Rode the 12,000? Counting Coaches, People and Errors En Route to the Rehearsal of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks at Spring Gardens, Vauxhall in 1749

Abstract

The Gentleman’s Magazine claimed that ‘above 12,000 persons’ attended the rehearsal of George Frideric Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks at Vauxhall Gardens in April 1749. Widely reproduced in biographies of Handel, in histories of London, and in studies of eighteenth-century British society and culture generally, in order to indicate not only Handel’s supposed popularity but also the spreading taste for art music, the commercialization of leisure, and the sophistication and egalitarianism of London’s population and venues, the figure is hugely inaccurate. This article offers a refutation of the claim and an exploration of the consequences for historians of relying too heavily and incautiously on the Gentleman’s Magazine as a source.