‘Vauxhall Gardens in an Uproar’: The Reinhold Affair of 1750

Abstract

The Widener Library at Harvard holds a possibly unique copy of an eighteenth-century satirical pamphlet called ‘The Reprisal, being the Second Part of V–x–l in an Uproar’. Apart from the apparent facts that it concerns London's great pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, and a madness that afflicted the musicians and the proprietor there one summer, this pamphlet has defied proper explanation. The discovery of an article of 1750 has provided the solution, and has allowed The Reprisal to be reinterpreted as a revelatory text, involving a serious industrial dispute at Vauxhall, and explaining, at the same time, much of the contemporary criticism of pleasure gardens, masquerades, operas and other exotic cultural luxuries which enjoyed so much popularity at the time, and which, according to their detractors, threatened to deprive the British nation of its power and prosperity.