Unbuilt Bath: The city as it might have been
Timothy Mowl and Julian Orbach
(Stephen Morris, £20)
IN his epistolary novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Tobias Smollett, has the comically hypochondriac and irascible—but gradually mellowing—figure of Matthew Bramble, a country squire, comment on the recent architectural improvements to Bath. Writing to his friend and doctor, he finds much to criticise in the city since his last visit. After observing that the form of the Circus must distort the geometry of the rooms within the constituent houses, he goes on to comment incredulously that ‘the same artist who planned the Circus, has likewise projected a Crescent; when that is finished, we shall probably have a Star; and those who are living 30 years hence, may, perhaps, see all the signs of the Zodiac exhibited in architecture at Bath’.
Smollett is here playing a joke on his readers because he was a close friend of John Wood the Elder, the figure
