Beau Death

A Note on Sources

Oliver Goldsmith’s Life of Richard Nash, of Bath, Esq (1762), written a year after Nash’s death, with the advantage of access to Nash’s own fragments of autobiography, remains a fascinating work that can be read online. The other biographies consulted by the present author were Bath under Beau Nash, by Lewis Melville (Lewis S. Benjamin) (Eveleigh Nash, 1907); Beau Nash: Monarch of Bath and Tunbridge Wells, by Willard Connely (Werner Laurie, 1955); Splendour and Scandal: the Reign of Beau Nash, by John Walters (Jarrolds, 1968); and The Imaginary Autocrat: Beau Nash and the Invention of Bath, by John Eglin (Profile Books, 2005). Nash’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was first written by Thomas Seccombe in 1894. The latest online version is by Philip Carter in 2009.

Of the sources mentioned in passing, the contemporary account of Nash’s funeral was in the Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, 21 February 1761. The notice of Juliana Papjoy’s death and strange living arrangements is in the Annual Register for March, 1777. George Scott’s correspondence of 1761 concerning the formidable Mrs. Hill is discussed in Eglin’s book and is held at the British Library in the Egerton collection. The details of Dr. Walsh’s participation in the 1909 Bath Pageant can be found in The Year of the Pageant, by Andrew Swift and Kirsten Elliott (Akeman Press, 2009).

It only remains to be said that the Beau Nash Society and all its members, Widcombe Hall and the house at Charlcombe with the infinity pool were products of the author’s imagination.