a social intercourse it is little wonder that many saw the opportunity of a modest debauch.

People came to Bath to take the waters and be seen, but the other reason was to buy goods unobtainable at home. The shops were similar in quality to those in London, but with the advantage that they were all closely grouped together.
From 1718 attempts were made to pave and properly clean the streets of Bath and to light them with oil lamps. A general hospital was built in 1742. The first bank in Bath opened in 1768.
During the Summer Bath was full of rich visitors. They played cards, went to balls and horse racing, went walking and horse riding. However the high life was only for a small minority. There were a great many poor people in Bath, as there were in every town. Despite the fine architecture there was also plenty of squalor and overcrowding

Gambling
Behind the fashionable facade of 18th century Bath, with its attractions as a spa and the benefits of its healing waters, there was also the fact that it reigned supreme as the most fashionable gaming centre in England. Quarrels at the tables, duels, and suicides of the foolish who had risked all and left themselves penniless were frequent. Gambling was endemic in early eighteenth-century Britain.
Every card sharper, every gentleman and gentlewoman in reduced circumstances living went to Bath in the hope of winning a fortune at the tables, or at least of obtaining board and lodging, with the prospect in the last resort of decamping without paying.
In fact, gaming affected Bath's inhabitants to such an extent that, the Guardian, Bath's newspaper, reported "the ladies of bath…described how they would go directly from the church to the gaming tables". Among fashionable ladies the passion was quite as strong as among men.

While eighteenth-century Bath is chiefly remembered for its famous and fashionable characters, it is also a place that was notorious for its beggars, vagabonds, prostitutes, lunatics and criminals.
With its extremes of wealth and poverty, and a substantial labouring class, Bath was clearly a complex city.The city had a dual nature, insofar as it was known as the centre of the age of elegance, but it was also the centre of unashamed licentiousness.
Streets like Walcot Street, Avon Street and the Holloway district where people could be with common prostitutes for as little as a shilling.These streets were literally teaming with prostitutes.
Prostitution was so rife in fact that by 1805, when Jane Austen was a resident, a Female Penitentiary and Lock Hospital had to be founded to tackle the problem. Although the Penitentiary offered prostitutes salvation from walking the streets it was only in exchange for some 'honest behaviour'.

In addition to that, the poor and the sick were flooding Bath's streets searching for cures and alms. Despite all of its wealth and frivolity, Bath was a place without industry or trade, and unemployment rates for the lower classes were extremely high.
That is why the social elite of Bath created The most important charitable organization in order to solve the problem of poverty: ‘The Society for the Suppression of Common Vagrants and Imposters, the relief of Occasional Distress, and the Encouragement of the Industrious Poor'"(50). As the title suggests, the wealthy were suspicious and felt the need to distinguish those who truly needed help from the imposters. Many of those who applied for relief were in honest need of help, but there was a small minority vagrants who felt that they could get as much in a day's begging as they could from a week of honest work. Many quacks and charlatans also set up in business to pray off the wealthy invalids who flocked to Bath during the season

The Decline in Popularity
Towards the end of the century, Bath's popularity with the aristocracy dwindled and the nature of the visitors changed from high society to the emerging middle classes. More people began to retire to Bath and it became safe rather than exciting. New anti-gambling laws and the death of Beau Nash added to the decline.
As with other spas, Bath's popularity faded in the nineteenth century.In 1789, King George the Third and the court stayed at Weymouth for ten weeks and started the fad for sea bathing which caused the development of seaside resorts at the expense of the spas.

The pursuit of pleasure always had its critics. The Methodist Charles Wesley, for instance, considered Bath 'the headquarters of Satan'. But as the Evangelical movement within the Church of England gathered converts in the 1780s, 1790s and 1800s, then hedonism of all varieties came under a sustained assault from the pulpit. Some preachers went so far as to suggest that an enjoyment of the theatre, literature, masquerades, parties of pleasure, fashion, and even levity in conversation were but steps on the road to perdition.
However, the rising tide of religious Evangelicalism did not drive women indoors, rather it reoriented the public life of the more serious-minded away from worldly pleasure towards good works. As the eighteenth century progressed, organised charities and campaigning associations grew up alongside the worldlier entertainments, drawing more and more women into a different sort of public life. Benevolence became fashionable, introducing women to the sober satisfactions of public meetings, committee work and the administration of a movement.
Even architectural renewal could not halt the process of decline; the heyday of the spa had passed. Bath's very popularity had killed it as a fashionable resort. As the middle classes flocked to the city, the glamour of exclusivity was lost. Gradually the ebb and flow of seasonal visitors bringing with them the sparkle of London life gave way to a staider air as Bath became a favoured retirement home for those seeking an inexpensive gentility.
Bath lost its importance. It doubled in size but the new industrial towns grew at a much faster rate. Bath remained a market town, popular with tourists and shoppers.
37. Bath's glorious century was drawing to an end. With the huge expense of fighting the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, Britain slipped into recession at the start of the 19th century and a financial scandal caused the collapse of Bath's banks.When stability returned in the 1820s, building energy was channelled into the newly popular semi-detached villas. The population continued to grow quickly and Bath's reputation became that of a quiet refined resort, in architecturally excellent surroundings. After 1800, the seaside resorts gained in popularity and Bath slipped from its pinnacle.

Conclusion
Spa resorts have traditionally sought to address the problems of mind, body and soul and this has resulted in a range of activities being available to the spa visitor. These have included the arts - with theatre, music and the ballet, outdoor recreation, debauchery and frolics, dancing, religion, gambling as well as drinking or bathing in the waters in many different manners. Such activities were often carried out in an environment of lavish architecture, grandiose parks and a strong social hierarchy. the spa location was often in pleasant countryside and if a town, there would be parks and gardens in which to promenade and socialise. Then there was the entertainment. The Theatre and the Assembly Rooms provided a constant stream of events that often involved dancing, combining fun with exercise.
The spas were no strangers to horse racing and in fact the sport developed alongside the other infrastructure of the spa. Gambling and the Casino provided entertainment for those of like mind
The other was the possibility of engaging in many of the other activities at the spa resort. Some of these pastimes were particularly influential in creating a feeling of well being, often divorced from the more direct physical effects of the prescriptions.
In fact many people took the season at the spa without actually taking a prescribed course of treatment.
We must also remember that Three remarkable men were largely responsible for the creation of the eighteenth-century city: Ralph Allen, the entrepreneur who provided money for the growth of bath, Richard Nash the gambler and master of ceremonies who created a new way to interact between people from different social classes and the architects John Wood the elder and the younger who gave the city an original architecture.
However some factors lead the city to its decline such as the emerging of a middle class, a financial crisis and the napoleon war.We can even go further by highlighting the fact that the own greatness of this city ineluctably lead the city to its decay by attracting poor people, prostitutes, charlatans ,and luxury and leisure did not satisfy the customers, thenit was no longer a fashionable
place.