The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island

Chapter 4. Performance Alfresco: Music-Making in London’s Pleasure Gardens

Chapter  Performance Alfresco: Music-Making in London’s Pleasure Gardens rachel cowgill Pausing in Paris on a tour through France and Italy in 1770, the English music-historian Charles Burney noted his impressions on visiting a French version of a familiar haunt: I went to one of the Vaux Halls (they have 3 or 4 here) paid half a crown for my admission and had my eyes put out by the quantity of lights and my ears stunned by the number of fiddles etc for the dancing. When I have described this Vaux Hall it will be easy—no it will not be easy—to find the resemblance. It is on the Boulevard. At the first entrance is a rotund—not very large—with galleries round it well light up [sic] and decorated. Then you pass through a quadrangle in the open air well illuminated and the galleries continued on each side to another square room still larger with a row of Corinthian pillars on each side with festoons and illuminations. This is a very elegant room. In this and in the Ist room minuets, allemands , cotillons and contre danses, when the weather is cold, which was now the case, in the extream. There was a great number of people all at present in mourning for a Queen of Denmark and this was all the change that was given for my half crown. Not a morsel of garden.1 The venue in question can be identified as Jean-Baptiste Torré’s ‘‘Wauxhall ,’’ which opened in 1764 on the boulevard Saint-Martin, its name making capital from the growing reputation of one of the largest and most Figure 4.1. A. C. Pugin and J. Bluck after Thomas Rowlandson, Vauxhall Garden from Ackermann’s Microcosm of London (1809), etching with aquatint. Lambeth Borough Archives, Landmark 5057. 102 Rachel Cowgill spectacular of the 631 commercial pleasure gardens known to have operated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London.2 In his travel journals, Burney was generally willing to admire where admiration was due; to put his reservations about this Parisian imitation simply down to national prejudice , therefore, would be to miss the point. Although he highlights the venue’s deficiencies and particularly the price of admission—at two and a half times what it cost to enter Vauxhall—his description is broadly appreciative .3 There is music here as well as illuminations, ornaments, and interesting architecture; and unlike its English namesake this venue also appears to have been licensed for public dancing. But somehow for Burney the Torré is just not Vauxhall, the absence of garden restricting the rus in urbis experience so crucial to the ambience of London’s pleasure gardens. Compare , for example, Tobias Smollett’s description of the charms of Vauxhall in his novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), where his character Lydia Melford emphasizes the delights of socializing alfresco: Image to yourself my dear Letty, a spacious garden, part laid out in delightful walks, bounded with high hedges and trees, and paved with gravel; part exhibiting a wonderful assemblage of the most picturesque and striking objects, pavilions, lodges, groves, grottos, lawns, temples, and cascades; porticos, colonnades, and rotundas; adorned with pillars, statues and painting: the whole illuminated with an infinite number of lamps, disposed in different figures of suns, stars and constellations; the place crowded with the gayest company, ranging through those blissful shades, or supping in different lodges on cold collations, enlivened with mirth, freedom and good humour, and animated by an excellent band of musick.4 The multifarious features so cherished in accounts such as this have attracted the attention of scholars from many disciplines in recent years, but the contribution of music, which was central to the London pleasure garden experience, has tended to be overlooked and underplayed. Musicologists have tended to find the naked commercialism of garden proprietors in pursuit of novelty, spectacular entertainment, and multimediality offputting ; but for those who have been willing to forage through the extensive surviving sources of garden repertoire, the rediscovery and recuperation of music by the likes of Charles Dibdin, J. C. Bach, and Henry Bishop, much of it either written for or made famous through performances at Vauxhall, Performance Alfresco 103 has proved ample reward.5 Indeed, some of the most celebrated composers of the day were contracted to the gardens, not least because they offered employment over the summer months, from...