With the exception of novels like Smollett's Humphry Clinker (1771) and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey  and Persuasion, most literary texts about Bath are hard to find.  Stored away in library rare book rooms where scholars alone can find them, they remain safe from dust and humidity, but hidden from readers who could enjoy them and learn about another time, in all its complexity.  It is my hope that this site will grow to include many texts, and that it will provide links to images and information that will begin to place them in context.  There's nothing like holding a book from the eighteenth century in your hands, and this web site will not replace that experience; but twentieth-century technology can allow us to bring together resources that these writers would be glad for us to have.

- Mary Chandler, "The Description of Bath" (1734)
 
          - Anon, "The Diseases of Bath:  A Satire" (1737),
           with an Introduction, Notes and an Annotated Bibliography
            by Robert Lassandrello.

          - Anon, "Poetical Epistles to the Author of The New Bath Guide" (1767),
            with an Introduction, Notes, and an Annotated Bibliography by Greg Hill.

          - [Christopher Anstey], "Liberality, or The Decayed Macaroni,
            A Sentimental Piece" [1790?], with an Introduction, Notes  and an
            Annotated Bibliography by Robin LeCombe Secco.