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Vauxhall Revisited: The Afterlife of a London Pleasure Garden, 1770–1859

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Abstract

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Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2006

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References

1 Blanchard, Laman, ed., George Cruikshank's Omnibus (London, 1869), 172Google Scholar.

2 Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997), 67Google Scholar.

3 Wroth, Warwick's The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1896)Google Scholar and his Cremorne and the Later London Gardens (London, 1907)Google Scholar remain the best studies. Although the debt owed to Wroth (1858–1911) by any scholar of the Gardens is obvious, his histories offer little in the way of analysis. The same can be said of highly derivative later works by other authors: Southworth, James Granville's Vauxhall Gardens: A Chapter in the Social History of England (New York, 1941)Google Scholar and Scott, Walter Sidney's Green Retreats: The Story of Vauxhall Gardens, 1661–1859 (London, 1951)Google Scholar. Edelstein, T. J.'s short exhibition catalogue, Vauxhall Gardens (New Haven, CT, 1983)Google Scholar, is excellent, but does not consider the nineteenth century.

4 Porter, Roy, London: A Social History (London, 1994), 289Google Scholar; Altick, Richard D., The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 320Google Scholar. Altick offers a wealth of detail on the personnel and programming of other London venues, but very little analysis of the social or gender makeup of audiences. As with Wroth's earlier accounts of London's pleasure gardens, little explanation is offered for changes in the content of such entertainments, apart from a desire for novelty.

5 The word is used here in the same sense as that used by de Bolla, Peter in his article entitled “The Visibility of Visuality: Vauxhall Gardens and the Siting of the Viewer,” in Vision and Textuality, ed. Meville, Stephen and Readings, Bill (Basingstoke, 1995)Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., 294.

7 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Shaftesbury, Lord, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Klein, Lawrence E. (Cambridge, 1990), 31Google Scholar.

8 Réponse d’un artiste a un homme de lettres qui lui avoit écrit sur les Waux-halls (Amsterdam, 1769), 1011Google Scholar; Le Rouge, , Description du Colisée (Paris, 1771)Google Scholar; Coyer, Abbé, Nouvelles observations sur l’Angleterre (Paris, 1774), 109–10Google Scholar; Goodman, John, “‘Altar against Altar’: The Colisée, Vauxhall Utopianism and Symbolic Politics in Paris (1769–1777),” Art History 15, no. 4 (1992): 434–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The Warwick Wroth Collection, comprising four large scrapbooks held in the Museum of London Library, is the richest collection. Other repositories, however, have single-volume scrapbooks or miscellanies: Jacob Henry Burn, “Historical Collections Relative to Spring Garden at Charing Cross … and to Spring Garden, Lambeth … Since Called Vauxhall Gardens,” British Library, Cup.401.k.7; Oxford, Bodleian Library, G.A. Surrey c. 21–25; “Vauxhall Miscellany,” Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT. Sadly, identifying the precise date and source for the many newspaper and other clippings in these scrapbooks is difficult. Although the year is almost always recorded, the source and precise date are often not given.

10 Cunningham, Hugh, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1980), 95Google Scholar.

11 Wahrman, Dror, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, 2004)Google Scholar; Roberts, M. J. D., Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a useful discussion of literature on gender, see Vickery, Amanda, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History,” Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383414CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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13 Hodgkinson, Terence, “Handel at Vauxhall,” Victoria and Albert Bulletin 1, no. 4 (October 1965): 113Google Scholar.

14 Gowing, Lawrence, “Hogarth, Hayman, and the Vauxhall Decorations,” Burlington Magazine 95, no. 598 (January 1953): 417Google Scholar; Solkin, Painting for Money, 190–99.

15 , G. F. P., Vauxhall Gardens Past and Present (London, 1849), 34Google Scholar.

16 “Vauxhall,” source of clipping unidentified, Museum of London (Wroth Collection), Vauxhall Scrapbook (hereafter cited as WWC), 3:38.

17 Oxford, Bodleian Library, G.A. Surrey, c. 23, 35.

18 From The Citizen of the World, 71. Friedman, Arthur, ed., The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1966), 2:296Google Scholar.

19 Fielding, Henry, Amelia, ed. Battestin, Martin C. (Oxford, 1983), 395Google Scholar.

20 Burney, Fanny, Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, ed. Cooke, Stewart J. (New York, 1998), 162Google Scholar.

21 See the clipping of ca. 1769 in WWC 3:6.

22 Cited in Ogborn, Miles, The Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York, 1998), 137Google Scholar. See also Breward, Christopher, “Masculine Pleasures: Metropolitan Identities and the Commercial Sites of Dandyism, 1790–1840,” London Journal 28, no. 1 (2003): 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Oxford, Bodleian Library, G.A. Surrey, c. 21, fol. 161.

24 Egan, Pierce, Life in London (London, 1821), 338Google Scholar.

25 “A Swell out of luck!!!” print, 837/0/12, Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT. Nead, Lynda, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT, 2000), 132Google Scholar.

26 Even in the cant-ridden, “fast” world of Pierce Egan, one must admit that the swashbuckling male heroes have very little presence. The only characters that step off the page in The Pilgrims of the Thames are Penelope (a “questionable female” they meet in Vauxhall) and the match girl Charlotte, whose life story is interpolated among the otherwise wearisome antics of three heroes. Egan, , The Pilgrims of the Thames, in Search of the National! (London, 1838), 246Google Scholar.

27 Carter, Philip, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society in Britain, 1660–1800 (London, 2001), 137Google Scholar; Breward, “Masculine Pleasures,” 70–71. For the shift from politeness to chivalry, see the essays in the Journal of British Studies, vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2005)Google Scholar, especially Michèle Cohen, “‘Manners’ Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830,” 312–29.

28 The Times, 27 June 1804.

29 WWC 3:68.

30 The Examiner 291 (25 July 1813): 466.

31 Clipping dated 22 August 1819, WWC 3:84.

32 The year 1821 was an important caesura in management terms, as the Gardens finally passed out of the Tyers family. The great Jonathan Tyers had been succeeded by his son, and then in turn by his son-in-law, Bryan Barrett, whose elder son George sold up in 1821 for £30,000.

33 Vizetelly, Henry, Glances Back Through Seventy Years, 2 vols. (London, 1893), 1:20Google Scholar.

34 Letter of 12 July 1827. “A German Prince” [Hermann, Fürst von Pückler-Muskau], in Tour in England, Ireland, and France (Philadelphia, 1833), 157Google Scholar.

35 For Professor Keller, see Altick, The Shows of London, 345–46.

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37 The New Picture of London, Being a Complete Guide and Hand-book (London, ca. 1840), 113Google Scholar.

38 For examples of their rhetoric, see the evidence presented to the Select Committee on the Observance of the Sabbath Day (Parliamentary Papers [1831–32], vol. 7).

39 Roberts, Making English Morals, 118.

40 The Times, 9 October 1827.

41 WWC 3:102.

42 Egan, Life in London, 336.

43 See the comment appended to the letter of “Laicus,” The Times, 8 June 1837. See also the response to the letter of “Civis,” The Times, 20 July 1830.

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46 Ibid., 55.

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48 In addition to Bunn, these included Robert Wardell (1845–54), Edward Tyrrel Smith (1855), and Robert Duffell (1858). Smith later leased Cremorne Gardens, the much less venerable pleasure garden that operated on a site north of the river from 1846 until 1877. For Cremorne, see Nead, Victorian Babylon, 109–38.

49 Poster, 30 August 1841, Oxford, Bodleian Library, G.A. Surrey c. 25, fol. 45.

50 Vizetelly, Glances Back, 1:208.

51 “Vauxhall Gardens,” The Times, 7 July 1842.

52 For an account of one of these spectacles, see Schlesinger, Max, Saunterings In and About London, trans. Wenckstern, Otto (London, 1853), 40Google Scholar.

53 Altick, The Shows of London, 323–31.

54 See “Punch at Vauxhall,” Punch, 12 July 1845, 30.

55 The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 446 (14 August 1830): 5Google Scholar.

56 For an example, see Cruikshank's “Scene at Vauxhall” in the second volume of Thomas Roscoe's 1832 “Novelist's Library” edition of Fielding's Amelia.

57 For a rare complete run of Vauxhall Papers, see WWC 1:40. This quotation is from the first number, dated 19 July 1941. The Vauxhall Papers had a predecessor in the Spring Garden Journal published ca. 1770. Sadly, no issues of this periodical survive. Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, 123.

58 Vizetelly, Glances Back, 1:206–7.

59 Mandler, Peter, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven, CT, 1997), 38Google Scholar.

60 For the stage version, see T. P. Taylor, The Miser's Daughter. A Drama, in Three Acts (London, n.d.).

61 Ainsworth, William Harrison, The Miser's Daughter, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London, 1843), 2:215Google Scholar.

62 Ibid., 2:257.

63 For these episodes, see ibid., 2:99–119, 206–44, 257–75.

64 For Cruishank's three engravings of pleasure gardens, see ibid., 2:118 (“Mr Cripps Encountering his Master in Mary-le-bone Gardens”), 230 (“The Masquerade in Ranelagh Gardens”), 262 (“The Supper at Vauxhall”).

65 Walford, Edward, Old and New London: a Narrative of its History, its People, and its Places, 6 vols. (London, 1873–75), 6:466Google Scholar.

66 [Tallis, John], Tallis's Illustrated London (London, 1851), 233–34Google Scholar.

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69 Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 131.

70 Knight, Charles, Cyclopaedia of London (London, 1851), 45Google Scholar.

71 Knight, Charles, London, 6 vols. (London, 1860), 1:397Google Scholar.

72 “A Last visit to Vauxhall,” Punch, 17 September 1859, 119.

73 The Times, 9 October 1827.

74 Manners, Lord John, A Plea for National Holy Days (London, 1843)Google Scholar; see also the contributions of “Parson Lot” [Charles Kingsley] to the short-lived periodical Politics for the People (1848).

75 Jevons, William Stanley, “Methods of Social Reform: Amusements of the People,” Contemporary Review 33 (October 1878): 498513 (512)Google Scholar.

76 Marius Kwint, “The Legitimization of the Circus in Late Georgian England,” Past and Present, no. 174 (February 2002): 98–99.

77 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 370–74.

78 The Rev.Richardson, J., Recollections, Political, Literary, Dramatic, and Miscellaneous, of the Last Half-century, 2 vols. (London, 1856), 1:230Google Scholar. Though “younger,” Astley's also became “a fount of perpetual nostalgia.” Kwint, “The Legitimization of the Circus,” 99–100.

79 Smith, Sketches of London Life and Character, 149–50.

80 Unidentified clipping, 17 July 1830, Oxford, Bodleian Library, G.A. Surrey c. 24, fol. 25.

81 Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 129.

82 Bunn, Alfred, The Vauxhall Papers (London, 1841), WWC 1:40Google Scholar.

83 Nord, Deborah Epstein, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 38Google Scholar; Nead, Victorian Babylon, 9; Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneuse.”