"No city in Britain has a history like Bath's. Others have exploited their mineral waters ... and many have been holiday resorts. But none has ever been the country's alternative capital as Bath was for almost a hundred years, a place to which a large part of society came annually and just about everyone who was anybody visited at least once : from writers and artists such as Samuel Pepys, William Beckford, Thomas Gainsborough, Henry Fielding and Fanny Burney to actors and playwrights like Mrs. Siddons and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. James II's Queen to a bath in order to become pregnant ; lesser bathers hoped to cure gout or pox. Eventually most were found at the Pump Room, the heart of Bath's social scene. There over glasses of the celebrated mineral water, gossip was exchanged and duels or elopements arranged. Thomas Hinde describes the most curious, amusing and scandalous personalities and events with made this such a unique community in the eighteenth century and which still makes Bath such a popular city today."--back over.