SOCIETY AT ROYAL TUNBRIDGE WELLS - Online Book

In The Eighteenth Century - and After
Illustrated From Rare Prints & Portraits In The Collection Of A. M. Broadley
By Lewis Melville Published By Eveleigh Nash. Circa 1912

A lthough Tunbridge Wells is, with the exception of Bath, the oldest watering-place in the kingdom, and was for a century second in importance as a spa only to the Somerset­shire city, no great mass of literature has arisen around it. Innumerable books have been written on Bath, many volumes have been devoted to Brighton : only two authors have written the history of " The Wells," Thomas Benge Burr, in 1766, and Paul Amsinck, some­time Master of the Ceremonies there, in 1810. These works are now scarce, and, further, it cannot be said that either has any great claim to consideration, for the account of the place is not by any means complete, and more than half the space is devoted to mansions, some of which are not in the immediate neighbourhood. The field, therefore, may fairly be considered clear for a twentieth-century writer, who, whatever his failings may be, has at least the advantage of presenting to the reader information as to the place and to the company that resorted there. It has been my object to bring together all the information that can be gleaned about " Tunbridge Wells," and, in the furtherance of this project, I have not hesitated freely to use contemporary descriptions of the place and of the company.

In order to use the same page numbers in the book for the text I have had to move all the full page illustrations to the begining of the book.