The London pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century / by Warwick Wroth ; assisted by Arthur Edgar Wroth.
- Warwick William Wroth
- Date:
- 1896
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The London pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century / by Warwick Wroth ; assisted by Arthur Edgar Wroth. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![weight were, at least according to the bills, engaged. In 1826 (June) a balloon ascent from the grounds was made by Mrs. Graham, and in 1838 her husband also ascended. Belzoni, the famous excavator, exhibited his feats of strength in 1803. In 1804 Sadler’s Wells was known as the ‘‘Aquatic Theatre.” A large tank filled with water from the New River occupied nearly the whole of the stage, and plays were produced with cascades and other “ real water ” effects. Our rapid survey, omitting many years, now passes on to 1844, when Samuel Phelps became one of the proprietors of Sadler’s Wells. During Phelps’s memor- able management (1844-1862) there were produced some thirty of Shakespeare’s plays, occupying about four thousand nights—Hamlet being played four hundred times. In 1879 Sadler’s Wells was taken by Mrs. Bateman (from the Lyceum Theatre), and under her manage- ment the whole of the interior was reconstructed. At the present time it is a music-hall with two houses nightly. It is curious to note that Macklin, describing Sadler’s Wells as he remembered it some years before Rosoman’s time, says that several entertainments of unequal duration took place throughout the day, and were terminated by the door-keeper calling out “ Is Hiram Fisteman here ? ” Fisteman being a mythical personage whose name signified to the performers that another audience was waiting outside. The price of admission at that time was threepence and sixpence ; to-day the charge is twopence, a box being procurable for a shilling. [The authorities are numerous. The Percival collection relating to Sadler’s Wells (in Brit. Mus.) contains a great mass of material bound in fourteen volumes. Useful summaries are given in Pinks’s Clerkenwell^ 40Q, ff; in the Era Almanack^ 1^72, p. i, ff; in M. Williams’s Some London Eheatres; and in H. Barton Baker’s London Stage, ii. p. 187, ff ]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2897721x_0092.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
