JONATHAN OATES, Anti-Jacobitism and the English People, 1714–1746

Abstract

could expose visitors to other dangers: drinking, gambling, and risky sexual liaisons. Fertile ground for satire, the spa was clearly understood by many contemporaries as a place that could be the ruin of a person, just as it could be the setting for recovery and reinvention. Although Murky Waters discusses Bath at some length, the Somerset town is noted to be the exception rather than the rule. Vasset differentiates between ‘national spas’ that attracted visitors from far and wide, and which often had the benefit of noble or royal patronage, and ‘local spas’ such as Matlock in Derbyshire, the fortunes of which were more fragile due to their dependence on local celebrities (Bath’s own celebrity was dandy Beau Nash). The book also interrogates the supposed division between spa towns and seaside towns, noting that towns such as Scarborough could be considered to be both. In Yorkshire and Derbyshire, as well as in London, spas were common, and many people in the late eighteenth century would have found themselves within ‘reasonable distance of a middle-sized spa’ (p. 9). (An Appendix includes a useful map of eighteenth-century spas by area and category.) Whatever their local character, Vasset suggests that spas can be considered microcosms of wider society, ‘blank page[s] on which political utopias and dystopias could be projected’ (p. 204), such as the self-regulation of society or the control of news. At the same time, they could be points of contact with foreign tastes and cultures, as patrons mixed with people from other countries. Murky Waters does not claim to be an exhaustive history of the spa in Britain. Rather, it is a counterbalance to existing historiography that tends to present the spa as a healing, restorative, place with a straightforward chronology. Vasset’s Conclusion embraces the messiness of the spa, noting that ‘spa towns are, in many ways, un-chronological’, places where ‘time is not linear but cyclical, seasonal, ephemeral’ (p. 253). Murky Waters makes a convincing and fascinating case for the spa as an ambivalent, contradictory, space that melded nostalgia and bucolic landscapes with subversive potential: a venue for gossip, sexual experimentation, and forging new and radical political alliances.