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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.
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.
473 pages, Hardcover
First published August 30, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 15, 2016
Vauxhall Gardens was 18th century London’s Disneyworld, it had wide promenades, music, food, art, and later on, Novelty Acts like tightrope walking, balloon flights, and fireworks. It also cost a mere shilling to get in for most of its life, making it accessible to a fair amount of London. It was the sort of place you could both take your kids for some wholesome family entertainment, and also the sort of place you could go to pick up some mollies and have sex in the bushes. The author makes this seeming impossibility coherent, and has also collected the largest set of images of the art and documentary maps on Vauxhall yet published. (Though to be fair, no one has published a book at all on Vauxhall since the 50s.) Did you know there are only 2 known photographs of Vauxhall, taken right before it was torn down in 1859? It is extremely strange to see a picture of Vauxhall if you already know it from it’s main legacy: a perpetual, peripheral ghost of 18th-19th century social life.
Vauxhall also was one of the few places in the 18th century presenting solid English music, as it were: the composers were overwhelmingly native (except Handel, who is honorarily English anyway), the musicians were English, and the singers were English. If you want to understand English resistance to Italian and French culture, as well nativization of other European music styles, you have to look at Vauxhall.
Is it acceptable to knock a book down for being just WAY TOO LARGE? This book is too large. I found it physically punishing to read. I read it with a pillow in my lap. I know it’s an Art Book (™), but I mean really. It’s still majority text. According to Amazon it weighs six pounds. It does not come in e-book. I slightly suspect no one was expected to actually READ this book, just buy it, look at a few of the pictures, and put it on a shelf, so probably I am the one in the wrong here. But this book is widely appealing and well-researched, so I do recommend it, if you have strong forearms.
Vauxhall also was one of the few places in the 18th century presenting solid English music, as it were: the composers were overwhelmingly native (except Handel, who is honorarily English anyway), the musicians were English, and the singers were English. If you want to understand English resistance to Italian and French culture, as well nativization of other European music styles, you have to look at Vauxhall.
Is it acceptable to knock a book down for being just WAY TOO LARGE? This book is too large. I found it physically punishing to read. I read it with a pillow in my lap. I know it’s an Art Book (™), but I mean really. It’s still majority text. According to Amazon it weighs six pounds. It does not come in e-book. I slightly suspect no one was expected to actually READ this book, just buy it, look at a few of the pictures, and put it on a shelf, so probably I am the one in the wrong here. But this book is widely appealing and well-researched, so I do recommend it, if you have strong forearms.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews