The Gentleman's Daughter (44 page)

49 ‘A General Prospect of Vauxhall Gardens’, 1751.

50 ‘View of the Grand South Walk in Vauxhall Gardens’, 1751.

51 ‘A View of the Company in Vauxhall Gardens’, 1779, from
Carnan & Newbury's Pocket Book
.

52 ‘A View of the Company at the Pantheon, Oxford St’, 1779, from
Carnan & Newbury's Pocket Book
.

These metropolitan gardens had a tremendous capacity and admitted virtually anyone who could afford the price of the ticket, so the size of the throng and the dangers latent in the mob were close to the surface in the written reactions of polite visitors. To celebrate the proclamation of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1749, ‘a new way of entertaining the publick with a jubilee masquerade’ was devised at Ranelagh, expected to draw ‘Millions of people’ and an ‘a bundence of people come from France, Italy and Holland’.
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One visitor, the lawyer John Spencer, reported with amazement that ‘the crowd of people in the park was greater than you can possibly imagine & what is very surprising there was not in the least riot or disturbance of any kind all the evening’; despite the fact that the fireworks display caused one of the grand pavilions to ignite.
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Being a popular resort for both the likes of Frederick Prince of Wales and the well-dressed prostitute, the pleasure garden, particularly Vauxhall Gardens, conveyed the spice of danger amidst the glory, but demonstrably the gardens were also visited by respectable married couples and family parties. Polite, agreeable entertainment was to be had if one kept to the lighted path, in the company of known acquaintances. Dr Johnson reportedly believed Ranelagh to be altogether ‘a place of innocent recreation’.
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Outside London, town pleasure gardens, such the Spring Gardens in Leeds (in existence from at least 1715) or the Spring Gardens in Bath (from 1742), had less racy reputations, drawing a more socially homogenous custom.
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A high-profile promenade was also to be had along one of the numerous custom-built walks laid out in London and the provinces in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The most prestigious perambulation was to be enjoyed on the London Mall, constructed by Charles II in 1660, where the quality were to be observed on summer evenings and winter afternoons in their charming ‘undress’. Although one of the avenues on the Mall was reserved for the royal family and their friends, virtually anyone could join the cavalcade in the other carriageways, so the walk became synonymous with the moving of multitudes. De Saussure reported in 1725, ‘the park is so crowded at times that you cannot help touching your neighbour. Some people come to see, some to be seen, and others to seek their fortunes; for many priestesses of Venus are abroad, some of them magnificently attired, and all on the look-out for adventures.’
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The appeal for some was akin to that of a colossal beauty parade, as here, where a maudlin Sir Richard Philips sighs in 1817 for the bewitching beauties of yesteryear:

53 ‘A View in Kensington Gardens During the Performance of the Military Band’, from
Poole's Cabinet of Fashion and Repository of Literature
(1827).

54 These ladies admiring potted plants appear in the untitled frontispiece to
Marshall's Ladies Fashionable Repository
(1827).

Town walks in the provinces fulfilled the same exhibitionary function. The Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells (laid out in 1638), Avenham Walk in Preston (1690), the ‘New Walk’ in York (1730s) and the Grand Parade in Bath (1740s) are all famous examples of formal walks laid out as places of polite resort.

That genteel women walked the town and city streets of Georgian England cannot be in doubt. Indeed, foreigners attributed the unattractive size of English women's feet to their prodigious taste for exercise.
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When ladies were not sauntering along an elegant tree-lined parade, they were taking more purposeful walks in fashionable shopping districts. London's superior shopping was renowned across Europe. The most stylish shops were to be found on the Strand, Pall Mall, St Paul's Churchyard and, latterly, on Bond Street. In 1725 De Saussure was entranced by the attractive shops on the Strand, Fleet Street, Cheapside and Cornhill, ‘where the choicest merchandise from the four quarters of the globe is exposed to the sight of the passers-by. A stranger might spend whole days, without ever feeling bored, examining these wonderful goods.’
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London shops were often open until ten at night, but the afternoon was the most popular time for conspicuous consuming. Christian Goede, a German visitor in London between 1802 and 1804, noted that the West End was busiest between one and three, when the ladies purchased luxury goods in Bond Street and ‘the gentlemen pass on horseback up and down the street to see and be seen. [The] foot-pavement is so perfectly covered with elegantly dressed people as to make it difficult to move.’
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But in May 1808 Ellen Barcroft contrived to miss the carriage trade despite having spent half a day at large in the city: ‘We were out at least 5 hours walking in different parts of the town. We were in Bond st but the fashionable had not made their appearance.’
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A stroll around the better London shops was a standard feature of most tourist itineraries, male or female, just as a shopping spree was a crucial element of a trip to town in the provinces. Shops offered pleasures for the eye, but also opportunities for refreshment and relaxation, one of the most famous venues of the 1790s being Harding, Howell and Co. on Pall Mall, which had four departments on the ground floor and a room above where customers partook of wine, tea and sweetmeats. Even in Colne, local ladies and gentlemen collected at Betty Hartley's general store for tea, ‘to be tempted with her fashionable and elegant assortments from London’.
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Shopping was well entrenched as a public cultural pursuit for respectable women and men long before the advent of Selfridges and Whiteleys. Shops and showrooms were acceptable sites of mixed sex congregation from their very establishment. When, in 1711, Lady Mary Pierrepont and Edward Wortley surveyed the available spaces for a romantic rendezvous, both Cortelli's Italian Warehouse and Colman's toyshop were mooted spots. The urban voyager and female pleasure-seeker was no invention of the 1880s.
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55 ‘Prospect of a Noble Terras Walk’, York,
c.
1756. Another of York's facilities for polite recreation, this walk was laid out in the 1730s by the City Corporation.

Cultural tourism was a mainstay of the genteel life out of doors. Both the tour and the day-trip were popular diversions throughout this period, incorporating the viewing of a catholic range of sites. ‘How-to’ manuals for patriotic travellers were published throughout the eighteenth century, encouraging the observation and investigation of everything from field systems to local birth rates.
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Tourist attractions fell into five main categories: the commercial exhibition, scenes of natural beauty, architectural wonders, industrial sites or feats of engineering, and impressive institutions. Thus, in addition to predictable visits to county seats and pretty views, genteel tourists examined bridges and factories, hospitals and almshouses. Elizabeth Shackleton fancied herself a connoisseur of domestic architecture and the rural picturesque, but she also found time to ride out to view the new turnpike road, the Leeds cloth hall, the new locks on the Leeds to Liverpool canal at Bingley, and went to watch poor children winding silk. She also regretted having missed Mrs Walton's outing to view the Peels' cotton printing factory at Church.
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In the 1770s Mary Chorley was taken to admire Preston and Liverpool docks, a paper factory, a coal pit, a picture gallery, a china auction, an army exercise and the opening of the Lancaster assize. On a visit to London in 1786 Margaret Pedder relished all the traditional metropolitan attractions, but also attended the Foundling Hospital, Greenwich Pensioners' Hospital, the Magdalene and a meeting of sons of clergy and charity at St Paul's, making charitable donations at three of these institutions. In the 1790s Mary Chorley's own daughter Sarah Ford of Lancaster catalogued her visits to a furnace, a sugar house, a rural powder mill, the new Lancaster canal and the aqueducts at both Preston and Lancaster. Ellen Barcroft's sojourn in London a decade later, also incorporated edifying visits to Christ's Hospital, Greenwich Hospital, the Fishmonger's Almshouses, St Paul's meeting of the sons of the clergy, and the Magdalene chapel where she heard a sermon on charity. Judging by a rapt description of the steam-powering of Derby Infirmary penned in 1813, the female fascination with both engineering and worthy institutions still ran deep in the early years of the nineteenth century.
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