Reading London: the Literary Representation of the City's Pleasures, 1700-1782

Reading London: the Literary Representation of the City’s Pleasures, 1700-1782 Leya Landau Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University College London London University February 1999 ProQuest Number: U643575 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U643575 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract This dissertation investigates the representation, in fiction, of Lxindon’s spaces of pleasure, in the period between 1700 and 1782. It examines the way that these literary depictions both reflect and create their own imaginary versions of familiar urban sites. The thesis engages with recent work by social historians and theorists of eighteenth-century culture, and argues that a gradual shift in cultural sensibilities, from polite urbane respectability to a more bourgeois and feminine sentimentalism, is articulated through literary portrayals of London’s urban spaces. My reading of ‘the city as text’ treats London as a place to be deciphered by the reader, and considers historical detail and peculiarities, rather than theoretical and ahistorical interpretation, as integral to the discussion. The chapters are organized as a series of case-studies, centred around places rather than authors, and focus on the relationship between geography and literature. In the first chapter I investigate the way in which the relocation of the theatres from the outskirts of London to the centre of the city was selectively represented in contemporary literature. The chapter starts with the treatment of the London playhouse in periodicals and scandalous fiction, in the early part of the century, and considers how the cliché of theatrum mundi is given a topical relevance in debates concerning urban identity. It goes on to discuss changing attitudes to the playhouse in various novels, focusing particularly on Samuel Richardson’s mid-century ambivalence about the theatre, in his dual role as guardian of the City’s morals and author of popular fiction. I also discuss the correlation between the identity of readers of novels and the identity of playhouse audiences. The second chapter examines the changing attitude to Italian opera and the Opera House, from excoriating criticism in early Scriblerian satire to praise and acclaim in the later literature of sensibility. In the third chapter I discuss the changing fictional representation of London’s more exclusive pleasure gardens - Vauxhall and Ranelagh. The chapter also considers how certain popular literary works, in particularThe Arabian Nights (which first appeared in English translation in 1706) and Richardson’s Pamela (1740-1), shaped the reputation and design of the gardens. The final chapter examines the fictional representation of the coffee house. I explore the way in which early periodicals like The Toiler and The Spectator construct a polite and urbane version of London through a selective presentation of the city’s coffee-houses. I go on to trace the evolution of early literary tropes associated with the coffee-house, in later works, particularly novels. These include the connection between the variety of coffee-houses and shifting urban identity, and the significance of the absence of women, in literary portraits, from the eighteenth-century coffee-house. CONTENTS Abstract 2 Contents 3 Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 5 1. Transactions Behind the Curtain’: the London Playhouse 23 2. From Sound and Senselessness’ to Sensibility: Italian Opera in London 82 3. The Skirts of the Metropolis’: Vauxhall and Ranelagh 155 4 'Men of Business, or Men of Pleasure’: the London Coffee-House 219 Bibliography 280 Acknowledgements There are many people to whom I owe a debt of thanks for their help during the course of researching and writing this thesis. I particularly want to thank John Mullan for patient, stimulating and good-humoured supervision over the last four years. Henry Woudhuysen provided valuable advice during the later stages of writing, and Markman Ellis was also generous with his time, comments and coffee-house discussions. My research was greatly facilitated by the staff at the British Library and the London University Library at Senate House, and I am grateful for their courtesy and assistance. Thanks also to Shoshana and Menachem Smith for unpatronizing computer and CD-ROM expertise. I am very grateful to the British Academy for a three-year research grant, and to the Department of English at University College London for a fourth-year fellowship, which enabled me to complete this thesis. Finally, I want to thank my parents for the unstinting support and encouragement they have given me during the last few years. This thesis is for them. Introduction In 1763, a young James Boswell described in his London Journal (1762-3) how he wished to be perceived by his peers: Could 1 but fix myself in such a character and preserve it uniformly, I should be exceedingly happy. 1 hope to do so and to attain a constancy and dignity without which 1 can never be satisfied, as I have these ideas strong and pride myself in thinking that my natural character is one of dignity. My friend Temple is very good in consoling me by saying that 1 may be such a man, and that people will say, ‘Mr. Boswell is quite altered from the dissipated, inconstant fellow that he was. He is now a reserved, grave sort of a man. But indeed that was his real character; and he only deviated into these eccentric paths for a while.’ t Boswell wryly ponders the notion of a ‘natural character’, identifying an essential latent dignity, which will replace the temporary dissoluteness that has hitherto characterized his stay in London. He wishes to abandon the shifting urban mode of seeming and of performance, and embrace a single part which will most effectively express his ‘true’ city identity. To ‘fix himself in character’, he must choose a personality that conveys the respectability he seeks to embody. It is not so much a case of disclosing intrinsic traits and qualities that the writer implies here, as remaining faithful to an unchanging role. He must not deviate from a particular character if he is to ‘attain a constancy and dignity’ which will be respected by observers. A few months earlier during his stay in London, Boswell had indicated the part he wished to play in the city: I felt strong dispositions to be a Mr. Addison. Indeed, 1 had accustomed myself so much to laugh at everything that it required time to render my imagination solid and give me just notions of real life and of religion. But I hoped by degrees to attain to some degrees of propriety. Mr Addison’s character in sentiment, mixed with a little of the gaiety of Sir Richard S te e le .2 Boswell’s familiarity with the pages of The Spectator elicits a desire to fuse two recognizable polite, urban personae into a single metropolitan identity; an alloy comprising 1 Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle, first published 1950 by Yale University, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p. 258. 2 Ibid., p. 62. 5 the restrained dignified sentiments of Joseph Addison, and the more diverting humour of Richard Steele. Ironically, it is Boswell’s imitations of the authorial identities of writers like Addison and Steele which will endow him with a greater ‘natural’ gravitas, in a city which has the ability to confer a sequence of separate identities on its population. These private, urban meditations reveal more than the familiar idea that the metropolis, by virtue of its size and anonymity, allows for performance and dissimulation- characteristics which can be identified in representations of the city from almost any period. Boswell’s reading of the capital is filtered through the particular and selective impressions offered by The Spectator (1711-14). What we see is a young ingénu negotiating the city through the pages of an urbane body of writing, which had constructed its own representation of a more polite and respectable London fifty years earlier. As he embarks on a personal exploration of the capital, Boswell treats the city as a text to be read, partly through his own discoveries and interpretations, but more significantly, as it has been described in previous works; and his own urban identity - the way he conducts himself in the city — is significantly influenced and shaped by residual images from earlier urban writings. The idea of the ‘city as text’, a place to be read and interpreted, is an appealing one for literary critics, as well as cultural and urban theorists. It suggests that a sprawling and socially discontinuous topography can be deciphered and ordered into some sort of consistent and logical urban code. In one of the eaiiiest attempts to map out a semiotics of the city, Kevin Lynch comments: ‘[l]egibility is crucial in the city setting.’^ Lynch’s study, The Image of the Cify (1960), treated metropolitan features such as the paths, districts, edges and landmarks as units in a form of urban semantics. His work is invoked by Roland Barthes in an essay entitled ‘Semiology and the City’(1967).4 Although Barthes expresses certain reservations about Lynch’s approach,^ he offers a similarly abstract approach to understanding urban space: ‘the city is writing.

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