Poetry: The New Bath Guide

Overview
Christopher Anstey’s The New Bath Guide (1766), subtitled “Memoirs of the B, n, r, d Family,” is a light-footed verse satire that maps the rituals, impostures, and pleasures of Georgian Bath. Written as a series of epistolary poems in a buoyant anapaestic meter, it follows a country family’s first season at England’s fashionable spa, using their letters home to skewer the city’s cult of health and its intricate social choreography. The poem became a sensation for its deft blend of travelogue, social comedy, and mock-heroic style, and it helped cement Bath’s image as the stage on which provincial naiveté meets metropolitan polish.

Epistolary Design and Voices
Each letter adopts the idiom of a different family member, giving the reader a prism of perspectives. The father takes a sober, earnest tone, convinced that the mineral waters will restore vigor and propriety. The mother clucks over remedies and reputations, her language dotted with fashionable expressions and mild malapropisms. The daughter writes in a sprightly, flirtatious voice, alive to the thrill of assemblies, new gowns, and strategic introductions. The son is exuberant and credulous, plunging into every novelty, bathing, gaming, card parties, and dubious friendships, with equal enthusiasm. Their distinct voices generate comedy and pathos while exposing the varied motives that draw people to Bath.

Bath As Social Theatre
The Guide sketches a full day’s cycle of Bath life. Mornings begin at the Pump Room, where arrivals are announced, waters are sipped with a brave face, and the day’s plans are hatched. Visits to the baths themselves produce a running joke: the sulphurous steam, the communal awkwardness of immersion, and the medical jargon of physicians and quacks who prescribe, contradict, and profit with equal confidence. Afternoons spill into promenades along the Parades and across the river to pleasure gardens, while evenings climax in assemblies where a master of ceremonies orders minuets and country dances, orchestrates introductions, and enforces the fragile etiquette of precedence. Gaming tables buzz, flirtations spark and sputter, and reputations turn on a glance, a partner, or a whisper.

Satire of Cure and Fashion
Anstey delights in the paradox that cure-seekers often come for anything but cure. The waters are simultaneously marvel and emetic; their virtues are extolled even as drinkers wince and joke. The city’s medical marketplace, a bustle of doctors, apothecaries, baths, and regimens, is mirrored by a marketplace of manners, where fashionable illnesses, spiritual fads, and sentimental poses are adopted as readily as new caps and ribbons. The son’s susceptibility to gaming sharpers and coquettes, the mother’s credulity before lofty prescriptions and lofty names, and the daughter’s tactful negotiation of dances and suitors all illustrate how Bath turns health, leisure, and courtship into public performance.

Form, Tone, and Technique
The poem’s anapaestic swing is crucial to its charm. The sprightly measure carries gossip, catalogues of entertainments, and bursts of mock-heroic elevation, transforming a dip in the Cross Bath or a minuet in the Rooms into miniature epics. Anstey’s quick shifts of register, playful rhymes, and eye for topical detail make the city’s vocabulary and choreography vivid without pedantry. The epistolary frame grants immediacy and variety while letting irony accrue as different letters contradict or unwittingly reveal more than they intend.

Arc and Aftertaste
There is no tragic unmasking; the family survives its season with purses thinned, eyes widened, and self-importance gently punctured. The father regains a pragmatic sense of proportion, the mother adjusts her zeal for cures to the limits of credulity, the daughter acquires social poise, and the son learns, if only for the moment, the costs of being perpetually game. The city remains what the poem has made it: a gleaming machine of politeness, pleasure, and pretense. By turning Bath into a comic microcosm of eighteenth-century sociability, Anstey offers a guide that is less a directory of streets and more a map of vanities, capturing the rhythms, temptations, and provisional charms of a world built around the promise that health and happiness might be had by subscription.