Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790-1860

Abstract

Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at Virginia Springs, 1790-1860. By Charlene M. Boyer Lewis. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Pp. x, 293. Illustrations. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $19.50.) In Ladies and Gentlemen on Display, Charlene Boyer Lewis investigates medicinal and leisure travels to Virginia Springs resorts by southern gentlefolk from 1790s until eve of Civil War. Lewis's analysis derives from a capacious survey of sources related to organization of facilities and experiences of visitors. Private correspondence illuminates values espoused and rituals enacted by wealthy men and women who vacationed at Virginia Springs. Medical tracts chart evolution of expert and popular thinking about water therapy and health practices. Business papers and newspapers reveal efforts of proprietors to maintain successful establishments and attract wealthy patrons. Lewis juxtaposes her original research with expansive historiography on southern culture and concludes that springs provided southern elites with both a proving ground for refined gentility and a bulwark against changes sweeping antebellum society. If Lewis's evidence cannot support final assertion of book, that the southern elite was as much a product of Virginia Springs as of plantation (214), she persuasively argues that leisure lives of southern gentry were serious business. Part one of Lewis's book offers a survey of how Virginia Springs operated and particularly emphasizes English influences on resort architecture and landscape. Just as southern elites frequently emulated English genteel practices, Springs owners mimicked English buildings and parks as they constructed their resorts and groomed surrounding environment. The result was an assiduously crafted facade of refinement and beauty that belied drudgery required of white workers and slaves who catered to whims of wealthy visitors and then disappeared behind scenes. Lewis carries her discussion of racial and class tensions at resorts as far as scant evidence will allow her; unfortunately, available sources reveal little about underside of gentry leisure. Lewis largely abandons her analysis of linkages between England and American South as she begins part two of her book, which focuses on medicinal significance of Virginia Springs. Health experts in early American Republic were bound up in an Atlantic medical community, but Lewis seldom references such ties in her extensive discussion of evolution of medical thinking between late eighteenth and midnineteenth centuries. She does provide a captivating (and sometimes sordid) elucidation of water therapy and resort patrons' near-obsession with bodily functions. Lewis also carefully explains shift from curative to preventative treatments and increasing association between mental and physical health in mid-nineteenth century. She demonstrates that southern elites thought about trips to Virginia Springs not simply as efforts to cure ailments but rather as opportunities to foster health and happiness. Lewis's discussion of facilities and medicinal benefits of Virginia Springs lays background for heart of her work: social rituals of gentry visitors. In part three, which takes up more than half of book, Lewis turns her attention to wealthy patrons of these establishments and their efforts to learn and showcase rituals of gentility at these resorts. …