Wood lived and worked within a specific culture, and there is a question as to the degree to which his interpretations of history and his artistic intentions were understood within that culture. Some have chosen to see Wood as utterly eccentric and, by implication, isolated in his ideas.24I do not agree with this interpretation, the popularity of the Description of Bath alone seems to argue the contrary. It was certainly Wood’s intention to make a parallel between the ancient city of Bath and its contemporary manifestations and it would seem strange that he be totally isolated in this. The Description of Bath is divided into two books, rather in the manner of the Bible, one devoted to ancient history, one to the contemporary city. There are repeated inferred parallels between the account of antiquity and the description of the contemporary city and its inhab-itants. The first book of the Description reconciles the Bladud myth with Old Testament and classical sources, it then describes Bath in Roman times, skips through subsequent invasions and occupations, celebrates the Reformation and ends with the inauguration of Beau Nash as the new ‘Titular King’ of Bath.
To refer to Nash as the King or ‘Little King’ of Bath was a commonplace. The second book of the Description proceeds chronologically from the point of
The emblematic city
Nash’s inauguration and describes the contemporary city, its laws, habits, customs and of course its architecture, which is principally Wood’s architecture.
The first book, then, is devoted to the ancient history and founding of the city and revolves around the story of King Bladud. The second book describes the city renewed, expanded and re-founded under its new ‘Titular King’, Beau Nash.
Wood thus saw his work as a re-foundation of the city of Bath in terms of its primitive origins. The implicit identification of Nash with King Bladud is clear and can be found in references as late as the early nineteenth century.
I have shown above how Wood uses emblematic interpretation to rationalize some of Bladud/Abaris’s reputed magical attributes; but Wood seems to have had difficulty in finding a hidden emblematic meaning in Bladud’s reputed practice of necromantic divination that would allow him to furnish the reader with an explanation of his conjuring, both rational and suitably princely. Here he falls back on the explanation that Bladud and the Druids did indeed engage in supposed conjuring, but that this was in truth nothing but trickery and illusion, the aim being to enslave the credulous population of unsuspecting good-hearted Britons and bring them around to the Persian Magian religion. This rings a strange note in the biography of the founding hero.
Elsewhere Bladud/Abaris is given a glowing character reference by Wood that he has taken from the Roman Orator Himerius writing on Abaris:
[Bladud/Abaris] was affable and pleasant in Conversation, in dispatching great Affairs secret and industrious, quick sighted in present Exigencies, in preventing future Dangers circumspect, a searcher after wisdom, desirous of friendship, trusting indeed little to Fortune, and having every thing trusted to him for his Prudence.25 These are just the sort of qualities that you might want in a founding hero, or indeed in a master of ceremonies. What you presumably do not want is a trickster involved in dubious charlatanry and manipulative conjuring tricks. However, Wood’s overriding intention, it seems to me, is to maintain a strong connection between the ancient British founders of Bath and its contemporary inhabitants. To endow Bladud with prophetic gifts would place him outside Wood’s particular Christian understanding, an understanding into which we gain some insight through the pages of his Origin of Building, an understanding in which the gifts of the spirit, that is, prophecy, healing and speaking in tongues, are confined to scriptural accounts. Presumption of heathen prophetic utterance was, I would suggest, as unthinkable to Wood as credence given to claims of prophetic utter-ance among his contemporaries. Therefore, there was no alternative for him but to interpret Bladud’s prophetic and conjuring powers as tricks. For Wood the inhabitants of Bath ancient and modern were rational, sober, learned and cultured, and not given to enthusiastic outbursts. Both were players in the sacred
Jo Odgers
drama of Christian redemptive world history. The Woods’ architectural projects in the city are conceived as a backdrop to this drama, a return to the sacred origin of architecture and to the mythic foundation of the ancient British past.
Notes
1 Wood, John, The Origin of Building; or, the Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected, J. Leake: Bath, 1741.
2 J. Wood, A Description of Bath, Bath: Kingsmead Reprints, 1965. This is a facsimile of the 3rd edn, Bath: J. Leake, 1765.
3 C. E. Brownell, ‘John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger: Architects of Bath’, unpub-lished doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 1976. T. Mowl and B. Earnshaw, John Wood, Archi-tect of Obsession, Bath: Millstream Books, 1988.
4 See drawing and explanatory note in Bath Reference Library, MSS, Wood, Origin of Building. See also J. Wood, Choir Gaure, Vulgarly Called Stonehenge, Oxford: The Theatre, 1747, p. 52.
5 V. Hart, ‘John Wood, Stonehenge and Palladianism: or Whose Renaissance is it Anyway?’, Scroope, Cambridge Architecture Journal 1992, 4. R. S Neale, ‘Bath: Ideology and Utopia 1700–
1760’ in The Eighteenth Century Town, A Reader in English Urban History 1688–1820, P. Borsay (ed.), London: Longman, 1990.
6 C. Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982. V. Hart, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts, London:
Routledge, 1994.
7 See Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, New York and London:
Routledge, 1979, pp. 34–5.
8 Wood, Origin, Closing lines.
9 ‘Britaines Monarchie’. Lyte pedigree. 1605. BL Add Ms 59741.
10 Yates, The Occult Philosopy, particularly ch. 9 ‘Spencer’s Neo-Platonism’.
11 Wood, Description, pp. 35–9.
12 Isaac Newton, The Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended (Dublin 1728). See Isaac Newton, A Dissertation on the Sacred Cubit of the Jews, in John Greaves Misc. (Oxford 1737).
13 See Wood, Description, p. 40.
14 For Stantondrue, see Wood, Description, ch. 4, pp. 147–59. For Stonehenge, see John Wood, Choir Gaure.
15 Wood, Choir Gaure, p. 84.
16 Ibid., p. 87.
17 See Brownell, ‘John Wood’, Hart, ‘John Wood’, and John Summerson, ‘John Wood and the English Town Planning tradition’, in Heavenly Mansions, New York: Norton, 1963, pp. 87–110.
My observations on the Circus and Stonehenge are, in part, dependent on these authors.
18 Wood, Description, pp. 154–5.
19 See Hart, V., ‘John Wood’, p. 33.
20 Wood, Description, p. 156.
21 Wood, Choir Gaure, Brownell, ‘John Wood’ and Mowl and Earnshaw, John Wood, pp. 179–206.
22 Summerson, Heavenly Mansions.
23 Haycock, D. Boyd, William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in Eighteenth-Century England, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002.
24 See, for example, Mowl and Earnshaw, John Wood and Summerson, Heavenly Mansions.
25 Wood, Description, p. 38.
The emblematic city