Vauxhall Gardens Research Articles

Six Essays on Vauxhall Gardens

Six Essays on Vauxhall Gardens

Women in Whistler’s Images of Chelsea and the Thames

Women are an active, if often low-key, presence in Whistler’s Thames images, from ghostly figures of models and fashionable strolling women to the small traders who populated the streets near his home in Chelsea. Women shopped for their families; they worked outside the home as servants, nursemaids, shop assistants, and in family trades. They travelled along the river daily and criss-crossed its banks in a changing cityscape in which new spaces for leisure were being opened up. They sought a living in a night-time world of entertainment venues like Vauxhall Gardens and Cremorne that could lead to exploitation, disease, and an early grave. This world beyond Whistler’s Chelsea homes, overseen during the 1860s by his model and partner, Joanna Hiffernan (and by his mother, Anna Whistler for a time), is often overlooked. Moreover, Whistler’s suggestion that the presence of tiny, anonymised female figures in works like Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea and Cremorne Gardens, No. 2 was merely about colour and establishing a balance of decorative elements invites fresh analysis. This essay takes as its starting point women’s presences in Whistler’s riverside home and family circle before venturing outdoors to explore the world they inhabited along the Thames at Chelsea. It considers such questions as: how did women experience the contemporary redevelopment of the river? How did they occupy its adjacent streets and public spaces? Drawing upon examples of Whistler’s Thames subjects from the 1870s and the work of chroniclers of social change like Chelsea photographer James Hedderly (1815–1885), it examines the world of women along the river in the context of visual, literary, and socio-economic discourses of the period. It seeks to give voice to their presence beneath the quiet surface of Whistler’s images and how, as “involuntary neighbours”, they made sense of the watery, arterial world of London’s celebrated river.

An English Composer and Her Opera: Harriet Wainewright’s Comàla (1792)

ABSTRACT This paper discusses an opera by the English composer Harriet Wainewright (ca.1766-1843), namely Comàla, which received its premiere at the Hanover Square Rooms, London on January 26, 1792. The composer was from a Liverpool family of Wainwright (variable spelling). In her Critical Remarks on the Art of Singing (1836) she describes her musical ability as a young woman. Moving to London she cultivated an introduction to influential figures in society and attended opera performances, where the singing of stellar castrati such as Pachierotti or Marchesi fascinated her. Possessed of a fine soprano voice she studied harmony and counterpoint with John Worgan, an organist at Vauxhall Gardens. She decided to compose an opera herself and spent about a year writing Comàla, a dramatic tale from the poems of Ossian. But she was unable to find a theater in London that would stage the opera; it had to be performed as a concert piece, the lead roles being sung by Sophia Corri and James Bartleman. Critics, including Burney, were fulsome in their praise of the work, and Haydn’s publisher William Napier eventually brought out a full score in 1803. Disappointed at not securing staged performances of Comàla or her earlier opera (Don Quixote) Harriet left for India in 1796 where she married Col. John Stewart, an officer in the British Army (East India Company) in 1801. She had Comàla performed in Calcutta by amateurs, singing the main role herself. Returning to England as “Mrs. Col. Stewart” she continued to compose songs and choruses after her husband’s death in 1820. She died in London at the end of 1843.

Maid of Honour

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‘I Am Convinced I Shall Achieve Something Valuable If I Can Brighten the Lives of the People Here’: Bombsites, Housing and Art in Lambeth

After the Second World War, artist Peter Laszlo Peri approached the London County Council with the idea of creating sculptural reliefs with a family theme in coloured concrete on two of Lambeth’s new housing estates. The results were three reliefs: ‘Following the Leader (Memorial to the Children Killed in the Blitz)’, 1949, on the Vauxhall Gardens estate and ‘Boys Playing Football’, 1951–52, and ‘Mother with Children Playing’, 1951–52, on the nearby South Lambeth estate. After the war, the reconstruction and improvement of housing were crucial. The London County Council planned for large areas of London to be rebuilt: including an ambitious programme of housing. This paper looks at these artworks within the context of the housing they sit amongst. I read these sculptural reliefs, created between 1949 and 1952, within the LCC’s post-war housing and community policies and as symbols of Lambeth’s renewal. This paper places these reliefs, and their settings, within the wider context of debates surrounding the post-war renewal of London, community participation and placemaking.

A Musical Italy: Michael W. Balfe’s Italian Experiences

The Dublin-born musician, Michael W. Balfe, was a singer, composer and conductor whose brilliant musical career was heavily influenced by formative experiences in Italy. In 1825, Balfe, interested in broadening his musical studies first went to Paris where he was introduced to the great composers, Luigi Cherubini and Gioachino Rossini, who took a personal interest in him and his musical talents. On the advice of Rossini he spent the next few years in Italy studying singing with the famous Rossini singer, Filippo Galli, and taking music composition lessons from Ferdinando Paer, in Rome. Later in Milan he studied harmony and counterpoint with Vincenzo Federici. By 1831, when he was only 23 years old, his first three operas had been produced in Palermo, Pavia, and Milan. He returned to London in August 1835, participating with the great Lablache, Tamburini, Rubini and Grisi in a concert in Vauxhall Gardens. In 1834 he made his debut at La Scala, Milan, singing opposite the renowned mezzo-soprano, Maria Malibran in Rossini’s Otello. He appeared again with Malibran in Venice early in 1835, singing once more in Rossini and Bellini operas. Balfe worked as a singer and composer throughout the Italian peninsula/states during the years, 1825-1835 and this article will chart these experiences and demonstrate how the time he spent in Italy and the people he met, influenced his life and later career as an important and popular European composer.

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

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.

Thomas Rowlandson's Vauxhall Gardens: The Lives of a Print

While there have been many reception studies of verbal texts, it is only recently that we have begun to explore the historical and cultural contexts of interpretations of eighteenth-century visual print culture. Given that Thomas Rowlandson's 1784 watercolor Vauxhall Gardens has become the definitive image of that famous pleasure garden, and has given rise to many complex and contradictory readings, a reception history of this beguiling print is long overdue. Tracing the print's reception from Henry Angelo, an old, school friend of Rowlandson's, through David Coke and Alan Borg's 2011 sumptuous cultural history of the gardens, this article concludes with a closer look at a version of the print that has only recently come to light. Part of the Paul Mellon Collection housed at the Yale Center for British Art, this image, perhaps a trial version, contains a surprising figure that is absent from the more familiar watercolor. At center left, just behind the figures that have often been identified as the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Duncannon, stands a man who appears to be holding a drawing pad with which to capture the likeness of the viewer who stands before him, or, better yet, the likeness of the artist who faces the crowd and sketches the scene captured in Vauxhall Gardens, in other words, Rowlandson himself. An endless of hall of mirrors in which we can gaze at ourselves gazing at others gazing at us, Rowlandson's Vauxhall Gardens is indeed a print with many lives.

Enjoyment in the night: discovering leisure in Philadelphia’s eighteenth-century rural pleasure gardens

London’s Vauxhall Gardens, originally called the New Spring Garden, set the standard for extravagant and often rowdy eighteenth-century public entertainment. Vauxhall Gardens, which opened in the e...

Handel as Orpheus: the Vauxhall statue re-examined

In her book Handel as Orpheus, Ellen Harris argues that throughout his career in Italy and Britain, Handel was publicly associated with homosexuality and homoeroticism, through associations of him with the mythic musician Orpheus. One of her key examples for this association is Louis François Roubiliac’s statue of Handel that was installed at Vauxhall Gardens in 1738. Harris claims that the statue ‘was commonly understood to depict the composer as Orpheus’, thus linking Handel to homosexuality. Using a range of readily available textual and visual evidence, this article argues that in the statue Handel’s contemporaries more likely would have seen the composer in the guise of Apollo, and that the comparisons of Handel to Orpheus do not carry an association with homosexuality.

The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne by Todd Gilman

Reviewed by: The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne by Todd Gilman David J. Golby Todd Gilman. The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne. Newark: Delaware, 2013. Pp. xix + 623. $120. As I sit writing, I am some 20 kilometers from Cliveden, the English country house where the premier of Arne’s Alfred took place. This masque features his most famous composition by far: the song “Rule, Britannia.” The open-air, landscaped amphitheatre where the song was first performed is still in evidence, but it is very easily missed among the more spectacular and ostentatious sights of the estate. This is perhaps entirely appropriate, as the originator of this tune has also slipped almost entirely from view over the years, while the euphuistic jingoism of the creation itself retains prominence in the British consciousness. And even if it reaches a global audience of many millions every year at the Last Night of the Proms, it is possible that the people who could name its composer are a tiny fraction of those [End Page 109] who could whistle its first few bars. British Prime Minister David Cameron was famously castigated for mistaking Arne for Elgar as the composer of this celebrated ode when interviewed by David Letterman on U.S. television (2012). While it is easy to scoff at Cameron’s ignorance, I wonder how many British musicians would have given the correct answer. Arne is surely in need of a twenty-first-century champion, and Mr. Gilman assumes this role. His book is highly readable. Arne’s reputation has been paid an enormous disservice, and Mr. Gilman is well placed to tackle the question of his neglect head-on. In the “Polemical Introduction,” he asks if he has been the victim of “Handel-mania” and conventions of taste among the social elite and learned who have judged his music mainly on the basis of contemporary aesthetic prejudices rather than on intrinsic worth—prejudices promulgated in subsequent centuries up to the present day. Is Arne’s reputation and standing still the victim of his being perceived among contemporaries and others as “Handel-lite,” his “beautiful” music considered in British critical circles as inferior to Handel’s “sublime” offerings? This perception of gravitas and seriousness in an artist, whether composer or performer, is crucially important in the confirmation of relative merit and longevity. Critics were particularly receptive to the “sublime” in the (often sacred) work of foreign musicians. Unlike the Handel-obsessed majority, as represented by composers such as William Boyce, Arne was forward-looking, experimented with the galant style, and most often put himself at the mercy of the notoriously fickle middle-class theater and pleasure garden audiences—not the first or last native musician to suffer the consequences of showing much greater ambition as an artist than the play-it-safe norm, risking the almost inevitable unfavorable comparisons with the nonnative elite. Despite this “glass ceiling,” Arne accomplished a great deal and enjoyed commercial success, particularly for his stage music. His gift for melody, the cultivation of a highly influential vocal style, and his combination of “English” grace, elegance, and simplicity with “Celtic mellifluousness” were rewarded with great successes during his career. Charles Burney, his articled apprentice from 1744, is crucial in assessing Arne’s reputation among his contemporaries to the present day, and persistently supports Arne’s “light” style and preeminent position among native composers. Working chronologically, the minutiae of Arne’s life and dealings with the theatrical world reveal gems, including his connections with Drury Lane, Vauxhall Gardens, and the long-term and fluctuating collaborations between Arne and Garrick (it is clear that Arne’s respect for Garrick was not reciprocated, and relations between them were often strained). The machinations of the life of a successful native composer and the shenanigans, intrigue, infidelities, business dealings, and politics (including the “calamitous” Licensing Act of 1737), that went on behind the scenes give this story life. The rich tapestry of personal and professional allegiances, including the coming together of musical families through business, marriage or both, all enrich the drama. The circumstances surrounding the composition and performance of Arne’s most celebrated piece, “Rule, Britannia,” are a case in point...

Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels by Karen Lipsedge

Reviewed by: Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels by Karen Lipsedge Trevor Speller Karen Lipsedge. Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. xi + 215. $95. Homes are built as much by the imagination as by brick and mortar: this is one of the central insights of Gaston Bachelard’s classic The Poetics of Space. Poetry, memory, and dreams, when read together, can produce a “poetics” of houses and other places. Bachelard’s claim—that we experience space in literary and cultural terms—makes his phenomenological account an important origin for contemporary readings of literary spaces. In scouting the locations of eighteenth-century novels, Ms. Lipsedge comparably reads “the domestic interior as represented in the eighteenth-century British novel” by putting these imaginary rooms into a meaningful historical and literary context. Domestic Space therefore builds on such previous studies as Alistair Duckworth’s The Improvement of the Estate, Simon Varey’s Space and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, and Cynthia Wall’s The Prose of Things. Ms. Lipsedge’s chief end is to bridge the imagined and real spaces of domestic life. Reversing Bachelard’s emphasis, she writes that “if the modern reader is to have [a] . . . clear understanding of these imagined houses, he or she needs to know about the ‘real’ eighteenth-century house and garden.” This “real” architectural space is largely conceived and produced by architects’ and interior decorators’ writings, blueprints, paintings, and engravings, proffered to the Georgian “polite élite.” Discussions of Palladian architecture and the writings of architect and translator Isaac Ware form a helpful groundwork for the study. Changes in Georgian rooms and interior design are catalogued. For instance, interior decoration developed “a lighter, more inviting appearance . . . due to innovative materials . . . and the increased use of lighter hues for painting.” Her inverted commas around “real,” however, merely wink at a more complicated theoretical issue. She passes over why the influence of architecture should outweigh that of other cultural products and practices in defining domestic space. Architects and interior designers can make claims about how interiors ought to be used, but poets, painters, and essayists speak just as forcefully as they imagine such spaces. Ms. Lipsedge allows plays and pictures to help define her sense of domestic space, but standard works seem overlooked, for example, Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” or the response to it by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Similarly, there is a brief reference to one of Hogarth’s engravings for Marriage à la Mode, but its inclusion only reveals the shortcoming of not examining the cultural impact of Hogarth, and other artists, more fully. The chapters of Domestic Space consistently cycle back to rooms in Harlowe Place, Mr. B’s estates, and Vauxhall Gardens, so much so that these spaces begin to feel familiar and lived in. There are readings of Richardson and Burney in the chapters on “Social Rooms,” “Private Rooms,” and “Garden Rooms.” Each chapter also begins with a brief architectural and cultural exposé of the room investigated. This allows Ms. Lipsedge to compare domestic spaces between authors. For instance, chapter four considers garden rooms in Pamela, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Evelina. The chapter’s conclusion frames garden rooms as a stepping-stone for Evelina, Betsy Thoughtless, and Pamela. They are surprised and empowered by the hero’s intrusion [End Page 122] into the arbor, which “facilitates the novel’s happy ending.” Clarissa’s fortunes are reversed, for Lovelace’s entrance into the ivy-summerhouse ultimately proves fatal to her. The strength of Domestic Space is in its readings of Clarissa. Recognizing Clarissa’s private spaces as necessary to her sense of interiority, much is made of the closets, parlors, and gardens in the novel. For instance, Ms. Lipsedge argues that Clarissa’s small parlor initially constitutes a gendered social space under her control. Clarissa has her own parlor for private retirement and spiritual reflection, which is anomalous, for such rooms were meant for family gatherings, sometimes with guests. Her division from the rest of the family is thus spatially coded. Solmes later proposes to Clarissa in this very room, transforming it into “a public and artificially...

Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text ed. by Christina Ionesc

Reviewed by: Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text ed. by Christina Ionesc W. B. Gerard Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, ed. Christina Ionescu. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Pp. xviii + 609. £64.99; $109.99. Pictorial rendering of texts has blossomed in Catherine Gordon’s British Paintings of Subjects from the English Novel 1740–1870 (1988), Philip Stewart’s Engraven Desire: Eros, Image, and Text in the French Eighteenth Century (1992), and David Blewett’s The Illustration of Robinson Crusoe, 1719–1820 (1996). This volume continues that growth. Ms. Ionescu’s Introduction might have been extended into a monograph. Its heavily [End Page 128] footnoted pages are comprehensive, though the references defy easy comprehension. The book lacks a catalogue of illustrations; like a critical edition of a text, a competent catalogue is often a necessary starting point. Ileana Baird perceptively analyzes the visual “paratexts” of illustrations and decorative imagery in early editions of The Dunciad; in addition to elucidating the cultural significance and historical and critical backgrounds, she provides careful readings of the images themselves. The 1728 and 1729 editions with Dullness’s owl and the burdened ass carrying specific books in the pannier illustrate the popular appetite for personal satire. Headpieces from the 1735 edition, where the emphasis changes “from illustrating the laughable foolishness of the dunces, to highlighting the serious consequences of their public performance,” reveal a cultural shift toward “religious and moral concerns.” Illustrations in mid-century editions, Ms. Baird suggests, picture “less political content and more everyday life information and social detail.” Much less useful is Yolanda Caballero Aceituno’s examination of the paratextual (black, marbled, and white pages and inserted graphics) in Tristram Shandy as a collective rebellion against an “orthodox Augustan humanism,” which she narrowly defines, primarily by misreading Paul Fussell’s 1965 monograph, as the control of “any possibility of self-assertion, especially through literary creativity.” Alas poor Swift and Pope! Building on this problematic position, Ms. Aceituno ignores previous discussions (save a nod to William V. Holtz). Commonplace statements are offered as “discoveries” (“incorporation of images and other typographical devices . . . was not merely experimental technique”; “it is clear these images [the lines of narrative progression at the end of volume six] are not mere adornments”). This has been obvious for over 250 years. The “activist” Sterne used his paratextuality to fight “against dogmatic rationalism . . . [and] the restrictive pessimism of Augustan humanism,” embodied by “hypercritics,” mentioned humorously three times in Tristram Shandy and elevated here to imperial censors. Sterne’s imagery may indeed occupy cultural space on the enticingly named “semiospheric frontier” (after theoretician Iuri Lotman’s semiosphere, “describing the whole semiotic space of a given culture”), but rather than illuminate, this obfuscates. Essays stretch boundaries, though not always usefully. Asserting a well-known need to “recognize a broader spectrum of visual response” beyond “the physical boundaries of the book,” Leigh G. Dillard invokes specific instances of “parallel illustration”: literary galleries (such as Boydell’s on Shakespeare), Hogarth’s 1725–1726 print series of Butler’s Hudibras and his spurious frontispiece to Gulliver’s Travels, and, most intriguingly, Francis Hayman’s designs for Richardson’s Pamela, which appeared in enlarged form on the supper-boxes of Vauxhall Gardens. Ms. Dillard’s categories for investigation—basically, paintings, prints, and collections of reproductions—are not new (despite the fanfare) though she addresses images created independently of the text and the “greater creative interpretation” available to painters and engravers. Elizabeth Kubek examines mimeticism and signification, rallying Lacan, Derrida, Saussure, and Sarah Hrdy toward a thesis on the “compensation and control . . . at work in eighteenth-century book illustration”; cited among title pages are Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy (1668), Hogarth’s [End Page 129] Analysis of Beauty (1753), and Sarah Fielding’s David Simple and its sequel (1744). This eclectic grouping offers insights, but it challenges coherence and nothing is concluded. Darren Wagner explores how visualizations of the womb paralleled developments from early folkloric beliefs to the “unembellished, technical, and objective” scientific perspective. He notes that medical illustrations, though at times still subjected to the allegories of medieval...

Vauxhall Gardens: A History by David Coke and Alan Borg

Vauxhall Gardens: A History by David Coke and Alan Borg

Vauxhall Gardens: A History – By David Coke and Alan Borg

Vauxhall Gardens: A History – By David Coke and Alan Borg

Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century ed. by Tiffany Potter (review)

Tiffany Potter, ed.Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century. University of Toronto Press, 2012. 344 pp. 18 b and w illustrations. ISBN-10: 1442641819; iSBN-13: 978-1442641815. First the disclaimer: I have known the editor of this collection and more than half of its contributors, some for more than twenty years, and have edited some of their essays in Lumen, the proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and TransAtlantic Crossings. Given that csecs has had its own annual meeting since 1971 and that the pool of eighteenth-century scholars in this country is relatively small one, it would be difficult to find reviewer who was not connected in one way or another. However, I am not, at present, engaged in any projects with any of the authors in Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century. In order to minimize perceived conflict of interest, I intend to steer toward essays whose authors I don't know. The dust jacket, featuring A View of the Grand Walk, offers splendid view of an outdoor concert at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, well attended by women in the latest style of wide-bustled dresses. The first names of the Nuremberg-born engraver who set up print shop in London circa 1744, Johann Sebastian Muller (circa 1715-1792), are not given in the credit, and the date of this, circa 1751, is missing. He worked with the painter-designer, Samuel Wale, who was founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768. The design shows woman, backed by small group of musicians, singing an elevated bandstand to crowd of well-dressed strollers. In an age that knew no film, television, or radio, this was the perfect, genteel (and much healthier) afternoon entertainment. The editor of this volume has previously published monograph on Henry Fielding (Honest Sins: Georgian Libertinism, 1999), edited Robert Rogers's 1766 tragedy about Pontiac, Ponteach, or the Savages of America (2010), and co-edited collections on Battlestar Gallactica (2007) and The Wire (2009). Some essays fix on more customary subjects, from theatres, plays, and actresses, to novels, magazines, and cookbooks, as well as populist politics, dress, and portraiture (xi). To demonstrate just how far she is prepared to push the popular-culture envelope, Potter boldly leads this collection with dazzling leap The Rape of the Lock to the 2009 adaptation, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century blends eighteenth-century studies with twenty-first century multimedia. If the dust jacket lulled you into thinking staid gathering was to follow, well. we're not in tranquil Vauxhall Gardens any more. Potter divides this collection into three parts: the first (after her own essay on zombies) more or less rooted in the eighteenth century, the second focusing on reading and writing, and the third bringing us up to speed on recent adaptations of the long eighteenth century in our so far short-lived twenty-first. So this avoids being an exclusive club for period-limited studies but is, rather, gathering where specialists can let their hair down (something both male and female authors could do) and make connections between their academic interests (which have to combat the stigma of relevance) and their cultural surroundings. Anyone who thinks the eighteenth century is dry vacuum between the Renaissance and Romantics (or the hole in the Early Modern donut) will be pleasantly shocked to learn more about the role women played in every aspect of life. Berta Joncus looks at two sopranos who used their enormous appeal to transform their roles. Lavinia Fenton took some of the sting out of John Gay's satirical lines, turning Beggar's Opera into a sentimental vehicle (25). Kitty Clive, who starred in some of Fielding's ballad operas, had strong views on how best to interpret the script. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams witnessed an argument between Fielding and Clive, sparked by his intention of casting her as the bawd in The Wedding Day. …

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

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.

Vauxhall Gardens: a history

From their early beginnings in the Restoration until the final closure in Queen Victoria's reign, Vauxhall Gardens developed from a rural tavern and place of assignation into a dream-world filled with visual arts and music, and finally into a commercial site of mass entertainment. By the 18th century, Vauxhall was crucial to the cultural and fashionable life of the country, patronized by all levels of society, from royal dukes to penurious servants. In the first book on the subject for over fifty years, Alan Borg and David E. Coke reveal the teeming life, the spectacular art and the ever-present music of Vauxhall in fascinating detail. Borg and Coke's historical exposition of the entire history of the gardens makes a major contribution to the study of London entertainments, art, music, sculpture, class and ideology. It reveals how Vauxhall linked high and popular culture in ways that look forward to the manner in which both art and entertainment have evolved in modern times.

‘HEE-HAW … LLELUJAH’: HANDEL AMONG THE VAUXHALL ASSES (1732)

ABSTRACTThe discovery of a satirical list from 1732 helps us revisit Handel's affairs during the early 1730s. Placing the composer among elite guests at the opening night of Vauxhall Gardens in 1732, the new document predates his known links with the venue by six years, offers a rare description of him as subservient to John James Heidegger and possibly alludes to his medical condition prior to 1737. It also invites an exploration of hidden affinities between English oratorio and John Henley's much-abused Oratory, including a hypothesis about the strictures applied to Esther by the Bishop of London. Much more important, it helps launch a re-examination of Handel's role in the ‘Second Academy’ as a court composer in an entrepreneurial milieu.

HANDEL RECOVERING: FRESH LIGHT ON HIS AFFAIRS IN 1737

The summer and autumn of 1737 remain a foggy patch in Handel biography owing to poor documentation and Handel’s absence from London. We do not know whether his illness led to a rapprochement with the ‘Nobility’ opera, how his visit to Aix-la-Chapel complicated the new opera season or, especially, whether these developments relate to Farinelli’s defection to Spain. This shaky factual ground also restricts our understanding of later events such as Handel’s lucrative benefit in March 1738 and the celebrated Roubiliac statue in Vauxhall Gardens. Thanks to surviving issues of the Daily Advertiser, however, we now can replenish the documentary pool and re-examine Handel’s affairs and their context during this period.