Introduction: Representing the Past

Abstract

Abstract The genesis of this book lies in the 1970s. It was then, as a postgraduate and new lecturer, that I was working on the history of eighteenth-century Bath, as part of a wider project investigating the development of fashionable culture in English provincial towns between 1660 and 1770. This resulted in the publication of The English Urban Renaissance (1989). The title was chosen to emphasize the dynamic nature of urban life in the post-Restoration years, after what some had argued to be an era of declining cultural prestige for provincial towns, and to stress the classical basis of the revival under way. Having completed a macro-study of this renaissance, it seemed natural to turn my attention to a micro-study of its most dazzling progeny, Georgian Bath. Yet what emerged, as I was drawn into the subject, was not an orthodox local history of the city from 1700 to 1830, but an exploration of the image of Georgian Bath between the early eighteenth century and the late twentieth century. This fundamental change in perspective derived from two impulses; a concern with the manner in which the past is remodelled, repackaged, and redeployed by each generation, and an interest in the process of representation. It is clear, at least in retrospect, that this shift in focus towards the way that the past is constructed and images of it created was a response on my part to the practical activity of making history, and doing so in the changing milieu of the final decades of the twentieth century.