Cassandra Nelson

Author Archives: Cassandra Nelson

Cassandra Nelson is an MA candidate at University of Alabama.


English Pleasure Gardens

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Vauxhall Gardens shewing the Grand Walk at the Entrance of the Garden and the Orchestra with the Music Playing. John S. Muller, ca. 1715-1792, German, active in Britain; after Samuel Wale, 1721-1786, British. After 1751. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Vauxhall Gardens shewing the Grand Walk at the Entrance of the Garden and the Orchestra with the Music Playing. John S. Muller, ca. 1715-1792, German, active in Britain; after Samuel Wale, 1721-1786, British. After 1751. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

The English garden will be in the spotlight this year as the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Chelsea Flower Show (May 21-25) marks its 100th anniversary. Arguably the most famous and most prestigious garden show in not only England but the world, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show has been held on the grounds of the Chelsea Hospital every year since its launch in 1913, except during the war years. Although the Chelsea Flower Show might seem like a modern attraction, gardens and parks have long been popular forms of entertainment in England. In fact, the Chelsea Flower Show takes place on what was once Ranelagh Gardens, one of several famous 18th-century pleasure gardens located on the outskirts of London.

In many ways, pleasure gardens were the amusement parks of Georgian England, allowing visitors to escape the hustle and bustle of city life while offering them a variety of entertainment, including picturesque gardens, strolling paths, musical concerts, al fresco dining, balloon rides, waterfalls, fountain displays, masquerades, balls, and even fireworks shows. Basically, there existed an attraction for almost everyone of every taste, not least important among them being the chance to see and be seen by members of London high society.

Vauxhall, open from 1661 to 1859, is considered the first and most popular of the pleasure gardens because of the variety of entertainment it offered as well as the large crowd it always attracted (due in large part to its low entrance fee of only a shilling). Due to its lack of exclusivity, Vauxhall also became a prime example of some of the problems that existed for most pleasure gardens: Vauxhall’s “dark walks” (unlit paths) were popular hideouts for young lovers as well as pickpockets, rapists, prostitutes, and other criminals, making the garden a sometimes dangerous and undesirable place to visit at night. Vauxhall’s “dark walks” were so infamous that they were commonly referenced in popular literature at the time, a prime example being Frances Burney’s novel Evelina, in which they are the setting for the heroine’s near-rape experience. But, despite its seedy underbelly, Vauxhall was only ever really rivaled by the more exclusive Ranelagh, which opened in 1746 and was particularly popular among the higher classes. Pleasure gardens became such a popular London attraction that they remained in fashion through the Victorian era and were recreated in other cities and even other countries. The following is a list of some interesting websites and recent scholarship related to 18th-century pleasure gardens:

  • A group of students at the University of Michigan have made a website about entertainment in 18th-century Britain that includes a page on “Pleasure Gardens and Tea Rooms.”
  • Sarah Jane Downing’s book The English Pleasure Garden: 1660-1680 provides a history of the English pleasure gardens, including their creation, their rise in popularity, their use of various entertainments, and their decline into hideaways for London degenerates.
  • Jonathan Conlin studies the progression from the first pleasure gardens of the 17th century to the amusement parks of the 20th century in his book The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island, which focuses on the affect of architecture, design, music, and lighting on visitors.
  • In their book Vauxhall Gardens a History, David Coke and Alan Borg provide a detailed history of the music, entertainments, artwork, social events, and interesting people that were always to be found at Vauxhall, that helped make it such a popular destination, and that influenced art and entertainment for years to come.

“The Mechanical Turk” and Automata of the 18th Century

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The Mechanical Turk. Windisch, Karl Gottlieb. Inanimate Reason, 1784. Houghton Library, Harvard University. SG 3675.94.10 Source: John Overholt.

The Mechanical Turk.
Windisch, Karl Gottlieb. Inanimate Reason, 1784.
Houghton Library, Harvard University. SG 3675.94.10
Source: John Overholt.

In a recent article for the BBC News, Adam Gopnik reflects on the persistent allure of the Turk, a chess-playing automaton that fascinated eighteenth-century spectators across Europe and America.  The Turk was created by Viennese inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen and first appeared in the court of Empress Maria Theresa. Essentially an early type of robot, the contraption featured a large wooden cabinet with a chessboard on top behind which sat the torso of a mustached man dressed in oriental robes. Before every performance, in order to convince the audience that the Turk really was a machine, the operator, first Kempelen and then later Johann Maelzel, would go through an elaborate demonstration of opening the cabinet doors to reveal the complex, whirring jumble of wheels and cogs that powered the machine. Once the cabinet was closed, an audience member would be invited to challenge the Turk at a game of chess. Impressively, the Turk was able not only to move its own chess pieces but also to recognize if its opponent made an illegal move and even to win a large portion of the games it played. The automaton was a sensation. Before being destroyed by a fire in New York in the 1850s, it toured throughout Europe and North America and played against such opponents as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. Most impressive, though, is the secret that the Turk managed to keep for over 50 years: it was all a fraud.

In reality, the Turk’s impressive chess skills were the result not of elaborate, mechanical clockwork but of a human operator, usually a random chess-player from the town where it was currently performing, cleverly hidden in a secret compartment behind the display of clockwork parts. It is this ability to fool its eighteenth-century audience for so long, or rather the willingness of the eighteenth-century audience to be fooled by the automaton, that Gopnik focuses on in his article. Although there were several people who doubted the machine early on – Edgar Allen Poe, for example, discusses how it must be controlled by a hidden chess player in his essay “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” – the majority of spectators were happily convinced that it was just an impressive piece of machinery. Gopnik argues that the spectators who were so willing to believe the lie did so because they wanted what we still want to this day: a beautiful, elegant solution (an extraordinary automaton) rather than a cynical, ugly one (a hidden chess-player). Gopnik also points out that the real genius of the machine’s inventor was not fooling his audience but realizing and harnessing the mastery that is available in the modern world but that often goes unnoticed. The chess-players who ran the machine were not chess-masters, but they were good enough to beat the majority of people they played against.

Fascination for the Turk isn’t limited to the eighteenth century, though. Several scholars in both the humanities and the sciences have studied and written about the Turk and other popular automata of the eighteenth century, including Gerald Levitt’s book The Turk, Chess Automaton, that gives detailed analysis of the machine’s hidden operation as well as the literature written about it. Likewise, Julie Park discusses the connection between general automata and the novel in the eighteenth century as part of a consumer-driven desire for novelty and self-representation in her book The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth Century England. In his book The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine, Tom Standage discusses how this mysterious machine played an important role not only in the development of the power loom and the computer but even in current debates about machine and artificial intelligence. The fact that it was fairly recently reconstructed by John Gaughan, though it no longer requires a hidden human operator, speaks to its lasting appeal to and effect on modern society. Interestingly, and as if to support Gopnik’s argument for realizing the world’s untapped potential for mastery, Amazon has launched an online crowdsourcing service that helps computer programmers connect and collaborate in order to accomplish a variety of tasks that computers still can’t do. They named the service, which they categorize as “artificial artificial intelligence,” The Mechanical Turk, after the eighteenth-century fraud automaton that was actually man-powered.