Abstract
Now largely forgotten, pleasure gardens were once popular and pervasive sites in the nineteenth century. Perhaps better known through the British venues of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, these privately owned entertainment venues were also found in nearly every city in ninteenth-century America, providing a mixed clientele with a host of entertainments, ranging from vocal concerts and refreshments, to firework displays, Fourth of July celebrations, and dramatic interludes. The patrons of these venues, the policies enforced by the proprietors, and the various activities occurring within these sites present a wealth of opportunities for exploring the performance of American identities through popular entertainments. Like the theatres, museums, and circuses with which they had close connections, these sites contributed to the discussion of what it meant to be American in the period following the Revolution.1
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Notes
Joel J. Orosz, Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740–1870 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990).
Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre From the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 4.
Thomas M. Garrett, “A History of Pleasure Gardens in New York City, 1700–1865” (PhD diss., New York University, 1978), 4.
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Jonathan Conlin, ed. The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013);
Peter De Bolla, “Vauxhall Gardens: The Visibility of Visuality,” in The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), chap. 2;
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John Dixon Hunt, “Theatres, Gardens, and Garden Theatres,” in Gardens and Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992), chap. 2;
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Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), chap. 4;
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Barbara Wells Sarudy, Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake, 1700–1805 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), chap. 9;
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Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
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Also see: Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007);
S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997);
David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997);
Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
Odai Johnson, Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre: Fiorelli’s Plaster (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), introduction to part I.
Malini Johar Schueller and Edward Watts,eds.,Messy Beginnings:Postcoloniality and Early American Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 15.
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, trans. Jay Miskowiec (New York, Routledge, 1998), 239.
D. T. Valentine, The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (New York: McSpedon and Baker, 1856), 472;
Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 176.
O. H. Holley, A Description of the City of New York: With a Brief Account of the Cities, Towns, Villages, and Places of Resort Within Thirty Miles. Designed as a Guide for Citizens and Strangers, to All Places of Attraction in the City and its Vicinity (New York: J. Disturnell, 1847), 53.
D. T. Valentine, The Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (New York: Edmund Jones, 1866), 586;
P. T. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum Written by Himself (New York: Tubbs, Nesmith and Teall, 1854; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 210.
W. Harrison Bayles, Old Taverns of New York (New York: Frank Allaben Genealogical Company, 1915), 455.
Antonio Blitz, Fifty Years in the Magic Circle: Being an Account of the Author’s Professional Life; His Wonderful Tricks and Feats; With Laughable Incidents and Adventures as a Magician, Necromancer, and Ventriloquist (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1871), 122.
Geraldine A. Duclow, “Philadelphia’s Early Pleasure Gardens,” Performing Arts Resources 21 (1998): 1–17.
A description of the gardens can be found in William Parker Cutler and Julia Perkins Cutler, eds., Life Journals and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, L.L.D. (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1888), 1: 276;
David John Jeremy, ed., Henry Wansey and his American Journal: 1794 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1970), 112;
Thomas J. Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884 (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884), 2:943.
Alan S. Downer, ed., The Memoir of John Durang: American Actor, 1785–1816 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966), 33.
F. H. Shelton, “Springs and Spas of Old-Time Philadelphians,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 47 (1923): 216.
Joseph Jackson, Encyclopedia of Philadelphia, vol. 4 (Harrisburg: National His torical Association, 1933), 1154;
Joseph Jackson, “Vauxhall Garden,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 57 (1933): 290.
See Gerald Kahan, George Alexander Stevens and the Lecture on Heads (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) for more on this piece.
John W. Wagner, “James Hewitt, 1770–1827,” Musical Quarterly 58, no. 2 (April 1972): 259.
William W. Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage (1853, reprint; New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 21;
William S. Rossiter, ed., Days and Ways in Old Boston (Boston: R. H. Stearns, 1915), 121–23.
Mary Ellen Hayward and Frank R. Shivers, eds., The Architecture of Baltimore: An Illustrated History. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 12.
William Fry, The Baltimore Directory for 1810, Containing the Names, Occupations and Residences of the Inhabitants, Alphabetically Arranged (Baltimore: G. Dobbin and Murphy, 1810);
James Robinson, The Baltimore Directory for 1804, Containing the Names, Trades & Residences of the Inhabitants of the City & Precincts (Baltimore: Warner and Hanna, 1804).
Stanley W. Hoole, The Antebellum Charleston Theatre (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1946).
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 1.
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© 2013 Naomi J. Stubbs
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Stubbs, N.J. (2013). Introduction. In: Cultivating National Identity through Performance. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137326874_1
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