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Introduction jonathan conlin When London’s Vauxhall Gardens closed in July 1859 many felt that it represented the end of an era. Whether under the moniker ‘‘New Spring Gardens ,’’ ‘‘Vauxhall Gardens,’’ or ‘‘Royal Vauxhall Gardens,’’ at its close the Lambeth resort could claim a history stretching back to the Restoration, almost two centuries. Together with its many rivals, such as Ranelagh and Marylebone, Vauxhall Gardens provided jaded urbanites with a pleasant suburban retreat, a place in which to amuse themselves and entertain family and friends. Here they ate and drank, listened to music, admired paintings and sculpture, and enjoyed a variety of other spectacles, the most important of which was the crowd itself. Though the first pleasure garden, London’s Spring Gardens (Figure I.1), had offered little more than bowls in the 1630s, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury pleasure gardens such as Vauxhall incorporated elements of masquerade , chinoiserie, and other exotic fantasies that transported visitors to new realms of fancy. Promenading along their shaded walks of a summer evening, visitors could escape the pains of the city while still enjoying its pleasures. Sudden contrasts of light and dark, familiar and strange, pleasure and danger that would have seemed deeply unsettling anywhere else became a source of excitement and wonder. For tourists to eighteenth-century London, a visit to Vauxhall was almost obligatory. For composers and performers, it offered the quickest way of attracting a public following. For novelists such as Fielding, Smollett, Burney, Dickens, and Thackeray, it was the perfect place to send heroes and villains alike. The significant and illustrious contingent of foreign visitors was struck by the resort’s success in bringing different ranks together without any obvious police. They admired this order, concluded it to be an inimitable product of a free British nation, then rushed home to establish their own gardens, adding yet more ‘‘Vauxhalls’’ to the many already found 2 Jonathan Conlin Figure I.1. Her Majesties Royal Palace and Park of St. James’s, colored engraving. From Nouvelle Théâtre de la Grande Bretagne, 5 vols. (London: David Mortier, 1715). 䉷 Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, D.C. elsewhere in Britain—in Norwich, Shrewsbury, Tunbridge Wells, and other places. Though several opened near established hostelries or were operated by former publicans, it was clear that these resorts were not the same thing as beer gardens or taverns. They were something else, something new: Vauxhalls. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the word Vauxhall duly entered the French, Dutch, Swedish, German, Russian, and Danish languages.1 Pleasure garden fashions and frissons could even be enjoyed by those who did not visit in person. For every visitor who made the journey to a Vauxhall on foot or by boat or carriage many more journeyed there in their imaginations, by viewing a print, reading a newspaper, or singing the latest pleasure garden songs in their own homes. Pleasure gardens were London’s gift to the world. Pleasure gardens have been seen as typifying a nascent public sphere, one identified with the ‘‘commodification of culture,’’ the rise of the ‘‘middling rank,’’ and other symptoms of modernity. Our knowledge of these gardens, however, is largely restricted to London resorts, and much of what Introduction 3 we know about even those renowned sites derives from works by Warwick Wroth, now more than a century old.2 Despite the importance of the individual artists (such as Hogarth and Whistler) and musicians (Handel, Haydn, and many others) active within them, pleasure gardens have been neglected by historians of painting, sculpture, and music. Those art historians and literary scholars who have addressed London pleasure gardens have focused almost exclusively on the 1760s and 1770s, ignoring their Caroline origins and Victorian development. Gardens outside London and abroad have been almost entirely ignored. Other pleasure gardens have been seen as little more than pale imitations of London’s Vauxhall. This volume is the first to consider the pleasure garden as an international phenomenon, as well as the first to survey these resorts from their origins in the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. Building on an interdisciplinary dialogue started by the 2008 Tate Britain/Garden Museum conference ‘‘Vauxhall Revisited: Pleasure Gardens and Their Publics,’’ the chapters in this book address a number of areas that have yet to receive any scholarly attention, such as musical programming and American pleasure gardens. One of the most dynamic social spaces of modern Britain and the United States...

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