London: 1753 by Sheila O’Connell

Abstract

90 and images cherished by some groups of people for others symbolize their own or a previous generation’s deprivation and hidden injuries of class. Mr. Borsay catalogues historical personages chosen and omitted from representations and retells quarrels over what elementsinBath’shistory to present and when. He describes how the organization of space in Bath works to separate, stigmatize, exclude, and elevate people. This book is a postmodern encyclopedia of almost all the sources of the historiography of Georgian Bath. We are shown how difficult it is to alter popular romance, guidebooks, and ‘‘common knowledge’’by accurate information gleaned from primary documents. Thus Mr. Borsay comes to think that Bath today is the product of the images through which people have experienced it. This study represents a missed opportunity and worthy project gone awry. Mr. Borsay’s earlier comprehensive study, The English Urban Renaissance, 1660– 1770, showsno doubt thataccuratescholarship is possible and can function usefully beyond the small circle of people who might read it through. The present ends by arguing that Georgian Bath’s ‘‘national heritage of beauty’’ has lasted because it ‘‘consoles’’ and ‘‘comforts’’ ‘‘people’’as an element in theiridentities, and that late twentieth-century uses of Bath exemplify how ‘‘people’’ ‘‘integrate the past with the present’’ in order to achieve ‘‘fundamental well-being.’’ Which people? In 1984 Orwell wrote ‘‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’’ At one point Mr. Borsay says ‘‘the past is a competitive business.’’The near future iseven more so. This book defends supposedly endangered objects and cultural ideals through a semiotic justification of picturesque nostalgia. A useful heritage study should be based on an unsentimental accuracy. Ellen Moody George Mason University SHEILA O’CONNELL. London: 1753. London: British Museum, 2003. Pp. 272. $47 (paper). This is the handsome and useful catalogue of an exhibition celebrating the 250th anniversary of the BritishMuseum, on display from May 23 to November 23, 2003. It contains 350 black-and-white illustrations , and thirty additional illustrations in color (the most charmingofthem, Carmontelle’s watercolor of Mozart, age eight, at the harpsichord), each accompanied by a cogent and informative commentary . The catalogue is prefaced by four essays. In ‘‘Curious and Entertaining—Prints of London and Londoners,’’ Sheila O’Connell tells her story through a wealth of artifacts, trade cards, and other materials. She surveys thethreedominant categories of the print trade (and of the age): topographical views, portraits, and satires. Her study nicelycomplementsthe most valuable of the book’s essays, ‘‘Art and Trade—From the Society of Arts to the Royal Academy of Arts,’’ Celina Fox’s discussion of the Society, founded in 1753 primarily to support the development of designers or artisans for London ’s burgeoning industries: ‘‘carvers, joiners, upholsterers, cabinet-makers, coach-makers and coach painters, sign painters, weavers, curious workers in all sorts of metals, smiths, makers of toys, engravers . . . .’’How this society evolved into the Royal Academy of Arts is told with clarity and precision. Ralph Hyde’s 91 essay on topographical print-making, ‘‘Portraying London Mid-Century— John Rocque and the Brothers Buck,’’ is more narrow but also useful. Finally, Roy Porter’s ‘‘The Wonderful Extent and Variety of London’’ sweeps over the whole of mid-century London in Mr. Porter’s usual dazzling manner,wherebymistakes in details are usually atoned for by the grandeur of the generalizations.Whoelse but Mr. Portercouldsupporthisstatement that during ‘‘the Georgian century the Church’s role in daily life in the city was on the wane’’ with the sole example of Hogarth’s Sleeping Congregation? The illustrations gathered for each geographical section—divided into The City; The River; Covent Garden and Bloomsbury; Westminster; St. James and Mayfair—are further subdivided by topics . ‘‘The City’’ has, among others, subsections on city politics, banking, coins, coin balance and weights, street criers, and a most useful group of illustrations (with explanations) pertaining to Elizabeth Canning, including a print of the floor plan of the house at Enfield Wash where she was a ‘‘prisoner.’’ All readers will discover things they did not know. One can discover why ‘‘bone china’’ has that name, why labor actions are called ‘‘strikes,’’who was the bald-headed colonel of the...