Limits to Culture: Urban Regeneration vs. Dissident Art by Malcolm Miles

Author:Malcolm Miles [Miles, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781783713103
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2015-06-20T07:00:00+00:00

The gardens, then, were one place where privilege was presented visually and in other ways to a mass public, as the proprietors encouraged attendance by the aristocracy as a magnet, to appropriate their status as an, ‘implicit suggestion that fashionable society was somehow knowable and identifiable’.62 The illustrator Thomas Rowlandson depicts exactly this in A View of Vauxhall Gardens (1784, reprinted in 1809). In the centre foreground there are two elegantly dressed women who have been surrounded by spectators.63 They are probably Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and her sister, Lady Duncannon. Among the spectators, Grieg identifies three newspaper editors. She notes, ‘the distinctiveness of the fashionable company, and the role of the press and public in monitoring that social differentiation’.64 The fashionable elite bought season tickets; those who wanted to watch them bought tickets for the evening, hoping to be lucky and listening to rumours as to who planned to be where. But when the stars appeared, they tried to avoid mingling with such aspirants:

Whilst topographical perspectives show criss-crossed walks that seem designed to encourage spontaneous encounters, first-person descriptions hint at a more carefully choreographed use of space. Opportunities for chance encounters appear to have been rare rather than the norm. At Vauxhall … instead of roaming the grounds at whim, the fashionable society more often remained sequestered for lengthy stretches in their supper boxes. When the Duchess of Devonshire was spotted … it was with a large party, noisily supping and facing the orchestra …65

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