“Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?” Catherine Morland asks in Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” (1817). And who indeed could ever be tired of the Royal Crescent (completed 1775), John ...

This runs concurrently with a more satirical impulse, the kind lampooned in Catherine Morland’s enthusiasms in Northanger Abbey or Ada Doom’s unseen “something nasty in the woodshed” in the sublime ...