Bathing in Verse: Christopher Anstey’s The New Bath Guide and Georgian Resort Satire

The New Bath Guide details the attempts made by the unfortunate Blunderhead family to adapt to the culture of Bath society. Through narrating the family’s mishaps, the poem offers a lively satiric exposé of the social rituals at Britain’s leading resort for bathing. Yet for all its fun at the expense of Bath, Regan argues that the poem also conveys the resort’s many attractions. The chapter considers Anstey’s anapaestic depiction of Bath in terms of its influence on resort-focused verse into the early decades of the nineteenth century. In order to grasp the full significance of the Guide, it is necessary to recognise the degree to which both Anstey and his imitators diverged from a satiric register that cast water-based resorts as iniquitous spaces of immorality and ill-health.