Bath as Spa and Bath as Slum: The Social History of a Victorian City (review)

For much of the twentieth century Victorian Bath received relatively little attention from historians. This reflected not only the unfashionable character of Victorian culture in general during the first half of the century, but also in Bath's case a dominant view of the city's history that celebrated its classical Roman and Georgian pasts. In the latter decades of the century, however, a number of historians sought to reintegrate the nineteenth century into Bath's history. Among these, Graham Davis is a key figure, and his research has appeared in a variety of publications, including co-authored general histories of the city. But the present monograph affords us the fullest account of his specialist research.

The geographical centre of Davis's study is Avon Street, a particular location in Bath that began life in the first half of the eighteenth century as a fashionably built, relatively well-off thoroughfare, located just outside the Westgate and running down to the Quay. It may not have had the grandeur of Queen Square, but it was a good deal more modish than some of the narrow medieval streets in the old city. Over time, however, matters deteriorated as the focus of Bath's life shifted away from the walled town and spa waters towards the grand residential crescents and terraces to the north and east. Already by the 1780s Avon Street was known as the spa's red-light district, and from the 1820s it was demonized as a classic slum. A counterpoise to the genteel image of the spa constructed in the guide books to "camouflage" the extent of industrial development and appeal to an increasingly residential market of well-off migrants (16), Avon Street was also used as a "pawn" in the struggles between local political parties and factions (110).

Making particular use of census material, Davis forensically examines the gap between the street's image and its reality—one that may have widened in the late nineteenth century—to demonstrate that Avon Street, though poor, was far from the repository of an undifferentiated and brutalized underclass its detractors portrayed. These arguments occupy the first part of the book. The second part examines public health: the gap between the "rhetoric" of a health resort and the reality of its inadequate sanitary provisions (20), especially for the poorer areas; the key role played by the city's Medical Officers for Health in promoting reform, despite the inherent ambivalence of their office; and the intensely political character of public health issues, evinced particularly in the struggle to introduce an effective municipal water supply that served all areas of the city.

There is much to admire in Davis's monograph. The intensive analysis of the primary sources, with extensive quotations and a wide range of tables reproduced, is an undoubted plus. This will allow comparisons with other towns, something that Davis himself undertakes as he seeks to demonstrate, contrary to received views, that Bath was in many respects a typical Victorian city. His emphasis upon the role of image and its manipulation for commercial and political ends is welcome, as is his reconstruction of the vital but convoluted world of late-Victorian city politics, refining what now seems the overly simplistic—though pioneering—research of Ron Neale's Bath: A Social History 1680-1850. Davis's monograph adds a great deal to our understanding of Victorian Bath. It also, however, raises a number of issues. It is difficult to argue that it constitutes a comprehensive social history of Victorian Bath, if only because the lives of the well-off residents and visitors, and the people they employed, are largely ignored.

And although there is much on water supply, in truth there is not a great deal on the spa as such, particularly its late-nineteenth-century revival. The book is effectively two case studies: one on Avon Street...