Bath and Beyond

The Social and Cultural World of the Georgian Assembly Room

Hillary Burlock, Robin Eagles, Tatjana LeBoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040349533
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book re-examines spa and assembly culture as key venues for sociability in the eighteenth century.

Focused chiefly on the eighteenth century, this book looks forward into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While many of the chapters concern aspects of the city of Bath, the book stretches beyond Bath's confines, taking in comparative British towns such as Tunbridge Wells, European spa towns, such as Nice, and the impact Bath had on spa towns in America. The chapters not only reconsider familiar themes such as the marriage market but also offer new insights into the architectural development of the city and the role of Masters of Ceremonies: the officials who oversaw Assembly Rooms' rules and culture. There are also insights into the musical culture of spa towns and the varied backgrounds of the artists and performers. As places that attracted the wealthy and powerful, the book rounds off with consideration of Bath and other spa towns' importance as centres of culture and diplomacy and of their place in the tourist industry.

This accessibly written book appeals to a broad readership, including undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics and informed non-specialists interested in social and cultural history, British history, and modern history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Bath Assembly Rooms and Its Subscribers
• 3 ‘Solemn yet Sumptuous’: Robert Adam’s Designs for an Alternative Assembly Room in Bath
• 4 ‘I am a Sort of Prisoner here’: Elite Performance and Bath Society in the Eighteenth Century
• 5 Not Just Suitors, Balls, and Proposals: The Late Eighteenth-Century Bath Marriage Mart Reassessed
• 6 Rauzzini and the Upper Assembly Rooms Subscription Concert Series: The First Five Years
• 7 Two Kingdoms: Masters of Ceremonies at Bath and Tunbridge Wells, 1735–c.1801
• 8 Electing the Arbiter Elegantiarum in Bath and Beyond: Power, Politics, and the 1769 Bath Contest
• 9 The Undertakers of Eighteenth-Century Bath
• 10 British Female Hospitality and Fashionable Society in Eighteenth-Century Nice, 1769–92
• 11 The ‘Bath Revolution’? Musical Distractions in French Spas, Cercles, and Salons
• 12 Bath, Abroad: How British American Colonists Imagined and Encountered the Famed Spa City
• 13 Bath Assembly Rooms: Then, Now, and Next
• Appendices
• Index