EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PLEASURE-GARDENS.* LONDON, insatiable leviathan, has swallowed up the neigh-
bouring villages, where a hundred and fifty years ago the citizens made holiday under spreading trees, and escaped from the narrow, noisy streets into the quiet of the country. Gay, writing about 1720, says that in spring— "Love flys the dusty town for shady woods,"
and mentions as sylvan retreats " Tottenham fields" and "Chelsea meads." In the same "Epistle" he speaks of the Hampstead balls as a resort of citizens' daughters, and the name recalls Evelina's trials with her city connections :— " ' Good gracious ! ' cried young Branghton, why you're all as fine as fivepence P Why, where are you going P To the Hampstead ball,' answered Mr. Smith." And it was in the Long Room at Hampstead that Mr. Smith—the Holborn bean with the " fine varnish of low politeness " so praised by Dr. Johnson, who told Fanny Burney, " There is no character
• The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century. By Warwick Wroth. London : Macmillan and Co. better drawn anywhere, in any book or by any author "— pestered ed the much-tried Evelina with his unwelcome atten- tions. Evelina's long room, which she thought well named, as it deserved no other distinguishing epithet, now part of a private house, took the place of the older " Great Room," where Gay's city misses disported themselves. The site of the older building can be identified in Well Walk, but the bowling-green, the "raffling shops," the concerts and assem- blies, have disappeared with the gay crowds that frequented them. It is such old memories and historical data concerning the old London pleasure-gardens that Mr. Warwick Wroth has collected with infinite pains; with the assistance of his brother, Mr. A. E. Wroth, he gives information about sixty- four gardens, but he adds that this long list " does not by any means exhaust the outdoor resources of the eighteenth- century Londoner, who had also his fairs and his parks and his arenas for rough sport, like Hockley-in-the-Hole." Mr. Wroth divides the London gardens into three groups, the pleasure resorts of the Vauxhall type—Cuper's Gardens, Marylebone, Ranelagh, Vauxhall itself, and various smaller imitations—of which the attractions depended on concerts, fire- works, and illuminated grounds ; the gardens connected with mineral springs—Hampstead, Bagnigge Wells, Sadler's Wells —and those that were more countrified, and come mainly under the head of tea-gardens, such as Highbury Barn and White Conduit House. Of these places of public amusement Vauxhall and Ranelagh are the best known, at least by name and reputation, to the modern Londoner. Pepys in his diary mentions the gardens at " Marrowbone " as well as the "Spring Gardens, Fox Hall." They were certainly among the oldest of the famous pleasure-resorts, but the Marylebone Gardens were closed in 1776, and Vauxhall, having been opened in 1661, lingered on to 1859. "Marybone," as it was always written, in its earliest days relied on its tavern and bowling-green for attractions. In the early part of the eighteenth century the tavern was notorious as a gaming-house. Macheath in the Beggar's Opera says :- " There will be deep play to-night at Marybone, and conse- quently money may be picked up upon the road." Some years later the usual Great Room was built for balls and suppers, and concerts and fireworks added to the amusements. It was at the fireworks at Marylebone that Evelina, frightened at a noisy explosion, jumped off the bench she stood on, and got separated from her friends. J. T. Smith in his Life of Nollekens, says :—" The orchestra of Marylebone Gardens, before which I have listened with my grandmother to hear Tommy Lowe sing, stood upon the site of the house now No. 17 in Devonshire Place, and very near where Mr. Fountain's boarding-school stood, nearly opposite to the old church, still standing in High Street." Mr. Smith goes on to tell the story of Mr. Fountain and Handel, of which Mr. Wroth gives Hone's version. According to Smith, "Mr. Fountain was once walking with Handel round Marybone Gardens, and upon hearing music which he could not under- stand, observed to Handel, ' This is d—d stuff ! It may be d—d stuff, but it's mine,' rejoined Handel." Ranelagh had a brilliant history, but a shorter one. On p. 206 Mr. Wroth speaks of its career of "more than a hundred and sixty years," but this is, of course, an error, as it was opened in 1742 and closed in 1805. There is a picture in the Later Italian Room at the National Gallery of the interior of the celebrated Rotunda at Ranelagh painted by Canaletto which gives a good idea of its somewhat insipid gaiety. It must have been painted about 1746, when Canale, or Canaletto, as he is always called, was in England. Ladies in their hooped petticoats are pacing the monotonous round, the musicians are in their places, the lamps, not a brilliant show to modern eyes, are lighted ; it must have been summer, for no fire is to be seen in the central mausoleum-like fire- place. Dr. Johnson's praise of the Ranelagh Rotunda has often been quoted. He called the coup d'esil the finest thing he had ever seen. In this he was comparing it with the Pantheon in Oxford Street, which Boswell says was less brilliantly lighted. Evelina expresses much the same sentiment:
felt I could not be as gay and thoughtless there [the Pantheon] as at Ranelagh." Ranelagh became a fashionable rival to Vauxhall. Walpole rejoices in the crowd of Princes and Dukes that frequented it, bat the chief amusement, walking round the Rotunda to the strains of the orchestra, does not strike us as being particularly entertaining. Probably
many of the frequenters shared Dr. Johnson's feeling about such fashionable resorts, that it was not so much the half- guinea's worth of pleasure to be got out of the places, as the "half-guinea's worth of inferiority to other people" in not having seen them.
Most of the pleasure-gardens owed their origin to the existence of a favourite tavern, possibly possessing a bowling_ alley or a fish-pond, where the citizens could obtain good ale and cheap refreshment on Sundays and holidays. By degrees enterprising proprietors added rooms for music and dancing, engaged musicians or acrobats and rope-dancers to amuse their guests, and if they were fortunate enough to discover mineral springs, advertised their discovery as possessing cures for every disease and as equalling in virtue the chalybeate waters of Tunbridge Wells. These pleasure-resorts had their periods of fashionable prosperity, as well as their decline and fall into disreputability ; some existed until their owners went bankrupt, some until the grounds became of more value for building on than for providing what Dr. Johnson kindly called " innocent recreation." As London grew north and west of the city it gradually absorbed all the gardens and mineral springs in Clerkenwell, Marylebone, and Islington, and by degrees Chelsea and the south side of the river became also built over. Sadler's Wells is still repre- sented by a music-hall, but Bagnigge Wells and the famous Islington Spa are only to be traced in a public-house and an inscription. Part of Ranelagh Gardens still remain, adjoining the grounds of Chelsea Hospital. It is free and open to the public now, and with the end of the present century comes an awakening to the need of preserving open spaces and quiet retreats for the caged-in Londoner. The old pleasure-gardens north and south of the Thames have dis- appeared entirely, and in their stead are arising parks and embankments, and the transforming of churchyards into shady retreats for the living.
Mr. Wroth has done his work well, and has illustrated his descriptions with reproductions of contemporary views. There is of course more material of interest in the accounts of the larger gardens—in the matter of Vauxhall and Ranelagh it is difficult to avoid comparison with Mr. Austin Dobson, whose " Vignettes" are highly-finished and lifelike—but for the antiquarian and the lover of old London, who looks through the smoky medium of the end of the century to its more youth- ful days, when the city lay in the midst of villages and suburban fields, the very brevity and similarity of the notices will be fall of interest and thoughtful suggestion. With their aid we can picture the recreations of a bygone day, and we can turn the dingy streets and alleys once more into gardens glowing with artificial lights, where the music is echoed by the songs of nightingales.
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