Whether crystal-clear or cloudy, intended for bathing or imbibing, mineral springs and spas have long fascinated Britons. Yet, as historian Sophie Vasset argues, scholars, satirists, and spa-goers alike have often made assumptions about eighteenth-century British spas which make these seminal spaces seem too pristine, even simple. Vasset primarily targets historians’ concentration on the “commercialization of leisure” (2), namely in Bath, as purifying waters, places, and peoples which were far muddier than previously appreciated.
As demonstrated by the book’s title, Vasset takes a jaundiced approach to the roughly 350 spas which dotted Britain during the eighteenth century. Vasset is especially keen to reassert “the centrality of sickness and care in spa towns” (2), which, in turn, allows us better to appreciate the complicated, often contradictory, conversations surrounding spas of every size and shape. From sickly spa-goers and their doting doctors to the cottage industries that sprang up around them, these widespread watering holes became “self-contained bubbles of health, nature and leisure … fertile grounds for fiction and satire, as well as theoretical systems of interpretation” (27–28). Rather than straightforward places of leisure and pleasure, then, spas served as problematic mirrors and magnifiers, healing sickly bodies (broadly construed) through an uncomfortable process of ingestion, order, and self-reflection.
Vasset employs five straightforward chapters—which she likens to the concentric circles produced by an object being dropped into a pool of water—to trace British spas’ broad impacts on self and society. Chapters 1 and 2 are perhaps the most important for the book’s purposes, clearly situating spa towns as essential resorts of cure and care. Vasset’s categorization of early modern diseases into four main groups—rheumatic, nervous, sex-related, and those of the skin and eyes—reflects her ability to translate complex, largely outdated notions of health and science into easily digestible consumables. From there, Vasset relies upon a more customary investigation of eighteenth-century Britons’ understanding of mineral waters as equal parts risky and remedial. Physicians flitted about spa towns, promising cures for innumerable ailments, but only under their proper guidance. As ever, rumors of quackery prevailed. This all made for a dangerous game, with three main hazards: mineral waters could damage the user’s body through second-hand effects; the waters might prove “expensive and inefficient at best, toxic at worst” (111); or the water could be of poor quality or even putrefied as a result of poor maintenance.
The final three chapters move away from literal health into more figurative forays of societal symbolism. Chapter 3 extends the metaphor of murkiness to gender roles, explaining how spa culture “disrupted” codes of gender and “became an imaginary locus for the representation of gender fluidity” (147). Nudity, bathing, and exercise—never mind the drama of the marriage market and the ever-present specter of prostitution, adultery, and the ignorant cuckold—fostered fine waters for sharp satire and cutting criticism. Questions of gender became a bellwether of popular spa fiction, as free-wheeling guests assumed the roles of the “female beaux” or the male “macaroni,” sexually charged identities based around image and imagination (147).
The next chapter shifts to political volatility. Vasset shows how contemporary popular literature presented an odd binary. On the one hand, freedom of speech, gossip, and sex seemed assured in spa towns. But, at the same time, powerful rules, protocols, and hierarchical traditions attempted to ascribe order to these ephemeral worlds of their own making. Yet again, spa towns are presented as microscopes and mirrors, spaces which “served as veritable spyglasses to observe the nation” and reflect upon “how the system of the town as a whole responded to competing political principles” (178), which ranged from national pride to women’s roles to the regulation of gentility.
Chapter 5, finally, pivots to the pocketbook, as so many Britons hoped to make an easy profit off these supposed spigots of wealth and health. Investment, speculation, and corruption ruled the backroom business of pump rooms and assembly halls, proving the ruin of many and the fortune of few. No matter these variable ventures, proprietors had to serve the privileged and poor alike, for while well-heeled customers tended to make a spa more fashionable and profitable, the rights of the commons meant that impoverished parishioners also had access to these otherwise exclusive waters.
Practically leaving no stone (or perhaps, more fittingly, spring) untouched, Vasset’s vibrant study proves a much-needed addition to the historical and literary conversations surrounding British mineral waters and spas. Her maps alone (10, 256–63) deserve immense praise, as they represent the most comprehensive survey of eighteenth-century Great Britain’s spas, springs, wells, and watering places to date. Vasset also integrates various popular literary voices and tropes into the analytical fold but manages to do so without centering Bath, that ever-looming colossus of eighteenth-century fiction, satire, and gossip. Yet, as in any study, Vasset misses certain opportunities for clarity and clarification. Her central thesis, for instance, sometimes becomes as murky as her book’s title, as “the ambivalence of diverse discourse on watering places” (34) occasionally clouds the importance of her critical threads. So too does Vasset’s concentration on sick bodies largely skirt the myriad mental and emotional ailments that Britons hoped to cure in their trips to the spa. Then, as now, health was a capricious concept that was more than skin deep.
Ultimately, while Vasset does not pursue “any kind of exhaustivity” (34) in this thoughtful and timely analysis, she gets close. Murky Waters reflects the culmination of over two centuries of historical and literary analysis, satire, and imagination surrounding Great Britain’s vast multitude of mineral springs and spas, and it is required reading for anyone interested in this ever-flowing topic.
