A mine of information on not only how Londoners of all classes spent their leisure hours at these establishments, but also what they and the literati of the day thought of them. For here was contained, for more than a century, the recreational life of an entire people - from the fashionable, if somewhat dull, assemblies in Ranelagh's great rotunda, to the more democratic nightly festivities amid the decorated supper boxes and leafy avenues of Vauxhall Gardens, to the free and easy atmosphere of such middle- and working-class pleasure haunts as Bagnigge Wells, Dobney's Bowling Green, and the ill-famed Dog and Duck in St. Georges Fields. Besides the amusements peculiar to the gardens themselves, there were the embryonic stirrings of a number of other entertainments that were destined to flourish in the second half of the eighteenth and the coming century. Thus, in addition to the music, dancing, bowling, occasional gambling, and consumption of tea, wine, cakes, and other comestibles for