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The Masquerade in Ranelagh gardens
George Cruikshank
June 1842
Steel-engraving
12.7 cm high by 10 cm wide, framed
Eleventh illustration for the volume edition of William Harrison Ainsworth's The Miser's Daughter: A Tale, Book Two, Chapter 8, facing page 176 (first plate for the June 1842 number in Ainsworth's Magazine).
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Having crossed the bridge leading to the Chinese temple, Lady Brabazon stopped, and setting Randulph at liberty, leaned against the rail at the entrance, to survey the gay crowd around. While she was thus engaged, Beau Villiers, followed by an attendant with a bottle of champagne on a silver waiter, approached her, and pressing her to take a glass, looked significantly at her, as if he had something to communicate.
Taking advantage of this fortunate interruption, Randulph sprang into a Chinese-fashioned boat lying near the bridge, and seizing the oars, rowed off towards the canal, keeping near its sides, the better to view the company. Failing, however, in discovering the object of his search, he was returning towards the bridge, where Lady Brabazon was still standing in conversation with the beau, when a roar of laughter from the dancers in the alley on the farther side of the clipped hedge attracted his attention.
This, it appeared, was occasioned by a misadventure that had just occurred to the old beau, who having been carried away by his enthusiasm at the fair Thomasine's dancing, had rushed forward with the intention of snatching a kiss from her ruby lips, when the jealous little barber, divining his intention, threw himself in his way and tripped up his heels. In this posture he presented a tempting mark for Mr. Cripps, whose wand resounded in a rapid succession of strokes upon his withered limbs.
Randulph, who had raised himself in the boat to see what was going forward, now sat down, and had just resumed the oars, when Clementina Brabazon, and another masked dame who had been conversing with Trussell and Firebras, approached the edge of the canal, and called to him.
"I know who you are searching for, Mr. Crew," cried Clementina; "and could help you to find the person if I chose."
"Then you will choose, I am sure," replied Randulph, pulling hastily towards her. "Where is she?"
"Well, I'll be good-natured," she answered. "Look behind you."
Randulph instantly turned in the direction indicated, and beheld Hilda seated at one end of the temple. Behind her stood Sir Norfolk Salusbury, while Sir Bulkeley Price was handing her a glass of champagne. But Hilda was so much occupied by what was passing on the canal, that she was not aware of the knight's attention. [Chapter VIII, "The Masquerade at Ranelagh, with the Various Incidents that Occurred at It," pp. 176-77]
The masquerade costumes momentarily confound the reader's identifying the specific Ainsworth characters involved in the complex action. To the left, Cripps disguised as Harlequin is clubbing his master, Beau Villiers. Meanwhile, to the right, Crew in the Chinese boat is turning to observe Hilda in the pavillion, attended by the costumed figures of Sir Norfolk Salusbury and Sir Bulkeley Price. Just to the right of the hedge (centre bottom) Cruikshank has stationed Lady Brabazon and "another masked dame," and right against the hedge Trussell and Firebras in oriental costumes.
Cruikshank may well have seen Nathaniel Parr's print Jubilee Venetian masquerade ball in Ranelagh Gardens, Chelsea, London (1749), in which revellers are dressed as monks and nuns, sultans, and cossacks, and as Pulcinello (Punch) from the Commedia dell'Arte. The fashionable Rotunda forms the backdrop. Cruikshank's handling of the scene, moreover, suggests that it is derived from a print by Charles Grignion, A View of the Canal, Chinese Building, Rotunda, &c. in Ranelagh Gardens, with the Masquerade, a hand-coloured engraving after Antonio Canaletto, dating from the 1750s, and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Although Swiss count John James Heidegger upon arriving in London from Italy in 1708 originally introduced the Venetian masquerade ball as a subscription event at the Haymarket Theatre, the city's public gardens such as Vauxhall and Ranelagh offered more spacious settings in which the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and even the proletariate might hobnob as masked characters. This mass celebration rather than the development of the Crew-Scarve plot is the real subject of Cruikshank's panoramic illustration in which he subordinates Ainsworth's figures in a large-scale design that anticipates his epic temperance canvas The Triumph of Bacchus (1863).
Before the revellers begin to arrive at the pleasure grounds in Chelsea upriver, Ainsworth has established that his personification of misrule, the presumptuous valet, Crackenthorpe Cripps, has donned the masquerade costume of the pantomime figure of Harlequin, the mute character who is invisible to both clown and pantaloon in the British adaptation of the Italian Commedia dell'Arte:
Having decided upon going by water, Mr. Cripps and his party left Billiter-square about one o'clock, and embarked in a tilt-boat, rowed by a couple of watermen, at Old Swan Stairs, near London Bridge. They were all, of course, in their masquerade attire, Mr. Cripps being arrayed in the parti-coloured garb of the hero of pantomine, — which differed only in some immaterial points, such as the looseness of the pantaloons at the ancle, and the amplitude of the shirt collar, from the garb of the modern harlequin. He was provided with a wand, and his face was concealed by a close black vizard. [Chapter VIII, pp. 168-69]
George Worth, in William Harrison Ainsworth, notes of the novel's fashionable settings, "The London pleasure haunts of the day, in each of which important action takes place, are carefully described by Ainsworth. . . . The virtues of this novel are clearly recognized when it is contrasted with a much feebler late novel set at almost exactly the same period, Beau Nash, in which mid-eighteenth century Bath . . . has none of the vivid ambience we sense in the mid-eighteenth-century London of The Miser's Daughter" (p. 68). Among these well-known eighteenth-century pleasure gardens Ainsworth and Cruikshank have already described the Mall, the Folly on the Thames, and the gardens at Mary-le-bone. In the July 1842 instalment, they will transport nineteenth-century readers to the gardens at Vauxhall. According to Ainsworth,
On the left of the rotunda stood the Earl of Ranelagh's old mansion, a structure of some magnitude, but with little pretension to beauty, being built in the formal Dutch taste of the time of William of Orange. On the right, opposite the mansion, was a magnificent conservatory, with great pots of aloes in front. In a line with the conservatory, and the side entrance of the rotunda, stretched out a long and beautiful canal, in the midst of which stood a Chinese fishing-temple, approached by a bridge. On either side of the canal were broad gravel walks, and alleys shaded by lines of trees, and separated by trimly-clipped hedges. The gardens were exquisitely arranged with groves, bowers, statues, temples, wildernesses, and shady retreats. [Chapter VIII, pp. 171-73]
Regarding Cruikshank's dispute with Ainsworth regarding the origins of the pleasure garden scenes in the novel, biographer Blanchard Jerrold cited Ainsworth's preface to the 1850 Cheap Edition to show that the author felt that the descriptions of such fashionable pleasure gardens as those at Ranelagh were entirely of his invention, and that he did not merely "write up" Cruikshank's illustrations:
Other and lighter portions of the tale refer to the adventures of a young man on his first introduction to town-life about the middle of the last century, when Ranelagh was in its zenith, and Vauxhall and Marylebone Gardens in vogue; when the Thames boasted its Folly, and when coffee-houses filled the places of clubs. The descriptions I believe to be tolerably accurate, and they are at all events carefully done, with the view of giving a correct idea of the manners, habits, and pursuits of our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. Temptations to pleasurable excess were no doubt sufficiently abundant then, but not more abundant than nowadays, when casinos and other places of licentious resort are tolerated; and our modern youth have as much to fear from the allurement of vice as their predecessors. Apart, indeed, from a certain grossness in conversation, our forefathers were to the full as decorous as ourselves, and quite as moral, though they did not cloak their faults so carefully. Consequently, vice in those days was less dangerous, because less specious and more easily shunned than at a time when its ugliness is better concealed. [The Life Of George Cruikshank in Two Epochs Vol. I]
For the same instalment, Cruikshank and Ainsworth take readers inside the Rotunda (upper right) to describe the crowds of masquerade dancers in the elegantly-lit interior in Randulph and Hilda dancing at Ranelagh, in which the story veers away from the confidence man Cripps to follow the romantic plot involving the hero and heroine. In that second July 1842 illustration, Cruikshank increases the scale of the figures and places Hilda and Crew, who are merely peripheral in the initial July illustration, at the centre.
Ainsworth, William Harrison. The Miser's Daughter: A Tale. With 20 illustrations by George Cruikshank. First published in 3 volumes by Cunningham and Mortimer, London, 1842. London, Glasgow, and New York: George Routledge, 1892.
Ainsworth, William Harrison. "Preface," The Miser's Daughter: A Tale, Chapman and Hall cheap edition (1850). Cited by Blanchard Jerrold, in Chapter 9, "Illustrations to Harrison Ainsworth's Romances," The Life Of George Cruikshank In Two Epochs Vol. I (1882).
"Ranelagh Gardens." Garden Visit.com — The Garden Guide. " Chapter 12: Historical Gardens," in London Parks and Gardens, 1907. https://www.gardenvisit.com/book/london_parks_and_gardens_1907/chapter_12_historical_gardens/ranelagh_gardens.
Vann, J. Don. "The Miser's Daughter in Ainsworth's Magazine January-October 1842." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1988. Pp. 22-23.
Worth, George J. William Harrison Ainsworth. New York: Twayne, 1972.
Last modified 22 June 2018