There is no city in which a barbarian could feel less at home than Bath. It is not even a city in which a civilized gentleman can feel quite at home. This is a city built for ladies of the Old School . . . woman comfortable, even slightly superior in simply being ladies.
Bath is most famously, home of waters which smell and taste like medicine, half the hope in even modern cures I think, and invite you for a good wallow. Elaborate wallowing holes were built here in Roman times and Bath has had several periods of prominence.
Of course, there are two competing images of historical Bath. One is decadent watering hole for the elite from Roman to Georgian times. Sin happened here . . . even if it happened elegantly. 
It is important for conservatives tempted to worship the past to recall this lest we grow discouraged with our own age. There is no Golden Age to which we can return, at least none since the Fall. What we love about the past is that the evils of it tend to die out in our memory. They are so insubstantial and silly that it is hard to believe in them after a few hundred years. Who remembers the back stabbing gossips of the late seventeenth century who gave up their honor for social standing? Who remembers the men sneaking off to clubs to drink too much, gamble away a fortune, and betray their better selves?
If we remember them at all, it is as figures of fun, absurd to us, or as tawdry counter-points to Austen heroes.
Of course there are greater evils, on thinks of slavery in the U.S. or the concentration camps or the Gulag, which never die in our memory. What does happen is that their defenders grow old trying to defend them and die out. Eventually everyone acknowledges their great stain on human history. If most human sin is silly, they are the sorry occasion when we rose to the level of Devils. Thank God, Bath never knew such horror in the Christian era. The mercy of the loss of history protects us from the horrors done in the name of Druids and pagan Roman gods.
Jane Austen was here and it is an important lesson that the sin has all burned up with time, but her elegant and Christian values, and books, remain. Bath is drunk on Jane Austen and she is a booming industry.
Is Jane Austen the perfect antidote to post-modernism? Jane Austen is not afraid of moral judgments. She is Christian, fierce against sin, but also pities human weakness. She is merciful without being intellectually flabby.
Like all traditional Christians, Austen believes in love and its power to heal the heart and a culture. Is it any wonder that Hollywood cannot stop remaking her books? In a time when nobody can fall in love forever and when women have been turned into objects to market, a time when women were the “objects” of love seems much saner.
Our college women may not be able to believe in love for them, but they can believe in it in the seventeenth century. Throw in a little p.c. eyewash for the feminists in the studio and making an Austen book is the closest thing most studios can get to make the sort of movie many young women want to see. (Boy meets girl. Boy romances, but does not seduce girl. A girl holds out due to some misunderstanding, but boy and girl get married in the end. They live pretty happily ever after.)
Her writing is lean in a way Victorian writing is not, which is good for the limited vocabularies of our time. Her plots are very controlled with strong central characters and supporting casts that are not too large for modern tastes. Her books do not set up problems that are too difficult and the resolutions are always pleasing, but characters learn as they grow to their “happily ever after.” She is critical of her characters and lovingly critical of her culture as she writes.
In short, Austen is a progressive conservative. She wants to change some things about her times, but she also sees much good in her culture. Revolution, the disease of her time, has no appeal for her. You can look in vain for any kind word for those who would stir things up. Austen saw the folly long before history made Voltaire look foolish.
You can still experience a bit of Austen’s world in Bath . . . for a price. Hope, the Fairest Flower in all of Christendom, took a group of ladies to tea in Bath. 
There they did what ladies do. . . enjoy space without men. They did not discuss hats and children. For all I know they discussed geo-politics and children, but they did so without men around. Blessed thought! The men went and did what men will do when alone. . . and each got a small break from the constant martyrdom of the Other.
Once when I was a feminist I found myself in the odd position of refusing to acknowledge this basic truth with a wife who demanded I do so. I did not want to lead. She used her freedom to demand that I lead. I did not want to have “guy space,” but she demanded room for women’s teas, book clubs, and the Alter Guild. In short, she refused to give in to modernity. It was all very irritating and like a fool I did not appreciate the courage.
She taught me better when I saw that, at least for Hope, she had the goal of reviving the Woman’s World that the fifties had reduced to “house cleaning” and feminism could only associate with slavery. The world of clubs and culture, of powerfully cool women was her world. It had been destroyed before her birth, but she was, and is, determined to revive it. There will be room in it for Dorothy Sayers, Victoria, Joan of Arc, home school moms, and all the working women who want to work as women and not as men.
I came to understand the monarchial idea of married life . . . I was head of our family by the grace of God and through no particular merit, just as Prince Charles will someday be King because of birth and not because he deserves it. Just as my children do not deserve their mother, or their father in a different sense (!), so I do not deserve my job as spiritual head of the house. I rule, because someone must if we are to have the children any culture needs, but I do so in fear and trembling.
Just as the King knows that he is, by all odds, the most foolish man in his own cabinet meetings so a wise man knows how to value his wife. Our functional inequality (each superior in his or her own sphere) does not mask our ontological equality. . . and each exercises his or her unique role with fear and trembling.
Bath reminds me of all of that with its stubborn refusal to forget the Old Ways. It knew sin and has seen sin vanish. It knew gentility and has seen that gentility does not vanish, that it is made of tough stuff proof against Cromwell, Georgian sin, and Nazis. It still allows for pockets of quiet mannerly ladies.
Even the food in Bath makes this progressive conservative lesson.
The Bath Bun is a strange thing to modern tastes. At first, to taste buds used to McDonalds injected fat hype, they seem tasteless. Chew them, itself a lost art, and a wonderful yeast flavor begins to fill the mouth. Put a small amount of cream or jam on them . . . very small since you don’t just want the flavor of the jam (at least if you are a grown up!) and you have reached a subtle taste bud heaven.
French food is better than English, if you demand that your food shout its goodness to you. English food is better (at its best) for homely, solid, goodness. If it is true that a nation is like its food, then the Bath Bun proves that there was something sweet, but subtle, about eighteenth century England . . . but substantial since a Bath Bun is just bread after all. Napoleon should have known better than to attack a nation whose idea of a treat was jam and bread. There is a nation with staying power.
It does make one wonder if a country with fried Snickers bars can out last the Islamic terrorists, who for all I know still eat locusts and wild honey.
Of course, only an idiot, a useful idiot to feminists but still an idiot, would confuse the idea of being a lady with love of tea, Bath Buns, and the culture of Jane Austen. Lots of ladies do love such things, particularly as they are part of one of the last eras when women were allowed their own world (as were men) and the two were not forced to share space . . . even when they do not want to do so.
Lots of ladies have no such taste. They are still ladies, but made of other stuff.
Anyone with West Virginia roots knows his great-grandmother may not have been a Bath Bun lady. She could kill rattle snakes with a hoe, use same (the hoe not the rattlesnake) to weed the vegetables, and then paint the back porch before putting on her best dress and going to prayer meeting. But then a sneaking suspicion comes in, what if she then sat and had Bath Buns (or their West Virginia equivalent) with the other farmwomen?
Weren’t those Austen ladies dealing with tougher daily lives than almost anyone in our soft age? Imagine a carriage ride from Bath to London, the lack of most modern comforts, and the pain from bad teeth. Perhaps, there is space for all kinds of ladies at my Austen tea.
There is something faintly absurd in our culture, which forgets that even these strong women were happy to defer to the protection of their even stronger husbands. We are so used to the computer generated fight scenes in movies where ninety-pound humans can generate the force to take down three hundred pound humans that we have forgotten physics.
It is true that however inept at it I would be, and I would be very inept, I am still more capable of physically defending Hope than she is of defending me. Size does matter after all.
Of course, romance and the difference between genders is all a product of Christianity. Druids and Romans simply let the physically strong rule and forgot any notion of equality. Christianity tamed the gender wars, at least a bit, by giving each an important role. She forced men and women together and did not allow either to exploit the other (at least not for long), but also gave us all a break in allowing for different spaces.
There was always the blessed sanctity of the cloister for both if they wished to be alone with the greater Other!
The Christianity of Bath remains as the great Church in the center of town is a living place . . . something about which the man who gave us a tour for which we did not have to pay was quite pleased to point out. 
He was one of those utter heroes of the World War II generation or the generation right after it whose minds are still shaped by that conflict and the education of those days.
I trust those men and I trust his wife. This only I have against them: they raised my generation. They forgot I think that the lessons of their own town are hardy and will endure any assault, but that one given generation can ignore them for a time and be harmed. They assumed that we would be civilized and left too much to our own choosing. We botched it, as you might expect.
Of course, our grandchildren are likely to view us with horror. (”Look at the things grandmother wore! But we must be tolerant of the old dear, it was a horrid age.” said the daughter in the frock to her teen age child about pictures of grandmother in Vegas.) That does not excuse the Greatest Generation, but does say that their saving us from the Nazis will last and their allowing for the Culture of the Beatles will not.
One could tell by the ads that Bath is trying to change its image and once again become the watering hold for the elite and decadent. Good luck to them. I cannot imagine it working, but if it does of this I am sure. Bath will have some sort of genteel Vegas holiday, but then the values of Christ, of Austen, of the World War II generation will reassert themselves when the playboys have burned themselves up. I imagine that someday Vegas itself will someday keep a few historic casino’s open as wide eyed Christian or Mormon tourists are regaled by the stories of the bad old days. Sin just has no staying power in a culture in general. . . though sadly each of us can testify to its power in the particular.
Here is hoping Bath remains in the hands of the ladies and the gentleman who love them in the short term. The yellow stone, the country, and the God created waters, will deliver it back to them in the end in any case. In the meanwhile, go have a Bath bun and show your sense and sensibility.