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Abstract
Vauxhall made its way into the social plots of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels as a site of leisure and spectacle that attracted fashionable crowds of both the upper and middle classes. As the actions of the literary characters who visited this space suggest, Vauxhall afforded countless opportunities for advancement in terms of conflict or personal agenda, solicited or unsolicited sexual conquest, and the confusion of status in the crowd’s mixing of classes. With each new literary representation of Vauxhall comes a remembering of past spectacles, trysts, and maiden terrors. We ought not think of Vauxhall as belonging to the narratives that deploy it as a setting; instead, we should recognize how the casts of these stories occupy and utilize the space. Tracing a broad chronology between fictional visits to Vauxhall made in novels published between 1778 and 1848, this project examines the pleasure gardens as a vessel of both society and history, considering the ways in which the space foregrounds and complicates questions of realism and temporality across these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts. By conducting case studies of Vauxhall’s representation in Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), Valentine's Eve (1816), Vanity Fair (1848), and Pendennis (1848), I approach questions of realism, setting, and the disorienting blur between fictional containers and the affordances of their real referents. Rather than examining Vauxhall as a constituent element of prose fiction, my project promotes a consideration of the geographical location as it is occupied by the characters of their respective novels. Directing critical attention toward settings with fictional and real provenance, my project introduces the notion of fiction to the historical and archaeological discourses concerning the pleasure gardens and allows Vauxhall to become a way of thinking through ideas about realism and periodization in the history of the English novel. The alignment of Vauxhall’s real and literary existences in its function as a site of fiction and fantasy allows this space, a monument of eighteenth-century design, to transcend time, first by maintaining relevance to changing social and cultural tastes, and finally as a cultural and historical icon.