The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century
9781465682000
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
In the following pages an attempt has been made to write, for the first time, a history of the London pleasure gardens of the last century. Scattered notices of these gardens are to be found in many histories of the London parishes and in other less accessible sources, and merely to collect this information in a single volume would not, perhaps, have been a useless task. It is one, however, that could not have been undertaken with much satisfaction unless there was a prospect of making some substantial additions—especially in the case of the less known gardens—to the accounts already existing. A good deal of such new material it has here been possible to furnish from a collection of newspapers, prints, songs, &c., that I have been forming for several years to illustrate the history of the London Gardens. The information available in the writings of such laborious topographers as Wilkinson, Pinks, and Nelson is, of course, indispensable, and has not been here neglected; yet even in the treatment of old material there seemed room for improvement, at least in the matter of lucidity of arrangement and chronological definiteness. For, if the older histories of the London parishes have a fault, it is, perhaps, that, owing to their authors’ anxiety to omit nothing, they often read more like materials for history than history itself. Thus, we find advertisements and newspaper paragraphs set forth at inordinate length and introduced without being properly assimilated with the context, and the reader is often left to find his own way through a mass of confusing and trivial detail. The principal sources of information consulted are named in the notes and in a section at the end of each notice, and, wherever practicable, a list has been added of the most interesting views of the various gardens. The Introduction contains a brief sketch of some of the main characteristics of the pleasure resorts described in the volume, and it is only necessary here to add that even our long list of sixty-four gardens 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. But these subjects have already found their chroniclers.
