Gathering Flowers: Romantic Era Botanico-Literary Production And

Gathering Flowers: Romantic Era Botanico-Literary Production and the Transatlantic Mediation of Culture by Kelli Towers Jasper B.A., Brigham Young University, 2003 M.A., Utah State University, 2006

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English 2016

This dissertation entitled: Gathering Flowers: Romantic Era Botanico-Literary Production and the Transatlantic Mediation of Culture written by Kelli Towers Jasper has been approved for the Department of English

Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, committee chair

Jeffrey Cox

Ann Schmiesing

Jordan Stein

Sue Zemka Date

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.

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Jasper, Kelli Towers (Ph.D., Department of English) Gathering Flowers: Romantic Era Botanico-Literary Production and the Transatlantic Mediation of Culture Dissertation directed by Associate Professor Jillian Heydt-Stevenson

Abstract

My dissertation addresses a vibrant body of texts produced and read widely through Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century: texts I have termed “botanico- literary productions,” or more simply, “flower books.” Combining exquisite drawings of flowers with written information in the form of poetry anthologies, moral tales, botany lessons, and cultural histories, flower books fuse science, literature, and art. Yet in spite of the popularity they enjoyed, today’s scholars have often dismissed them as mere commercial productions peripheral to the concerns of a revolutionary age. I address this misconception by tracing the influence flower books exerted on British and American readers’ perceptions throughout that formative period (1775-1850). I argue that in amassing and structuring information from a variety of sources, these texts link the foreign to the domestic to build a sense of shared belief across diverse climates, landscapes, and populations. Only a few notable studies of this genre exist, most of which rightly emphasize its importance for women authors. I add an original approach to this critical work by focusing on the flower book itself as a socially significant artistic form that compiles numerous bodies of knowledge and employs various media to spread powerful paradigms about the relation of nature to identity. I argue that flower books “mediate culture” by creating order from the chaos of an increasingly globalized world and instructing their readers how to do the same. This project challenges age-old assumptions of literary analysis, particularly the beliefs that for a work to be extraordinary it must stem from a sole creative genius, demonstrate a unique artistic vision, or assert a radical break from contemporary values. Because flower books borrow from pre-existing sources, and their creation requires extensive collaboration, they open up compelling ways to rethink authorship and originality. Moreover, because their power to shape society arises in part from their status as common household objects, flower books require us to recognize and respect the formidable influence apparently ordinary and familiar things exert, especially in times of unrest and upheaval, to create and sustain a sense of shared and stable culture.

Acknowledgements

Many people helped make this dissertation possible. The Center for British and Irish

Studies and the Center for the Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado provided crucial funding for research. Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library likewise provided a fruitful month of research and fellowship among numerous visiting scholars and an enthusiastic and knowledgeable staff. I also acknowledge librarians at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library for valuable guidance through their rich archives. Kirstyn Leuner, Paul Westover, and Ann Rowland all read pieces of this document and offered vital insights and suggestions; their encouragement and enthusiasm for the project is much appreciated. Jordan Stein introduced me to flower books in the first place and presented me with an initial framework in which to understand them. William Kuskin provided me with an inspiring introduction to book history that has forever changed the way I think about texts.

Finally, for her influence on my thinking and writing I particularly wish to recognize and thank

Jill Heydt-Stevenson, whose patient teaching and unfailing mentorship over the last eight years have brought all of my scholarly work to a greater level of maturity. She has reviewed many, many drafts of these chapters (and of the proposals and prospectuses leading up to them) and her discerning judgement and intellectual sensitivity have helped me to clarify and beautify every paragraph.

I dedicate this dissertation to Evan, who toted countless books to and from the library for me, and who has been my friend and support through every step of this project; and to

Myrna and Lillian, my brave, beautiful girls—I’m so glad you came along to share in this journey.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Origins of the Flower Book 1 1. Collective Good: Pedagogies of Gathering 18 2. “The Eloquence of Flowers:” Women, Anthologizing, and Authorship 77 3. American Idiom: Figuring National Identity through the Format of Flora’s Interpreter 144 4. Poems, Plates, and Plants: The Art of Illustration 191 5. “Blindfold Through the Fields: The Problem and Promise of Reading Flower Books 261 Coda 333 Works Cited 338 Appendix A: Primary texts examined 348 Appendix B: Graph of publication years from Seaton’s catalog of flower books 355

List of Figures

Figure 1.1: Price comparison from Mary Barton and The Ladies' Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals...... 58 Figure 1.2. Plate XXVI from The Ladies' Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals, illustrating ten flower species. (Google Books) ...... 68 Figure 3.1 Sample page of Flora's Interpreter with labeled components ...... 149 Figure 3.2 Frist edition standard-issue binding of Flora's Interpreter (1832), with printed paperboard covers. (Library Company of Philadelphia) ...... 150 Figure 3.3 Georg Dionysius Ehret, "American Turk’s-cap lily" c.1740s. (Victoria and Albert Museum) ...... 152 Figure 3.4 Sample of Flora's Interpreter's Index of Interpretations. (Google)...... 171 Figure 3.5 First Edition index of American Authors. (Ohio State University Libraries) ...... 181 Figure 4.1 Sample page from A New Family Herbal (1814) showing a specific image (rather than a stock image) created for placement within a body of text...... 201 Figure 4.2 Sample pages from Flores Poetici (1833). (Winterthur Library)...... 201 Figure 4.3 Unlabeled plate from Flora's Interpreter (1848). (Winterthur Library) ...... 202 Figure 4.4 Color Table of Greens, a sample of Werner and Syme's color charts, as reproduced in Barton's A Flora of North America, Vol.1 (1821). (Google Books) ...... 209 Figure 4.5 "The cranberry." Table 17 from Barton's A Flora of North America (1821). (Winterthur Library)...... 212 Figure 4.6 Detail of "the cranberry." (Winterthur Library) ...... 212 Figure 4.7 "The Skull-Cap." Table 21 from Barton's A Flora of North America (1821). (Winterthur Library)...... 212 Figure 4.8 The evolution of embellishment in Flora's Dictionary in editions from 1835, 1837, and 1855. (Winterthur Library) ...... 219 Figure 4.9 Spread from Flora's Dictionary 1855 edition. (Winterthur Library)...... 220 Figure 4.10 Pages from a copy of Flora's Dictionary, 1835 edition. (Winterthur Library) ...... 224 Figure 4.11 Cover of Waller copy, Flora's Dictionary (1837). (Winterthur Library)...... 225 Figure 4.12 Frontispiece and presentation plate from the Waller copy of Flora's Dictionary. (Winterthur Library) ...... 225 Figure 4.13 Frontispiece and presentation plate for the Gibson copy of Flora's Dictionary (1837). (Google Books)...... 226 Figure 4.14 Cover and two higher-quality plates from the Chapman copy of Flora's Dictionary (1837). (Ohio State University Libraries) ...... 227 vii

Figure 4.15 Cover, frontispiece and presentation plate to 1855 edition of Flora's Dictionary (Winterthur Library)...... 229 Figure 4.16 Sample plates and "List of Plates" from The Romance of Nature (Google Books) 243 Figure 4.17 Consecutive page spreads from The Romance of Nature, showing how the image on a separate plate creates white space. (Google books)...... 244 Figure 4.18 Cover, endpapers, and title page of Flowers and Their Kindred Thoughts (Winterthur Library) ...... 251 Figure 4.19 Spread from Flowers and Their Kindred Thoughts (Brigham Young University Libraries) ...... 252 Figure 4.20 Sample spreads from Flowers and Their Kindred Thoughts (Winterthur Library) 254 Figure 4.21 Table of Contents for Flowers and Their Kindred Thoughts (Winterthur Library) 254 Figure 5.1 Frontispiece to The Young Ladies' Book (1829) ...... 265 Figure 5.2 Sample Illustration from The Flower People, 1846 edition. Facing p.161. (Google Books)...... 300 Figure 5.3 Image from The Flower People, 1846 edition. Facing p. 171. (Google Books) ...... 301

Introduction

Emergence of the Botanico-Literary Production.

A striking affinity between plants and texts emerges in the history of English language and literary production. The Latin term florilegium and its Greek counterpart anthology both literally denote a “gathering of flowers,” yet their earliest English uses name collections not of posies, but of poesy. Scholars and writers at least as early as the sixteenth century harvested

“blossoms” from the writings of poets, church fathers, pagan philosophers, and their own productions into bouquets, wreaths, and nosegays for preservation and, later, publication.1

Vegetal metaphor also inflects English-language descriptions of the material makeup of many texts: as animal paper made from byproducts such as vellum and parchment gave way to cotton, linen, and wood-pulp papers, pages even more closely evoked the leaves and sheaves they were named for, while leaves sewn together in “gatherings” and bound on one side to form a codex, yielded the book as we now know it. Meanwhile, texts that gathered literal rather than metaphorical allusions to plants also enjoyed a long and glorious tradition: the illustrated herbal documenting the identities and uses of plants, and the herbarium (also known as the hortus siccus, or “dry garden”) in which collectors actually pressed and preserved plant specimens between pages, were some of the most important and valuable works produced in the medieval and early modern periods, while developments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanical science and print technology made botanical illustrations both more technically focused and more widely available.

1 The OED lists 1621 as the earliest use of florilegium, and 1640 for anthology, but Hugh Plat’s Floures of Philosophie was published in 1572, and Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay in 1573. 2

Each of these elements—botany, literature, and material text—shares a powerful bond with the others, and yet it was not until the latter part of the eighteenth century that social, scientific, and economic conditions allowed them to coalesce in material form. From the

Romantic period through the first decade of the twentieth century, authors, editors, illustrators, printers and publishers worked passionately at the nexus of botany, literature, and print to produce a new genre I have termed “botanico-literary productions,” or more simply, “flower books.” The work of anthologizing apparent in these texts—of gathering both literal and metaphorical flowers from nature, culture, literature, history, science, and personal experience— presented during this period a monumental task that both men and women enthusiastically embraced. My dissertation explores how flower book writers and the texts they published propelled a particular language and a multitude of interpretive possibilities relating to flowers particularly through Great Britain and the northeastern United States between 1775 and 1850.

Further, I elucidate the mediations that arose from the construction and circulation of this archive: its far-reaching ambitions and effects on readers’ ability to navigate consumer culture, to practice social cooperation, to participate in the public sphere, to discipline personal study, to envision distinct but interrelated national identities, to formulate new relationships between images, words, and objects, and to more clearly see and value unique local environments.

The hybrid and collaborative nature of many of these texts makes them difficult to classify, and one result (with a few notable exceptions I will discuss below) has been a dearth of scholarship that concerns them directly. Much important scholarly work has been done, however, tracing the social, scientific, and economic conditions that nurtured the flower book into full bloom. First and foremost, these studies affirm that the eighteenth century witnessed a dramatic increase in botanical awareness, brought about by colonial enterprise, bioprospecting 3 expeditions,2 and the influx of information about, exposure to, and dependence on, newly- discovered plant species. As Londa Schiebinger points out, plants in the eighteenth century became “significant natural and cultural artifacts, often at the center of high intrigue” (3).

Suddenly, not only the taste and comfort of a nation, but its very fate could hang on its ability to identify, preserve and bring valuable plants into cultivation within its own borders. Botany thus

“worked hand-in-hand with European colonial expansion” (7), becoming “big science and big business, an essential part of the projection of military might into the resource-rich East and

West Indies” (5). While scientists like Carl Linnaeus strove to classify and catalogue these new discoveries, curators of botanical gardens collected and grew them for public display, edification, and especially local supply of crucial items like quinine and rhubarb;3 florists meanwhile developed hardy, unusual, and showy varieties for sale, exhibiting them at flower shows

(spectacles that joined theater and opera as genteel forms of entertainment). Gentlemen and entrepreneurs established colonial plantations for large-scale farming of important tropical plants such as tobacco, tea, and sugarcane, which goods quickly shaped social tastes and customs. The study of botany became an integral part of genteel childhood education for both boys and girls, and, as Amy King argues, the “botanical vernacular”—especially with its sexual valences created by the Linnaean system—infiltrated and inflected everyday language and conversation. Plants found their way into political discourse, religious sermons, moral lessons, and ribald jokes,

2 2 Schiebinger explains that botanists served their empires in three important ways, first by identifying and cataloguing plants already valuable in domestic markets, second by finding substitutes for goods purchased at great expense from other empires, and third by determining how to transport and acclimatize plants to imperial territories around the world (11). Several such plants became vital to the operation and success of imperial projects in the eighteenth century, including commonly-recognized ones like coffee, tea, sugarcane and tobacco, but numerous other significant plants like Peruvian bark (the source of quinine), and rhubarb (commonly used as a laxative) (4). 3 Jillian Heydt-Stevenson offers an insightful close-reading of rhubarb’s many medicinal uses, its social significance, its exotic provenance, and efforts to establish its domestic cultivation. See “Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and History” (2013). 4 supplying seemingly limitless fodder for enlightenment, inspiration, and innuendo. In short, simply to live either in or connected to Romantic-period Europe was to see, eat, smell, speak, and trade in botany. Plants helped structure lived reality.

One of my main goals in this dissertation is to show how botanical awareness could not have gained such cachet had it not developed in tandem with improvements in print technology as well as increased literacy and literary awareness. Adrian Johns emphasizes the “making, distribution, and use of printed materials” as a “key part of natural history” (106); and the vital importance of visual illustration to the study of natural history underscores his point, since accurate “descriptions” of plants and animals are far more easily done with pictures than with words. Because of early modern naturalists’ particular craving for texts, Elizabeth Yale in fact argues that they invented archives as we know them, “search[ing] for papers just as they hunted down curious or obscure species of plants and animals” (12), accumulating manuscripts that had scattered after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, and eventually compiling them at designated sites for public access. By the late eighteenth century, as Andrew Piper notes, these bookish new beginnings had expanded and evolved to include a host of new institutions such as the lending library, the private family library, and ever-more-numerous bookshops, as well as new bookish practices such as reading clubs and the giving of gift-books (3). With the rise of the novel and the first great English dictionary compiled by Samuel Johnson, English readers gained a greater sense of themselves as English readers, with a distinct literary heritage; the increasing number of newspapers and especially of literary magazines in the 1820s and 30s created a forum in which writers, readers, and critics could engage in debates over the constitution of literary identity and greatness. David Stewart argues that these magazines highlight a cultural preoccupation with the new phenomenon of a “reading public,”—a much larger and more 5 encompassing public than texts had ever circulated among before—and suggests that writers in this period began to differentiate “literary” works from more vulgarly commercial ones (2). In addressing a reading public, however imaginary or problematic, writers, editors of magazines and books, as well as contributors to periodicals assumed positions as arbiters of culture. Their texts could carry their voices far and wide, and the wider and more consistent the circulation, the greater the impression that distance need not impede participation in an apparently shared culture. Botanico-literary productions emerge from this fertile, teeming soil, and, as they maintain roots in a wide variety of textual parent-genres, these flower books dynamically recombine and deploy numerous histories, traditions, and formats in order to explore the human condition and to shape social values.

A genre ripe for re-evaluation

Complex as they are, and much as they resonate with the oft-cited Romantic philosophy of Nature (itself a complex and multifaceted product of the economic, political, scientific, literary, and textual concatenation described above), flower books have long occupied only marginal status in our scholarly discussions of Romanticism, sometimes due to prejudices toward their popularity among women readers and a belief that they circulated merely as decorative or kitschy commercial goods, qualities that historically afford such works a lower status than that of

“real” or “important” literature. More often, though, I believe flower books have been overlooked because they perform their cultural labor in the blind spots of traditional literary and artistic studies. The following review from art historians Wilfrid Blunt and William Stearn

(1950) provides a sense of both challenges:

These little books, with their engaging naiveté of presentation, their charming—if

inaccurate—pictures, and their delightfully awful verse (Mrs. Smith’s poem on the 6

Snowdrop, beginning “Like pendant flakes of vegetating snow,” is typical and quite

irresistible) are pleasant to browse in by the winter fireside. They recall the distant,

leisured, carefree childhoods of our great-grandparents in happier England—an England

when income tax was a penny in the pound. But we must keep our sense of values: it is

nonsense to consider such trifles, however elegant, as great works of art, and folly to

purchase them at the exaggerated prices demanded by booksellers to-day. (257)

This passage appears as a brief side-note in Blunt and Stearn’s larger analysis of the history of botanical illustration, and, on one hand, these scholars correctly discern that the artistic quality and production value of images in most flower books does not reflect the same scientific rigor and sumptuous quality of images in grander botanical reference works. On the other hand, by judging flower books against the standards of this wholly separate genre, and lacking the motivation and proper tools to analyze the books’ own unique functions, these scholars not only deride what they see as flower books’ weaknesses, but entirely mischaracterize their context and interventions. Fortunately, numerous studies in recent decades have laid the groundwork for more accurate analysis, overturning notions of nineteenth-century England as “happier” by revealing the tumults of that revolutionary age, and offering insights that complicate any initial appearance (especially in texts written by women, who so often wrote to supplement scanty incomes) of carefree leisure. Likewise, recent scholarship on various unconventional, composite, commercialized, or plebian texts such as literary annuals, “select collections,” miscellanies, critical editions, travel writing, and penny dreadfuls4 critically reevaluate the importance of publications once considered unworthy of notice.

4 See Piper, Gamer, Harris, Fay, and Hoeveler. 7

Equipped with more expansive notions of genre, of historical context, and women’s participation in the literary marketplace despite prejudices against their gender and role as authors of genius, I will examine the flower book genre’s construction and effects with far greater precision—recognizing, for example, that while many flower books modestly profess to claim no higher status than trifles, and do adopt the diminutive scale and decorative appearance typical of books marketed to this era’s female (i.e. non-serious) readers, they frequently harbor ambitious artistic, philosophical, and social agendas. As Eliza Fay has similarly argued for women’s travel writing, flower books “cannot be dismissed as cultural flotsam”; the genre reveals how women’s engagement with botanical science provided them an entrée into the public sphere and enough authority to compete in the literary marketplace, while also offering them a

“flexible tool for exploring intellectual, emotional, and cultural values” (74). Assuming such forms as anthologies of floral poetry or sentiment, collections of botanical images, dictionaries in the Language of Flowers, practical instructions in gardening, stories or dialogues meant to teach botany, journals of nature observation, and moral lessons or sermons glossing plants, these works often manifest an intense desire to cultivate, shape or improve the reader’s mind, values, and imagination, and thereby influence society’s tastes and habits.

Though we cannot precisely quantify the extent to which flower books succeeded in their goal to improve a reader’s knowledge and sensibility, the sheer numbers of them that appeared in the Romantic and Victorian periods suggests how ambitious was their aim. Beverly Seaton catalogues 113 books on the Language of Flowers published between 1773 and 1906 in Europe, the United States, Peru, and Brazil; her bibliography of miscellaneous flower books, though by her own admission not comprehensive, includes 149 more (203-217).5 In my own research for

5 Several of the books in Seaton’s catalogue lack publication dates, but by graphing the number of flower books with known dates published each year, we see an initial peak in the early 1820s, the greatest peak between 1845 8 this project I examined almost ninety flower books published in their first edition between 1770 and 1860, with seventy-five of these published between 1819 and 1850 (see Appendix A). Some of these continued through numerous editions on more than one continent; Sarah Hale’s Flora’s

Interpreter, for example, reached at least seventeen editions. These books were “steady sellers”

(to borrow a term from Matthew P. Brown6), and while circulating as commodities they achieved a number of cultural interventions.

A handful of excellent studies have begun to analyze how this genre influenced literary and social culture. Seaton’s The Language of Flowers, A History (1995) places the nineteenth century Language of Flowers into literary and social contexts and reveals its diverse appearances and functions in England, America, and France. Her analysis emphasizes that while few people actually used this language to communicate coded messages to each other, authors’ inclusion of this language in their books is highly interesting for the broader cultural attitudes and individual aspirations it helps them express. Other notable studies focus on the ways flower books reveal women authors’ careful navigation of gender norms and enable women’s contributions in science, education, and art. In western culture the association of women with flowers has as long and venerable a history as that between flowers and texts—one that helps explain women’s’ attraction to, and success with, publishing so many flower books, but which also required them to reckon with complex and contradictory gender expectations. Ann B. Shteir’s foundational work Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science (1996) traces the evolution of cultural attitudes

and 1850 with production, with production holding fairly steady through about 1880, when numbers begin to decline (see Appendix B). 6 In The Pilgrim and the Bee (2007), Brown places canonical works of early American literature in context with a canon of “steady sellers” (usually devotional miscellanies) also popular at the time, to show how reading practices attached to one genre inflects approaches to reading the other genre, and vice versa. Though it focuses on the late seventeenth century his work offers a useful model for investigating the cultural interventions of steady-selling flower books in the Romantic period. 9 toward women and botany from 1760 to 1860. Profiling several notable women writers working in diverse literary genres and styles, Shteir shows how botanical texts provided an important forum for women’s significant contributions to the science itself, particularly their promotion of botany in popular culture. Samantha George takes up a different conversation in Botany,

Sexuality, and Women’s Writing (2007), which explores the ways women’s ventures into scientific study changed how they interacted with and thought about nature, and generated new literary forms such as the botanical dialogue and the botanical poem with scientific notes. Her study takes a decidedly more literary angle than Shteir’s, placing flower books into conversation with the writings of Rousseau, Erasmus Darwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft to explore “the cultivation of the female mind and its implications for the theories of feminized discourse of botanical literature” (5).

Three other studies consider the female-flower relationship in terms of its impact on the creation of literal and literary worlds. In Women, Literature and the Domesticated Landscape

(2011), Judith Page and Elise Smith investigate flower books in conjunction with novels and poetry to reveal the garden as an intensely affective space that, in both its actual and literary or artistic instances, facilitates the personal work of coming to know oneself and one’s place in the world, and supports the sociocultural work of participating in that world and preparing children to do so as well. Conversely, Amy King’s book Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English

Novel (2003), discusses how botanical science infiltrated the creation of literary worlds, working itself into a complex metaphor for young women’s sexual maturation (“bloom”) and the rituals, perils and joys of sexualized courtship. Deidre Lynch builds on King’s argument in “Young

Ladies are Delicate Plants: Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism” (2010), but contends that scholars of Romanticism should attend not only to the Nature found in the wilderness, but also to 10 the more commercially- and technologically-influenced Nature with which average townsfolk of the early nineteenth century interacted daily. She argues that practices such as greenhouse or hothouse “forcing,” or rituals such as flower shows have especially important implications for the representation of women characters in literature.

In this project I also carefully attend to the complex gendering of botanico-literary production and the ways in which it facilitated and shaped women’s involvement as authors, editors, and arbiters. My analysis, however, goes beyond these scholarly studies by casting new light on the significance of often-overlooked works of several well-known authors and members of distinguished literary circles, including Elizabeth Kent (sister-in-law of Leigh Hunt and participant in the Cockney School), Mary Tyler Peabody Mann (a New England transcendentalist and wife of Horace Mann), Sarah Hale (long-time editor of Godey’s Lady’s

Book), Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (a prolific Evangelical writer), Jane Webb Loudon (wife of eminent horticulturist John Claudius Loudon) and Susan Fenimore Cooper (daughter of James

Fenimore Cooper). I likewise illuminate several lesser-known authors’ contributions to the development of Romantic literature and philosophy, and pay tribute to the hosts of others who contributed to the genre’s proliferation and used it to launch their voices into the wider world.

Yet even as I honor these writers, I posit that author-centered studies alone do not provide adequate tools to appreciate and understand flower books’ significance, either individually or as a genre. Instead, by concentrating on the books themselves as complex collections of scientific information, artistic expression, and social commentary whose purpose and functions depend largely on their material and organizational forms, I show how they consolidated, embodied, circulated, and transferred various notions of cultural identity, working alongside (sometimes with, sometimes against ) other kinds of textual documents during the long Romantic period. To 11 accomplish this task, my methodology draws from that of cultural studies, anthropology, and book history, examining the print histories of flower books and the ways they resonate with other kinds of contemporary texts such as botanical reference works, horticultural magazines, practical instruction manuals, other kinds of composite texts, and gift books and literary annuals. I also consider how novels and poetry help illuminate the issues and philosophies that influence flower books’ creation and cultural intervention.

My study reveals that, like many works of this long era, flower books individually but also across the breadth of the genre often draw simultaneously on iconography and philosophies of the Enlightenment, neo-classicism, Romanticism, and Realism. Broadly speaking

Enlightenment ideas influence their science, eighteenth-century celebration of sensibility emerges in an emphasis on feelings as connected to morality, and the Romantic emphases on nature arise in the flower books’ frequent invocation of Flora as well as picturesque and bucolic scenery. Like the Romantics too, this genre manages to acclaim both community and individual experience. Later nineteenth-century Realism, as we have come to identify it especially in

European painting, materializes in flower books’ use of scientific botany as well, which often strove to apprehend the physiological details of plants without emotion (though as I point out in

Chapter 4, botanical illustration raises complex questions about objectivity and verisimilitude).

Realism also emerges in works such as Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours, which adopts a journal format to document nature through the details of quotidian life. The diversity within this genre shows its usefulness in articulating many different perspectives, while the simultaneous resonance it creates between such perspectives suggests its power to create a sense of cohesion.

Ultimately I argue that this genre creates certain kinds of order within the chaos of an increasingly globalized world and implicitly instructs their readers how to do the same: in this 12 sense, flower books mediate cultural ideals, hopes, and anxieties. This project challenges certain assumptions that have frequently predicated—though less often in scholarship today—literary analysis, particularly the beliefs that for a work to be considered worthy of notice— extraordinary, for example—it must have stemmed from the work of a sole creative genius and it must have demonstrated a unique artistic vision or asserted a radical break from contemporary values. Because flower books liberally borrow from pre-existing sources and clearly rely on extensive collaboration among artists, writers, printers, and publishers to come into being, I argue that they open up compelling ways to rethink authorship and originality. Moreover, because their power to shape society arises in part from their status as common household objects, flower books require us to recognize and respect the formidable influence apparently ordinary and familiar things exert, on the one hand by expressing a variety of differing viewpoints, but on the other, especially in times of unrest and upheaval, by creating and sustaining a sense of shared and stable culture.

Critical vocabulary

In my argument, I employ several key terms that I would like to define here. First, the term botanico-literary production derives from the term literary production¸ as used by Pierre

Macherey and William Kuskin. I use it to draw attention to the team of laborers that must cooperate to bring any work (in Thomas Tanselle’s sense of the work as separate from the text that attempts to constitute it) into being as a printed object, most commonly a book. Often, I will use the word “production” to stand in for the word “book” so as to emphasize the multifaceted and complex social and material processes it embodies.

Next, the term culture connotes here several meanings: it signifies a group of humans at least loosely associated by shared language, ideas, idioms, customs, assumptions, values, and 13 shared labor; it also constitutes an instrument of domestication and civilization (as with its variation, cultivate); likewise, it acts as an agent or catalyst of a fundamental change (a bacterial culture ferments a primary substance into something new, different, and better—an apt parallel for the refinement of personal sensibilities supposedly attainable through exposure to the cultural arts). As I will show, flower books participated in all of these cultural and enculturating acts at the levels of the local, the national, and the global-imperial.

Third, a major component of my argument rests on the term mediation, which offers similarly multivalent significance. I argue that flower books act as intermediaries, for they communicate with and connect to different art forms, diverse knowledge pools, manifold societies, social customs, and varying climates and geographical regions. They also constitute unique mediums in and of themselves, their physical makeup and organizational forms contributing vitally to their methods and functions of enculturation. Finally, these books mediate readers’ perceptions of “reality” by directing their gaze toward certain objects and shaping their ability to see and interpret their environments. Thus, I use the term mediation to connote the importance of flower books as physical embodiments of particular paradigms, which spread their operations across various divides, whether generic, social, philosophical, or sexual.

Rationale of chapter organization

As a first step toward understanding the significance of texts that anthologize from pre- existing sources, Chapter 1 broadly analyzes the importance of collecting in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society, when colonial expansion and improving technologies of production and transportation markedly increased the amount and variety of things available for contemplation and consumption. The Enlightenment created various conceptual structures like academic disciplines, systems of classification, and standards of taste to help make sense of it all, 14 and part of their project was to further develop and refine any one individual reader’s capacity to think taxonomically. Flower books participated in this project by evolving and disseminating pedagogies of collection focused not merely on accumulation, but on curation—the ability to discern and judge value based on a code of ethics that the resulting collection can symbolize and transmit. As composite texts that themselves could form part of collections and inspire further acts of gathering, flower books provide patterns of selection and arrangement intended to guide readers’ senses of value in multiple arenas, and to support their development into social beings interested in the good of the community and the state.

Chapter 2 follows my initial discussion of collecting with an investigation of its natural counterpart, the art of arrangement. Specifically, I explore how the work of combining and publishing collected materials in the structures particular to flower books facilitated disciplined practice of early feminist principles. I specifically emphasize the term practice to acknowledge these books’ experimental nature and the invigorating space they created for women to engage in collaborative and self-directed learning, to publicly display and claim credit for intellectual labor, to explore a wide range of philosophical and religious positions, and above all to assume positions of authority—of authorship—within their own texts. Placing flower books in context with writings from Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft I show how women’s work in compiling and arranging their texts, takes advantage of the safety offered by more conservative gender norms, even as it embraces more radical notions like Wollstonecraft’s definition of enlightened modesty.

Chapter 3 offers an in-depth case-study of one particular flower book, Sarah Hale’s

Flora’s Interpreter (1832) in order to show that the very characteristics that might lead scholars to dismiss flower books as low-culture—their rearranging of material from other sources, and 15 their status as mass-produced decorative objects—are exactly what made them popular and gave them substantial influence. In spite of Hale’s claim that her text is a “trifling production,” it remained in print for thirty years, boasting seventeen editions and surviving five sets of publishers to become the single most-published work Hale ever produced. This chapter presents an analysis of the book’s format and its crucial role within the projects of nation-building and culture-shaping Hale so passionately endorses, for she successfully imitates popular European flower books in order to promote and circulate a collection of American poetry. My study reveals

Flora’s Interpreter as a shrewdly conceived text in its own right insofar as it executes the complex task of rooting American literature in a British cultural past while clearing sufficient ground for the creation, expression, and transmission of a specifically American identity, and successfully utilizes the tropes of gift-book production to disseminate this paradigm to audiences

(i.e. women and youths) most likely to carry on its work among succeeding generations. In revealing the sophistication of Flora’s Interpreter’s intertextuality, this chapter offers significant insights into the processes through which literary production influences identity and culture construction, specifically as it enlists transnational circuits of culture into national service.

Chapter 4 examines another integral aspect of flower book format, the construction and role of illustration. This is one component of this genre that requires particular mental flexibility, since flower books exhibit great variation in both the concepts they strive to illustrate, and the tools they use to illustrate them. Many texts include gorgeous colored pictures, but they also employ “poetical illustrations,” and repeatedly portray plants themselves as divine “poems.” I therefore analyze the intimate relationships between plants, poems, and pictures and consider their place within, and impact on, popular Romantic-era philosophies of nature, art, science, and the spiritual self. While the flower books’ diverse of approaches to illustration present certain 16 challenges to modern readers, they constitute one of the genre’s major contributions: its dynamic exploration of the philosophy of representation during a time of great innovation and experimentation in each of the three key areas the books strive to combine—botanical science, print technology, and poetic and artistic theory. All of these experienced major growing pains during the Romantic period, and in bringing them together in one place flower books inevitably reflect those complexities. For this reason the books are as enlightening and valuable for their apparent tensions and conflicts as they are for their synergies and resolutions. This chapter explores instances of friction and dissonance, as well as instances of powerful resonance that flower books create and reinforce between images, words, and actual plants in the real world.

Having thus far attended to the flower book’s culture-constructing properties and ability to create a sense of shared identity, I turn in my final chapter to address flower books’ more problematic tendency to so thoroughly mediate readers’ perceptions of their environments that they collapse distinctions between cultures, localities, and plant species. In supplying an attractive and meaningful surrogate version of nature, flower books could, in effect, blind readers to their own less familiar local environments. I will also show, however, that some flower book authors noticed these problems and worked to address them. Mary Tyler Peabody Mann’s The

Flower People (1846) frames the featured plants emphatically within a New England household garden and meadow of surrounding wildflowers, thus clarifying their historical and geographical contexts. Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours (1850) departs more markedly from convention, weaving threads of the flower book through the much wider fabric of a nature- journal and placing them in context with animals, birds, and human practices. Both of these works offer vital insight into American landscapes in particular, and together they indicate a shift in tone and purpose within the genre. While flower books that focused on plants’ aesthetic, 17 metaphorical, and fanciful qualities would remain popular into the twentieth century, Mann and

Cooper helped establish a new kind of nature writing that strove to overcome some of the genre’s faults of generalization and too-easy transfer onto biologically distinct landscapes, while preserving its promise to yield insight into the deep and powerful connections among all living things.

Taken together, these chapters lay a foundation for a broader appreciation and understanding of the flower book genre’s internal complexity, as well as for its multivalent and far-reaching cultural influence. My study also contributes to our growing scholarly awareness of plants’ significance in Romantic-era literature more broadly, and increases our ability to interpret the complex viewpoints that plants empower writers to express.

Chapter 1

Collective Good: Pedagogies of Gathering in the Flower Book

While evidence of the human impulse to collect appears in almost every time period and culture, it took on new dimensions in western societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this time Europe experienced a vast increase both in the sheer amount and variety of stuff available for consumption, and in the number of people engaged in sorting through it. Andrew Piper has characterized this period as a time “when there were suddenly too many books” (3), but it was also a time of too much everything: colonial exploration and expansion regularly introduced new curiosities for academic and public scrutiny; enthusiastic amateurs scoured the home turf for venerable antiquities and choice specimens of nature; the commercial world yielded strange and wonderful objects as never before. New plants, animals, minerals, bones and fossils, exotic foods, ingenious machines, delicate prints, opulent fabrics, and foreign fashions all flooded throughout Europe, leaving social, scientific, and philosophical institutions awash in a tide of new materials and competing ideas. Various philosophies of the

Enlightenment strove to make sense of this deluge, giving rise to new academic disciplines like

Natural History, new scientific systems such as Linnaean classification, and to social systems like the discrimination of taste, all of which aspired to organize these materials into understandable relationships with history, nature, society, and the self. Meanwhile consumers acquired and displayed not only objects, but also knowledge and accomplishments as indicators of their wealth, experience, personal merit, and social ambition.7 Simply as a result of living in this constant barrage of new information, commodities, and curiosities, people scrambled to discern or reassess the meanings of things and ideas, and had to learn through their daily acts of

7 See Susan Pearce On Collecting, and Claire Walsh on shopping in the eighteenth century. 19 casual and intentional consumption to sort through and select the best ones with which to surround themselves. In short, during this period collecting was far more than an amusing hobby or pastime—it was the name of the game.

The flower book genre as it developed from the 1820s onward provided a unique toehold into this teeming material and philosophical world, evolving and disseminating a particular pedagogy of curation first through each book’s gathering of excerpts from numerous other materials, then through its own status as a collectible object, and finally through its tendency to inspire similar collections. Although not the only composite or collectible works published in this period,8 flower books merit their own consideration; their devotion to plants as a primary organizing principle distinguishes them from the random assortments of excerpts, stories or pictures found in miscellanies and annuals, while their diverse approaches to interpreting those plants creates a larger variation across the genre than we see in more firmly delineated forms such as critical editions of an author’s oeuvre or “select collections” of works in a particular literary genre. Flower books generally were produced in one-off fashion, rarely envisioned as parts of a series or adhering to a specific format. Their material forms range from grand folios to miniscule pamphlets, some filled with lavishly colored plates and some with nothing but text, and their primary emphases likewise run the gamut from practical instructions in gardening to dictionaries of floral symbolism, from moral tales to botany lessons, and from selections of sacred or secular poetry to historically and scientifically contextualized nature journals. Yet despite the wide variety of form and content, flower books unify around a key belief in the power of plants, and especially certain processes of collecting plants and their related materials, to teach

8 As numerous scholars have recently shown, the long Romantic period witnessed a marked increase in composite works such as miscellanies, nation- and genre-specific “select collections” (as of English plays or novels), critical editions of a particular author’s oeuvre, literary annuals, and many kinds of gift books. See Andrew Piper, Michael Gamer on the “select collection,” and Katherine Harris on the literary annual. 20 essential lessons in spiritual, moral and aesthetic sensitivity, savvy consumerism, and healthy sociality. Thus the organizing principles at work in most flower books offer far more than mere order: namely, they provide patterns of selection and arrangement intended to guide readers’ senses of value in multiple arenas, and to support their development into social beings interested in the good of the community and the state.

On one hand, these particular aims of flower book pedagogy are not wholly unexpected.

As Saree Makdisi has argued, the periods of revolution and reform that characterize the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain manifest a transition in national and imperial philosophy, a moving away from the unabashedly commercial exploitation of people and resources, toward a justification of imperial power based instead on “a civilizing mission against decadence and idleness, against inefficiency, against barbarism, against moral failing and unregulated desire” (193). In the wake of Regency decadence and the heavy economic and emotional tolls of the Napoleonic wars, various efforts to revitalize the British empire centered on training its people to bridle their passions and appetites and develop sensitivity, discernment, and good judgment in all areas. Makdisi specifies the particular importance of these qualities in women, who increasingly were seen as “the ideological guarantors of [self-regulation and] moral virtue” (192). Flower books thus participate in a much broader literary movement of practical, moral, and social pedagogy, one whose supposed appropriateness for women’s participation (as I outlined in the Introduction and explore further in Chapter 2) indeed led numerous female authors and editors to contribute.

Given these conditions it can be tempting to shrug off an author’s professed desire to offer moral instruction as a nod to convention, a way of justifying her work’s existence within a literary scene with definite boundaries on what women’s writing could and should look like. On 21 the other hand, the flower book genre shows a remarkable suitability to the exploration of value and social behavior, and, as this chapter will show, the books’ pedagogies of curation do indeed strive—in surprisingly practical, and productive ways—to engender high functionality in these areas. The genre’s fitness for this task is twofold. First, plants provide a nexus for a consideration of an astonishing array of topics, giving readers ample opportunity to develop judgment and sensibility in any or all of them. During the Romantic period plants circulated in numerous capacities, such as botanical specimens, profitable commodities, and cherished personal possessions; they were widely adopted as powerful symbols of abstract concepts in religion, literature, politics, personal expression and individual and collective identity(ies), including those relating to gender and social class. With their ties to place, plants provided opportunities to explore questions of native-ness, cultural history, migration, and issues of cultural tension, mixture, dominance, and erasure. Yet along with their geographical specificity plants also reflected a sort of aspirational universality, an ability to cross boundaries of culture, language, and time, and provide common ground and understanding. Finally, the long-standing association between plants and women meant that flower books provided a vital space in which female authors, editors, and readers could explore and educate themselves in all of these fields, and add their own voices to the conversations. Plants open the door for practically any reader to practically any subject.

Second, flower books add to this topical richness an even more powerful layer of instruction through their particular models of collection, providing guidelines for an activity that, given its increased importance and even urgency in this period, had a powerful ability to widely and quickly disseminate ethics of self-regulation and temperance. The psychology of collecting is no straightforward matter; though it offers ample opportunity to develop discerning taste, 22 certain strains of the activity pose serious obstacles to healthy, cooperative social behavior. Jean

Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin, for example, characterize collecting as an essentially neurotic and potentially pathological activity. They argue that even the most mild-seeming collectors, along with their relatives the hoarders, accumulators, misers, and connoisseurs, engage in an essentially solipsistic, antisocial activity—what Benjamin sums up as a “dangerous though domesticated passion” (“EF” 241)—by which they deeply invest their ego into a series of objects that have been separated from their use-value, in order to distinguish themselves from the masses and cling to a tenuously concretized mirror of their own fragile subjectivity. When not displaying an outright fetishism, collectors according to Baudrillard manifest, at the least, a regression to the anal stage of psychosexual development that takes pleasure in the “serial intimacy” of possessing and arranging a group of objects (88), and attaches an intense fear of castration and death to their potential loss (98). With such pernicious pitfalls at hand, the course of collecting that flower books chart for readers—for instance, the course to good citizenship—provides a unique insight into the practice of selection and arrangement, offering ways for us to consider the important public, socializing functions (rather than private, narcissistic ones) collecting could play for everyday individuals experiencing critical changes in their relationships to objects and information.

Natural Education: the problematic legacy of Rousseau

Paul and Virginia: Nature’s Benevolent Influence

Flower book publication rates gained their first real critical momentum in the 1820s, but their philosophical stakes and tensions, and the nuance of their messages and lessons, have roots in the late eighteenth century. At this time a number of influential writers and philosophers looked to nature as a source of truth untainted by artificial and often corrupt social systems. In 23 particular, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about the education of children in natural settings9 found an even wider audience through Bernardin de St. Pierre’s wildly popular novel Paul et

Virginie (1787), a story of a boy and girl who grow up together in a remote corner of a tropical island, Mauritius. In this Edenic environment, nature exercises its ennobling influence on the children and their families: “Solitude, far from having made them barbarous, had made them more humane. If the scandals of society provided no matter for their conversation, the study of nature filled them with wonder and delight” (58). The families work out their subsistence on the land with feelings of great satisfaction and gratitude, “transported with admiration for the power of a Providence which, by their hands, had spread plenty and graces amidst these barren rocks and provided them with pleasures that were simple, pure, and ever-renewed” (58).

Bernardin’s portrait of these families strongly argues for the educational benefit not just of being in nature, but of working with nature, to procure necessities like food and shelter, and to develop sophisticated mental and emotional skills. Paul in particular epitomizes this kind of development through the sensitivity with which he cultivates the grounds of his house. When he was a boy, his mother’s slave Domingue had already made their arid mountain valley fruitful:

“He cultivated the ground that seemed to him most fertile […], choosing for each place the most suitable kind of seed” (44). Judging from the diversity of crops Domingue chose and where he planted them, he was clearly a well-educated gardener. Saint-Pierre lists among these crops millet, maize, wheat, rice, pumpkins, marrows, cucumbers, sweet-potatoes, sugar-cane, cotton, coffee, bananas, and tobacco. Yet Paul’s gardening-sense soon outstrips Domingue’s, thanks to his innate abilities and presumably to a keen sensibility cultivated over a lifetime of intimate association with Nature, one perhaps not tainted by having been a slave: “At twelve years of age

9 These are particularly expressed in Rousseau’s Emile. 24

Paul was more robust and intelligent than Europeans at fifteen, and where the Negro Domingue had merely cultivated, he beautified” (59). Although this might be an instance of some racial prejudice, another explanation for this could be that, unlike Domingue, who has been more narrowly charged to grow food and keep the families alive, Paul can be more fully open and receptive tithe importance and power of beauty, prompting him to create more of it and to make existing beauties as apparent and influential as possible.

Bernardin’s description of Paul’s garden occupies two whole pages of the narrative

(around 800 words), and repeatedly conveys the idea that Paul’s labor magnifies nature rather than dominating it; in turn, nature magnifies him. Bernardin specifies not only the kinds of wild plants Paul transplanted to his valley, but the individual merits of these plants and the ecological sensitivity and sharp aesthetic judgment with which he placed them. “His industrious hand had brought fecundity even to the most arid parts of the enclosure” (59), and every plant he chooses has a valuable use in the garden, whether for food, shade, fragrance, or visual impact: orange and lemon trees, tamarinds, custard-apples, paw-paws, myrobalans, mangoes, avocados, guavas, jack-fruits, and jambos all provide sustenance, while agathis, Persian lilac, aloes, and grasses offer shade, verdure, color and fragrance. Paul even has the foresight to begin his planting with

“trees that flower or fruit in their second year” (59), so as to benefit from them as soon as possible.

Paul’s garden—his selection and arrangement of plants, or in other words his collection—thus embodies his natural education, his entire life’s worth of observation, applied learning, and steady maturation in habits like forethought and patience. It also displays his artistic sensitivity, showing that a partnership with nature engenders appreciation for a beauty that includes, rather than excluding, form, function, and effect—or in other words, for principles 25 of architectural design. The seamless blend he achieves between nature and art centers in one key principle, that “in disposing these plants and trees according to his own plan he had not strayed from Nature’s; with her as his guide, he [ensured that] each plant [would] grow in its proper site and each site receive from its plant its natural ornament” (59). Bernardin’s descriptions cast

Paul’s garden as a textbook ideal of picturesque beauty10 equal to any design from contemporary landscape architects.11 He “arranged the trees and plants so as to compose a view that could be enjoyed all at once,” with smaller plants nearest to the two houses, graduating to grasses, shrubs, and finally trees further out from the center, so that “this vast enclosure appeared an amphitheatre of greenery, fruits and flowers, containing vegetables, strips of meadow and fields of rice and corn” (59). The paths he built to navigate the valley not only made its difficult terrain

“as accessible to the hand as to the eye” (60), but also “brought about a most harmonious union between ease of walking and roughness of ground” (60). He identified and improved natural grottoes among the ravines and tall trees, in whose “vaulted chambers below ground […] the heat never penetrated and [where] one could go to enjoy the cool” (60). Each pathway offered a different picturesque view: “From this avenue you could see the houses; from that one the inaccessible summits of the mountain. Within a dense copse of tacamahac-trees […] not a single object could be made out at high noon, while, close by, the point of that outcrop of rock commanded a view of the entire valley and the distant sea” (60). Each of these features show

Paul to be a landscape designer of rare ability, knowledge, and sensibility—as in tune with

10 William Gilpin consolidated definitions of the picturesque in 1794 in Three Essays: on picturesque beauty, on picturesque travel, and on sketching landscape. He specifies that picturesque beauty depends on what lends itself best to painting, including qualities like roughness, ruggedness, ruins, variety, contrast between light and shade, and compositions visible to the eye. 11 Although Capability Brown and Humphry Repton are now perhaps the most famous of these architects, Paul’s sensibilities may align more with those of Uvedale Price or Richard Payne Knight, who as Heydt-Stevenson shows, argued against mere “stylish innovations” and heavy-handed “improvements” in landscape-design, and valued a more organic version of picturesque aesthetics that respects the vitality of existing features like trees and allows them, and their viewers, more freedom to be themselves (Austen 151-152). 26 ecological systems as with aesthetic ones, and as interested in useful plants and usable spaces as in beautiful and emotionally arresting ones. He crafts a place that is valuable both for what it produces, and for the aesthetic and sensory delight it provides.

Perhaps most importantly, Paul’s dedication to improving his garden perpetuates a sort of civilizing cycle, both for himself and then for anyone who visits it. The grounds, so plentiful with serene, refreshing, and life-giving properties (both practical and spiritual), mainly serve the cluster of illiterate commoners12 that make up Paul and Virginia’s household, and benefit them materially and intellectually. Over time, each of Paul’s gardening projects increases his knowledge and refines his taste, which he then employs on the next project and so on—but improvements to the garden also elevate and refine the sensitivities of all the family members, solidifying their appreciation for industriousness, functionality, and order, and awakening insights they may not have experienced before. “Not a day passed without their giving each other some help of some enlightenment—yes, enlightenment; and if their talk sometimes contained errors, what danger have these for the man whose life is pure?” (70). Paul’s harmonious enhancements of the landscape amplify nature’s ability to instruct all viewers, giving them insight into the most essential, the most enduring truths.

Limitations of Natural Education: the case of Virginia St. Pierre

The popularity of Bernardin’s novel did much to solidify a general belief in nature’s truly civilizing powers (as opposed to society’s artificially civilizing ones) across Europe at the close of the eighteenth century. A belief in the ability of nature to stimulate the imagination and enlighten the mind is one of the most well-documented tropes of Romantic philosophy. But since

12 Until Virginia departs for France and Paul convinces a neighbor to teach him to read, Virginia’s mother is the only literate member of the household. 27 most Europeans did not enjoy the “privilege” of banishment to remote tropical locations, they faced a more complex question—how to access Nature’s refining influence in a broader social setting. Some simply sought for solitude and seclusion wherever it was available to them, in country estates or rugged landscapes like England’s Lake District. Even then, as I will discuss in further chapters, scholars such as Deidre Lynch and Londa Schiebinger have noted that colonial bioprospecting enterprises, new technologies such as refrigeration and greenhouses, and even systems of botanical classification in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rendered the human-plant relationship anything but straightforwardly natural. Meanwhile, the dominant

Linnaean sexual system of nomenclature raised serious concerns about the supposed purity and innocence of nature-study, and a lively trade in rare, exotic, newly-discovered, or newly- developed specimens meant that some plants acquired immense commercial, scientific, and even entertainment value, and offered ample opportunities to flout self-regulation and indulge in excess. Although the most complex thinkers expressed the notion that Nature is the best teacher—of knowledge, morality, taste, or spirituality—this idea gradually revealed itself as an overly-simplistic belief.

Tensions between nature and culture, between the more primitive and the excessively artificial inform many of the conflicts in Maria Edgeworth’s 1801 novel Belinda Edgeworth’s leading man, Clarence Hervey, a one-time rake who falls in love with Rousseauvian philosophy, rejects the society of worldly French belles and determines to locate a simple, uncultivated woman to educate as his wife. Yet Edgeworth soon makes it clear that he trusts nature—or rather, society’s now-common assumptions about nature—too much, when he puts this plan into action. He locates the apparently ideal spousal candidate one day when, lost in the woods, he chances upon a cottage in the midst of a definitively picturesque glade—a “cultivated spot […] 28 strikingly contrasted with the wildness of the surrounding scenery”—where a young girl stood watering “a profusion of rose-trees, which were in full blow” (363). Though he admires her

“finely shaped hands and arms, and the natural grace of her motions” (364), the girl appears to him all the purer and unspoiled as a result of her idyllic backdrop: “The setting sun shone upon her countenance, the wind blew aside the ringlets of her light hair, and the blush of modesty overspread her cheeks […]. In her large blue eyes, there was an expression of artless sensibility, with which Mr. Hervey was so powerfully struck, that he remained for some moments silent”

(363). He sees her as a “child of nature,” opposed in every way to the “frivolous slaves of art”

(371).

Hervey’s unquestioning trust in a cultural construction of nature—its supposedly purifying effects on women—then prompt him to enact a series of questionable decisions that more broadly reveal the idea of natural education as a questionable philosophy, for they yield disappointing results. Following the sudden death of the girl’s grandmother, Hervey takes her into his protection, renames her “Virginia St. Pierre” (a strange collation of Bernardin as author and of his heroine), and arranges for her to live with an older woman “secluded from all intercourse with the world” aside from his own visits (370). He supervises her “education,” limited so as to maintain her innocence, and “for some time [Hervey] discovered every day fresh indications, as he thought, of virtue and abilities in his charming pupil,” such as her preference for roses over diamonds. To him, her “indifference to objects of show and ornament appeared

[…] indisputable proof of her magnanimity,” yet the novel’s narrator points out that “there was more of ignorance and timidity, perhaps, than of sound sense or philosophy in Virginia’s indifference.” Wholly ignorant of the value society places on the diamonds (and barred from all opportunity of displaying them in public) she naturally has no use for them, while the roses elicit 29 a simple, childlike delight and a nostalgia for her girlhood home and late grandmother; “it could not justly be said,” therefore, “that she was free from vanity, because she rejected the diamonds”

(372). This conclusion is so logically obvious that the narrator concedes “these reflections could not possibly have escaped a man of Clarence Hervey’s abilities; had he not been engaged in defence [sic] of a favourite system of education, or if his pupil had not been quite so handsome”

(372). Ultimately Hervey concedes that her initial appearance of charm and purity stemmed not from “the superiority or her unprejudiced mind,” but from a mixture of chance and enforced inexperience—that because “she had accidentally lived in a beautiful situation in the New Forest, she appeared to have an instinctive taste for the beauties of nature, and for what we call the picturesque” (372, emphasis mine). Virginia remains lovely, but her sequestered existence renders her timid, dependent, naïve and insipid, her innocence degraded to ignorance.

The failure of Hervey’s experiment reveals (both to him and to the reader) the need for a different kind of pedagogy, one able to reconcile natural, social, and intellectual input, navigate their respective limitations or extremes, and synthesize their strengths. Debates about the proper balance between these elements continue in discussions of education to the present day, but in the 1820s when flower books began their rise to popularity in earnest, a number of related issues coalesced to reanimate Hervey’s reformed pedagogy, taking on in another genre the desire to reevaluate what women should learn. Many writers still praised and sought to elucidate the potent but ineffable influence of nature to awaken and hone certain sensibilities, though as Edgeworth makes clear, nature could not by itself constitute a complete educational system—and a construction of nature that substituted ignorance for reason, most certainly needed reformation.

Likewise, while an individual’s rejection of society might seem noble and poetic, the decades of strife surrounding the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815) had shown that a 30 full-scale rejection of society and social norms could bring violence and tumult rather than serenity; reform from within society seemed a far more viable, if slower, option.13 At the same time, numerous writers explore a linked problem: with the onset of the industrial revolution, fewer and fewer people, particularly among the working class, had access to whatever refining influence nature could offer, while even those who lived and worked in close proximity to nature—such as tenant farmers, whose poverty had worsened as a result of war, and whose and dissolute habits were a source of increasing public alarm—seemed to experience a fundamental disconnect from it. Thus the essential questions facing those who sought a more precise pedagogy of nature for the sake of reforming society were, first, how to provide people already living in society not merely with exposure to nature, but with personal points of spiritual connection to it; and second, how to train those people to see nature such that they could glean its most individually enlightening and socially constructive lessons.

Flower Book Values: Civilizing Through Beauty and Utility

A number of early flower books manifest a desire to supply the missing piece or pieces that could channel nature’s influence into more effective instruction, exploring in detail various mechanisms by which nature, when it does manage to do so, accomplishes its civilizing work.

Some flower books focus on plant-human interactions in the hands-on labor of gardening; others focus on the expression of this relationship as it appears over time in literature and culture; yet both strands of the genre walk the interesting line between a desire to reveal to the mind or direct it toward lasting, transcendent truth, and a desire to make this information usable and implementable, with real impact on the quality of everyday life. Some flower books combine

13 In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars England experienced continued bouts of strife such as that surrounding the Peterloo massacre of 1819. Agitation for reform occurred at all levels of society in succeeding decades, bringing about formal political reforms like the Great Reform Act in 1832, but numerous informal ones as well, as I describe in this chapter. 31 these strands within their own pages, but even where they focus on one or the other—the practical or the philosophical—it is important to our understanding of the genre that we consider both facets as sides of the same coin. Reading about flowers, encountering them, studying them, gathering them, planting them—each of these activities could gain greater efficacy if joined with one or more of the others. To illustrate this point, in this section I explore excerpts from a number of early flower books alongside excerpts from contemporary issues of Gardener’s

Magazine, a periodical for professional gardeners. Together these texts show that regardless of their particular bent, flower books consistently argue for a vital synergy between beauty and usefulness that contributes to the overall elevation of society.

The Use of Beauty

Many flower books, in identifying the act of articulating the relationship between usefulness and beauty as a complex task, initially emphasize their useful qualities in very basic terms. Maria Elizabeth Jackson’s Florist’s Manual (1816) promises in its subtitle, “Hints for the

Construction of a Gay Flower Garden.” Elizabeth Kent’s Sylvan Sketches (1825) aims “to give an unceremonious introduction of certain trees and shrubs to our readers, who are occasionally in the habit of meeting them without being acquainted, in many instances, even with their names”

(ix). The author of Memoirs of the Rose (1824) delivers “new illustrations of the beauties of the garden in general; many of the incidents in the history of this flower being very interesting, and most of the poetical tributes exceedingly beautiful” (vi). In The Garland of Flora (1829)

Dorothea Dix compiles “a list of the most interesting flowers, with striking passages from the ancient and modern poets referring to them,” meant to “be useful as a storehouse of poetical sentiment and imagery, and give a new, or stronger interest, to Floral pursuits” (iii). In short, 32 each of these authors argues that his or her14 book performs a specific task, and fills a specific need.

Although these writers generally deliver on such basic promises, the real scope of their labors is usually much larger. The author of Flora and Thalia (1835) calls her book a work of

“moral amusement” (vii), a term that encompasses many flower books’ ambitions not just to inform, entertain, or soothe but to effect spiritual education and growth. And plants, these authors argue, provide the perfect vector for such learning. For one thing, in humans’ hectic and unceasing efforts to survive, their beauty manages to capture our notice, arresting our thinking and initiating a spontaneous learning process. As Elaine Scarry points out, beautiful things

“ignit[e] the desire for truth by giving us, with an electric brightness shared by almost no other uninvited, freely arriving perceptual event, the experience of conviction and the experience, as well, of error” (52).15 In other words, beauty astonishes with its rightness, while revealing how wrong we might have been. Jackson describes the power of plants’ beauty as capable of reaching any and every person, a powerful quality in a tool of instruction:

The beautiful varieties of colour, form, and scent, exhibited in the structure of the

vegetable creation, have, from the beginning of time, forcibly attracted the attention of

mankind; and from the early age of infancy to the latest period of the decline of life have

excited admiration, from the inhabitants of the cottage, to him, the wisest of the human

species [Solomon], who dwelt in palaces and spake of plants “from the cedar of Libanus

to the hyssop which grew upon the wall.” We may then, perhaps, be allowed to consider

it as a part of the wisdom of the present sapient era, that the vegetable species is become

14 The anonymous author of Memoirs of the Rose self-identifies as male. The anonymous author of Flora and Thalia self-identifies as female. 15 Of course, there have been arguments against this connection between beauty and justice. See, for instance, Mark Canuel’s Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime. 33

a subject of general enquiry, and of prime consideration in the arrangement of every

modern dwelling.” (1-2)

Part of the wisdom of loving plants that Jackson describes centers in the extension of their beauty far beyond mere appearance. Botanists exploring the minutiae of plants’ physiological structures, or the mechanisms by which they propagate, or their relationships with other plants, insects, and other animals routinely marvel at the intricacy and wonder of these characteristics.

But the overall effect of encountering this beauty is more than cumulative—so much more that it defies specific description, leaving writers to gesture toward it in ardent but general terms. Flora and Thalia’s author argues

There is no study that possesses so many charms [as botany], nor any that can exceed it,

in raising our curiosity, gratifying our taste, or expanding our powers of discrimination. It

excites the student to elevated feelings; for the more we study the works of the Creator

the more His wisdom becomes manifest. With these sentiments, the Editor offers her

little Work, hoping it may be a means of calling forth those ideas which all should

possess when they contemplate nature, “always pleasing, everywhere lovely.” (vii-viii)

The author of Memoirs of the Rose similarly argues that “whatever multiplies or diversifies the associations of intellect or feeling with which we regard the objects of creation, must, at the same time, heighten the enjoyment of rational and religious contemplation” (vi). And most pointedly,

Kent writes in Sylvan Sketches,

To attempt to enumerate the uses of vegetable productions were to enter upon an endless

theme indeed; as vain would it be to attempt to describe their beauties; but there is

something beyond mere use, something beyond mere beauty, in their influence upon the 34

human mind; --there is something in flowers and trees which excites our kindest

sympathies, which soothes our keenest sorrows. (xv)

This ineffable “something more” in plants that Kent strives to articulate here argues for the power of beauty and usefulness put together, or perhaps more accurately, the highest use of beauty. Eighteenth-century and Romantic-era philosophers certainly contemplated the identifying characteristics and psychological influence of beauty, most famously differentiating it from the sublime.16 But Scarry argues that we most correctly understand these aesthetic categories by placing the beautiful in continuity with the sublime rather than in counterpoint

(84), seeing both as equally powerful influences for good on individuals and societies. The results of plant-observation that Kent observes—increased sympathy, alleviated sorrows—seem remarkably close to Scarry’s descriptions of the effects of beauty: that beauty confers on the beholder a renewed feeling of life (89-90), and prompts a “generous-hearted impulse” to share it with as many people as possible (6-7).

Because beauty can acquaint us with our errors and accomplish this sort of radical

“unselfing” (113), Scarry contends that beauty finds its ultimate purpose and expression in the way it prompts a desire for, and a will to create, justice. She writes, “In the absence of its counterpart, one term of an analogy [beauty] actively calls out for its missing fellow [justice]; it presses on us to bring its counterpart into existence, acts as a lever in the distribution of justice”

(100). In this sense, beauty has the potential to accomplish so much more than simply giving pleasure; its symmetries continually remind its beholders of the “manifest good of equality and balance” (97), inspiring them to create similar balance in other arenas too, including social ones.

The beautiful object is thus most remarkable not for its own pleasing qualities, but for its ability

16 See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757); and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (1790). 35 to transform its beholders, to redirect their attention to less selfish and more cooperative endeavors. Such is Scarry’s argument, but as Kent and numerous other flower book writers likewise imply, beauty—especially the beauty of flowers—exerts a formidable social force.

The Miseducation of Lady Delacour

But the question remains, if beauty is available on some level to most people, and it has a tendency to prompt copies of itself so as to share its influence, why do injustice and corruption still linger in some circles, even amid the opulence of countless beautiful things? Scarry admits that not all beholders’ responses to beauty find their most noble expression; imperfect and misguided responses can “giv[e] rise to material cupidity and possessiveness” (6). In Belinda,

Edgeworth provides an example of such miseducation through the character of Lady Delacour, a celebrated socialite wasting away in her life of dazzling artifice, crushing ennui, and desperate grasping for social dominance. “I was intended for something better,” she laments, “but now it is too late—[….] all I ask or wish for is admiration” (64). Lady Delacour inhabits a world of opulence obsessed with appearances, where the benevolent influence of beauty is skewed into ruthless deployment of glamour. As John Berger explains, envy gives glamour its power, and in this way it can deeply influence identity formation (147): as an instance of this, Lady Delacour has come to believe that “what she is […] entirely depend[s] on others wanting to be like her”

(Berger 147). To compensate for her lost connection to beauty’s more fulfilling power (a loss she recognizes and deeply mourns), she places a jaded trust in spectacle, expense, and possessions, and she collects objects, clothing, and admirers alike to shore up her conflicted sense of self.

Lady Delacour’s severed relationship to the natural and the beautiful strongly manifests in her treatment of a giant aloe plant, which she uses to humiliate her ex-best-friend Mrs.

Luttridge. The aloe answers her purpose for two reasons: it is both an object of curiosity and a 36 valuable financial commodity, for “a plant that blows but once in a hundred years is worth having” (63). To foil Mrs. Luttridge’s plans for a grand party, Lady Delacour swindles a respectable working-class gardener out of this possession, and “had it whispered about, that an aloe in full blow, would stand in the middle of one of [her] supper tables” on that very same night (63). The spirit of her botanical display resides entirely in show; she herself sees no beauty in the aloe and feels no sense of its connection to nature; to her it remains “an ugly thing” whose looks do not improve even when surrounded with “the most beautiful, or rather the most expensive, hot house plants [she] could procure” (63). Although the plant draws an eager crowd, the spectators seek only entertainment, not spiritual nourishment; this suits Lady Delacour, as she never aspired to improve society, only to impress it. Yet when she momentarily exults that

“everybody came from Mrs. Luttridge’s to me, or to my aloe” (64), her recognition of the parallel between herself and the plant indicates a growing level of self-awareness. As a collector,

Lady Delacour has at times existed within the psychological subject/object collapse Baudrillard describes, when a person’s possessions become “things of which [they are] the meaning” (89).

Yet here, in sardonically acknowledging her separation from the aloe and her own pitiful willingness to accept its allure as her own, she treats it not as a surrogate self so much as an apt symbol of her self-loathing and her hatred for the system that brought it about. Her own corruption, her regrets, and the withering of her once-noble qualities are but a few of the “ugly things” which opulent surroundings cannot entirely veil.

Taken as a whole, the entire dramatic situation Edgeworth creates here pointedly critiques genteel society’s utter dissipation by endorsing, via irony, the Romantic Nature-ideal: in such a world of artful cunning, the natural object at the center of this intrigue clearly has no power either to refine or civilize, and its “fall” into artificiality, while lending Lady Delacour a 37 temporary measure of social authority, parallels her own. In fact, given the intrigue’s absolute pettiness coupled with its heavy cost, the aloe perfectly epitomizes the kind of bad behavior

Makdisi argues the new British imperial mission was striving to eschew—and though this might be part of what Foucault would call a disciplinary strategy, certainly decadence, idleness, moral failing, and unregulated desire, have not made Lady Delacour happy.

Yet importantly, the novel offers hope: just as Edgeworth rejects the idea of

Rousseauvian innocence, she also rejects the notions of irredeemable social corruption and of rigid disciplinary enforcement. Lady Delacour is not the antithesis of Bernardin’s Paul, nor is she an echo of his Virginia, doomed to inevitable (though slower) death at the hands of corrupt society. Instead, Edgeworth gives her a level of agency similar to Clarence Hervey’s: she can, if she chooses, reject one educational system for another. As I made clear above, Hervey’s complete switch from an education drawn wholly from artifice to one dependent on nature’s teaching revealed a separate set of problems; Edgeworth proposes a far more sustainable balance of natural sensibility and worldly knowledge through the novel’s heroine, Belinda. Neither a

“child of nature” nor a “slav[e] of art” (371), Belinda bridges the gap between Virginia St. Pierre and Lady Delacour. She blends her natural education (that is, her own innate responses to beauty and her inner moral development that began in her childhood) with an intellectual education of extensive reading, and also with the social education she gains through observation and interactions with London society. Through Belinda, Edgeworth thus proposes a pedagogy that welcomes multiple locations in nature and society, and that utilizes and further develops perception and reason rather than merely protecting innocence. Lady Delacour’s own keen perception of the empty social system that surrounds her indicates her readiness for re-education in this new course. 38

Edgeworth also suggests that a balanced education carries with it a seemingly effortless but powerful influence. Unlike natural education, which has to be enforced and guarded either by circumstances (such as island solitude) or by people outside of the system (such as Hervey, who has extensive worldly knowledge), and also unlike corrupt social education that enforces its own norms through vicious means, like gossip, ridicule, envy, and exclusion, Belinda’s education possesses arresting symmetries that, like the beauty Scarry describes, make others aware of what more they need to learn and gives them new convictions (52). Belinda never attempts to impose her will or ideas on others, but she becomes a mentor to both Lady Delacour and to Clarence

Hervey as their attraction to her catalyzes adjustments in their values and behavior. Hervey realizes, for example, that

[i]n comparison with Belinda, Virginia appeared to him but an insipid, though innocent

child; the one he found was his equal, the other his inferior; the one he saw could be a

companion, a friend to him for life; the other would be merely his pupil, or his plaything.

Belinda had cultivated tastes, an active understanding, a knowledge of literature, the

power and the habit of conducting herself […] with discretion, which must be the

combined result of reasoning and experience. Mr. Hervey had felt gratuitous confidence

in Virginia’s innocence; but on Belinda’s prudence, which he had opportunities of seeing

tried, he gradually learned to feel a different, and a higher species of reliance […]. The

virtues of Virginia sprang from sentiment; those of Belinda, from reason. (379)

Belinda not only wins Hervey’s heart, she tempers his philosophy of education by revealing that hers facilitates healthier, more compassionate, and more invigorating intrapersonal relationships, enriches her engagement with people and ideas, empowers her to navigate challenging ethical situations, and renders her steady and dependable. As we will see in the remainder of this 39 chapter, this central message of Edgeworth’s novel strongly carries over into the ethos of most flower books. Although Belinda as a character is never directly associated with plants or nature, she represents the kind of grounded, self-regulating person that flower books strive to create—a person who welcomes learning, but who has also learned to observe, to weigh options, and to make difficult but wise decisions that create space for moral and philosophical ideals within the constructs of social life.

A New Kind of In-Crowd

Flower books embrace the social dimension of balanced education partly through acts of anthologizing. If Lady Delacour’s character development illustrates the devastating effect of bad friends, flower books seize upon the power of good ones: by excerpting from certain works, flower book writers identify the group of thinkers they find worthy of emulation—those people who understand beauty’s higher call. Flower book writers’ attention to specific individuals and cultures thus delineates a particular in-crowd, separate from the glitterati of fashionable society, but charismatic in its own way. Kent quotes John Evelyn17 saying “All intelligent persons have embraced the solace of shady groves, […] and all devout persons have found how naturally they dispose our spirits to religious contemplation” (xv). Dix argues that flowers “excite a lively interest in pure and tasteful minds” ([iii]). The author of Memoirs of the Rose notes that “Milton and Euripides […] ‘delighted in the Rose;’ Vitruvius acknowledged it to be one of the best ornaments of a Corinthian capital; lovers in ancient times were accustomed to swear by it; and such veneration [viii] had the Persians for this exquisite flower, that it creeps into almost all their songs, fables, and odes” (vii-viii). In excerpt upon excerpt, flower books powerfully assert that

17 From Evelyn’s Silva: or, a Discourse of Forest Trees. Originally published in 1664, new editions of this text were published in 1670, 1679, 1706, 1729, 1744, 1776, 1786 1801, 1812, and 1825. 40 the love of flowers not only transcends all social and cultural boundaries, but that it has inspired history’s most eminent thinkers and graced its most venerated, romanticized cultures, supporting their rise to greatness.

Significantly, flower books invite readers to join this in-crowd, or to reinforce their ties with it through renewed association. If all the (genuinely) cool kids love flowers, then it follows that discerning readers will enjoy keeping company with them. Flower book writers often argue this as a given: as the author of Memoirs of the Rose states, “To the intelligent portion of that amiable sex, to whom these pages are most particularly devoted, as well as to persons of taste in general, no apology can be necessary for presenting these memoirs of a flower, so generally and deservedly celebrated, and so universally esteemed” (vii-viii). Dix expresses a similar thought, noting that some readers will naturally feel “a curiosity, which cannot be wanting in any cultivated mind, to see in what various lights these favorite works of creation have been viewed in various ages, and observe the endless colors and shadows of association, which genius has thrown over them” (Dix [iii]). True, such statements at times feel manipulative; interpreted a certain way they smack of unabashed self-promotion and bald-faced flattery, as if the writers are simultaneously congratulating themselves for their wisdom in publishing the books and complimenting their readers for having the good taste to pick them up. Their intent, of course, remains unknowable, but I suggest that we read these passages as earnest pleas rather than smug self-assurances, largely because a sympathetic reading allows us to consider a more interesting and far bolder argument: that they believe that contemplating flowers—especially with the guidance of a timeless group of wise companions—can in fact develop any individual’s intelligence, taste, and even genius. And the greater the number of people possessing these qualities, the greater their influence to shape and elevate the values and actions of society. 41

Thus, through their identification of a flower-loving in-crowd, and their implicit invitation to join it, flower books offer aspirational identity as a tool of social reform. Wrapped up in that identity is a set of principles that strives to emphasize the eternal and universal over the temporary and socially contingent. For example, the author of Memoirs of the Rose addresses his18 book to a “fair correspondent […] of modest and retired habits, whose taste and disposition led her to prefer the society of Flora in the field and flower garden, before the solitude of dissipation in the giddy circles of fashionable life” (v). Like many writers of the day he advances nature over fashion so as to persuade his readers that re-centering one’s focus on the latter could rehabilitate the former.

But we misread these books if we interpret the Memoirs’ endorsement of “modest and retired habits” as a recommendation for total sequestration from society. Sociality is in fact a crucial element of the flower book formula. As Edgeworth’s Belinda makes clear, Virginia St.

Pierre’s preference for roses over diamonds resulted from nostalgia for the one and ignorance of the other. A sound ability to judge value must account for both arenas. By inviting readers to join a group of thinkers, flower books operate on the assumption that the highest ideals flourish most when a critical mass of the population cooperates to enact them. Thus the point is not to withdraw from society, but to change it by embracing the best of what both society and nature have to offer. Praise for modesty and retirement opposes ostentation and relentless one- upmanship, but it does not preclude social interaction; it simply suggests a shift in perspective and (perhaps) of venue. Since a garden can play host to giddy fashion as easily as a ballroom or theater might, the goal is not merely to surround oneself with flowers; instead, as the author of

Memoirs implies, we can trade the “solitude of dissipation” for “the society of flora”—that is, by

18 The author of Memoirs of the Rose self-identifies as male. 42 contemplating nature and society in good company, we can learn a more effective and ultimately more enjoyable and deeply satisfying way of interacting and connecting, both with nature and with people.

Floral Reform in the Trenches

Thus, flower books offer a strong pedagogical means of social reform, but perhaps the most effective way they engage in the actual work of improvement lies outside of their individual pages, in the ways they encouraged (and succeeded in convincing) readers to continue their own collections of flower-related knowledge, lore, and literary and artistic material. Scarry argues that beautiful things prompt copies of themselves, leading to a greater distribution of beauty throughout populations and thus a greater elevating influence. The flower books of the

1820s and early 30s most definitely did inspire numerous offspring and increase in their distribution, much as their writers expected they would. As the author of Memoirs of the Rose states, he “by no means pretends to have collected all that is interesting […] on the history of this celebrated flower—it was neither within his ability nor his intention to do this: on the contrary, be believes there is hardly a reader, but will be able to add to the instances in these Letters, anecdotes or eulogies of the Rose” (vii). Indeed, countless readers did exactly this, sometimes adding to their own private collections and sometimes publishing collections of their own.

Whether or not flower books fully succeeded in exerting an elevating influence on society is a more complex question, and one I address more directly in Chapter 5; but especially in the genre’s early years these books earnestly express a belief that flower love could initiate a unifying social movement toward deeper knowledge and more tempered judgement.

While many middle- and upper-class readers continued to try their hand at contributing to social reform through making their own private or public flower books, some writers strove to 43 translate the philosophy and process into even more concrete and democratic terms. In the late

1820s, horticulturist and writer John Claudius Loudon wrote passionately about the potential for floral instruction to reach an audience that flower books often could not: the illiterate poor. Like many in his day, he felt great concern over the condition of tenant farmers and other working- class people in the British Isles, and over the disconnect between the high ideals discussed among the upper classes that rarely trickled down to those below. He wrote,

A few enlightened individuals may bring an art to the highest degree of perfection, and

may record its principles, and the history of its productions in books; but unless the minds

of those who are to practice this art are so far enlightened as to be able to understand and

reason upon those principles, and draw proper and useful inferences from that history,

improvement can never become generally beneficial to society, or permanently

incorporated with the practice of the country. (GM 1827:iii)

Loudon realized that for those who could not gain ready access to books, or even read them at all, their content could have no effect. He launched his periodical Gardener’s Magazine (1826-

1843) partly to spread useful information to professional gardeners, but especially to educate the upper-class landowners also among his readership about the steps they could take to improve their estates by improving their employees’ and tenants’ access to education and up-to-date information.

Loudon promoted education for the poor via lending libraries and “labourer’s institutions” (1827:iii) for gardeners employed on estates, asserting that “one movement of improvement to the lowest classes will produce an impulse through all those above them”

(1826:276). His ideas, thus, focus a great deal of attention on the possibility of ameliorating life for the most uneducated and poverty-stricken populations—specifically, by teaching them how 44 to grow gardens. In the early volumes of Gardener’s Magazine he published and promoted a number of letters from his contributors on the subject, praising their efforts, soliciting reports of all successes in this line, and urging his readers to get involved in any way possible. One contributor, William Stevenson, proposed that Gardener’s Magazine provide a series of papers

“On the benefits to be derived by the country labourer from a garden, and the means of

[acquiring] those benefits” (1826 2:101), and he outlined a number of steps that might be involved in the process not just of teaching the poor how to garden, but of convincing them it was worthwhile. Stevenson’s plan reflects a measure of middle-class condescension in its harsh characterization of the poor’s values and habits but it also highlights the growing general awareness of the truly desperate plight of laboring classes in this period of reform, especially in rural areas. He identifies the need for incremental education and careful attention and guidance, but remains confident that gardening will be an effective means of delivering the poor from their physical and intellectual destitution.

It is extremely difficult to [lead] men, who have not been accustomed to the exercise of

their thoughts, and to derive gratification from that exercise, to any mental pursuit: you

must at first make use of his gross motives of advantage. Thus, it would be difficult to

draw off a peasant from the ale-house to the cultivation of his garden, by merely

expatiating on the interest and pleasure derived from such cultivation; you must first get

him into his garden, by proving to him, that by its proper cultivation he may benefit his

health, save his money, and cheaply contribute to some of his animal gratifications.

Having thus drawn him into it, and excited his interest regarding what grows there, and

chiefly because by means of his garden his meals may be rendered less costly to his

purse, and more agreeable to his palate, you may gradually unfold to him higher and 45

more intellectual motives for cultivating it, and the prospect of new sources of enjoyment

to be derived from its cultivation. (102)

Stevenson outlines his program with the specificity of a psychologist or occupational therapist; indeed, he anticipates the “hierarchy of needs” that Abraham Maslow would make famous in the

1940s19 when he suggests that people in poverty of necessity remain so focused on their “animal gratifications” that “mental pursuit[s]” hold little value (GM 1826 2:102). Gardening, though, offers a reward at every level of the gardener’s psychological capability, and thus offers a viable pathway toward, in Maslow’s terms, “self-actualization.” Stevenson anticipates these stages: at the most basic level, gardening can provide food and reduce expenses. Next, it can begin to refine taste and open the mind to aesthetic principles (like the picturesque) as the gardener learns

“in what manner to select and arrange [flowers], so as best to please the eye” (104). Third, the garden can interest the gardener in scientific principles like vegetable physiology, and fourth, the gardener can become his own teacher (104). Essentially, this is the “teach a man to fish” philosophy, only with a great many intellectual benefits added to that of being able to eat for a lifetime: a laborer who learns to cultivate a garden will also “improve [his] taste, […] multiply

[his] sources of innocent pleasure, […] by watching Nature […] raise and purify his thoughts,

[and perhaps] be called forth from the ignorance and obscurity in which [he] otherwise would have dwelt, and be rendered [a] useful contributor to these branches of sciences” (GM 105).

Logical as Stevenson’s plan is, it does not fully account for reasons why tenant farmers, working so closely with nature, would not have recognized and seized upon the rewards of gardening in the first place. He suggests social norms of the laboring class stand in the way, and thus that mentorship is absolutely necessary: those who teach these principles “must not leave

19 See Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review (1943). 46

[the pupil] to himself” (104). On the other hand, Loudon and a number of other contributors to the magazine call for a shift in upper-class culture that would provide the poor with resources to begin their gardening, and allow them to benefit directly from the produce of their own labor. As

Loudon scathingly observed, “Were it once to become the fashion for country gentlemen to be as much occupied in improving the condition of their labouring classes on their estates, as they formerly were in improving the breeds of cattle all over the country, how great and how beneficial would be the change!” (1827: 24). The most hopeful and compelling reports in the magazine reveal reform efforts at both the lower-and upper-class ends of the spectrum, and provide evidence that gardening really did have the power to restore health, industriousness, community spirit and especially dignity to a dejected people. One contributor describes an experiment at Stackpole Court, in Pembrokeshire, where the owner, Lord Cawdor began providing his laboring tenants with space for gardens, and offering prizes for the best-kept ones.

Lord Cawdor’s gardener reported that within a short time,

the spirit of gardening soon became general, and cuttings of the fruit-trees, plants, and

flower-seeds, were in great request with those very individuals who were most prejudiced

against them at the formation of their little gardens, [and] many of the labourers, who had

worked about the gardens for years, and never asked the name of a plant, began to ask the

names of flowers. (1826: 275)

The prizes most certainly helped spark interest in the gardens, but the contributor notes that after a few years these were discontinued, “being considered unnecessary; and it was gratifying to see that the cottagers paid the same attention to their gardens, in the evenings and mornings, as usual; they had experienced the comfort and advantage arising from so doing” (275-76). This example particularly emphasizes the power of cultivating one’s own garden rather than 47 somebody else’s. Being allowed to enjoy the benefits of one’s own labor would become even more important as the industrial revolution increasingly stratified society and alienated workers from the produce of their labor.

Yet another contributor, a magistrate in Monmouthshire, noted the great improvement he witnessed among the laboring classes in his area from the grander experiment of building a village for his tenants. Stating his belief that “the moral and political degradation of the labouring classes in this country, generally, is more the effect of the circumstances in which they have been placed, than of any positive and unavoidable necessity” he goes on to document the progress he sees among them as they are given soundly-built cottages to live in, and taught to cultivate gardens. Though noting the initial difficulty of rousing the laborers “out of that state, bordering on despair, which paralyses the exertions of a great majority of our labouring poor,” the writer records that

Every cottager has his own oven, and bakes his own bread; he has also a snug corner in

his pantry, which I hope to live to see filled with a small cask of good home-brewed beer

or ale; but, what is worth both put together, he has his garden. […] [Previously,] the taste

of the country savoured not of a garden; the old cottager was well content with a few

square yards, sufficient to contain a few leeks, and perhaps onions; and I found more

difficulty in inducing them to bring their gardens into useful cultivation, than on any

other point after the plan was first started. [Yet now,] with one exception, (arising,

perhaps, from peculiar circumstances) all the villagers gardens are now well cultivated,

some of them highly—producing peas, beans, potatoes, cabbages, cauliflowers, in the

vegetable, and, more sparingly, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, some strawberries,

and apples, in the fruit line. […] Many a man that used to waste his spare time and money 48

in public-houses is now to be seen at work in his garden, after the day’s labour is over.

Several of the women, too, are conspicuously industrious in this way. (1827 2:19-23)

All of these contributors highlight the power of the garden as a multi-faceted tool, or perhaps more correctly, an interface of educational opportunities that could be tailored to any person, regardless of their economic power. All of the writers concede that, for the poor, the process of education must first address basic issues of hunger, and that people are more able to care for and about their gardens when they have adequate housing. But all testify to the power of the garden as a venue that offers rich philosophical benefits as well as a means of social rehabilitation, one capable of drawing the rich and the poor alike away from a meaningless waste of time and money and engaging them instead in physical activities that benefit their own bodies as well as nature’s (for example, rearing food crops). For the wealthy, plants and gardens reacquaint viewers with the useful within the beautiful, and for the poor, gardens acquaint them with the beautiful within the useful.

And for all classes, gardening promotes a strong community spirit that reaches across class lines and other boundaries, a particularly significant move in the late 1820s, which, no doubt, helped lead to the first Great Reform. “There is scarcely any person fond of gardening, and of promoting the comfort of his fellow-creatures, who might not do something,” wrote

Loudon:

The humblest individual might give away seeds or plants, and, wherever he saw them,

commend neatness and good crops, and blame slovenliness. Clergymen might do much in

this way. Village clubs might be formed by the richer inhabitants, for giving instructions

verbally and by printed tracts, and also seeds and plants, and awarding premiums to their

more humble neighbors, in Lord Cawdor’s manner. […] Many country gentlemen only 49

require to have a good thing such as this proposed to them, in order to its adoption. We

recommend such gardeners as can do it, to hint the thing in a proper manner to their

masters, and especially to their mistresses, and the young ladies of the family. (1826:

276)

A love of gardening could provide common ground, clearing the way for a greater degree of social awareness and interaction, and hopefully, for a greater degree of care.

Above all, Loudon’s attention to this matter—a cause to which he continued to devote great time and attention, even publishing in 1834 his Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa

Architecture which included a number of plans for laborer’s dwellings and gardens—centers on the idea that all of the physical needs and intellectual capacities exercised and gratified in the tending of a garden confer on the gardener greater vitality. Scarry argues that beauty too confers a “surfeit of aliveness” that “seems to place requirements on us for attending to the aliveness or

(in the case of objects), quasi-aliveness of our world, and for entering into its protection” (89-

90). Just as Scarry argues that experiences with beauty lead people into a quest for justice,

Loudon’s accounts of these gardening experiments concur that through the work of cultivating beautiful and useful gardens both the rich and the poor found greater purpose in their lives, and a greater measure of respect and trust for each other. He states,

The agricultural labourers, in many parts of the country, are in such a wretched state of

ignorance and degradation, that to look at their cottages, habiliments, and weekly wages,

one would think them incapable of any degree of refinement; but the experiment made by

our correspondent shows the contrary, and that in a short time not only the habits of

necessity, but even the tastes of a degraded people may be changed. (1827: 24-25) 50

The garden was the means and the by-product of these experiments; the real accomplishment was the development of amateur gardeners (rich and poor) into socially-minded, knowledgeable, industrious, and self-directed people. What flower books suggest in theory, Loudon tracked in practice—and showed that at least some of the time, it really worked.

A Pedagogy of Curation

Thus far I have attended mainly to early nineteenth-century flower books’ commitment to educating their readers in the life and care of plants as instruments of social reform. Now I turn more directly to the role of collecting, and the pedagogies of collection that flower books model and endorse. To briefly reiterate some foundational points of my argument thus far, flower books as a genre depend on acts of gathering for their own formation, and they tend to inspire readers, directly or indirectly, to continue such acts of gathering. Once made, these collections beget other collections, whether of excerpts from numerous fields, of various kinds of books, or of actual plants either for preservation and study, or for cultivation, sustenance, and enjoyment.

These collectors instruct and enlighten themselves in the process of assembly because such work engages them in sophisticated and pleasurable intellectual exercise. While numerous impulses motivate the basic human instinct to collect (and plants can indeed gratify some baser needs and desires by providing food, shelter, etc.), collectors often, in their flower books, express a yearning for the higher end of plants’ instructional continuum; they look to flowers, and to certain writers on flowers, in a process of determining the worthiest teachers on beauty, value, and sociality. These principles outline the basic premise for why flower books engage in and promote further acts of gathering. This next section will address flower books’ general principles regarding what the most effective collections should look like, and what criteria they should embrace and practice. 51

Significantly, flower books consistently emphasize the importance of selection and arrangement of their materials, even as they cover similar topics or imitate textual forms of other books. In other words, many flower-book editors acknowledge that their books follow designs set forth in previous volumes, but still lay claim to originality—a way of being the same, but different. In fact, in order to adhere to the importance of female modesty, many women editors emphasize this quality, including Sarah Hale, who perhaps over modestly claims in Flora’s

Interpreter (1832) that “there is nothing new attempted,” except in her “selection and arrangement of American authors” (iii) (See a full analysis of this text in Chapter 3). The similarities between published flower books make sense at a practical level, since many writers found inspiration in texts like Memoirs of the Rose that explicitly pointed out how readers might add to the work they began. Such readers continued the work of collecting in various ways; some amassed literary excerpts, looking for relevant passages in local or less famous texts; some composed verses of their own; some created drawings and paintings to accompany literary excerpts or to illustrate floral messages they created with the Language of Flowers. In any case, as flower book writers followed each other’s leads, they evidently viewed themselves as participating in a much broader collective effort to glean from them insight and wisdom related to flowers, both in making their own books and publishing them. On the other hand, it is equally possible that market forces influenced the genre’s internal similarities: since flower books came forth from numerous publishing centers, a writer might happen upon a volumes published in some faraway city and determine that her own local readership would happily receive a variation of it. Or perhaps writers, amateurs especially, viewed their acts of gathering mainly as a practice focused on the skills and strengths built through engaging in the process of collecting, rather than on the originality of the result, something I will discuss at greater length in Chapter 2. Whatever 52 the individual motivations of these writers, it is significant, especially at the beginning of the industrial revolution when mass-production made so many of the same things available to so many, that flower books reassure readers that room exists for countless individual perspectives, even when following a “plan” invented by someone else (as Sarah Mayo Edgarton follows

Hale’s plan in The Flower Vase (1844), which I discuss in Chapter 2), or when gathering from similar, sometimes even the same, sources.

In conjunction with my argument for flower books as social instruments, we might think of the genre as an early form of social media—a platform to create and share content and participate in social networking—somewhat akin to, say, Pinterest. Just as Pinterest enthusiasts browse other peoples’ pin boards for inspiration, and are often extremely selective about what they put on their own, so too might flower book readers and writers have looked to each other both for the raw materials of their collections and for ideas about how to engage with them.

Flower book readers could come across an idea or excerpt in someone else’s book, feel inspired to make their own variation or arrangement of it, and through that process feel both an increased connection to the world at large and a thrill of accomplishment in their individual act of creation.

They might even feel a desire to publish their result, as much to illustrate their participation and support of a movement as to innovate within it. Also, much like a Pinterest board, a flower-book author’s collection of excerpts serves a dual purpose: to narrow the field of selection to presumably the best options, and to construct and reflect a certain authorial identity. The first of these is practical; it aims to benefit the reader, saving her time and effort and promising to make her a more chic-but-savvy consumer. (The unwavering popularity of “editor’s picks” in periodicals from then till now shows how appealing and useful we find such collections, and what trust we continue to place in them). But the second purpose is more complex. The labor of 53 curation—of choosing certain bits and rejecting others—connects intimately to the collector’s sense of self, and an awareness of that self being observed by others. As Berger notes, this consciousness of appearance applies particularly to women whose cultures place them “in the keeping of men” (46), and yields a double-standard in which “men look at women [and] women watch themselves being looked at” (47). A curation is a performance, a projection, a sort of

“mood board” that only shows strategic parts of an identity and masks others. Modern social media has shone a spotlight on the ways such collages of ego can distort perceptions of reality, for curator and audience alike, but people in the nineteenth century recognized these perils too. I have shown that Lady Delacour in Edgeworth’s Belinda provides one early example; now I turn to Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton (1848) to consider the issue in greater detail.

Things of Which I am the Meaning: Collection and Identity in Mary Barton

Gaskell’s tale of working-class life in industrial Manchester offers two very different portraits of plant-collectors and their modes of collecting in Alice Wilson and Job Legh, a pair of poor and elderly neighbors. A spinner by trade, Job is an avid botanizer and naturalist who devotes his spare time to studying the science of plant and animal classification, and spends his spare money buying specimens to add to his collection. Alice, a domestic servant and washerwoman, is also a skilled country healer who occupies her spare time gathering medicinal herbs and preparing them for therapeutic use. That Gaskell identifies these different kinds of plant collecting practices among the working class is significant, as it brings several important questions about collection and sociality prominently to the fore. Not only do Job and Alice demonstrate that collecting occurred regularly even among people with almost no disposable income, but their hand-to-mouth mode of existence hastens the personal and social consequences of their different modes of gathering and reveals them in stark relief. 54

Because Job is poor and without formal education, his academic fascination with plants, insects, and animals is both admirable and distressing: we applaud his pursuit of knowledge, but with dawning recognition of its heavy price. Job belongs to what Gaskell calls “a class of men in

Manchester, unknown even to many of the inhabitants, and whose existence will probably be doubted by many, who yet claim kindred with all the noble names that science recognizes” (73).

Among these “thoughtful, and little understood working men” of the manufacturing district are amateur physicists, mathematicians, entomologists, and of course botanists—“equally familiar with the Linnaean or the Natural system, who know the name and habitat of every plant within a day’s walk from their dwellings; who steal the holiday of a day or two when any particular plant should be in flower, and […] set off with single purpose to fetch home the humble-looking weed” (73). Despite his appearance as a “broad-spoken, common-looking factory hand” (73),

Job’s eyes “absolutely gleamed with intelligence, so keen, so observant, you felt as if they were almost wizard-like” (74). Clearly he defies the stereotype of ignorance and indolence among the working classes, even seeming to fulfill the hope William Stevenson voiced in Gardener’s

Magazine that a laborer could “by watching Nature […] raise and purify his thoughts, [and perhaps] be called forth from the ignorance and obscurity in which [he] otherwise would have dwelt, and be rendered [a] useful contributor to these branches of sciences” (GM 105). In contrast to the more common recreation many sought at gin palaces, Job’s pursuit appears wholesome and laudable, and adds zest and purpose to his life.

And yet, Job clearly manifests many troubling symptoms of the collecting-neurosis

Baudrillard and Benjamin describe, first and foremost an ability to react more spontaneously and openly with the objects in his collection than with people. For collectors, “[h]uman relationships, home of uniqueness and conflict, […] are a continual source of anxiety,” Baudrillard explains; 55

“By contrast, the sphere of objects, consisting of successive and homologous terms, reassures”

(88). Likening this “serial intimacy” to that of a harem, he argues, “man never comes so close to being the master of a secret seraglio as when he is surrounded by his objects” (88). And in his little apartment, Job Legh is indeed surrounded: “the whole room looked not unlike a wizard’s dwelling. Instead of pictures were hung rude wooden frames of impaled insects; the little table was covered with cabalistic books; and a case of mysterious instruments lay beside” (73). He works attentively among these objects, pausing only a moment to greet Mary Barton on her first visit to his granddaughter Margaret, who notes, “Grandfather is so fond of his books, and his creatures, and his plants. It does my heart good to see him so happy, sorting them all at home, and so ready to go in search of more, whenever he’s a spare day. Look at him now! He’s gone back to his books, and he’ll be happy as a king, working away till I make him go to bed” (76).

Despite Margaret’s pleasure in her grandfather’s happiness, it appears that his collection has become an alternative to human interaction.

In some circles Job’s increasing knowledge of the natural sciences might give him fluency and entrée, but in the world he inhabits his collection leads to social isolation—though this is not without its own kind of benefit. Because he is so “fond of such things as most folks know nothing about,” he is generally excused from the obligation to talk about them with other people, and free to build them in his imagination however they most please him. Job’s collection thus exists not only in the interior of his house, but the interior of his mind. Benjamin defines just such an interior as the ideal habitation for a collector; distinctly separate from the space, mental or physical, where a person “has to deal with reality,” the interior offers refuge from social and business concerns and “sustain[s] him in his illusions” (“LP” 38). Job’s collecting powerfully suppresses the concerns of his everyday life: for a poor man he is remarkably nonchalant about 56 money; he expresses no interest in the politics of labor rights that so consume his neighbor John

Barton. Most shocking of all, his devotion to his books and specimens so severely impairs his own perception that he does not notice his granddaughter’s rapidly failing eyesight. His blindness parallels, and perhaps even exceeds, hers.

Beyond sparing him the pain of these circumstances and distracting him from any feeling of particular responsibility to improve them, Job’s collecting may fulfill an even deeper psychological need to sublimate a fear of death and conjure a measure of control. Baudrillard argues that

What man gets from objects is not a guarantee of life after death but the possibility, from

the present moment onwards, of continually experiencing the unfolding of his existence in

a controlled, cyclical mode, symbolically transcending a real existence the irreversibility

of whose progression he is powerless to effect. […] Objects allow us to apply the work of

mourning to ourselves right now, in everyday life, and this in turn allows us to live—to

live regressively, no doubt, but at least to live. (96-97; original emphasis)

The systems of taxonomy and classification that Job so passionately studies offer just this kind of structure and predictability, a soothing seeming-endlessness of slots to fill. Each specimen added to the collection yields thrilling but safe excitement and the comforting illusion of mastery, while the clinical detachment of scientific perspective, caring so little for quotidian triumphs and tragedies, adds a façade of constancy.20 Given the harshness and vicissitudes of working-class life—Margaret’s deteriorating eyesight relates directly to her work sewing on black cloth in dim

20 Of course the “constancy” of scientific classification is a myth; in fact, systems of taxonomy and plant/animal identification underwent frequent revision through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much to the chagrin of botanists and naturalists striving to keep up with the changes. See Bigelow’s remarks on this in the preface to Flora Bostoniensis. 57 light, since “mourning has been so plentiful this winter” (84)—such allurements would be hard to resist.

Interestingly, Margaret too seems to reap some of the same benefits from Job’s collecting; it allows her also to defer reality even as her efforts to support his habit require her to shoulder the physical, material, and emotional burdens it permits him to shed. She defends his obsession to Mary, explaining that “It keeps him silent, to be sure; but so long as I see him in earnest, and pleased, and eager, what does it matter? Then, when he has his talking bouts, you can’t think how much he has to say. Dear grand-father! You don’t know how happy we are!”

(76). Being “so loth to think he should be stinted of what gives him such pleasure” (83), she refuses to tell Job about her increasing blindness and continues to take in the needlework that worsens her condition in order to support their household—for “we’ve sometimes little enough to go upon, and what I earn is a great help” (83). Given that Margaret’s usual plain work “pays so bad” (84), and that even this tiny and unreliable income contributes significantly to their upkeep, Job’s collection-related expenses are indeed alarming—“for grandfather takes a day here, and a day there, for botanizing or going after insects, and he’ll think little enough of four or five shillings for a specimen; dear grand-father!” (83). Job’s hobby places as much of a financial strain on the household as alcoholism might, especially considering that at the novel’s beginning, the Bartons spend approximately two shillings on an “extravagan[t]” meal for seven working- class adults (46, 53).21 Yet Margaret remains steadfast in her desire to indulge his whims to the greatest extent possible, even as they require quite literal self-sacrifice. Presumably she does so because his collection, as Benjamin argues, supports an illusion dear to them both: the “dream

21 At this meal the Bartons serve bread, milk, eggs, 1.5 lbs. of ham, and rum to warm the tea, and spend what I estimate is less than 2 shillings; the price of the bread and ham are not specified, but the rest adds up to 1 shilling (46). Gaskell calls this meal an “extravagance” (53).

Price Comparison from Mary Barton and The Ladies’ Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals One shilling in 1840 is about four pounds in 2015, using the retail price index. (measuringworth.com)

~2 shillings An “extravagant” meal for seven working-class adults (Gaskell 46, 53) 4-5 shillings What Job Legh routinely pays for interesting specimens (Gaskell 83) 5-6 shillings The bulb of a “choice hyacinth” (LFG ii ) 1/50 penny The seed of a double-rocket larkspur (LFG ii) 2s 6d The price of each installment in The Ladies’ Flower Garden (GM 15:88) 7-8 shillings What installments of LFG would have cost if the flowers had been illustrated individually rather than in groups (GM 15:89) 40 shillings (2£) Cost of an entire volume of LFG, bound in cloth (GM 16:262) 50 shillings (2.5£) Cost of a volume of LFG bound in gilt-edged morocco (GM 16:262)

Figure 1.1: Price comparison from Mary Barton and The Ladies' Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals.

[of] a better [world]—one in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the everyday world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful” (“LP” 39). Despite its high cost, Job’s collection shows that someone, at least, can escape the strain of daily life for a while.

Job’s mode of collecting would not seem nearly so harmful were he better able to afford it; on the one hand this exposes one element of his fantasy as he plays the role of a middle- or upper-class man and begs the question of whether collecting should remain a hobby only for the rich. (Figure 1.1).22 More importantly, though, it exposes the psychological and social problems such a mode of collecting can generate, regardless of the collector’s income. First, Job’s knowledge renders him a sort of expert, but also a sort of child, who Margaret must shield.

Second, aside from her meager share of his fantasy, Job’s collection is self-serving: its primary

“use” is that Job can possess it. Baudrillard argues that every object has two functions, “to be put to use, and to be possessed” (86), and as a collector Job prizes possession above almost all else.

He doesn’t have any plan for his accumulated objects or knowledge; they do improve his

22 I refer to this table again in two later sections of the chapter; see p. 63 and 66. 59 feelings about life, and to some extent his health through air and exercise when he gathers specimens, but do not improve his economic circumstances or add to his or anyone else’s material comfort.

Job’s actions during a visit from Alice Wilson’s nephew, Will, a sailor, manifest these problems clearly. Will’s stories draw Job out of his usual preoccupied silence, but only to butt heads when Will claims his friend Jack once saw a mermaid. Job responds disdainfully, to which

Will takes some offense, countering Job’s accusations with his own eyewitness account of flying fish, and though Job responds more favorably to this, the encounter highlights the social barriers that his mode of collecting creates:

“It’s the Exocetus, one of the Malacopterygii Abdominales,” said Job, much interested.

“Aye, there you go! You’re one o’ them folks as never knows beasts unless they’re called

out o’ their names. Put ‘em in Sunday clothes, and you know ‘em, but in their work-a-day

English you never know nought about ‘em. I’ve met wi’ many o’ your kidney; and if I’d

ha’ known it, I’d ha’ christened poor Jack’s mermaid wi’ some grand gibberish of a

name. Mermaidicus Jack Harrisensis; that’s just like their new-fangled words. D’ye

believe there’s such a thing as the Mermaidicus, Master?” (206)

The breach between the two men only begins to heal when Will reveals that he actually owns a dried flying fish. As Baudrillard notes, “it is usually not an object’s presence but far more often its absence that clears the way for social intercourse” (105), and such is the case here: because

Job does not possess an Exocetus, he suddenly opens up to Will, who does.

So great is Job’s interest in the fish he seems even prepared to recant his earlier denial of the mermaid. Will offers, “But I say, old gentleman, I ha’ gotten one dried, and if you’ll take it, why I’ll give it to you; only […] I’d wish you’d just gie me credit for the Mermaidicus.” The 60 narrator responds, “I really believe, if the assuming faith in the story of the mermaid had been made the condition of receiving the flying fish, Job Legh, sincere man that he was, would have pretended belief; he was so much delighted at the idea of possessing this specimen. He won the sailor’s heart by getting up to shake both his hands in vehement gratitude” (206). Job’s reaction to Will’s gift makes Job likeable because it so clearly reveals the simple, childlike joy he derives from his collection, a joy that all adults perhaps yearn to feel. At the same time it renders Job slightly ridiculous, reducing him from a knowledgeable scientist expressing an authoritative view to an eccentric old man clapping his hands over a new toy. Furthermore, Job faces both the limits of his system’s wider social value and the limits of his own emotional separation from his collection when he considers how to repay Will for such a present:

Job wanted to prove his gratitude, and was puzzled how to do it. He feared the young

man would not appreciate any of his duplicate Araneides [spiders]; not even the great

American Mygale, [a tarantula] one of his most precious treasures; or else he would

gladly have bestowed any duplicate on the donor of a real dried Exocetus. (207-208)

As Benjamin argues, a collector “bestows on [objects] only a connoisseur value, rather than a use-value” (“LP” 39), and here Gaskell makes clear that although Job has spent a great deal of money on his collection, his treasures are worthless to those, like Will, who have neither a practical application for them or a desire to possess them. The moment also reveals the depth of

Job’s attachment to these objects as his “precious treasures,” a feeling so strong that he cannot bear to offer even a duplicate specimen to someone he thinks won’t properly value it. Thus Job once again depends on Margaret to provide him with the currency of broader society—“what could he do for [Will]? He could ask Margaret to sing” (208). 61

Significantly, Gaskell provides an entirely different model of a collector in Alice Wilson,

Job’s downstairs neighbor, whose acts of gathering empower her to interact with the world rather than to withdraw from it. Her interest in plants leads her, like Job, to study their identifying characteristics and other properties, and to spend much of her free time combing the local landscape for particular varieties to bring home. Describing her return from one outing, Gaskell explains

She had been out all day in the fields, gathering wild herbs for drinks and medicine, for in

addition to her invaluable qualities as a sick nurse and her worldly occupations as a

washerwoman, she added a considerable knowledge of hedge and field simples […]. This

evening she had returned loaded with nettles, and her first object was to light a candle

and see to hang them up in bunches in every available place in her cellar room. […] [The

window] was oddly festooned with all manner of hedge-row, ditch, and field plants,

which we are accustomed to call valueless, but which have a powerful effect either for

good or for evil, and are consequently much used among the poor. The room was

strewed, hung, and darkened with these bunches, which emitted no very fragrant odor in

their process of drying. (46-47)

Alice, unlike Job, gathers plants useful for food and medicine, and so instead of rendering her a child engrossed in her own imagination, her collection makes her an agent, a force in society.

Her plants, rather than resting eternally in a prized hortus siccus, become the “delicate little messes of broth which [she] was sometimes able to manufacture for a sick neighbor” (47). Job’s and Alice’s modes of collecting both offer avenues for self-education and intellectual engagement, but psychologically the end result of their endeavors differ: Alice’s work leads to an improved emotional ability to cope with life since her focus is service, which in turn produces 62 strong social bonds and feelings of self-esteem and personal efficacy, while his mode, as I have discussed, ends in social withdrawal at great cost to others. .

Alice’s mode of collecting also demonstrates greater discipline and temperance than

Job’s, since she keeps her plant-gathering expeditions in perspective with her other responsibilities. She pursues them only “on fine days, when no more profitable occupation offered itself,” but then she does so attentively and tenaciously, “rambl[ing] off into the lanes and meadows as far as her legs could carry her” (47). She is passionate and highly motivated in her collecting, but not obsessive or excessive. Further, her specimens cost her nothing but time and effort, and occasionally even add to her own economic support. Finally, like Job, Alice finds value in things which others often disregard, but the value of Alice’s plants rests not just in what they are, but what they can do. Because she intends to use rather than merely possess her plants, she does not entirely qualify as a collector in Baudrillard’s definition; her plants might more properly be called a “supply” than a “collection.”23 I posit, however, that her identity is as much connected to and reflected in these plants as Job’s is in his; they are every bit as much the “things of which [she] is the meaning” (Baudrillard 85). The plants pass through her possession, but all of her effort to locate, harvest, preserve, and process them forms a vital part of who she is and who she chooses to be. She has spent her whole life gladly defining herself as one who gives service, who is herself of use.

23 Baudrillard states “A utensil is never possessed, because a utensil refers one to the world; what is possessed is always an object abstracted from its function and thus brought into relationship with the subject. […] Every object thus has two functions—to be put to use, and to be possessed. […] These two functions stand in inverse ration to each other. At one extreme, the strictly practical object acquires a social status: this is the case with the machine. At the opposite extreme, the pure object, devoid of any function or completely abstracted from its use, takes on a strictly subjective status: it becomes part of a collection” (Baudrillard 86).

Once again, then, the novel’s setting among the working class allows the critical importance of use-value to shine through with full force. Indeed, usefulness comes to define the economic, social, and emotional divisions between rich and poor as Gaskell represents them: the poor must care almost exclusively about use-value at the peril of starving to death, while the rich need not care about it at all. John Barton rails at this injustice, noting “We’re their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds” (40), but he takes pride in the dignity of work, social responsibility, and grounded perception that this attention to usefulness promotes. He would rather see his daughter “earning her bread by the sweat of her brow, as the Bible tells her she should do, aye, though she never got butter to her bread, than be like a do-nothing lady, worrying shopmen all morning, and screeching at her pianny all afternoon, and going to bed without having done a good turn to any one of God’s creatures but herself” (39). In Barton’s estimation, shopping and playing the piano have no use-value; they are equivalent to “doing nothing” because their focus is self-serving and self-aggrandizing, and dependent on the labor of others to create the money and time required to indulge in them.

But what Alice offers in the novel is an example of one who turns collecting into something greater than personal accumulation of objects or knowledge—whose collection serves a social purpose and eases rather than adds to others’ burdens. To accomplish this feat as a working-class woman, and at the risk of her own survival, Alice must exercise greater discipline than her middle- and upper-class counterparts; yet the qualities of judgment, prudence, economy, thriftiness, resourcefulness, savviness, and creative application developed in this process only amplify the personal benefits she derives from the activity. They make such actions habitual and thus sustainable, and they engender self-sufficiency and self-confidence. Thus Alice becomes an 64 especially admirable model for readers of any class to emulate in their own acts of collection and object-deployment.

Flower Book Principles of Collecting

Gaskell’s novel directly illustrates the importance of careful engagement in acts of collecting, and although flower books address the issue more implicitly, their values do coalesce into a generally recognizable set of guidelines for the practice. Not all volumes in the genre embrace all of these criteria, but as they work together to develop a reader’s sense of value and social responsibility, they posit a number of important precepts. First, a collection must have a clear use-value beyond the collector’s own possession and pleasure. As beautiful objects, flower books were eminently possess-able, but they almost always claim to serve a more practical purpose. Even books on the Language of Flowers, seemingly the most whimsical branch of the genre, often link many bodies of knowledge together for an integrated learning experience, and they encourage communication, expression, and play, all of which support the second of the genre’s key precepts: that collecting can empower connection. In identifying social ties that extend in many directions—through history, across cultures, between classes, and with nature— these books encourage readers to tap in to their own sympathetic resonance toward individuals and groups. The third precept closely follows: Collection can increase a capacity for mindfulness. By modeling acts of collecting that place the individual in a wider context, flower books have the potential to build self-awareness without solipsism. Finally, flower books argue that collection can and should be accessible to people of all classes in a way that does not exceed their individual resources of time or money.

This last precept strongly opposes more traditional notions of collecting that emphasize exclusivity and privilege gatherings of rarities, curiosities, antiquities, exotics, or riches. Flower 65 books generally operate from a middle-class perspective, seeking to balance efforts to treat ignorance among the working-class through education and exposure to beauty, and efforts to rehabilitate and reform the vacuous decadence of the upper-class through a rededication to usefulness. By adding the principle of economy, this final precept combats the notion of collecting as a luxury and underscores its worth as a practice of intellectual perception.

Collectors could embrace such frugality in different ways; as my price comparison from Figure

1.1 shows, the high cost of entire books placed them utterly beyond the reach of working-class people, and even buying installments of books would have constituted a major indulgence for them, reasonable as such prices may have appeared to middle-class consumers. Yet with the establishment of lending libraries (which J.C. Loudon passionately advocated) came a greater opportunity for working-class people to participate as collectors of information—as readers of books, if not owners, though they may have felt a sort of communal stewardship for the libraries’ offerings. In such a schema the objects or ideas collected, and the matter of who “owns” them, matter much less than the processes of evaluation. Ideal collections would aim not for opulence, but for a sort of metaphysical elegance: the simple, the essential, the perfect fit. Thus, regardless of money spent or the monetary “worth” of assembled items (always relative anyway), this philosophy argues that the more relevant value of a collection ultimately rests in the values it enacts.

Applied collecting in The Ladies’ Flower Garden

As a final case study, I will explore one flower book’s enactment of this pedagogy of curation: Jane Loudon’s The Ladies’ Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals (1838-1840). The first installment in a series now considered among the most attractively and copiously illustrated of popular gardening reference books in its time, this book embodies collection in several 66 ways—its ordered gathering of information, its innovative plate design, its material production in numbers over a period of several months, and finally its status as part of a larger series—all vetted and streamlined for utmost beauty, utility, and economy. As we might expect, Loudon demonstrates her rigorous process of curation in The Ladies Flower Garden most prominently through her selection and arrangement of materials. As the wife and amanuensis of John

Claudius Loudon she worked at the forefront of cutting-edge professional horticultural publications and developments of her time,24 but having had almost no practical knowledge of plants prior to her marriage, she knew how to approach these as an outsider. The Ladies’ Flower

Garden series would establish her authority as a skilled translator of scientific and technical information for amateur audiences; through the 1840s she published a number of works that distilled the salient points of professional gardening and rendered them understandable to laymen. Readers valued her work as much for the jargon and excess detail she sifted out of her publications, as for the essential information she put in.

Accordingly, The Ladies’ Flower Garden clearly foregrounds both Loudon’s encyclopedic reach and her commitment to everyday use-value as among her book’s chief merits. The introduction boldly states her intention “to comprise in [the following pages] all the ornamental annuals that the best judges whom I have consulted on the subject think really deserving of culture in a flower-garden” (ii, emphasis mine), including their botanic and English names with any synonyms, a brief botanical description, and a “popular description, with the geography, history, properties and uses, culture, and in short, everything worth knowing of the plant” (iii, emphasis mine). She follows through with her promise, cataloguing more than 300 plants in almost as many pages, placing them in context of both the Linnaean and Natural

24 The Loudons married in 1831. 67 systems (and in later volumes, the DeCandolle system which became the standard in medical botany), and supporting her descriptions with carefully cited references to more than 150 published books, along with “original” information gathered from “various gardeners, eminent for their success in the culture of annuals” (GM 1839, 15:88-89). To all this Loudon added a number of helpful paratextual elements: an index of English and scientific names, a glossary of terms, a list of authorities and books referred to; a table of contents fully disclosing the book’s organization according to botanical systems, and a list of the forty-eight plates.

Yet even as it covers such vast territory, the book’s acts of gathering and organization rely as much on incisive editing and streamlining as on accumulation. Loudon rejects several well-known plants as “not worth culture”—meaning not worth cultivating, though the phrase as written offers a relevant critique of broader social norms too—due to their inconspicuous flowers, weedy appearance, or exorbitant prices. She argues that such inferior flowers persist in flower gardens only because gardeners, and indeed often nurserymen too, “know them and do not know anything better” (LFG i). Likewise, Loudon firmly adheres to her chosen category of annual plants in order to consolidate existing information into one exceedingly useful and affordable text. “It is true that most of these flowers were figured on their first introduction in one or other of the botanical periodicals” she writes, “but in those works they are mixed up with greenhouse and hothouse plants and shrubs, […] so that a person wishing to get coloured figures and botanical descriptions of all the finest annual flowers, must now purchase plates and descriptions of hundreds of other flowers that he has no need of” (i-ii). By contrasting her book with its contemporaries in this way Loudon lays out her selection criteria and desired outcomes with particular clarity. Haphazard or indulgent collections, she suggests, result in unnecessary 68

expense and debilitating clutter; rigorously and responsibly curated

ones become cost-efficient and

effective tools.

The plates themselves

underscore the importance of

gathering and streamlining too: unlike

most botanical illustrations of the day

that featured only one plant per plate,

Loudon’s grouped several related

species together. Figure 1.2. This

innovation offered viewers greater

ease of species comparison as it

rendered similarities and differences

Figure 1.2. Plate XXVI from The Ladies' Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals, illustrating ten flower species. (Google Books) within each group more apparent. It also made the book far more cost-effective to produce and to buy. John Claudius Loudon’s review in Gardener’s Magazine noted that the three plates in the book’s first installment contain fourteen plants, which if illustrated individually, would have cost seven or eight shillings rather than a mere two shillings and sixpence (see again figure 1.1) (GM 15: 89). Perhaps more than any other single element of the book, the plates embody principles of beauty, utility, and economy; they are at once the most visible and the most concentrated symbol of the book’s overall ethos. 69

Interestingly, the book’s material construction and mode of production and publication automatically involve readers in their own acts of collection and curation, in essence letting readers practice Loudon’s preaching. Like many books of the time, The Ladies’ Flower Garden reached the market in installments, so readers bought and collected pieces of the book as they came forth from the publisher. However, both Jane and John Claudius Loudon seemed keen to emphasize that the point of buying in installments was not merely to make a luxury item more affordable—that is, to accumulate for the sake of ownership or display—but instead to invest in a carefully-crafted instrument with multiple uses. Early advertisements for the volume tout its practical value in no uncertain terms. John Claudius Loudon announced in Gardener’s Magazine

“we think it but justice to state that this is an elegant work, and one which will be found not more beautiful than it is useful” (15:88), and which will be as much at home on the drawing room table, or used as a drawing-book for young ladies (90), as it is in the gardening library. This praise rested on several factors which he specifically describes: the more affordable price of each number (2 shillings sixpence), the number of plants illustrated in each number’s three plates, the high quality of rendering and coloring in the plates (“so delicately drawn on zinc, and so beautifully and artistically coloured, that were it not for the engraved name at the bottom of the plate, each impression might pass for an original drawing” [89]), their balance with the quality of the letterpress pages (which he said were “everyway worthy of the plates” [GM 16: 262]), and finally that the book “will be finished in a definite period, and for a definite price” (GM 15:90).

“In short,” he proclaimed, “there is not a cheaper, or more useful, or, indeed, a more elegant, botanical and horticultural work in the course of publication” (89). With each monthly purchase over the 18-month course of its release, readers not only added to their personal collection of the volume, but honed a taste for these same qualities of beauty, utility, and economy. 70

Loudon’s desire to educate and empower readers in their individual acts of selection and gathering broadened even further as the Ladies’ Flower Garden developed into a series of books.

From the beginning Loudon had envisioned her volume of annuals as only the first of many—so as soon as she completed the first, she commenced installments of The Ladies’ Flower Garden of

Ornamental Bulbous Plants. Loudon intended to complete a seven-volume compendium that would “contain coloured groups of all the most ornamental flowers in British gardens, as well those grown under glass, as in the open air” (LFG “Preface” n.p.). Though ultimately she only published four volumes,25 each one addressed flowers specifically according to the kinds of work and expense required to grow and tend them—flowers from user’s point of view. Loudon’s plan enabled consumers (as owners) to expand the acts of collecting they had begun with her first volume, but more importantly it also empowered them (as users) to tailor those collections to their individual needs, interests, and income levels. In other words, Loudon constructed her books specifically so that gardeners and readers would not need to possess the whole series, but could choose the ones most relevant to their situations. She explains in her preface to the first volume that “Each work will be complete in itself, so that the proprietor of a small town-garden, who can grow only annuals or bulbs, need only purchase the […] volumes, containing the plants he feels inclined to cultivate: while the proprietor of a greenhouse, or of any kind of hothouse, by purchasing the volume containing [those] plants […], may see at one glance the […] flowers suitable for his purpose” (LFG “Preface” n.p.). Thus Loudon saw her readers not as obsessive accumulators in pursuit of a complete “set” of her work, but as discriminating and practical

25 The Ladies’ Flower Garden series demonstrates Loudon’s characteristically ambitious reach, though it was never fully completed according to plan (the death of John Claudius Loudon in 1843 and changing economic circumstances contributed to a gradual decrease in publishers’ investments and production values and to a shift in Loudon’s own publishing focus). Still, between 1839 and 1849 she did manage to bring four complete volumes into being, plus British Wildflowers (1844) that follows much the same format. Ornamental annuals (1840), ornamental bulbous plants (1841), ornamental perennials (1843-44), ornamental greenhouse plants (1848). 71 stewards who would naturally create different foci in their collections by avoiding parts they considered superfluous.

The series showed that consumers could incorporate mass-produced and widely-available elements into their collections and still successfully express their own individual taste and discernment. Rather than leading to a banal uniformity, the modular books instead allowed for efficient and effective customization, as well as for the exercise of personal choice. Wealthy readers might choose to buy complete copies of all the works in the series, or only one or two; other consumers might purchase only certain installments of these books, and some may have desired only the text or the plates.26 As industrial technology continued to make more of the same goods available to a wider population, and as society’s orientation shifted even more toward a consumer culture, Loudon’s books thus offered vital instruction and a hopeful message: individual identity need not depend on displaying rare or unusual possessions, but can rest on a dedication to practicality. She suggests that proper education and good information can empower people to purchase—to collect—only the things that will best serve them. Her method acknowledges emotion and the pleasure of choice, but links it with logic, restraint, and responsibility.

There are several levels of pedagogy present in this flower book, then: First, as a composite text The Ladies Flower Garden models Loudon’s own philosophy of curation; second, the collectible but customizable series provides a controlled means for readers to put her principles into action by choosing only those volumes most appropriate to their needs. Perhaps most importantly, though, Loudon intended for readers to extend these principles beyond the

26 I do not know whether The Ladies’ Flower Garden was officially sold in any form other than installments and complete volumes—that is, I cannot currently prove whether booksellers ever separated the plates from the text and offered them for sale. However, this was common practice for some publishers and booksellers of other flower books, as I point out in my discussion of Flora’s Dictionary in chapter 4. 72 book, starting literally with their own front yards. Keeping in mind her rejection of the rare and costly in favor of the practical and tasteful, it matters significantly that the first work in The

Ladies Flower Garden series focuses on annual plants. As Loudon points out, “The flower of a choice hyacinth, the bulb of which will cost five or six shilling before planting, is not much more beautiful than that of a double rocket larkspur, which may be reared to perfection in three months, from a seed which will cost about the fiftieth part of a penny” (LFG ii). Not only are seed-grown annuals the least expensive and often most immediately gratifying garden plants, they are also the most easily propagated, preserved, and distributed; furthermore, if gardeners collected and saved seeds from their mature plants each year, they would have little need to buy more. Annuals are plants for the masses.

Such an emphasis on cultivating cheap and plentiful but eye-catching plants contrasts notably with other gardening fads of the early nineteenth century which, enamored of the quest for foreign, exotic, tender, and rare plants entering the market, strove to collect and display as many of these curiosities as possible. As the French journalist Alphonse Karr wrote, “Amateurs love only rare flowers; and these they cultivate, not so much to see and smell them, as to make a display. Their enjoyment consists far less in possessing certain flowers, than in knowing that others do not possess them” (Cleaveland 9). A display of rarity or curiosity has only a limited appeal, however, and like Edgeworth’s Lady Delacour with her “ugly” aloe, many such plant collectors found themselves disappointed with the lackluster results of their quests to impress.

Maria Elizabeth Jackson’s Florist’s Manual (1816, 1822, new edition 1827) explained:

A Flower-Garden is now become a necessary appendage of every fashionable residence,

[…] and the fashionable novice, who has stored her borders, from the catalogues of some

celebrated name […], who has set apart a portion of ground for American plants, and 73

duly placed them in bog soil, with their names painted on large headed pegs, becomes

disappointed when, instead of the brilliant glow of her more humble neighbor’s parterre,

she finds her own distinguished only by paucity of colour, and fruitless expenditure.

Variety of species, bog borders, and largely lettered pegs, are all good in their way, but

they will not produce a gay flower-garden; and the simple cause of the general failure in

this particular is the prevalent solicitude for rarity and variety, in preference to well-

blended quality. (1827, 7-9)

Like Jackson, Loudon grounds her ethos of collection in “well-blended quality,” arguing for the power of a garden’s (and any collection’s) overall effect rather than any particular element’s individual “value.” Notably, Loudon did not necessarily oppose incorporating any foreign or newly-introduced plant that met her standards of beauty and economy. She was not, for example, staunchly attached to only native plants. However in advocating for flowers readily available from most nurseries, she emphasizes the unimportance of exclusivity. At the same time, though,

Loudon provides plenty of range for variation: since she catalogues over 300 species of annuals, it’s not as if she expected everyone to plant petunias. Regardless of the plants’ uniqueness, she argues, gardens of annual flowers could still fulfill a desire to possess and display worthwhile and lovely things reflective of the owner’s tastes. On the whole, then, Loudon’s rejection of rarity and expense in favor of beauty, utility, and economy accepts a resultant measure of similarity between collections. But in embracing elements of mass-production she reassures us that consuming the same products as one’s neighbor does not necessarily dissolve individual identity or expression. Books and plants are merely the materials with which any number of people might construct any number of gardens. 74

I have argued that flower books aim to imbue readers with good judgment and a sense of social responsibility, and shown how The Ladies’ Flower Garden series models key precepts in its dedication to usefulness, its emphasis on prudence, and its assertion that anyone of any class can make a beautiful garden. As a final consideration let us consider how Loudon’s books support social connection. Like many flower book authors, Loudon gathers a group of authorities to instruct readers, creating an authoritative coterie within the text itself. Also, through the values she repeatedly cites, she encourages readers to view themselves as participants in a broader movement, a collective identity: we are the gardeners who cherish beauty and practicality above expense. Loudon’s specific invitation to women in The Ladies’ Flower Garden plays a particularly vital role in its social influence. Her advice and encouragement of female gardeners empowered numerous women to get outside, to pursue new avenues of education, and to join or create new communities of enthusiasts—in other words, to enter new arenas of social participation and influence. The importance of flower books to female authors and readers merits its own extensive consideration, a subject which I take up in Chapter 2; here I will simply emphasize that if women were expected to bear considerable responsibility to ensure society’s moral virtue and self-regulation in this period, The Ladies’ Flower Garden provides a refreshingly unsentimental, pragmatic template for that work. Loudon maintains focus first and foremost on skillful gardening, but her opinions and instructions cultivate a specific kind of gardener. The women who followed her advice to leave the house and go into their gardens—to participate directly in the selection of plants, the rearing of seeds, and the care and maintenance of flowers—engaged in an instructive and empowering practice through which they could develop technical expertise, productive habits, consumer acumen, and enhanced philosophical 75 perception. The flowers that seemed to be the purpose of their labor turn out to be a bonus to far more influential work: personal preparation for effective civic involvement.

Perhaps the broadest form of socialization Loudon encourages through her text is the creation of gardens themselves, because people almost always make gardens in order to share them. True, owners may restrict their sharing to only an exclusive group; often the most highly- cultivated gardens exist in “private” spaces, and part of their charm stems from their separation from the outside world. It is also true some prize their gardens primarily as spectacles—as shows meant to impress visitors with the owner’s power. Yet on the other hand, the creation of a garden manifests a selfless impulse too, a desire to give others a revitalizing, inspiring experience, and this holds true whether applied to an estate or to a pot of geraniums outside a pub. “It is astonishing how much beauty may be displayed in a little garden only a few yards in extent”

Loudon argues (i), and the desire to bring beauty into existence at any level, and to share it with even a small group, can exert a beneficent force in society.. If they can be seen, say over a fence or through an archway, even “cloistered gardens become only semi-private, and public gardens, though open to all, often engender feelings of private stewardship—a willingness to pick up trash in a park, for example, or a feeling of personal violation when such spaces are vandalized. In other words, gardens elude easy categorization as either private or public, regardless of who officially owns them.

Moreover, the creation and protection of gardens depends on social cooperation: the perception of garden-planners choosing appropriate plants for given purposes, the market-savvy of those charged with procuring the plants, the expertise of seedsmen and nurserymen making starts available for purchase, the grunt-work of manual laborers preparing soil, planting, watering, and tending the plants, and even the emotional attachment of casual viewers. The 76 success of such a large endeavor relies heavily on the sharing of information between these groups, a realization which spurred the publication of practical works like Gardener’s Magazine and The Ladies’ Flower Garden, as well as more philosophical and literary flower books. The more frequent and more effective the communication, the more people could make more effective gardens, engaging in the instructive, cooperative, disciplining and richly rewarding work of tending them.

Taken as a whole, The Ladies Flower Garden stands as a witness to the overall claim of flower books that engaging with plants according to a specific ethos of collection can hone a person’s ability to deploy sound judgment and prepare them for responsible social participation.

The gatherings apparent in The Ladies’ Flower Garden offer readers vital tools with which to navigate an increasingly bewildering array of choices, and thus the mode of collecting endorsed here does indeed serve an important psychological purpose—one that perhaps, as Baudrillard suggests, keeps some neuroses at bay. However, compared to the desperate, fragile, and self- deceiving habits Baudrillard describes, Loudon’s mode of collecting charts a far more robust and hopeful path. In blending the rational with the imaginative, the useful with the decorative, these texts embody discernible pedagogies that bridge reason and imagination, nature and culture, self and society. As collectible collections that encourage collecting, flower books respect the power of objects, but show that the call of a curator extends beyond the task of protecting them and has nobler aims than the jealous defense of a private hoard. A curator’s stewardship, they suggest, includes the responsibility to discern and reveal the elements of greatest value—and ultimately, to champion the values themselves.

Chapter 2

“The Eloquence of Flowers”: Women, Anthologizing, and Authorship

In the first chapter I investigated the pedagogy of consumerism and social responsibility implicit in acts of collection; this chapter takes up the art of arrangement, exploring how the work of combining and publishing collected materials in the genre’s characteristic structures enabled women editors in particular to accomplish a number of significant tasks. Facing such challenges as limited opportunities for formal education, minimal institutional imprimatur, and rigid gender norms, women’s work on flower books facilitated disciplined practice of early feminist principles, as much for the author-editors themselves as for the readers they sought to instruct. Their acts of anthologizing—which I define broadly in this chapter to include excerpting from other authors’ pre-existing works, interspersing one’s personal compositions among such excerpts, and even gathering the flowers solely from one’s own work but placing them in conversation with the genre—engaged them in collaborative and self-directed learning, provided a socially acceptable public platform on which to display and claim credit for intellectual labor, and opened vital space for exploring a wide range of philosophical and religious positions in the context of Christian respectability. Through the format of the flower book author-editors pushed against the various lines of professionalism, formal training, and gender bias that might exclude them from participation in the public literary sphere, including notions of authorship that locate

“originality” only in a writer’s unique words. Flower books expand the definition of authorial presence and genius to account for the author’s treatment of her materials, whatever their origins—locating greatest merit in the insights her particular combination of elements can reveal, renew, or revitalize. Recognizing the bold claims of this format, together with its artistic, 78 intellectual, and social implications, equips us to more fully perceive just how innovative, dynamic, and influential a work it enabled its authors, especially women authors, to perform.

Assessing Authorship: the case of Elizabeth Kent

To more fully illustrate the interventions and impact of flower books and the labor of the authors who made them, I will examine some of the obstacles that have at times clouded scholars’ prior assessments. I begin, therefore, with a study on Flora Domestica (1823), by

Elizabeth (Bess) Kent. Among the earliest flower books to be published in the nineteenth century, Flora Domestica indexes literary history according to flowers by combining, as its subtitle states, Directions for the treatment of plants in pots [with] illustrations from the poets. It enjoyed reasonable success in its own time (a second edition was printed in 1825 along with a sequel, Sylvan Sketches), but more importantly it introduced key innovations that would influence flower-book creators for decades afterward. Most of the existing scholarship on the text and its author is persistently amiss in the observation and proper crediting of these innovations. Thus, tracing the scholarly struggle over Flora Domestica provides valuable insight for our own reassessment of flower books and their authors as a whole.

The most obvious oversight in studies of Flora Domestica is their tendency to minimize

Kent’s agency and authorial presence in the work, a pattern that emerges partly because the few critics who write on her do so as part of broader analysis of the Cockney School of poets or of her far more famous brother-in-law Leigh Hunt.27 Understandably these studies build largely on

Hunt’s manuscripts, since several prominent libraries possess collections of his papers, whereas regrettably few of Kent’s are known to have survived. Nevertheless, this imbalance of approach

27 See one notable exception to this pattern in Shteir’s profile of Kent in Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science (1996), which examines Kent’s history in the context of women’s contributions to the science of botany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 79 and of source material has repeatedly subordinated Kent and rendered her publications mere appendages to his work, thus critically impairing scholarly appreciation for her role in her own text’s creation. In 1930, Edmund Blunden, for example, baldly suggested that Flora Domestica

“might be fairly reckoned as part of the bibliography of Hunt [since] he had sent various poetical translations for it, and conceivably had instructed the dear authoress where to look among the

English poets for beauties congenial to her design” (195). This shocking dismissal of Kent’s role in the work may derive from Blunden’s own gender prejudices or from the fact that surviving manuscripts document only Hunt’s side of the collaboration—yet even contemporary scholars, including those focusing directly on Kent, fall into much the same pattern of legitimating Flora

Domestica’s literary and historical value through its association with more illustrious people.28

For instance, Daisy Hay’s 2008 article “Elizabeth Kent’s Collaborators” argues that Kent deserves recognition as “A writer whose work exemplifies the central philosophical tenets of the

Hunt circle” (280), yet supports this claim by focusing not on Kent’s own contributions but (as the title suggests) on those made by a host of others, including Hunt, the publishers Taylor and

Hessey, and the botanists Samuel Gray and his son. Like Blunden, Hay cites the several letters in which Hunt sent sections of text that Kent “incorporated verbatim into her volume,” and speculates that “even where letters do not survive to confirm […] Hunt’s suggestions, it seems more than likely that he influenced both Kent’s reading and her choice of quotations more generally” (EKC 274). Hay also posits (rather coyly) that “the seamless transitions between the

28 Two of the three studies that most succeed in assessing the work’s significance do so by characterizing it as a manifesto of Cockney suburban aesthetics (Elizabeth Jones 2003) and as a “Cockney retrospective” that brings together the voices and attitudes of Hunt’s circle after it had already dispersed (Daisy Hay 2008 and 2010). 80 voices of Hunt and Kent in Flora Domestica suggest that at least one of them took care to model their prose style on that of the other” (EKC 274).29

My goal is not to take the inverse position and deny Hunt’s influence on Flora

Domestica. The close bond between them is well-documented, and certainly shaped Kent’s emotional and intellectual life. She sought her first meeting with him when she was eleven years old, and though he eventually married her sister, it was Kent who attended him during his time in

Surrey Gaol (1813-14), served as his amanuensis, conducted his business and publishing negotiations, and participated in lively political and philosophical discussions with his many visitors, “run[ing] his rooms like the hostess of a literary salon” (Hay YR 17). By the time she began work on Flora Domestica in 1823 Kent had known Hunt for twenty years and lived with him for almost ten and, until supplanted by Shelley in 1816, she was his most intimate intellectual companion.

In linking Kent so closely with Hunt we do benefit from all the rich scholarship on his life and work—but to imagine her as merely a Huntian ventriloquist is to disregard the characteristically Cockney-School nature of their collaboration,30 as well as to ignore almost all we know of Kent’s character, namely her marked intelligence (especially considering she received only a dame-school education), her opinionated temper, and her stubborn, even forceful nature. Her nephew Thornton recalled her as “ambitious, of ardent affection, truthful, [and with] so much natural faculty for study as to master two languages, a wide range of history, fiction, science, and poetry, with a technical knowledge of woman’s favorite science, botany; which she

29 To be fair, Hay’s later group-biography Young Romantics (2010) offers the most sympathetic and in-depth account of Kent’s life that I have yet come across. The point of the work is to expose the “tangled lives” of members of the Cockney School and therefore it does highlight Hunt’s influence on Kent and her work—however, it also suggests that Flora Domestica constitutes a sort of declaration of independence for Kent, and a beginning to a life, even an intellectual and professional life, lived separately from him. 30 See Jeffrey Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School (2004). Also Daisy Hay, Young Romantics. (2010). 81 illustrated from the library by really graceful writing” (qtd in Blunden 359). He believed she might have been a better companion for Hunt than his mother had been; “a perfect match for

Hunt, one might think” writes Nicholas Roe, “except that when they first met she had come too close to competing with him” (Roe 84).31 Her “ardent” nature implies initiative and energy, but when we add to this the fact that Kent completed most of the work on Flora Domestica after

Hunt moved to Italy, the evidence accumulates that even while she sought his opinions and suggestions, Kent would nevertheless enthusiastically have taken the lead in her own text.

Indeed, letters between publishers John Taylor and J.A. Hessey confirm that she contended forthrightly with them over at least one editing decision (their excision of, in Hessey’s words, “a silly passage on Hampstead Heath which the Author wishes to have restored”), and that she closely attended her manuscript’s progress into print—Hessey notes “Miss K. is mighty anxious to have it published” (Rollins 325).

Given such ample evidence of Kent’s passion and resolve, another likely reason that scholars have neglected to give her due credit for authorship, talent, and innovation is the slipperiness of Flora Domestica itself: it combines so many literary genres and puts so many voices into play that linking it to Cockney School community and culture provides one crucial way to pin it down. Part manifesto, part botanical/gardening manual, and part poetical anthology, it begins with a lengthy and quite solemn essay celebrating the “eloquence of flowers,” citing in detail how plants inspired, and continue to inspire, the most influential thinkers of the ancient and modern world, and entreating the English public to take more careful notice of the botanical wonders surrounding them. The body of the text features an alphabetical arrangement of 213

3131 Roe explains that Hunt, still an adolescent when he met the Kent sisters, sometimes exhibited “a vulnerable and demanding side to his nature that was prey to ‘jealous anxieties’” (65). He felt drawn to Marian because she reminded him of his own passive and melancholy mother (85). She appeared to “nee[d] his care,” his instruction, and his protection (65). In contrast to Bess, Marian seemed (though the proved otherwise) more “malleable” (85). 82 flowers “usually grown in pots,” each entry containing the name of the plant (along with several of its names in other languages), its Linnaean classification, its botanical family, directions for its proper cultivation, and a sort of cultural history that weaves literary anecdotes and poetical quotations with tidbits of geography and anthropology. Some of these entries occupy less than a page, but a number of them fill five or more pages, with the entry for “rose-bush” taking a full twenty. There no pictures except for a colored frontispiece that was added to the so-titled “new edition” in 1831. Aside from the table of contents listing flower names and page numbers, no additional indexes track any other information (such as entries by specific poets). Though its purpose seems lighthearted—teaching people how to grow plants in pots—its nearly 400 text- heavy octavo pages render it anything but whimsical; to read it is to slide continually between past and present, practical and philosophical, through narrative, and paraphrase, and excerpt, with a sense almost of reverence for the plants, their histories, and the peoples and poets who love them.

The ambition and reach of Flora Domestica are impressive, and its Cockney School spirit of collaboration and community are certainly present; still, examining the work through the

Cockney School lens alone has definite limitations. For one, it was completed after the members of Hunt’s intellectual circle had largely dispersed and moved on to other projects and ideas, and classifying Flora Domestica as a retrospective places Kent in the unfortunate position of being late to the party. More importantly, it obscures the critical fact that Flora Domestica is perhaps the earliest botanico-literary anthology32 to emerge in the nineteenth century—a text that, for all

32 A few earlier works combined literary endeavors with botany, such as Maria Elizabeth Jackson’s Botanical Dialogues (1797) and Priscilla Wakefield’s An Introduction to Botany in a series of familiar letters (1807). Charlotte LaTour’s Le Langage des Fleurs was published in 1820, but its literary ambition is spare. Kent’s Flora Domestica appears to be the first work to combine botanical information with a selection of favorite literary excerpts—a mode of anthologizing many flower books adopted thereafter. There is a direct line of influence between Flora Domestica and Sarah Hale’s wildly popular Flora’s Interpreter, as I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 3. 83 its looking backward, anticipated future trends that beckoned numerous women into the labor of literary production, and became a key forerunner to the dozens of flower books that would proliferate through England and the United States in following decades.

Kent’s text thus helped lay the foundation for development of the flower book genre, and the problems of crediting her are the same problems we face in crediting the many women editors who followed. To reiterate, 1) the women themselves are not usually famous, and thus the archives documenting their composition processes are usually scanty and/or dependent upon those of more famous contemporaries; 2) their own voices are difficult to differentiate from those of their collaborators and the writers they anthologize, rendering moot models of authorship that depend on isolating which words are the author’s “own”; and 3) the resulting composite texts do not fit traditional literary categories and thus conventional genre-based or author-based analysis yields partial appreciation at best—reinforcing the trend of overlooking their influence and sweeping them to the margins of literary history. Though we may never recover the archival materials necessary to remedy the first two issues (or will only acquire them very slowly), we can certainly address the third: slippery as these texts may be, their mixed forms are materially available for examination, and scholars are indeed beginning to unpack the wealth of information and significance texts like this can carry. In the nearly fifteen years since Margaret Ezell called for “studies that are not focused on the 'advanced' or modern concept of authorship [...] but instead on all the varied aspects of the material culture of literature” (Ezell 11-12), many scholars have adopted a broader concept of authorship and originality that has shed light on historically underappreciated avenues of literary endeavor, among them the labor of editing (i.e. selecting and arranging primary materials to create composite texts). Andrew Piper, Michael Gamer,

Thora Brylowe, Katherine Harris, Jeffrey Cox and others have offered in-depth examinations of the myriad forms literary production took in the Romantic period, and the various professional collaborations involved in those productions. As Piper specifically shows, the line between author and editor was especially fluid in the romantic period, when many authors were editors, and the “processing of available artistic material [served] as an essential source of literary creativity” and innovation (88), “[contributing] in important ways to the increasing generic mixing […] that was one of the hallmarks early-nineteenth-century literature” (86). We thus have a greater understanding now of genre-focused “select collections” put forth by publishers, of author-focused collected editions, of scholarly critical editions, of translations by both men and women, of reader-focused miscellanies and annuals, even of printed graphics and comics.

In the remainder of this chapter I will contribute to this discussion by considering what the labor of compiling a flower book involved,33 and what made it so attractive and useful to women editors in particular during the first half of the nineteenth century. Specifically I explore this labor in the contexts of women’s formal education, public performance of modesty, and individual expressions of piety—elements that greatly illuminate the creative practice, intellectual exploration and personal articulation that render the compiling of flower books such a vibrant and vital form of authorship.

Anthologizing as Applied Intellectual Practice

The affinity between women writers and flower books in the nineteenth century, though sometimes taken for granted as an extension of a long-held belief in women’s natural kinship with flowers, actually makes sense for a number of more practical reasons. As I began to show in

33 Since very few documents related to the creation of these texts have survived or been collected (or if they have, they’re difficult to track down), my analysis is largely based on authors’ comments in the prefaces to their works, on elements in the bodies of their texts. Where I have found them, I have included contemporary reviews, publishers’ correspondence, and private letters and papers; 85

Chapter 1, anthologizing utilizes two key avenues through which women regularly exerted influence over the culture around them: that is, through acts of discerning consumerism and careful pedagogy. Further, flower books in general adopt a form similar to that of early modern commonplace books, welcoming additions from many kinds of available sources current and historical, public and personal, high and low brow; thus their creators could draw upon skills and personal knowledge already exercised in women’s private literary culture. Yet not only are flower books more public than commonplace books, they are also more thematic and focused than other published counterparts of this form, namely the miscellany and literary annual. As such, compiling and publishing these books offered their creators a stimulating, disciplined intellectual practice, one that women in particular were unlikely to find open to them, at least to such an extent, in almost any other activity. While other forms of authoritative editorial labor that grew in consequence during the romantic period (such as the making of critical editions34) required access to universities and other official repositories of knowledge and thus were only open to men, the more democratic nature of anthologizing (and in particular, botanico-literary production) mitigates this need for institutional imprimatur: women could build viable textual collections from the wide variety of printed material already available to them and collaborate with those who could extend their reach, while participating in the one scientific pursuit— botany—routinely recommended to their notice.35

I identify anthologizing as a practice or exercise specifically to emphasize its dynamic nature, which has particular significance for women: the “labor of anthologizing” I describe

34 See Piper, Dreaming in Books Chapter 2. 35 The degree to which women were encouraged to study botany waxed and waned through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the relationship between women and plants was often fraught with mixed messages. Shteir notes that in the eighteenth century, botany “became particularly became part of the social construction of femininity for girls across the middle and upper ranks of society” (36), but acknowledges that Elizabeth Kent’s articles in the 1829 Magazine of Natural History evoke almost the opposite picture (145.) 86 includes numerous stages where thought becomes action. Kent, for example, began her composition process with an idea born of reading and experience—that is, she had read and gardened and pondered enough to recognize that her book needed to be written. She then read even more extensively in literary, historical, scientific, and practical texts in order to amass information to support her idea, and she corresponded with friends like Hunt who could provide suggestions or translations to enrich it. She assessed this information and determined which parts would serve her vision; she designed and populated the organizational format that would make such a large and varied mixture of information legible; she honed her overall conceptualization of the project so as to explain its purpose and interventions to potential publishers and readers; and she engaged in professional negotiations with Taylor and Hessey to bring her manuscript into being, advocating for herself when necessary. Other flower book writers engaged in similar practices as I will show in greater detail below, and each of these stages constitutes vigorous cognitive and social engagement.

Because of its applied intellectual nature, anthologizing addresses several of the problems that both conservative and radical activists of the 1790s identified in women’s education and public engagement, while also offering a middle path by which women could actively grapple with these problems over the next several decades of achingly slow reform. The debate concerning literature’s danger to women was fraught in the eighteenth century,36 but despite major differences in their campaigns for change, both the conservative reformer Hannah More and the radical activist Mary Wollstonecraft agreed that any hazards women faced in literary engagement (as indeed in other areas of life) could be remedied through methodically increasing

36 Hannah More, for example, saw popular literature as a major threat to the development of women’s principles and their reason. Anne Stott cites in particular More’s distaste for the works of Rousseau, Goethe, and Schiller, as well as for the light literature supplied by publishers like John Lane’s Minerva Press; More argued that these works exercised and inflated readers’ sensibility without the restraint of morality (Stott 28). 87 their exposure to literature of quality, developing their taste and appreciation for rational thought, and teaching them to exercise sound judgment. These women and their fellow activists succeeded only marginally in transforming women’s education at the institutional level in the romantic period,37 though scholars have shown how a number of women writers took up the cause in their novels, poetry, and plays. I suggest, however, that the practice of anthologizing directly utilizes these early feminist principles, providing valuable opportunities of intellectual exercise for authors and readers alike.

Compiling flower books offered a specific activity through which women could discipline their “smatterings” into “real learning,” by addressing two issues that More and

Wollstonecraft alike cited as obstacles to women’s rational development: the haphazard nature of women’s formal schooling, and its undue emphasis on public display. In spending most of their early lives acquiring a “smattering of accomplishments” like singing or dancing, wrote

Wollstonecraft, women “receive only a disorderly kind of education” characterized by

a negligent kind of guess-work, […], the random exertions of a sort of instinctive

common sense, never brought to the test of reason […]. What they learn is rather by

snatches; and […] they do not pursue any one branch with that persevering ardour

necessary to give vigour to the faculties, and clearness to the judgment. (VRW 375, 381-

382).

Similarly, More argued

37 Wollstonecraft’s own school closed in 1786 when displeased parents withdrew the daughters they thought were receiving traditional training. More’s first school, which she opened with her sisters in 1757, was far more successful; it combined instruction in typical feminine accomplishments with lessons in literature, history, mathematics, and “that which contributed most to [the school’s] resounding success, religious and moral instruction” (M&M 200). More also opened a series of schools for the poor in the 1790s; these served a ten-mile area in Somerset. Though many women and men agreed with Wollstonecraft’s views on women’s education, her reputation (and by association, the reputations of her supporters) suffered so greatly after Godwin’s publication of Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman (1798) as to stall the movement’s progress for 50 years. 88

It is because the superficial nature of their education furnishes them with a false and low

standard of intellectual excellence, that women have too often become ridiculous by the

unfounded pretensions of literary vanity; for it is not the really learned, but the

smatterers, who have generally brought their sex into discredit. (SMSFE 223)

This trend for “smattering” only makes sense, given that half a century would pass before the first institution of women’s higher education in Britain opened its doors,38 and becoming “really learned” in the early nineteenth century demanded of women an astounding degree of individual motivation and self-direction from a very early age. Unless privileged to have access to tutors or unusually studious governesses, a girl might attend a few years of dame school and then assume sole responsibility for her own continuing education,39 which in turn would depend largely on her access to, desire to read, and ability to comprehend books and other print media. In choosing texts she might receive occasional pointers from conscientious friends,40 but without well- established habits of diligence, outside encouragement and reward, or the benefit of companions with whom to discuss complex or difficult ideas, it stands to reason that she would either glean only the most obvious elements of her reading or focus her attention on light-minded fare.

Indeed, the repeated critiques of female indolence found in historical documents and works of fiction from this period, so often attributed to personal failing, attest more to the dearth of intellectual guidance and encouragement most women received. In Edgeworth's Belinda,

38 The first institution of higher education for women in Britain, Queen’s College, was not established until 1848, followed by a handful of others in the latter half of the 19th century.

39 Roe points out that when Leigh Hunt first met Bess Kent she was eleven years old and “just out of dame school.” Her older sister Mary Anne (later Marian), age 13, “like many girls at this time, had received no formal school education” (64). 40 We see multiple examples of this type of mentorship in the biographies of the leading women thinkers and writers, including the authors of flower books I focus on in this work; Wollstonecraft was directed by Dr. Richard Price, Bess Kent gained direction from Leigh Hunt and his circle, Jane Loudon’s continuing education was mentored largely by her husband J.C. Loudon, &c. 89

Clarence Hervey despairs in the ignorance of his ward Virginia St. Pierre, seemingly unaware that his restrictions on her education have prepared her only to read romances. Even

Wollstonecraft’s own daughters, brought up by Godwin after her death, followed educational pathways largely determined by their temperaments, Fanny being “quiet, modest, unshowy,

[and] somewhat given to indolence,” and Mary being “singularly bold […] and active of mind,” with a great desire for knowledge and an “almost invincible” perseverance (Hay YR 25).

Understanding that women would most likely be left to their own devices after a brief period of early education, More and Wollstonecraft advocated for schooling that would teach women not merely how to perform but how to learn—the kind of education that would equip all girls—not just the innately passionate ones—with fundamental skills and habits of inquisitiveness, persistence and discernment, and thus enable them to feed their own intellects over a lifetime.

While women waited decades for such reform on an institutional level, the practice of editing offered a way to enact it on a personal one: flower books and other types of edited collections proliferated through the nineteenth century, and even more than traditional literary forms like plays, poetry and novels, these unconventional mixed gatherings are the material result of women’s incorporating systematic structure to their efforts of self-directed study and creative output. As mentioned above, anthologizing stretched skills established in the popular feminine pastime of compiling personal commonplace books, but where commonplace books remain private and require no specific structure, flower books prompted their authors to research both more broadly and more methodically—to focus on a particular theme, to establish criteria for selection, to determine a clear organizing structure for the chosen materials, and often to make and expose connections between disparate bodies of knowledge, and to prepare all these things for public evaluation. The poetry and flower “language” in these books could challenge 90 women readers with philosophical information, encourage them to revel in sentimental flights of fancy, and anchor ethereal and playful elements in the concrete and scientific world of plants, their physiology, and their history.41 Indeed, as an educational exercise this literal and figurative gathering of flowers seems directly calculated to fulfill More’s injunction that

[A woman] should pursue every kind of study which will teach her to elicit truth, which

will lead her to be intent upon realities; will give precision to her ideas; will make an

exact mind. She should cultivate every study, which, instead of stimulating her

sensibility, will chastise it; which will neither create an excessive or a false refinement;

which will give her definite notions; will bring the imagination under dominion, will lead

her to think, to compare, to combine, to methodize; which will confer such a power of

discrimination, that her judgment shall learn to reject what is dazzling, if it be not solid;

and to prefer, not what is striking, or bright, or new, but what is just. (SMSFE 222)

Kent’s Flora Domestica, for example, with its combination of “directions for the treatment of plants in pots” with “illustrations from the poets” shows extensive attention to precise, prosaic realities of botanical identification and plant-rearing, and yet because it is also layered with history and poetry, it is as deeply philosophical as it is practical. Kent’s ability to connect such seemingly disparate fields clearly demonstrates keen and firmly grounded critical thinking, and celebrates a kinship between lofty verse and fingernails caked with honest dirt.

This is not to say that plants, because objects of nature, were automatically free from

“excessive or false refinement,” or that flower books were never guilty of the same tendencies.

The botanical world offered plenty that was striking, bright, and new, a point my discussion in

41 A large number of flower books combine concrete facts about botanical physiology and history with more imaginative elements like poetry or flower language, in order to, as Sarah Hale says “mingle the useful with trifles.” (see preface to Flora’s Interpreter). 91

Chapter 1 of the Aloe plant underscored, as well as plenty of misinformation, unknowns, and evolving versions of “fact.” The literary marketplace, just beginning to capitalize on annuals and gift-books, likewise seemed increasingly to prefer the dazzling to the substantial, and anthologizing itself could harbor undisciplined sloppiness and imprecision under the auspices of miscellaneity. Anthologizing also carried with it the risk that an author-editor would misunderstand or misrepresent the sources she chose to include, or expose herself to coarse or troubling material in her quest for knowledge; More argued that the “profusion of little, amusing, sentimental books with which the youthful library overflows” hindered readers’ pursuits of “real knowledge and real piety” (SMSFE 157), and even Wollstonecraft conceded that some books

“ought not to be read before the judgment is formed, or at least exercised” (TED 370). Gathering without a firm sense of value or solid grounding for judgment, or worse, simply recycling excerpts from other anthologies, would only perpetuate bad reading practices and worsen educational smattering, complications I attend to in greater detail in Chapter 5.

Yet in spite of its potential pitfalls, editorial labor offered women uniquely focused training in developing their powers of assessment, and flower books provided a suitably safe yet intellectually challenging and stimulating field in which to explore and experiment with the balance of fact and fancy, beauty and substance. The space anthologies created for such play is extremely important: according to Wollstonecraft, imagination powerfully aids the cultivation of rational judgment and supports the development of intellectual autonomy. “Reason strikes most forcibly when illustrated by the brilliancy of fancy,” she explains—“The sentiments which are scattered may be observed, and when they are relished, and the mind set to work, it may be allowed to chuse books for itself, for every thing will then instruct” (TED 370). In other words, 92 imagination activates reason by providing matter for it to work on, and once reason awakens, it

“sets to work” on everything.

The particular mix of rational and imaginative elements in flower books, combined with the repeated acts of assessment involved in piecing them together, thus renders them particularly effective as educational essays—that is, as investigative “tries” by which author-editors exercised their imaginations, sharpened their thinking, expanded their knowledge and refined their taste. Unlike many more typical feminine activities in which, as Wollstonecraft wrote, “the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment” resulting in “weak beings [who cannot] be expected to govern a family with judgment, or take care of the poor babes whom they bring into the world” (VRW 375, 381), anthologizing has the potential to transform sound understanding into the accomplishment, building in women the confidence and credibility to assert individual taste and original thought.

It can fulfill Wollstonecraft’s injunction for “every one to form an opinion of an author themselves,” and can provide a key venue in which to venture away from parroted praise of

“authors whose merit is indisputable, […] the sublimity of Milton, the elegance and harmony of

Pope, and the original, untaught genius of Shakespear [sic],” (TED 370) and to engage in more daring evaluation of contemporary or lesser-known artists, a hallmark of the most ambitious flower-books and perhaps their most lasting legacy. As I will discuss in Chapter 3, Sarah Hale’s

Flora’s Interpreter sought to bring underappreciated American poets into the limelight;

Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica and Sylvan Sketches boldly placed Kent’s own acquaintances beside the likes of Shakespeare and Milton, and some scholars have asserted her greatest impact on literary history was her championing of the poet John Clare. Flower books and similar anthologies passed extremely significant judgment on contemporary and lesser-known artists 93 through their powers of selection—and the selections in turn provided means to judge the editors of such works. In the Southern Literary Messenger Edgar Allen Poe praised flower book Flora and Thalia’s excerpts as “exceedingly well-selected,” a brief compliment, but with profound significance (Harrison IX:43-44), Not all flower books are masterpieces of course, yet even the timid or trite-seeming ventures have qualities that suggest their creation involved important acts of critical thinking. On the whole, then, engaging in the practice of anthologizing had the potential to remedy some of the worst faults of women’s education and culture, to help women develop habits of intellectual independence based on informed rational judgment, and to prepare them to fulfill their social responsibilities through a focused and knowledgeable engagement with the wider world.

Radical Repurposing: a middle path of authorial empowerment

To further explore the importance of anthologizing to women’s education, this section considers how the practice offered ideologically moderate positions that allowed women to eschew the prescriptive aspects of more extremely conservative doctrines like More’s, while tempering the radical aspects of creeds like Wollstonecraft’s. In short, it provided a key middle path by which women could continue their forays into public intellectual participation without appearing to buck the system too much, a real threat to women of this time as we see in the vitriol heaped on Wollstonecraft’s reputation, especially after the publication of Godwin’s

Memoirs of her life in 1798. Her earlier endeavors at the school where she had begun teaching according to the philosophy she outlined in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters failed when parents withdrew the pupils they wished to receive a more typical accomplishments-based female education. But after her death, her bold, unequivocating voice—praised as it was in her

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)—took on a different cast to a public 94 now aware of her frequent disregard for social norms, and proved too threatening for the general

English populace, who were terrified of revolution. In her own lifetime at least, Wollstonecraft’s efforts to change society’s expectations of women often proved futile, and the vehement criticisms launched at her induced many women writers to express themselves more cautiously.42

Flower books operate in this more temperate vein, offering women authors a way to repurpose rather than utterly reject the norms of female education and exhibition. This work is radical in its own way, however, as women authors steadily found ways to claim authorial power for themselves and thus to empower each other. Flower books generally embrace philosophies and utilize tropes that seat women’s education and civic involvement safely within doctrines of feminine domesticity and private moral and religious improvement. Yet where More’s interpretation of this goal43 encourages the restraint, or even restriction, of women’s power and public involvement, flower books work to broaden women’s access and participation, albeit within a certain domestic scope. First and foremost, they clearly challenge the problematic bounds More places on the objectives of female education, and on where and how women should put their learning to use. Though More contradicts her own advice in publishing her writing, she advocates that

The great uses of study to a woman are to enable her to regulate her own mind, and to be

instrumental to the good of others. […] [Her] knowledge is not often, like the learning of

men, to be reproduced in some literary composition, nor ever in any learned profession;

but it is to come out in conduct. […] She is to read the best books, not so much to enable

her to talk of them, as to bring the improvement which they furnish, to the rectification of

42 See Katherine Binhammer, “The Sex Panic of the 1790s.” 43 Wollstonecraft couched her calls for reform within feminine domesticity and moral improvement too, but broadly speaking, where More tends to place rigid boundaries on women’s power, Wollstonecraft sought to free it. 95

her principles and the formation of her habits. […] That kind of knowledge which is

rather fitted for home consumption than foreign exportation, is peculiarly adapted to

women. (SMSFE 222-223)

The concrete labor of research, adjudication, and organization central to compiling flower books did certainly demand a well-regulated mind, and often the resulting texts proclaimed a desire to be instrumental to the general good—but otherwise, flower books contravene More’s restrictions with remarkable power. In these texts, the authors’ knowledge is reproduced in literary composition, which in turn often opened a door to participation in learned professions.44 Flower books that excerpt from pre-existing texts did enable women to talk about the best books and provided both a structure for this talk and a vehicle for its delivery into public domain. And finally, the kind of knowledge gathered in flower books is as exactly fitted for foreign exportation as it is crafted for home consumption, as I discussed in Chapter 3 and will return to in Chapter 5.45 Having already laid forth considerable evidence that anthologizing made good literary taste into a structured intellectual pursuit, I proceed here to explore how flower books provided public platform on which to display it, and more importantly, a platform from which to claim it.

44 Sarah Hale, discussed in Chapter 3, became an incredibly influential book and magazine editor; Flora’s Interpreter was her first “gathered” text—her first published work as an editor, rather than novelist or poet. Elizabeth Kent continued to pursue her study of Botany, and her writing about it became her main means of self- support in later life. Jane Loudon came to be seen as the foremost authority on amateur (non-professional) gardening in the middle of the century, both in England and the U.S. More’s definition of “learned profession” may not have included the profession of writer, or of amateur scientist, so perhaps my argument here is unfair—but still, I would definitely say flower books allowed women to participate to an important degree in the professional world. Alternatively, we may also say that women actively engaged as writers and social activists also often wrote flower books… including Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Priscilla Wakefield, Frances Osgood, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, and Louisa May Alcott. 45 These two chapters focus on Sarah Hale and Susan Fenimore Cooper, respectively, and discuss how flower books propagate and disperse a particular version of nature—that is, idealized English nature—that takes firm hold in the U.S. 96

Enlightened modesty: creation in emulation

In the vast majority of flower books authors blend their voices with a crowd, trading

Wollstonecraft’s piercing directness, fierce individualism, and disdain for “wast[ing] time in rounding periods” (VRW 374) for a different purpose. Where author-editors do advance pieces of their own composition—poems, stories, drawings—they reap the advantage of contextualizing them among the works of established artists, as well as within existing philosophical, religious, scientific, and social conversations. In this sense, anthologies appear to preserve more traditional gender roles, such as feminine delicacy.

If these flower books draw on such gendered rhetoric and style, we must not assume these texts are reticent about redirecting women’s education, though this may seem like a paradox; indeed, flower books often pursue aims directly in line with Wollstonecraft’s, including a desire to capture “simple, unadorned truth” in straightforward language (374)46 and to embrace an enlightened definition of modesty as the “sacred offspring of sensibility and reason—true delicacy of mind” (398). Such modesty, important equally for men and women Wollstonecraft insists, rejects both bashful timidity and vain presumption in favor of a confident steadiness rooted in solid understanding:

Purity of mind, or that genuine delicacy […] never resides in any but cultivated minds. It

is something nobler than innocence, it is the delicacy of reflection, and not the coyness of

ignorance. […] [S]o far from being incompatible with knowledge, it is its fairest fruit.

[…] those women who have most improved their reason must have the most modesty

[…] Would ye, O my sisters, really possess modesty, ye must remember that the

46 For example, Tonna’s Chapter on Flowers (discussed below) particularly emphasizes its “unadorned” language. 97

possession of virtue, of any denomination, is incompatible with ignorance and vanity!

(VRW 399)

Wollstonecraft’s exaltation of such rational modesty implies its rarity, but also shows it to be hearteningly within reach, even for beginners: if the pitfalls on either side are the states of knowing nothing (ignorance) and of believing one knows everything (vanity), then modesty simply requires a person to know enough—enough to assert informed opinions and to remain open to further learning. In other words, though modesty is the fruit of knowledge, even the beginnings of knowledge “nobl[y]” pursued, that is with humility and diligence, can bring modesty to bear. The process of cultivation has just as much validity in the early acts of groundbreaking as in the eventual harvest.

Editors of flower books often strive to position themselves in accordance with such modesty, while the flower book form itself offers useful opportunities to practice and enact it. Of course, gathering texts from many sources required editors to research and reflect, but also to participate and perform: whether acting as silent emcees for others’ work or inserting pieces of their own composition, editors balanced acknowledgement and admiration of others’ artistic merit with confidence in their own. To fold one’s own words into an anthology—or to publish anything at all, especially if one was a woman—was to risk public criticism of vanity and presumption, and yet anthologizing could serve as a valuable exercise in avoiding presumption through enlightened humility because it demanded self-assurance and simultaneously allowed for its delicate expression.

Challenges of claiming credit for originality

Even while anthologies at the formal level—through a blending of the editor’s voice with a host of others—embody this kind of uncontrived modesty, articulating it directly in words 98 proved more challenging. A number of flower book prefaces attest that even while a definition of modesty that was more expansive than innocence or ignorance gave author-editors valuable tools for aligning their work with the pursuit of virtue, precise application of those tools remained a rather tricky task. For example, in negotiating the powerful position of authorship within a gendered system still deeply uncomfortable with women assuming such power, many writers sought to appease social expectations through patterns of self-effacement that can seem disingenuous. Louisa Twamley47 wryly summarizes these in the preface to her Annual of British

Landscape Scenery: An Autumn Ramble on the Wye (1839): “The preface of a book […] usually consists of explanation, declaration, and deprecation,” she writes,

the first shewing forth the cause and manner of the book’s composition; the second

containing the Author’s confessions of humility, and the “solicitations” of fictitious

friends for the publication; while the third dexterously attempts to disarm the critic, by

assuring him that the volume contains nothing of sufficient importance to deserve the

honour of his attention (preface).

Twamley’s criticism suggests not only that such prefaces rang as hollow to nineteenth-century readers as they occasionally do today, but also that authors wrote in full cognizance of the strictures of the genre. Their rhetorical awareness alerts us to the sophistication and the sophisticated mission of these works: that despite these limitations, authors do recognize and lay claim to their own ambition and labor.

47 Although the Annual of British Landscape Scenery: An Autumn Ramble on the Wye falls more into the genre of travel literature than of flower books, these genres relate to each other in their importance for women writers, and in their ways of exploring/defining issues of place and identity. Twamley also was also active in making flower books and authored several throughout her career. I discuss her volume The Romance of Nature, or the Flower Seasons Illustrated at length in Chapter 4. 99

Even in cases where they seem to protest too much, flower book author-editors’ expressions of meekness often center on excusing themselves from an ambition that society might consider too lofty or too coarse—a desire for public adulation or of placement among recognized experts—not on refusing credit for the significant work they have invested, or the mindfulness with which they have performed it. Take, for example, Elizabeth Gamble Wirt’s preface to Flora’s Dictionary ([1829]).48 In some ways it appears a textbook example of the stereotype, claiming accidental publication thanks to the enthusiasm of “a few young friends” at whose request Wirt shared “the first rude sketch of this divertissement,” and under whose power it “found its way to the press in Boston” (4) Likewise, she avers that “this bagatelle […] is too light to attract the grave censure of the critic by profession” (4). And yet, Wirt relates her text’s history for two express reasons: to “exempt the lady who has amused herself in compiling it from any original purpose in publication,” and “to explain to those who may possess those

[unauthorized] copies, the identity of the work” (4). Wirt may downplay her own interest in the book’s commercial or social success, in other words, but she explicitly claims the labor as her own.

Wirt’s two purposes reveal the paradox under which she and other authors operated— perhaps intentionally so, since Wirt’s extensive attention to the second belies the sincerity of, and thus critiques, the first. For all she professes her book to be a “trifle” with no “serious consequence” (4), Wirt’s detailed description of her composition process demands that readers respect the creativity, intellectual rigor, and even occasional drudgery required for its construction. She delineates numerous aspects of this labor in detail, chief among which are

48 Quotations in this section are taken from the 1837 edition of Flora’s Dictionary. The preface is dated 1829, but I have never seen an actual copy of any edition prior to the one printed in 1835. 100 compiling the few known “eastern” flower definitions,49 and “supply[ing] the residue, which constitutes the far greater number” (3). To accomplish this second task, Wirt explains, she conducted extensive research for evidence to support her designation of meaning to each plant.

She specifically describes consulting both books and manuscripts, and weighing elements such as poetic allusions, botanical and common plant names, and a plant’s particular properties, including “hue, form, odour, place and manner of growth, sensibility, medicinal virtue, or some other circumstance connected with its history or character” (3). After matching enough plants with meanings to “giv[e] sufficient range and variety to this symbolic language,” Wirt

“furnish[ed] the whole with appropriate [literary] illustrations” (3), a task which again required extensive reading. It also involved writing poetry of her own: “Some of the lines are original contributions for this little work,” she states, “and it is believed that they will be found worthy of this association with established poets” (4). Finally, Wirt acknowledges the hours she devoted to the “irksome” and time-consuming process of creating manuscript copies, the demand for which eventually made it “expedient to call in the aid of the press” (4). In laying bare these details of her authorial process Wirt reveals the immense amount of labor, both intellectual and physical, involved in authoring an edited text, labor that modesty itself dictates.

Describing this labor thus strengthens the text and the writer’s credibility, even as it critiques society’s arbitrary rules about claiming credit for such labor, for women’s authority still rested on broader notions than modesty. Ideas of feminine gentility in particular proved troublesome, as they were based partly in education and behavior, and partly in the possession of a certain social class; common belief held that genteel women would not need to work or earn

49 These “eastern” definitions, as explored more fully in Chapter 3, are the meanings supposedly given to flowers in regions around Turkey. Though most books on flower language published in the 19th century cite this “eastern” tradition, it likely never existed in any consistent form. 101 money. That Wirt would reveal the time and effort she devoted to producing manuscript copies suggests that her denial of intent to publish Flora’s Dictionary had little to do with concern over its circulation it in public, and far more to do with fear of a perceived commercial motivation that could harm her reputation as a lady and reflect badly on her work. The truth is, however, that many flower book authors wrote to make money. Although little is known of Wirt’s specific financial situation, numerous other authors, including Twamley and Kent, faced financial instability and sought publication in hopes of supplementing their incomes. Yet almost all authors endeavor to conceal that motivation, not least because evidence of such supposed vulgarity in books aimed at image-conscious buyers could seriously damage sales.

Working within these confines, flower book writers demonstrate strategies to legitimate their efforts, that is, to broaden ideas of feminine gentility to include intellectual labor, some forms of physical labor, and even the labor of producing something for public consumption and personal financial gain. As I argued in Chapter 1, flower books encourage social reform by championing both the beautiful and the useful. Here we see a variant of that same impulse in flower books’ frequent depictions of labor as pleasure—often, as a far more rewarding, more invigorating form of pleasure than mere self-serving leisure. As I showed earlier, Wirt employs several conservative variations of the pleasure theme, calling her work a divertissement, a bagatelle, a petit jeu, a “little play of fancy” and an “innocent recreation to herself” (3).

Twamley likewise, despite her stated intent to “shew my own disregard for [the conventions of preface-writing],” clearly subordinates all other personal motivations to her enjoyment of the writing process, only delicately acknowledging the financial interest she likely felt since at the time of her writing the Annual she faced the precarious situation of being twenty-six and unmarried. Her preface specifies that publishers commissioned her to write passages for a set of 102 plates, a task “welcome to me for many reasons; but chiefly for the pleasure which it afforded me in revisiting past scenes and feelings” (n.p.). Twamley thus allows the reader a glimpse into her diverse motivations, but by focusing primarily on the pleasure of composition she wields control over her image, elevating its status from paid laborer to reflective intellectual.

Characterizing labor as pleasure allowed writers to evoke the reformed upper-class ethos

I described in Chapter 1: a position that clearly evidenced their access to discretionary time, but also their dedication to filling it with wholesome, worthwhile pursuits. As I showed in there, such modeling vitally supported flower books’ pedagogical aims: both prefaces and advertisements for the books emphasize their utility for genteel (or aspiringly genteel) readers in need of constructive recreational activities. Thus the principles embraced and demonstrated in these works had the potential to make gentility more attainable to people of all classes, and also to make it more fulfilling. Moreover, by inhabiting a revised version of gentility themselves, authors might not only legitimate their claims to the intellectual and creative aspects of their own work, but also greatly reduce the taint of commerciality—because as long as writers enjoyed their labors, and taught others to enjoy similar intellectual engagement and personal application, any financial interest in their books served a much greater good in the battle against indolence, dissipation, and ennui.

I wish to emphasize the potentiality and possibility of these outcomes, because flower book authors (and other like-minded writers) did not change social customs overnight; certainly in striving to effect such transitions they remained on precarious ground. Because of this, another rhetorical strategy such authors often use to navigate the thorny path between their own confident modesty and reformed gentility and society’s slower-moving mores is to characterize their editorial labors as acts of deeply personal meditation. In addition to downplaying 103 commercial interests and setting a good example for readers, this method also strives to excuse the works to some extent from competition or harsh comparison with similar publications, because personal The anonymous author50 of Flora Parvula; or, Gleanings Among Favorite

Flowers (1847) writes,

The votaries of Flora are so numerous and distinguished—their offerings so choice—that

to seek even the humblest station in their ranks, may demand more than an author’s or

compiler’s wonted apology. It has not been the design, in forming this little wreath, to

present any new or rare exotic, but simply to collect some of those floral relics strewed

by honored hands, which, though not found in every traveller’s path, have rewarded the

search of the lowly gleaner, and proved a source of interest and delight, not merely by

their connection with historic and legendary tale, or poetic thought, but still more by their

frequent relation to Christian truth and sentiment. (iii-iv)

Without question, Flora Parvula is much smaller and simpler than works like Kent’s Flora

Domestica. The Latin term “parvula” denotes smallness, slightness, youth, and unimportance; it immediately differentiates the volume from the many sweeping, encyclopedic botanical Florae also circulating in the book market,51 and gestures toward a more personal and familiar composition. Notably, the author characterizes herself as a gleaner and in choosing that kind of labor, she associates herself with the pastoral tradition, and to some degree dissimulates her own powers and education (she is using Latin, after all). But in a more positive light, this rhetorical strategy allows her to emphasize both the substantial amount of work involved in the

50 Some libraries attribute this book to Rhoda Maria Willan. 51 As a generic term, a “Flora” often denotes a botanical reference book, one that strives to catalog all plant species within given parameters such as within a specific geographical area. Typical titles include Flora Londonensis, Flora Bostoniensis, Flora Danica, and A Flora of North America. I discuss this issue in greater detail in Chapter 3. 104 composition process, and also its detail-oriented intimacy—the care with which she sifted through possibilities to locate treasures overlooked in weightier publications. Gleaning connotes piety and devotion thanks to an association with Ruth in the Old Testament; the allusion also provides a subtle financial justification for publication, since Ruth turned to gleaning as an honorable (if humble) way to provide for her family after her husband’s death. Taken together, these elements simultaneously clarify the volume’s aims and strengthen its ethos, working to justify its claim to a respectable place in the flower book genre, and in the flower book market.

With that market grown so crowded by the late 1840s, Flora Parvula attests that in order to credit their own labor and to effectively promote sales, author-editors found it increasingly important to specify, as clearly and gracefully as possible, exactly how their works related to and departed from other publications—a complex task when so much of their labor involved drawing on pre-existing texts. Copyright laws did exist within Britain and the United States in this period, but in both countries these pertained only to a limited category of texts: British law ended perpetual copyright in 1774, placing all texts more than twenty-one years old into the public domain; U.S. copyright laws exempted newspapers and magazines; and neither country governed reprints of foreign publications.52 Texts of all kinds routinely reprinted materials taken verbatim

(and often without citation) from other sources, but both writers and readers expressed growing concern about this practice. Again in the preface to her Annual of British Landscape Scenery, for example, Twamley acknowledges a debt to “certain old standard works […] for what of ancient

52 The Statute of Anne was established in Britain in 1710, and the first federal Copyright Act in the U.S. passed in 1790. International copyright law only came into being at the end of the nineteenth century, beginning in 1891. For an assessment of several scholars’ analyses of eighteenth and nineteenth century copyright laws, see notes 1 and 2 in Chapter 1 of McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting. See also Michael Gamer’s analysis of reprinted novels in Britain after 1774. 105 lore, and ‘feats of broils and battles’ I have interwoven with my peaceful, ‘plain, unvarnished’ narrative” (n.p.); nevertheless, she vehemently insists,

My descriptions are my own; I would not add my name to the weighty list of those who

have published books of copied paragraphs, each one of which, even a casual observer

may detect, and trace up, through all the grades of octavos and quartos, to some [writer]

of the last century […]. This has been so generally the case with the compilers (for I

cannot call them authors) of books on the scenery of the River Wye, that I beg to say I am

not one of the class. (n.p.)

Her simultaneous acknowledgment of her own originality and her passionate critique of the act of compiling speaks to the mounting public awareness of a line between anthologizing and plagiarizing, as well as to a concept of ethical editing that preserves the noblest qualities of authorship—namely original insight and artistry. Accordingly, as more flower books entered the market and (like books on the River Wye) began to recycle passages not from other kinds of sources but from earlier flower books, more author-editors used their prefaces to point out their exact areas of innovation, and thus strengthen their claims to legitimate authorship.

Few did so in terms as direct as Twamley’s, however. In fact, authors seem to state much more clearly what is not new in their works. Yet what may read initially in that second strategy as a coy false modesty actually offers a kind of full disclosure that indicates professionality: far more than just a means of effacing ambition or diffusing criticism, this strategy vitally emphasizes the author-editor’s integrity and critical acumen—her ability and willingness to contextualize her work among similar publications (writings on travel and the picturesque frequently feature such statements), and to indicate the gap it fills. For instance, when the author of Flora Parvula denies an intent “to present any new or rare exotic,” she clarifies that her work 106 instead will be one of rediscovery, recontextualization and reinterpretation, perhaps even of familiar flowers or excerpts; like her plants, she is a local who will direct readers’ attention to the

“floral relics […] not found in every traveller’s path” and highlight their value as vessels of

“Christian truth and sentiment” (iii-iv).

These conventions also testify to the vast possibility for creation—that is, for originality, and thus for authorship—even within structures of compilation and emulation. The author who, in Memoirs of the Rose (1824) invokes Montaigne’s claim “I have gathered a nosegay of flowers, in which there is nothing of my own, but the string that ties them” (iv), nevertheless acknowledges the vital artistic importance of that “string” by admitting a hope that his53 volume forms “a trio with Coleridge’s Sybelline Leaves and Leigh Hunt’s Foliage” (10). In Flora’s

Interpreter (1832) Sarah Hale claims “There is nothing new attempted, except in the arrangement, and the introduction of American sentiments” (iii), yet as I will show in Chapter 3 those innovations proved uniquely and crucially effective in the dissemination and popularization of American poetry. Hale also ardently defends editing as a vibrant and powerful form of artistic innovation: “Making a book (not writing it) is somewhat like preparing a dinner,” she argues: “the ingredients must be collected from many places, and these are usually so disguised by the preparation, that little of the original flavor remains” (v). The language of negation so commonly used in these prefaces thus serves as a way of acknowledging the availability of “ingredients” to all potential artists—but also as a way to note, tactfully, the potential of each artist to present a signature dish.

Undoubtedly, the most difficult part of this task for any artist to carry out, the part where empowered modesty bumped up most uncomfortably against society’s more restrictive

53As I pointed out in Chapter 1, Memoirs of the Rose was published anonymously, but the author self-identifies as male. 107 construction, was claiming credit for the elements she composed herself. Many authors refrained from attaching their names to their texts or the components thereof, trusting readers to give proper attribution—a strategy that in an era of enthusiastic excerpting and reprinting soon revealed its flaws. Fifteen years after its original publication Hale wrote a new preface expressing annoyance with “imitators [who have taken] selections bodily from FLORA’S

INTERPRETER […] to an extent which is very obvious,” a statement continued in a footnote that warns “It may be best to state that all the poetic selections here designated ‘anonymous’ were written by Mrs. Hale, expressly for Flora’s Interpreter. Those who use these will know from whom they borrow” (FI 1848 iv). Emma C. Embury adopts a humble power when she expresses a similar message in The Language of Flora (1854), a collection of original poems previously scattered in various periodicals “under various signatures.” Though positing they are

“perhaps but little worthy of appropriation,” she resolutely asserts “they are now for the first time claimed; and […] have that value which the simple philosophy of Touchstone recognizes: ‘A poor thing, sir, but mine own’” (n.p.). Authors who do identify their own selections within anthologies generally provide at least a brief justification for their boldness; in addition to possibly preempting criticism, though, it also indicates self-awareness and deliberateness. Just as flowers of many kinds mingle happily in a garden, flower book writers frequently reaffirm their right to blend their own voices with those of established artists, claiming kinship with them as fellow practitioners of personal creative expression—that is, in a spirit of discipleship, not in a claim to equal brilliance.54 Indeed, some authors even defend their prerogative as artists not to get too precious: their right, as it were, to sketch. In her preface to The Poetry of Flowers and

54 This claim to collegial kinship and right to emulation reminds me of the compositional challenges Hunt, Keats, and Shelley issued to each other, to write poems in certain styles. These poems are certainly not “perfect” poems, but they became highly influential and eventually have been deemed masterpieces of sorts. 108

Flowers of Poetry (1858), Frances S. Osgood notes “an apology may be deemed necessary for apparent egotism, in introducing so frequently her own effusions, among those of a far higher order,” but crisply explains “where an appropriate quotation did not immediately occur to memory, it appeared the shortest and easiest, if not the wisest way to compose, at the moment, a few lines or verses suitable to the flower and its sentiment” (n.p). Despite her emphasis on the convenience and speed of personal composition, Osgood’s text does not suggest that authors glibly published sloppy work. Rather it, in addition to the previous examples, indicates that author-editors’ development as artists depended on the freedom to imitate and to experiment, to send their work into circulation, and finally to declare it as their own.

By using flower books first to add their voices to the public conversation, and then to delineate and claim credit for labors they perform, women author-editors thus employed the tenets of enlightened modesty to justify and expand their public engagement with complex intellectual issues. And they did so as successfully with tiny books as with grand ones. The preface to Sarah Mayo Edgarton’s miniscule 3x5” volume The Flower Vase (1844) almost perfectly captures the host of issues discussed above—a sophisticated awareness of artistic heritage and practices, of market forces, of writerly ethos, and of the vast possibilities for innovation within compilation and emulation. She writes:

This little volume is put forth, not for its originality of design or arrangement, but

because it embraces the language of flowers in a smaller and less expensive form than

any similar work hitherto before the public. The poetic sentiments are chiefly original;

those that have been selected are usually from sources not attainable to the mass of

readers, and will, we think, be as new as they are appropriate. […] [Sarah Hale’s]

‘Flora’s Interpreter,’—the best of the flower books—has been our guide in this; but, 109

though imitating, we have not copied. The study of flowers is so interesting, and their

connection with poetry so natural, that it is hardly necessary to commend any work of

this class to the notice of the cultivators or the lovers of flowers. We only ask for ours,

that it many have its day with the rest. (n.p.)

With just these few brief sentences, Edgarton confidently and carefully delineates her book’s exact contributions, its scope, and its niche. Yet perhaps what The Flower Vase affirms most powerfully, is simply the right to participate. Edgarton appears to feel no “anxiety of influence;”55 if anything, her frank, unapologetic tone seems to draw power from its sense of belonging to a genre that grants space for innovation within imitation. By asking that her book

“have its day with the rest,” she likely speaks for many flower book authors who probably did not expect to change the world, but who did wish to engage more intimately, more critically, more materially, and more publicly with it. And crucially, she indicates that a book smaller than a postcard could be just as powerful and worthy a tool for doing so as many a weightier tome.

Her work and that of numerous other writers shows us that flower books, though not radical in the way that Wollstonecraft’s manifestos were radical, nevertheless greatly contributed over time to a revolution in women’s right to participate in the public sphere, and in the ways they could do so.

Scope for Originality in Religious Paradigms

Through this period of evolution in attitudes toward women’s public engagement, one aspect of respectability that remained especially important for women’s successful navigation of public involvement was a demonstrable adherence to Christian principles. Nevertheless, in this section I explore how flower books, perhaps surprisingly, also provided writers with a long tether for

55 Harold Bloom’s book The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973) proposes that poets are often hindered by their veneration of earlier poets and their own fear of being derivative and unoriginal. 110 exploring various relationships to religion. As I will demonstrate, flower books maintained a position of Christian propriety, and were able to invoke that element, but some were also experimental and wide-ranging in their applications of Christian teachings—so experimental, I will argue, that they invite us to reassess any existing generalizations about the flower book genre’s conservatism, traditionalism, or philosophical uniformity.

In their efforts to document and define the special relationship they perceived between humans and flowers across time, space, and culture, writers of these books offer interpretations that range from the scientifically objective, to the most conservative protestant stance, to private, even somewhat pagan spirituality, often in various degrees of combination. Indeed, emphatically pious volumes comprise only a small percentage of flower books overall; while many offer a traditional prefatory argument of their moral value, or invoke the New Testament invitation to

“consider the lilies of the field”56 that became a well-established trope, the subject matter of most flower books largely made it possible for authors to tick the religion box, so to speak, and simultaneously to venture outside of it. That they could do so and still uphold an aura of

Christian respectability is one of the format’s greatest strengths. For women authors in particular it provided a public and publicly sanctioned space for intellectual and spiritual exploration.

Where there are platitudes I recommend we view them as invoking a common language that acts as a springboard for a variety of viewpoints as numerous as the writers who penned them.

More’s writings provide a key context for understanding flower books’ need to conform on some level to a certain piety: in one of her most widely-embraced guidelines for women’s successful engagement in the public sphere, she insists that they must devote themselves to society’s spiritual improvement. “In this moment of alarm and peril,” she wrote,

56 Matt. 6:28-29 “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” 111

I would call on [women] to come forward, and contribute their full and fair proportion

towards the saving of their country. But I would call on them to come forward, without

departing from the refinement of their character, without derogating from the dignity of

their rank, without blemishing the delicacy of their sex: I would call on them to the best

and most appropriate exertion of their power, to raise the depressed tone of public morals,

and to awaken the drowsy spirit of religious principle. (SMSFE 221)

When Godwin’s publication of the Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of

Woman re-cast Wollstonecraft as (among other things) an atheist, many women activists and writers took strategic shelter under the banner of religion, which only grew in consequence and popularity during the Age of Reform.57 Of course, the conflation of feminine delicacy and superior female morality so apparent in More’s writings58 was also in many cases a very constricting kind of sanctuary—and in turn, one of the flower book genre’s most useful qualities was its ability to create fluid and flexible space within that preserve for the expression of diverse philosophies.

Indeed, as I indicated in the Introduction, flowers provide an ideal medium through which to perform this delicate work: on one hand, nothing seems more harmless, natural,

57 Sue Morgan points out that institutional forms of Christianity offered women in the Romantic and Victorian periods unprecedented opportunities for public involvement, through voluntary associations and charitable campaigning (such as in the antislavery movement), through foreign missionary service, and through the writing of religiously-inspired fiction, which “was frequently underpinned by considerable philanthropic involvement and painstaking social investigation” (7,10). Wollstonecraft herself invoked religious principles in many of her writings, using them as a basis for her argument about the innate equality in men’s and women’s capacity for virtue. I am interested in researching further whether the early decades of the 1800s witnessed a greater need for women to participate actively in overtly religious causes. 58 I have not yet found whether More wrote or commented specifically about flower books, but she definitely did not approve of “The swarms of Abridgements, Beauties, and Compendiums, which form too considerable a part of a young lady’s library” (Strictures 162), arguing that literary extracts “are excellent to refresh the mind, but not competent to form it” (163). However, since she encouraged young women to read certain more intellectually challenging texts in their fullness, to engage in “close reasoning” by “consider[ing] particular parts of a subject [and] turn[ing] a truth round and […] view[ing] it in all its varied aspects and positions” (166-167), she may have felt greater approval for the process of making an anthology. 112 wholesome, and “feminine,” a fact often reiterated in prefaces to flower books, their advertisements, and editorial reviews. On the other hand, however, blossoms provided many opportunities to explore or evoke thorny issues of science, politics, economics, and sex.

Certainly botanical subjects lent themselves extraordinarily well to moral and religious discussion, whether treated as symbols of simplicity and innocence or as conduits to complex knowledge. In the first issue of The Magazine of Natural History (1829)59 John Claudius Loudon argued that scientifically observing various aspects of nature, botany among them, would “have a beneficial influence on the moral sentiments and conduct” and “improve and humanize the whole man,” a claim that echoes both a Wordsworthian belief in Nature’s “palpable ministry” to the soul,60 and a Wollstonecraftian belief in the improving, enlightening power of sound information. As Loudon asked, “The more we enter into the details of nature, shall we not increase our taste for facts? Which is, in other words, the love of truth, the foundation of justice and honesty” (6-7). By this logic, nature was the fount of rationality itself.

Loudon also traced a parallel relationship between nature and religion: “Natural history is the parent of natural religion”; in fact, “the knowledge of the Author of nature, through his works, may be called the universal religion, as the love of fitness, induced by a taste for facts, may be called the universal morality” (7-8; emphasis mine). For Loudon, attending to the material details of creation in nature offered a way to transcend differences in cultures and creeds—not to denounce religion per se, but rather to circumvent it—to arrive at a knowledge of

God “without interfering with that knowledge […] obtained by revelation, or with […] the

59 This magazine is especially relevant here, since Elizabeth Kent contributed a lengthy series of articles for the botanical section; I will make this clearer somewhere… 60 See The Prelude (1805) Book First, lines 362-372: “But I believe that Nature, oftentimes, when she would frame a favored being, from his earliest dawn of infancy doth open out the clouds as at the touch of lightning, seeking him with gentlest visitation; not the less, though haply aiming at the self-same end, does it delight her sometimes to employ severer interventions, ministry more palpable—and so she dealt with me.” 113 doctrines of particular religions”(7).61 This moral and spiritual, yet non-denominational aspect of plant-lore appealed to many writers of flower books, as it provided a way to fulfill More’s injunction to save the nation “without blemishing the delicacy of their sex” while allowing freedom to explore and discuss a wide range of topics.

On the fringes

Some authors even used their volumes to dabble in religious territory quite exotic for the time. As I will explore in Chapter 3, for example, readers’ interest in the Language of Flowers stemmed partly from its foundation in “eastern” and “mahomedan” cultures. Closer to home,

Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary ([1829]) includes a section called the “Dedication of Flowers” popularizing the Catholic tradition of devoting flowers to specific saints based on which ones bloomed during the month of that saint’s festival.62 By at least its fourth edition Frederic

Shoberl’s The Language of Flowers (1835) includes this too, calling it the “Calendar of

Flowers,” and it continues to pop up in later American publications such as Lucy Hooper’s The

Lady’s Book of Flowers and Poetry (1842) and Henrietta Dumont’s The Floral Offering (1856).

It is perhaps tempting to view such an inclusion merely as another piece of floral novelty meant to entertain and lightly instruct schoolchildren (Shoberl’s volume advertises it alongside “The

Dial of Flowers,” for example, which explains how to grow a “clock” based on the flowers that open their blooms at certain times of day). However, Wirt places the “Dedication of Flowers” among the more scholarly sections of her volume, such as those on the structure and history of plants, the life of Linnaeus, and the translations of Latin nomenclature, thereby emphasizing the

61 In future, I would like to further understand how Loudon’s approach to religion it fit into philosophical discussions of the 1820s and 30s. Was his a radical viewpoint? 62 Wirt cites Hone’s Every Day Book (London 1826) as her source for this info; see Wirt (1837) p. 77. It’s hard to say whether Wirt or Shoberl included the Catholic tradition first. It seems it was first included sometime around 1835. I have not been able to find a first edition of Flora’s Dictionary, or earlier editions of The Language of Flowers, so I do not know for sure. 114 intellectual depth and seriousness of her project. Such treatment stands in stark contrast to the vehement anti-Catholic rhetoric common in contemporary Evangelical texts (one of which I discuss in detail below), and resonates as a valuable lesson in cross-cultural appreciation and tolerance.

Flower books frequently invoke pagan imagery, such as the goddess Flora: her name appears in a large number of titles, sometimes in ways that push decidedly beyond a playful gesture toward neoclassicism and treat Flora like an actual being. Such books often portray a sort of collegiality between the goddess and the God of Christianity, though their stances on which of the two outranks the other remain alluringly ambiguous. The preface of Lucy Hooper’s aforementioned Lady’s Book of Flowers and Poetry, for example, explains both the “Eastern” and the Catholic traditions in the “sincere hope” that readers “may find [this] a mystic ‘Book’—a faithful ally in the cause of Flora, till they acquire proficiency in the ‘language of flowers’”

(Hooper 9). Similarly, in The Language of Flowers Poetically Expressed; Being a Complete

Flora’s Album (1847) author John Stowell Adams initially praises flowers in broad Christian terms as “the alphabet of angels,”63 remnants of Paradise that “bring to our view more vividly than anything else the beauties of Eden.” But in his Preface, he ultimately characterizes the volume as a sort of forensic rendering of the one on which, somewhere, a strikingly bookish

Flora is herself hard at work:

As long as sentiments have been attached to flowers, so long has Flora kept an Album on

the pages of which she has faithfully inscribed them. We do not profess to have found

this Album, as books have been found, on the dusty shelves of old and neglected

libraries; but we found scattered here and there, leaves, which by the sentiments inscribed

63 Dorothea Lynde Dix also calls flowers “the alphabet of angels” in The Garland of Flora (1829). She places the phrase in quotation marks, but does not identify the source. 115

upon them we felt assured rightly belonged to such a work. We therefore collected them;

and, when they were collected, we found we had in our possession a complete copy of

“Flora’s Album.” (n.p.)

These two volumes—the Lady’s Book of Flowers and Poetry and The Language of Flowers

Poetically Expressed—depict Flora as a being passionately invested and tangibly involved in issues of interpersonal and interspecies communication.

Moreover, these books conceptualize such communication as distinctly more otherworldly or paranormal than the code-talk popularized in flower language lexicons and grammars like Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary (1829) and Shoberl’s The Language of Flowers (1834), largely because they downplay, erase, or disavow the kinds of descriptors that betray its human origins and inconsistencies. Where Shoberl extensively outlines the considerable variability in

Eastern cultures’ practices of assigning meaning to flowers, and Wirt clearly explains that she made up many of her own meanings for Flora’s Dictionary, Adams completely omits any reference to cultural variation and artifice, arguing that “in Eastern lands, flowers have a language which all understand. It is that ‘still small voice’ which is powerful on account of its silence” (4). Henrietta Dumont’s volume The Floral Offering (1856) similarly claims that “in the

East the language of flowers has been universally understood and applied ‘time out of mind’”

(6), a truly sweeping statement, given that the usual “grammars” through which a flower-book reader might compose a message are far too complicated to ensure effective communication.64

To ring true, her assertion requires the intervention of some higher being(s), or the existence of some other plane of existence.

64 Seaton argues that few if any readers actually used the language of flowers as a method of communication. 116

Dumont also offers yet another view of flowers: she sees them not merely as convenient carriers of human messages, but as wholly separate, even autonomous beings, somehow parallel to humans. “Flowers have in themselves a real and natural significance,” she insists—“They have a positive relation to man, his sentiments, passions, and feelings. They correspond to actual emotions. They have their mission—a mission of love and mercy. They have their language, and from the remotest ages this language has found its interpreters” (6). Both Adams and Dumont use phrases that resonate with contemporary Christian rhetoric, yet are riddled with ambiguity: whose love and mercy do flowers convey—their own? God’s? Humans’ to each other? Is the

“still small voice” of flowers the same one Elijah heard after the earthquake and the fire—in short, the voice of the Lord?65 Or, since people in “Eastern Lands” understand it so much better than good western Christians, is it something else entirely?

Such questions provide a useful opportunity to examine an evolution in flower book philosophies between the early 1820s and late 1840s. In some ways, arguments about what powerful, intrinsic significations these flowers might possess appear to have come full circle, since Elizabeth Kent expressed similar ideas in Flora Domestica (1823): “flowers do speak a language, a clear and intelligible language,” she wrote—“ask Mr. Wordsworth […] ask Chaucer

[…] ask any of the poets, ancient or modern. […] Observe them, reader, love them, linger over them; and ask in your own heart if they do not speak affection, benevolence, and piety” (xxi- xxii). Despite similarities, though, Kent’s argument does not express belief in one single, intrinsic system of meaning dictated by Flora or the flowers themselves. Rather, she offers a lengthy examination of different ways human customs manifest a fascination with flowers—that is, an overwhelming consensus that they are pleasing and somehow significant, but that such

65 “And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice” (KJV; 1 Kings 19:12). [not sure if that’s correct but in any case you want the citation last] 117 significance takes on a variety of unique expressions in different cultures. She records that the

Greeks, for instance, used flowers to “expre[ss] the intensity of feelings to which they found common language inadequate” (xxi), and she documents many uses of flowers from the Scottish

Highlands to the Vale of Cashmere—but nowhere does she suggest that the “clear and intelligible language” of flowers communicates a single unified message through a recognizable grammar.

By the 1840s, of course, enough texts on the Language of Flowers had entered circulation, and their messages coalesced in the popular imagination to create a sense of systematic stability and pseudoscientific cachet, though as Beverley Seaton argues,66 and I hope my own points have made clear, coherence was purely illusory. In keeping with similar trends gaining ground in the Victorian period such as mesmerism, spiritualism, numerology, and phrenology, the Language of Flowers thrived in the paradoxical space between science and mysticism, drawing equal power from explanation and ineffability, clarity and obscurity. Of course, the same might be said of organized religions, that they tend to overlook human variability and reduce complex, mind-boggling ideas into straightforward dogmas and rituals. In that sense, all of these pseudo-sciences possess similar attractions to religion, making them more viable companions or alternatives to it. One could dismiss works like Hooper’s, Adams’s, and

Dumont’s as naïve or reductive, representing a decline in flower-book quality since they anthologize from earlier flower books in addition to fresher sources and they seem to oversimplify the cultural complexities earlier authors took pains to describe. On the other hand, these characteristics of a simplified, or perhaps streamlined, reiteration of flower language tropes vitally enhance these authors’ abilities to articulate their varying, and sometimes eccentric,

66 See Seaton’s cross-referencing of five different books on the Language of Flowers, pp. 168—197. 118 philosophical positions. Their enthusiasm for the Language of Flowers as a codified system of meaning appears to celebrate clarity, but by erasing inconsistencies and variations that would tie that system too closely to human creation, they cast a vote in favor of fantasy.

The taste for ascribing supernatural qualities to human-made systems culminates in Sarah

Hale’s Fortuna Flora, a section she added to Flora’s Interpreter in 1848.67 This new segment contains “the mystical language of flowers,” and promises “to stimulate the young to the observance of the hidden meanings which may lie concealed in the flower volumes of nature”

(iii). Where the earlier text provides a lexicon of the sentiments attached to each flower, the latter presents an elaborate system of fortune-telling by which readers can “ascertain the particular flowers that best designate [their] condition, character, and probable success in life” (253).

Flowers correspond to months, days of the month, and to four broad categories of temperament.

Readers decide which temperament best describes them, and then use their own birthdays to find their “natal flower,” their “temperament flower” and their “flower of destiny;” then they look up the sentiment for each of these flowers and place them in reverse order to find the “solution.”

Unlike Adams and Dumont, Hale does not insist that these “destinies” innately exist in flowers, and she makes no attempt to mask her invention of this system. To the contrary, she clearly advertises it as a “new and original department of Floral literature,” its originality key to refreshing the value of Flora’s Interpreter in a market flush with “many imitations of our plan”

(iii). “We consider it no trifling matter to have prepared a mystical charm of flowers for the young,” she insists (253), perhaps to vouch for her game as a wholesome and worthwhile activity, but also perhaps to emphasize the quality of her own efforts in designing it. Even without such overt statements, the system of fortune-telling bears unmistakable markers of

67 Hale’s addition of Fortuna Flora to Flora’s Interpreter took place sixteen years after the first edition was published; the two sections appeared in all subsequent editions of the text, including the final one in 1865. 119 human invention. The assignment of flowers to dates, for instance, has little organic significance; unlike the Catholic “Dedication of Flowers” which matches flowers to days of the year based on when they most flourish, Hale’s “natal flowers” and “flowers of destiny” (that is, flowers of the days and months, respectively) proceed in no apparent order except in an intermittently alphabetical one.

Despite this spirit of disclosure, though, and the clearly human origins of the system, conventional religious pressures seem to be exerting some impact on Hale, insofar as she seems concerned with her characterization of the text’s (and flowers’) supernatural powers. Fortuna

Flora in fact argues that flowers can reveal a person’s future, but Hale reins in this pagan potential by reattaching it to more prosaic Christianity: A person’s florally-determined destiny, she emphasizes, “is for [them] to make true. Heaven gives us opportunities; their improvement or neglect is our own work” (254). The statement seems brusque, given that this is her only conciliation to something more orthodox; in quickly dispensing with conventional anxiety toward such a playful game, she only seems to highlight its potential to subvert conservative religious norms. Hale designed Fortuna Flora as an innocent amusement for young people where “like bees, they may gather honey while hovering over and enjoying the beauty of these sweet gifts of nature” (253), yet ultimately the nature of this “honey” is multiple and she avoids constraining the ambiguity: the nectar within her flowers may include elements of botanical knowledge, or pious gratitude for God’s creations, or perhaps a love of poetry, since Hale

“commend[s] the practice of reading the particular authors whose productions are mingled in the web of each particular destiny” (253)—or all of these. Evidently, though, she considered as sweet as more traditional truths the allure of flowers as vessels of otherworldly communication and the belief that, in spite of all clearly apparent human invention, they contain and will reveal 120 cosmic truths. Of course, regardless of how terse Hale’s warning against a too-great belief in fortune-telling might be, she wielded little control over readers’ use of her text, and she clearly found intriguing these more mystical possibilities.68 Fortuna Flora thus embodies a number of philosophical potentials and contradictions, rendering it emblematic of the flower book genre as a whole as it stood in the mid-nineteenth century.

Rationalist Religion: Kent’s Flora Domestica and Sylvan Sketches

Hearkening back to Loudon’s argument that “natural history is the parent of natural religion,” Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica (1823) offers perhaps the earliest, and also finest, boldest, and most extensive example of a rational religion centered in nature’s “facts.” It ranges freely through elements of botanical science, cultural anthropology, ethnobotany, and literary history, but rarely invokes morality or religion outright. Her preface, in making an argument for the intimate link between plants and poetry, cites nearly thirty of western history’s most influential writers and philosophers, fluidly placing Homer and Ovid in company with Solomon and Jesus. Her entries on plants traditionally linked to Christianity, such as the passion-flower or the lily, generally acknowledge that link in a few words and go on to explain the plant’s provenance and growing habits, e.g.: “The passion-flower derives its name from an idea, that all the instruments of Christ’s passion are represented in it. –French, le grenadille; fleur del la passion [sic]. –Italian, granadiglia; flora della passion. Most of the Passion-flowers are natives of the hottest parts of America and require a stove in this country” (284). Kent’s approach to improving public morality, then, centers in her dedication to increasing their knowledge and understanding—a commitment to describing plants and their histories as completely and multi-

68 Seaton catalogues a number of similar floral fortune-telling volumes or sections of volumes; see pp100-101. 121 dimensionally as possible, rather than in prescribing specific moral meanings or lessons to be derived from them.

As Kent learned, however, such an approach proved a little too unorthodox to fully appease public expectations; she apparently received strong enough criticism for Flora

Domestica69 to elicit a rebuttal in the preface to her sequel Sylvan Sketches (1825). Addressing the issue with typical unabashed promptness (the passage comes in the second paragraph of a 44- page introduction, an important item of business to be dealt with up front), Kent writes,

It has been observed, and objected against the writer, that, in a former publication, […]

there was wanting a spirit of religion, and that frequency of grateful reference to the

Creator, which would seem naturally to flow from a contemplation of the wonders and

beauties of creation. As some conjectures, likely to be injurious to her, have been formed

with regard to the cause of this omission, and as the same remark may, with equal justice,

be made upon the present volume, she feels it necessary to say a few words upon this

subject. (ix).

Her “few words” occupy the next two pages of the preface, but before I proceed to analyze them directly, let us pause to consider several significant details of their context that will clarify their weight. First, Kent considered this critique of her piety potentially “injurious,” a detail that suggests she felt serious concern for her reputation, a concern almost certainly connected to her sequel’s greater willingness to show (or inability to hide) that she is a woman. Her first book

Flora Domestica had carefully omitted details—both factual and stylistic ones—that could identify its author as a diffident female, instead frankly adopting the confident voice of an equal among male intellectuals. The title page lists no author at all, and the preface breaks with

69 I have not yet located the exact review that prompted this response. 122 convention by adopting a first-person perspective that allows Kent to refer to herself in the gender-neutral term “I,” rather than as “the author,” which would require use of the telling pronouns “he” or “she.” Kent hints at her sex only once when admitting, “Many a plant have I destroyed, like a fond and mistaken mother, by an inexperienced tenderness” (xiii), but since she then proceeds in the preface to introduce a parade of flower-philosophers who are exclusively male, even this gendered hint can be dismissed as mere simile. The “I” itself claims a status of personhood and identity and announces a confident and unapologetic authorial presence, and

Kent further solidifies her own place in the distinguished circle of poets she features by including intimate personalized tributes to “the late Mr. Shelley” and to Leigh Hunt. The latter receives no mention by name, but is candidly thanked for his collaboration—not as a superior, but as “a friend, whose kindness I most gratefully and somewhat proudly acknowledge” (xxxiii). Kent makes it clear, in other words, that she considers herself an equal.

The boldness of Kent’s approach in Flora Domestica—her powerful assertion of her own collegiality among distinguished male writers, and her utter refusal to bow to feminine authorial convention—is unique among flower books in general.70 And yet, the preface to Sylvan Sketches suggests that it had its costs: Kent’s anonymity apparently did not last long, and she faced the reality that a single woman in her thirties, especially one completely reliant on her own earning power, had to more carefully manage her public image, including her performance of respectable

“femininity.” At this point in her life her reputation had already suffered greatly due to her ambiguously close relationship with Hunt, particularly after his publication of The Story of

70 The uniqueness of Kent’s more masculine approach to flower books also sets it apart from those written by men (such as Shoberl’s The Language of Flowers, or the anonymously published Memoirs of the Rose, or John Stowell Adams’s The Language of Flowers, Poetically Expressed), almost all of which adopt feminine stylizations in language and material construction and clearly market themselves to women readers. Since I believe Kent’s book is the earliest English flower-book proper, perhaps other writers learned from her experience. 123

Rimini (1816) which retells Dante’s story of a love affair between a woman and her brother-in- law. 71 Although Kent published both her books after separating from Hunt’s household, public suspicion of her intimacy with him still lingered. As I noted at the beginning of the chapter,

Kent’s publication of Flora Domestica represents a sort of intellectual declaration of independence from Hunt at the same time it pays tribute to him—but it also attests to the lasting material impact of their relationship, which for Kent included a damaged reputation, exclusion from polite society, and limited earning capacity (Hay 283). This, however, did not stop her.

In such circumstances, building a viable career as a writer and as a teacher (mostly of children, as Kent eventually worked as a governess), required a shrewder, if in fact bolder, performance of public persona than Kent had adopted in Flora Domestica. In Sylvan Sketches, which she prepared with so little input from Hunt that he expressed surprise at its completion,72 she evidently decided that if total anonymity in publication was not possible, then neither was it entirely desirable. While necessity demanded somewhat more deference to social convention

(women perceived as radical had a more difficult time finding gainful employment), it also compelled her to promote her own value as a skilled writer and authority on many subjects.

In her sequel, then, Kent demonstrates even more clearly the space flower books could create for women writers to express unconventional philosophical and religious positions. There, she takes full ownership of her female identity, still keeping her name off the title page, but not her gender: she refers to herself throughout by the third-person pronoun “she.” At the same time, she sticks to her guns, firmly defending and maintaining her preference for understated non-

71 See Hay, YR pp71-74. 72 In a letter dated May 27th 1824, Hunt wrote to Kent, “Until you told me the other day, I never gathered from your letters that you were at all advanced in your tree book, much less that you had nearly done it. […] I send [the following memorandums] to you rather to show you I had been thinking about the work, than from any hope of their being useful” (Hunt 216) 124 denominational religiosity. Returning now to her “few words on the subject,” we see Kent launch a measured but unapologetic rebuttal to her critics. “That [the author] has not introduced the subject of religion, is certainly true;” she concedes, “but she thinks it can scarcely be said with justice, that any book is wanting in a spirit of religion which treats the beauties of nature and of the pleasures to be derived from them”(x). This is only a beginning: not only does Kent offer the more general statement that “In speaking of the beauties and properties of created things, we speak of the beneficence of the Creator” (xi), she ultimately argues that nature provides more effective spiritual instruction than does the preaching of doctrine. Experiences in nature, she explains, transcend philosophical boundaries, touch human souls more directly than mere words, and respect individual dignity, intellect, and innate capacity for spiritual discovery and communion:

However men differ in the forms of religion, its essence is still the same; and many who

would listen without emotion to volumes of religious admonition, will feel their hearts

glow with grateful admiration when they walk abroad in the sunshine. If a man stand

upon a rising ground, and look abroad upon a fertile country, must he be told the source

of all that beauty? Must he be reminded what he ought to feel before his heart will swell

with a fullness of gratitude and love? Oh! Surely not. (xi-xii)

Kent’s outspokenness, in matters of religion and otherwise, perhaps prevented her from ever being considered a paragon of proper femininity either by the public or her own family.

Nevertheless, she managed through her flower books to propagate a powerful brand of rational moral activism and to stay true to her own voice—a voice that resonated, unsurprisingly, with

John Claudius Loudon for whom she later wrote a series of articles on botany for the Magazine of Natural History, and that garnered enough respect to earn her a spot as the authority on botany 125 for girls in The Young Lady’s Book (1829), a “manual of elegant recreations, exercises, and pursuits.”73 Certainly, the authorial space she helped defend—one in which women could embrace a spirit of religion while treating any number of subjects—was valued and used by numerous flower-book writers in the next several decades, whether they recognized their debt to her or not.

Evangelical Fervor: Tonna’s Chapters on Flowers

Thus far I have shown examples of flower books that embrace mysticism and paganism, and others that favor empiricism and reason, all under the general auspices of Christian respectability—as well as those, like Kent’s, which argue for more flexible definitions of religion altogether, and for less pressure on women to explicitly articulate them. I have suggested that authors who voice Christian homilies aligned themselves with religion in order to deflect the kinds of criticism Kent endured. Yet a number of flower book writers do adopt overt, even vehement religious viewpoints. Such works remind us how broad a spectrum flower books occupy and how varied their cultural (or counter-cultural) paradigms are, from the most secular to the most pious.

Many religious flower books enlist plants as potent object-lessons in the tenets of

Protestantism. The Christian Florist (1832), for example, illustrates a botanical primer with devotional poetry and Biblical passages. The Flower Book (1833) published by the American

Sunday School Union, features a dialogue discussing the moral lessons to be learned from flowers (such as modesty from the bowed “heads” of snowdrops). Author Margaret Coxe takes her cue directly from “the excellent Hannah More” in Floral Emblems, or Moral Sketches from

Flowers (1845) and combines a slightly more scientific study of nature with the study of

73 See Chapter 5 for further discussion of Kent’s work in The Young Lady’s Book. 126

Christian doctrine: “Were it in [the author’s] power to do so,” she avowed, “she would, as it were, baptize science, so that it might be made a useful assistant in the cultivation of the moral natures of children” (6). In her book, children and their teacher identify indigenous American plants (illustrated in the text with botanical drawings) and derive moral lessons from them: for instance, the pulmonaria virginica, whose dully purplish and rigid buds bloom into mobile, but meekly nodding bells of “sweetest blue,” illustrates “the contrast between the character, before and after, it is born anew of the Spirit of God” (16).

One of the most dogmatic yet most fascinating texts in my study, Charlotte Elizabeth

Tonna’s74 Chapters on Flowers (1836) eschews science completely, instead employing flowers as symbols and metaphors that ease delivery of strikingly rigid Evangelical doctrine.75 By turns engagingly lyrical and wincingly severe, the text presents a series of sermon-like memoirs— what Tonna terms “floral biography”—of exemplary acquaintances brought to the author’s mind by particular plants. (One of these is Hannah More herself, with whom Tonna formed a brief but cherished friendship a few years before her death). Unlike many flower books that posit a sort of universal code of interpretation, Tonna’s recollections are expressly personal: “My garden bears a nomenclature which no eye but mine can decipher,” she explains, consenting to “exhibit a

74 Charlotte Elizabeth Phelan Tonna published under the pen name Charlotte Elizabeth, which is the name under which many libraries catalogue her works. Most modern scholarship, however, refers to her as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, though she did not take the name Tonna until her second marriage in 1841. She adopted the pen name to protect her earnings from the claims of her estranged first husband George Phelan, who died in 1836. A prominent, controversial, and prolific writer, Tonna published over a hundred titles in her lifetime, including fiction, reading primers, social reform literature, and theological discourses. She passionately advocated for better working conditions for women and children, and her fervent Evangelicalism and intense spiritual viewpoint pervades her work, to the extent that she is nearly inseparable from her religion. She was totally deaf from the age of ten, and by her own account in her Personal Recollections (1841) was always intellectually-minded and almost totally uninterested in feminine and domestic pursuits. 75 As Elizabeth Jay explains, Evangelicalism encompasses many forms of dissent from mainstream Anglicanism. In general it is founded on a personal apprehension of God, with the interpretation of God’s word resting solely with the individual; thus we can only place Evangelical doctrines in a broad framework of consensus. Nevertheless, some essential beliefs include original sin, conversion, justification by faith, and the authority of the Word. 127 specimen or two […] humbly trusting that He who commended to our consideration the growth of the lilies, will be with us, to impart that blessing without which our walks, and words, and thoughts, must be alike unprofitably—sinfully vain” (2). This statement’s personal nature and its keen awareness of sin set Tonna’s volume apart; many flower books meditate on a blossom’s ability to bring a person generally closer to heaven, but no other expresses with quite the same frequency, directness, or heartfelt sincerity, warnings against what will keep a person out. Her memoirs stage a high-stakes drama, a battle for the souls of mankind, and while her condemnations sometimes shock with their vehemence, her equally passionate expressions of love for nature, God, and her wayward fellow-men make them all the more uncomfortably riveting.

In another iteration of the debate already emblematized through More and

Wollstonecraft, Tonna’s stance is essentially an inversion of John Claudius Loudon’s: neither sees science or religion as at odds with the other, but while he claims science provides a way to understand religion more broadly, she casts it as a potential distraction or impediment to the flow of spiritual insight. “Botany is doubtless a very delightful study; but a botanical treatise is one of the last things that I should be found engaged in,” she explains; “My love of flowers—for each particular petal—is such, that no thirst after scientific knowledge could ever prevail with me to tear the beautiful objects in pieces” (1). Tonna was not alone in expressing her distaste for the botanical practice of anatomizing plants, which many considered horrific and unnatural: Mary

Tyler Peabody Mann brings it into disturbing focus from the flowers’ perspective in The Flower

People (1842) where a snowdrop laments the violent murder of her siblings at the hands of botanists,76 a practice Wilkie Collins identifies in The Moonstone (1868) as a twisted and

76 See chapter 5 for further discussion of Mann’s The Flower People. 128 quintessentially aristocratic remedy for ennui.77 Although she does not quote Wordsworth directly, Tonna’s attitude also recalls his famous adage in “The Tables Turned” (1798) that “we murder to dissect”—that “our meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous forms of things” (28,

27). Although Wordsworth was not opposed to botany or science in general, his poem urges readers to “close up [the] barren leaves” of traditional book-learning in science and art to instead

“watch and receive” Nature’s “sweet […] lore” (30, 24). Yet Tonna takes this philosophy to a more orthodox place: it is not simply that dissecting flowers is violent and unnatural, or that a walk in the woods can teach a person more effectively than books can; it is that any pursuit, whether examining flowers, reading books or walking in the woods, is barren if one does not actively, intentionally pursue it as a conduit to God—specifically, the God of Christian

Protestantism.

Maintaining that “next after the blessed bible, a flower-garden is to me the most eloquent of books—a volume teeming with instruction, consolation, and reproof” (2) Tonna captures and endorses an Evangelical belief in typology: that all things related to God, whether his words (i.e. the Bible) or his creations, exist primarily for the purpose of explicating and reinforcing clear doctrines. Valued merely for their beauty or for the enjoyment they provide, gardens and flowers become false idols—but treated as lessons from on high, they literally become scripture, and fit the description given in Timothy, that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, [and] for instruction in righteousness” (KJV 2

Timothy 3:16-17).

77 Collins’s narrator Gabriel Betteredge, head servant in a genteel household, explains that the gentry face “a very awkward rock ahead in life—the rock of their own idleness. […] Nine times out of ten they take to torturing something, or to spoiling something—and they firmly believe they are improving their minds [.…] But there! the poor souls must get through the time, you see—they must get through the time. […] [C]ompare the hardest days’ work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders’ stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it MUST think of, and your hands something that they MUST do” (49-50). 129

It is perhaps Timothy’s concept of reproof that most starkly contrasts Tonna’s version of nature’s tutelage with those of writers like Wordsworth, Loudon, and Kent. For her, nature does not merely evoke soothing feelings like gratitude for God’s beautiful creations, wonder at the complexity of his workmanship, and reassurance of his love for mankind. It does not simply reinforce the thrilling sublimity of mankind’s smallness in the face of geologic, meteorologic, or cosmic forces, nor does it lead to improved morals through a solid scientifically factual basis of understanding. Instead it offers a constant reminder of human frailty and fallenness, with a spur toward repentance, sacrifice, and rededication to self-improvement.

Thus while Tonna observes and describes plants attentively, she values them not as biological specimens or even as beautiful objects. Instead she perceives them (so to speak) as burning bushes—they are God’s personal voice calling her to repentance and giving her a charge, and thus she describes them in language redolent with scriptural idiom and allusion.

Again, though she apparently finds comfort in the idea that such communications indicate God’s intimate interest in individuals, the doctrines and reproofs are far from comfortable:

I love to see the bud bursting into maturity; I love to mark the deepening tints with which the beams of heaven paint the expanded flower; nay, with a melancholy sort of pleasure, I love to watch that progress towards decay, so endearingly bespeaking a fellowship in man’s transient glory, which, even at its height, is but as “the flower of grass.” I love to gaze upon these vegetable gems—to marvel and adore, that such relics of paradise are yet permitted to brighten a path where the iniquity of rebellious sinners has sown the thorn and the thistle, under the blighting curse of an offended God. (1-2)

The contrast between her capacity to be fully in love with earthly things and yet so scornful of human beings, and the sudden shift from Wordsworthian worship of beauty to gothic

Evangelicalism is shocking and adeptly instantiates the Fall in her language: it’s as if Eve just bit into the apple. Thus, in Tonna’s paradigm, flowers are remnants of Eden, allowed to persist on

“this magnificent wreck of a glorious world” (80) as reminders of God’s love, glory and power, 130 and of his greatness and terribleness in meting judgment. At the same time, they embody indelible loss brought about by the foolishness and pride of mankind, hint at God’s mercy and offer hope of his forgiveness—to “brighten” one’s “path.” There is undeniable masochism in the

“melancholy pleasure” Tonna feels while contemplating these things: she seems not only to thrill at the smallness of humanity, but also to relish (in description at least) acknowledgement of human guilt.

The passage makes evident just how antithetical Evangelical doctrine could be to

Romantic philosophy in its insistence on original sin and blighted nature. Wordsworth offers a useful case in point for examining this contrast more closely. Though after his brother John’s death in 1805 he became one of the more religiously conservative Romantic writers, he nevertheless rejected the notion of original sin (arguing famously, of course, that children are born “trailing clouds of glory” (Ode 65), and Jay shows that though Evangelicals found his poetry generally acceptable by moral standards they warned readers specifically against his faith in Nature’s transfiguring power.78 Where Tonna adores an “offended God” who rains “blighting curse[s]” upon the earth, Wordsworth as a younger man rebukes such projections of negative emotions onto landscapes. In The Ruined Cottage (1797), he paints a picture of an utterly tranquil and balanced natural world that carries on through its cycles of life and death regardless of human drama. To read sorrow, tragedy, or punishment into nature is to betray the real

“weakness of humanity:” a propensity to “[feed] on disquiet,”—to turn away from “natural wisdom” and “natural comfort” and ultimately to “read / the forms of things with an unworthy eye” (193-198; 510-512). In this poem Wordsworth renders nature as unfeeling in the best and

78 Jay cites a passage from The Christian Observer for 1850, warning against Wordsworth’s desire for a unity with nature: “He must remember, that he speaks of fallen man, and of a ‘creation made subject to vanity,’ and that the ruin is altogether too great to be repaired by any influence of man upon creation, or of creation upon man.” (Jay 55). 131 most comforting sense: it operates on a different plane and timeline than humans do, with no remorse but also with no rancor. The weeds encroaching the cottage garden, far from proving human sin, instead indicate an organic return to equilibrium. Thus creation and decay coexist and cooperate, and human passions fade in the face of cosmic serenity.

The stark disparity between Wordsworth’s and Tonna’s positions renders them, one might suppose, utterly irreconcilable, as perhaps ultimately they are. Yet the genius of the flower book format is its ability to draw power from certain similarities between Evangelical doctrine

(including versions as extreme as Tonna’s) and more broadly appealing Romantic rhetorical registers and points of view, and to create a space where those ideas, for a few crucial moments of readerly thought, can exist together. Put more simply, Evangelical doctrine and Romantic philosophy stem from widely different origins, but the flower book format highlights their resemblance. The overlaps between these texts in their language, symbolism, and even some moral lessons remind us of another connection between them, that both early nineteenth-century

Evangelicalism and Romanticism were contending with a status quo of over-reliance on

“authorities” (whether of Anglicanism or the Enlightenment) that relied (in the minds of these movements) too heavily on ritual and prescriptive format, and minimized the importance of individual feeling and apprehension.

Flower books show us that philosophers in Romanticism and in Evangelicalism found plants useful rhetorical tools with which to appeal to and influence audiences of different persuasions. Tonna’s most severe expressions may feel jarring because they nestle within passages of familiar-feeling Romantic prose; they occupy a sort of uncanny valley, often very close to meeting our expectations of a Romantic meditation on nature, but suddenly different enough to cause us to recoil. But for Tonna’s readers—her particular audience of young 132 people—the similarities may have proved reassuring enough to keep them engaged with the text for a longer period of time. At the very least, the text’s conflation of Evangelical and Romantic philosophies requires a moment, however brief, of suspended judgment in which to reassess their points of crossover and divergence. One must parse, for example, exact differences between

Tonna’s “melancholy pleasure” in nature, and in “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of humanity” (92), between her belief in a nature “teeming with instruction, consolation and reproof”(2) and his belief that nature possesses “ample power / To chasten and subdue” (93-

94). While pinpointing such distinctions requires further reading and research, the flower book format prompts both.

Chapters on Flowers resonates particularly strongly with Romantic philosophy in its blend of universalism and individualism. Like many serious thinkers and writers in this period,

Tonna sought to perceive and communicate truth in the belief that one Truth existed for all the world and for all time. As stated earlier, Loudon argues that the scientific study of nature provides access to this Truth across all creeds and cultures. Wordsworth extols sublime experiences in nature as the conduit to universal truth, since in these “even the grossest minds must see and hear, / and cannot chuse but feel” (Prelude [1805] XIII 85-86). For Tonna, universal truth resides in the Evangelical Christianity’s doctrines, of which the natural world provides a symbol; in emphasizing her enthusiasm for this channel of illumination she does not shrink from identifying variations from her doctrine that in her estimation are inferior, misguided, and even harmful. Yet while Tonna’s vision of universal truth includes a belief in mankind’s general incorrectness and need to cast off blinding veils of pride and falsehood to accept Christ’s grace, Chapters on Flowers tells the story of her individual communion. The foundational doctrine of Evangelicalism is the direct personal apprehension of God: it allows for 133 no human mediators or authoritative bodies to distance that relationship, and places interpretation of God’s word strictly with the individual; as Jay notes, this belief meant that

Evangelical doctrine was polyphonous, united only within a broad framework of consensus (16).

As I pointed out above, Tonna’s chapters explain some of the meanings she gradually attached to her flowers through her “encounter[s] with a great variety of characters” and these meanings constitute the “nomenclature which no eye but [hers] can decypher [sic]” (2); although each one constructs a kind of sermon meant to instruct and inspire others, Chapters on Flowers is essentially a memoir—a record of key experiences and influences that shaped her own personal system of belief.

The singular intimacy and individuality of Chapters on Flowers become the text’s greatest rhetorical strength, for several reasons. First, in terms of the book’s appeal within the flower book genre, it prompts Tonna to document plants she actually encounters in life (and specifically in her own garden) rather than simply the ones most popularly valued, a choice that helps eschew patterns of rote moralizing that occasionally creep into more mainstream flower- symbolism books. By the time Tonna published Chapters on Flowers, readers would have been accustomed to ascribing certain interpretations to snowdrops, violets, roses, and forget-me-nots; this genre’s authors thus faced a formidable challenge in keeping their glosses fresh and insightful. Tonna does include some of these more popular plants, but among her more unusual choices are the furze-bush, the lauristinus (viburnum), the pale bell of the heath, the holly bush, and the lemon plant. She takes some delight in the element of surprise in a passage introducing the shamrock:

Should any of my readers have amused themselves by conjecturing which, among the

increasing variety of floral gems that herald the spring, would be brought forward as 134

appropriate to the month of March, they will probably be disappointed. The delicate

primrose may look forth from its crisp leaves; the fragrant violet may volunteer, in its

natural and emblematical beauty, to furnish a graceful type; but the parterre, with all its

attractions, must be passed by; for, among the long grass at the bottom of the garden, in

the most uncultivated, neglected spot, lurks the object of which we are now in quest: […]

Yes, the SHAMROCK must occupy the station of a flower for once, and why should it

not? England displays, as her symbol, the glowing rose,—Scotland, the lilac tuft of her

hardy and gigantic thistle,—and, alas! poor Erin’s green shamrock has too often

outblushed them both, as the life-blood of many a victim oozed forth upon the sod, under

the iron reign of spiritual tyranny, which still sharpens, for its own dark purposes, the

weapons of civil discord; wading onward, through rivers of blood, to the goal of its

insatiable ambition. But I must not identify the gentle shamrock with themes so revolting;

I have pleasanter combinations in view. (32-33)

Passages like this, which include strong political valences, contrast to those merely extolling the modest beauty of violets. The shamrock itself is an unusual choice, but in the context of the genre, the grisly image with which Tonna introduces it defies expectation and demands that we pay attention.

Second, Tonna’s intimate reflections on her own encounters with flowers humanize her, building readerly interest and sympathy even in the face of her religious zeal. She insists on the truthfulness of her recollections both of people and of plants: her first chapter promises that “in this, and every subsequent sketch, I shall adhere most strictly to simple, unadorned truth; the characters will be real, every incident a fact; and nothing but the names withheld” (3). She reaffirms this statement in her final chapter, insisting “I am not writing fiction; the [plants] that I 135 describe are within my view at this moment, distantly visible from my window, and their relative position is precisely what I have stated” (291).79 Of course, since memory and writing both mediate “facts,” as does Tonna’s desire to impart religious instruction, Tonna’s narrative surely employs some measure of invention. Still, her writing is powerful enough that, where fiction does enter into her narrative, it is not easy to pinpoint; the same characters circulate through numerous chapters, and descriptions of her garden are reliably consistent; both her people and her plants, in other words, seem to belong to a cohesive and believable network.

Building such a believable sense of reality into her work induces readers to think of

Tonna herself as a real person whose beliefs (however extreme) have developed from unique, and often difficult and painful personal circumstances. The subjects of her floral biographies are not simply real people, they are people with whom Tonna formed cherished relationships, and all of them at the time of her writing are dead—including her father, her younger brother, a deaf and dumb boy she adopted into her household for several years, and numerous colleagues and parishioners who became dear to her as she labored in the fold. Account after account of these many deaths builds for the reader a sense of Tonna’s personal loss, and her zealous doctrinal interpretations of each person’s floral symbol do double-duty as tools for managing her own grief. Uniformly she rejoices that their deaths freed them from the travails of life in a fallen world and ushered them (through their faith in Christ) into glory. But her joy is insistent; it is a decision, a resolve. Her faith, initially appearing so vehement and unwavering, draws strength from the faith of the people she describes—the grace, dignity, hope, and determination with

79 Tonna’s insistence on the truthfulness of her account echoes Wollstonecraft’s devotion to plain language, and also suggests some of the conflict Tonna felt over writing fiction in general, since Evangelical fundamentalists considered the writing of fiction to be sinful. Tonna did continue to write works of fiction until 1843, but she battled with herself about it and devoted herself increasingly to nonfiction (see Walker, www.victorianweb.org).

136 which they bore up crushing burdens of poverty, sickness, disability, grief, and responsibilities to care for the poorest of the poor.

The sympathy Tonna calls forth through her personal accounts, not only of people but of the flowers too, enacts a critical shift in her floral sermons; it brings out—surprisingly, sometimes impossibly—a poignancy in her preachiness. In the face of her sorrows and losses her interpretations of flowers often feel organic and sincere, as though the “lessons” she takes from them genuinely stem from her own urgent need to find hope and meaning in a harsh world, rather than from a calculated plan to instruct others. Some lessons are so personal to her that, she admits, they cannot fully be translated; for example, a chance observation of ivy in her garden one winter touches her so that she “looked until my tears flowed, for the power of imagination was irresistible,” but the idea imparted being quite abstract, she concedes she must “record my feelings without expecting any reader to enter into their depth” (291-292). Other instances are more relatable, but no less intimate. In speaking of the evening primrose which blooms when many other flowers have closed their petals, its “delicate buds […] throwing wide their silken leaves, with a haste that seems to bespeak no slight impulse of benevolent sympathy,” she reflects on the comfort the flower brings her in times of loneliness. She writes:

A feeling of desertion steals on my spirit, when I look upon the folded petals [of other

flowers] that laughed back my noontide greeting: […] for each returning summer bears

witness to some additional bereavement, while companions long-loved have gone down

into the grave, or faces that beamed lovingly on me have become averted in coldness, or

estranged by protracted absence. The [evening primrose] is then a precious remembrance

[sic] to tell me of One who changes not. (94) 137

The evening primrose symbolizes, conventionally perhaps, the constant love and reliable friendship of Jesus Christ, but more importantly it suggests the many personal inducements

Tonna had to rely on that love, including death, distance, and sometimes difficult relationships with living people.

In keeping with the latter, some of her floral accounts provide glimpses of the considerable personal and emotional cost Tonna incurred as a result of her zeal, often while laboring in sincere concern for what she sees as the good of others. She includes the forbiddingly thorny furze bush as a symbol of the substantial opposition and emotional wounds she routinely experienced in the course of gathering human souls to the fold. Specifically the bush’s yellow flowers remind her of Mary, an Irish Catholic woman whose conversion Tonna witnessed only after many years of effort and much antagonism from Mary’s community. Tonna brushes off the pain she felt, nonchalantly recalling “Well, the scratches were soon healed, that those ungracious thorns inflicted; and the certainty that I did indeed behold the flower removed to a fair garden where no thorns can enter, renders me joyfully willing to encounter as much, and more, wherever the Lord points a way” (30). Yet although she refuses to assign any lasting significance to the personal difficulties of missionary work, the passage reminds us that Tonna routinely placed her desire to save souls at a higher premium than her desire to make or keep friends—an honorable but lonely position, and one that rendered friendship with her more than a bit thorny too.

Tonna’s use of the flower book to relay her unrelenting religious commitment reveals two paradoxes—one about the genre itself and one about her own work. First, looking through the lens of flowers encourages multiple points of view and encourages readers to synthesize these perspectives; thus, although the genre sometimes expresses extreme interpretations like

Tonna’s, overall it resists a dogmatic agenda. But second, the readerly sympathy Tonna elicits 138 through her intimate, realistic narrative and her personal interpretations of flowers does fulfil the genre’s potential insofar as her instances of warm compassion contradict her doctrine’s harshest element, in particular her unflinching insistence on inborn human corruption, and her vitriolic denouncement of Catholicism. Tonna lived in Ireland from 1819 to 1824, and her anti-Catholic sentiments are among the most vehement, inflexible and troubling aspects of her writing; drawing on stock-phrases lobbed at Catholics for centuries she refers to the religion as “that fatal apostasy,” and an “erroneous faith,” and to its believers as “bigotted and ignorant,” “the deluded people of Ireland,” and “the bond-slaves of Satan” (23-24, 69). Although she professes deep love and respect for Irish people in general, love that her individual portraits of Irish people sufficiently bear out as sincere, her unabashed denouncements of their error frequently leave one reeling at the gap between personal response to individuals and abstractions levied against those very people.

As a final consideration of Chapters on Flowers, I highlight a particular instance—her discussion of the white moss-rose—that clearly manifests the competing forces at work within the text, its lyrical reflections pocked with moments of rupture where even the sympathy Tonna seeks to evoke through flowers cannot fully sustain the arguments she puts forth. In this chapter she describes the funeral for a two-year-old Catholic boy in southern Ireland. With the disclaimer that “it is well known how revolting are the scenes of riot and debauchery usually presented at an

Irish wake […] among the Roman Catholic population,” she nevertheless recalls this particular funeral as “one of the spectacles to which my memory often reverts with delight; associating with it all that is most touchingly lovely in the world of flowers. (73) Tonna’s jarring juxtapositions of prejudice, death, delight, and loveliness typify the rhetorical instability of the 139 chapter as a whole, which only increases the more she explicates the associations she ascribes to the rose.

Initially Tonna’s determination to find comfort in sorrow seems reasonable, as does her assertion that “there are many flowers that speak to me of early, happy death” (78). As stated earlier, Tonna encountered death frequently, both in her own personal circle and in her missionary work among the poor where infant and child mortality rates were especially high.

That death is, for her, one of the strongest of flowers’ associations only makes sense, as she had so many opportunities to see and contemplate the pairing. Tonna also viewed death as person’s glorious transfer from the “church militant” (fighting the good fight against evil on earth) and the

“church triumphant” (reigning victorious over evil in heaven) (293), and despite a firm belief in original sin she also believed that God found ways to commune with infants and children so they could accept Jesus as their savior before their deaths (264). She extends sympathy to sorrowing parents, but flatly refuses to mourn the babies: “I can weep with them, for it is a sore trial to a parent’s heart; but over the baby I do and must rejoice, with joy unspeakable and full of glory”

(266).

The rhetorical discomfort the chapter evinces arises not because Tonna seeks solace and insight in the tenets of her religious doctrine, but rather because she embraces these tenets with inordinate ardor. As her narrative proceeds, her expressions of joy in death become so strong as to seem morbid and even perverse. She writes, “For myself, I must declare that [flowers] never look so lovely in my sight, as when brought to wither gently on the bed of death” (73). I will discuss in a moment her reasons for admiring withering flowers, but first let us pause on the troubling fact that they appear lovely to her in the first place—because it relates intimately with

Tonna’s intense admiration for the dead child, who she claims “was very beautiful when living; 140 in death, surpassingly so” (74). She describes him laid out in white, under a white drapery festooned with white roses and green leaves, “his little cap just shading the soft bright locks that alone varied the snow-like appearance of the whole object” (74). Opposite him are the common accessories of a Catholic wake: incense, whiskey, tobacco, and a crucifix, elements that provide stark contrast to the boy’s natural setting and implied purity—and that provide Tonna opportunity rejoice that, “Happy spirit! Like a bird out of a snare of the fowler, he had escaped the chains that superstition was forging to hold him back from God. Before that idol crucifix he had never bent” (75). Tonna’s description of the scene is almost theatrical, a scene of pathos calculated to play on the emotions, strongly resonant of melodrama, sensationalism, and the gothic. Her ability to aestheticize a real child’s funeral in such a manner comes from at least a measure of emotional distance, a propensity to think in broader symbolic or artistic terms rather than to get caught up in the feelings of the moment. Of course, in dealing with death so frequently perhaps such distance is natural; indeed, the entirety of Chapters on Flowers relies on that skill, as its very premise is the translation of experience into meaning. Yet in this instance,

Tonna’s symbolic extrapolation of the scene seems cold: not unfeeling, for she speaks with great feeling, but on the whole inhumanly distant.

Returning to the subject of the withering flowers, Tonna cherishes them for their similarity to the little boy, and for their reminder that death is a natural part of life: the flowers

“appeared to claim, as their sweet companion, the little body so like themselves, in its short, sunshiny existence, its peaceful decay, its future uprising from the dust of the earth, to light, and life, and glory” (77). The statement offers a moment of respite, a reassurance of kinship between humans and nature. And yet, even this peaceful moment is short-lived, for upon further reflection she presents a different interpretation of the flowers that droop over the bodies of the dead: 141

[the flowers] seem to gaze upon the corpse, repeating the humiliating doom, alike

applicable to both—dust we are, and to dust we shall return. I could not look on such a

spectacle without beholding the Garden of Eden, by man’s transgression rendered

desolate, and perishing, alas! in man’s destruction—the creatures, the innocent and

beautiful creatures of God’s hand, made subject to vanity through our sinfulness; fading

and falling into one common grave. (78)

In Tonna’s final reckoning, dying flowers are not the friends of mankind, they are the civilian casualties of human pride: their deaths are our fault. She relishes this scene as a powerful, poignant, and aesthetically satisfying reminder of human guilt: “the pall may spread its velvet folds, and the sable plumes bow in stately gloom over the dead; but a single white rose, drooping amid its dark foliage, tells the story more touchingly, and with more eloquent sympathy, than all the art of man may contrive, to invest sorrow in a deeper shade of woe” (78-79). Although she concludes her chapter with praise for Christ and his deliverance, it is clear that she finds as much joy in harrowing up allegedly depraved souls.

Taken as a whole, Chapters on Flowers presents a highly individualized system of floral interpretation that builds potent feelings of readerly sympathy and interest in understanding

Tonna’s personal religious perspective. At the same time, the book exposes how the capaciousness of the genre tends to undercut and rupture extreme positions. Tonna expresses a belief that, through flowers, God will guide her readers to convictions that match her own: she entreats her audience “to reflect and pray, encouraged by the exhibition of what God wrought

[…] and what he is equally able, equally willing to work in them also” (262). Yet because she models such an expressly personal approach to building her own system of floral symbolism, she 142 offers an even more comforting assurance: that her language of flowers is hers alone, and that we are free to discover our own.

Conclusion

I have endeavored in this chapter to convey the usefulness of the flower book genre for a wide variety of purposes, and to women writers in particular. Although like any genre, these books developed certain conventions, the volumes I have analyzed illuminate how highly diverse and unpredictable this genre could be and what powerful venues it offered for women’s intellect and spirit. Even during a time of rigid gender norms and limited opportunities for women’s formal education and public participation, flower books pushed against conservative boundaries.

Women’s engagement in anthologizing and composition provided a structure for disciplined self- education and facilitated (because they often necessitated) collaboration with other knowledgeable people. Flower books allowed women to contextualize their own work within larger intellectual communities, while their determination to claim credit for their contributions helped expand public notions of what constituted modesty and gentility. Finally, the form assisted expression of a broad spirituality that provided ample space for religious and philosophical exploration, inviting us to reconsider the “orthodoxy” of the genre as a whole.

Most importantly these books show us that women enthusiastically took on the work of anthologizing as a vital form of authorship, inventing many instructive ways to connect, organize and present various bodies of information and inflect them with their own singular voices. While their texts participated in gift-book culture that often valued smaller, daintier, prettier and more whimsical offerings than Kent’s weighty Flora Domestica, they are anything but trivial—and over time they increasingly came to proudly bear the names of their creators on the title page. In short, flower books enabled many women to claim their place as authors because regardless of 143 which words in their texts were “original,” within their gatherings of flowers they assumed positions of authority—authority, moreover, not dependent on solitary genius, external distinctions or institutional access, but stemming instead from the quality of available intellectual materials with which they chose to surround themselves, the personal insight and reflection with which they treated such materials, and the discerning judgment and diverse perspectives through which they inspired and influenced their readers.

144

Chapter 3

American Idiom:Figuring National Identity through the Format of Flora’s Interpreter

“It is time our people should express their own feelings in the sentiments and idioms of

America:” thus proclaimed Sarah Josepha Hale in the preface to her 1832 publication Flora’s

Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments (iv). Bold as it is, declarations like this typify Hale, who over the course of her long career would become one of nineteenth-century

America’s most passionate advocates for the creation and preservation of national heritage— whether through focusing on American issues in her own fiction and poetry, soliciting and promoting the work of other American writers, campaigning for the preservation of historical sites like Mount Vernon and Bunker Hill, or lobbying for the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national rather than regional holiday.80 Far more surprising than Hale’s statement, then, is the curious platform to which it is mounted: a slim and rather modest-looking volume on the

Language of Flowers, drawn from numerous British as well as American sources. Compared to the monumental labors of cultural arbitration for which Hale is best known (in particular her forty-year reign as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book81), Flora’s Interpreter has received little scholarly attention and appears, as Hale herself admits, a “trifling production” (iii). Yet remarkably, even in a market increasingly crowded with similar fare,82 the book proved so

80 Hale’s own work frequently deals with themes including abolition, the frontier, and the revolution against Britain. Many of her most passionate campaigns for the preservation of heritage sites occurred during periods of unrest surrounding the Civil War, and were intended to unite a divided public through reverence for their shared past. 81 Godey’s Lady’s Book reached 150,000 subscribers in 1860, the largest circulation of any monthly magazine in the U.S. from then until the end of the century (Finley 23). 82 Poetic miscellanies enjoyed immense popularity in Britain throughout the eighteenth century, and were well known in the United States as well (see the Digital Miscellanies Index). Books combining literature and botany in various ways witnessed increasing popularity throughout the nineteenth century, as I discuss in greater detail later in the essay. The “language of flowers,” that is, the idea of codifying the meanings of flowers so as to send messages with them, particularly caught the public imagination, and hundreds of books on this subject were published in Europe and the U.S. from the 1820s through the early twentieth century (see Seaton). 145 popular with readers—and so dear to Hale herself—that over the next thirty years it continued through at least seventeen editions, survived five sets of publishers, inspired a host of emulators, and saw more printings than any other single book Hale ever produced. Despite its apparent conventionality and lightweight subject, the volume was clearly no trifle.

I posit that, as is the case with so many volumes in the flower book genre, the format of

Flora’s Interpreter is largely responsible for the pattern of casual scholarly disregard toward its significance.83 This chapter, then, offers an in-depth case study of that format, its sophisticated workings and its crucial role within the projects of nation-building and culture-shaping the volume so passionately endorses. For while Flora’s Interpreter first appears as a whimsical lesson on the sending of eloquent bouquets, ultimately it reveals itself as an ambitious collection of American-authored secular poetry, one Hale claimed as the first ever produced in the United

States and which she designed to declare a measure of artistic independence (or at least distinction) from England. Indeed, the same characteristics that might lead scholars to overlook or dismiss Flora’s Interpreter (as exploitative at worst, unoriginal at best, or merely intended to cash in on the market for gift books)84 are the very ones that made it so effective in its day and so worthy of analysis now: namely its bourgeois consumer appeal, its object-status, and its blend of scientific, literary, and orientalist components that freely echo and excerpt from established genres of European literature. Through its odd combination of elements Flora’s Interpreter executes a complex task, rooting American literature in a British cultural past while clearing

83 The pastiche of components found in most of these works prevents them both from straightforward classification (they are never simply poetry collections, works of fiction, or even anthologies) and from ready reprinting except as facsimiles, since their original layouts play an integral role in their appeal and the cultural work they perform; these characteristics place flower books largely outside the purview of traditional literary studies. 84 To name one example of such criticism, Beverly Seaton offers a detailed historical study of books on the language of flowers, but at times even her careful work seems a bit dismissive; she describes how these books “more or less follow the [publication] trail blazed by the gift annual” (87), and she identifies Flora’s Interpreter outright as “an exploitative cut-and-paste job” (86). I address this critique later in the chapter. 146 sufficient ground for the creation, expression, and transmission of a specifically American identity.

This study reveals Flora’s Interpreter as a canny text in its own right, and more importantly, invites us to consider what insights book history offers into the processes of identity and culture construction, 85 specifically those processes that bring transnational circuits of culture into national service and require definitions of nationalism far more figurative than literal. As an avowed literary nationalist Hale offers especially powerful insight into this subtle and nuanced practice. The passage I quoted in the opening paragraph of this chapter attests to her impatience and longing for greater cultural pride and unity among Americans. In 1832 the United States had long since declared its political independence from Britain, but with the country’s rapidly expanding borders, its transient, transnational and transcultural population, and its increasing regional tensions that would lead within decades to the Civil War, American identity had acquired only a nebulous definition.86 The literary marketplace was decentralized across several regional centers (Philadelphia, New York, and Boston), where scattered elements of national culture competed with a flourishing trade in cheap reprints of British books (McGill 1). Well then might Hale declare, “It is time our people should express their own feelings in the sentiments and idioms of America”; but who exactly were “our people,” what were these idioms, and where were they expressed? Hale searched extensively for American writings suitable to her

85 Though they deal with very different subjects, three studies of format have inspired and influenced my work here: Matthew Brown (early American devotional miscellanies), Joseph Rezek (black writers’ publications in books vs. pamphlets or broadsides), and Meredith McGill (low-brown rhyme scheme and print format as correlation to the democratic oral performance of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper). 86 Ed White reminds us that the “study of the development of U.S. nationalism needs to map the transition from the imperial imagined community of unbound serial ‘nations’ to the insistence upon the bound, unified, and singular nation, with some appreciation of the stages of this process” (76); in 1832 the Jacksonian U.S. was still very much in the midst of this transition. 147 purpose, and where none appeared she avidly composed them herself.87 Still, by arranging these as a flower book she blends her resulting collection of American poetry with numerous other genres (as we will see), with the British and European components playing equally prominent and fundamental roles in the overall structure.

This partnership of, so to speak, old and new world elements in Flora’s Interpreter captures the long, slow process by which cultural identities take shape: not through outright rejection of their antecedents, but instead through subtle repurposing of them. Anthropologists

Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban describe this process as entextualization, the making of things into texts by endowing them with new meanings legible to particular groups of people.

Because the objects of entextualization themselves are rarely “new,” re-signifying a particular text usually involves excerpting it from a previous or concurrent cultural framework and erasing or redefining its other meaning(s). While many have classified such acts as violent appropriations, Urban and Silverstein (more usefully, I believe88) instead characterize them as replications: not theft, but “an attempt at reproduction, at relocating the original instance of discourse to a new context—carrying over something from the earlier to the later one” (21). This carrying over, they argue, is “essential to culture understood as shareable or transmittable across the generations” (21). In other words, the vitality of any culture depends on its ability to replicate a version of the past or the other, but one sufficiently unmoored from previous contexts to make space for new interpretation.

87 A new introduction added to Flora’s Interpreter in 1848 explains, “It may be best to state that all the poetic selections here designated ‘anonymous’ were written by Mrs. Hale, expressly for Flora’s Interpreter. Those who use these will know from whom they borrow” (Flora’s Interpreter and Fortuna Flora [1848], 2). Entries written by other unknown authors are generally labeled according to the source from which they are excerpted (see figure 3). 88 Understanding entextualization as replication rather than appropriation is not to say that damage is never done in the process, or that the loss of previous meaning is never to be mourned. What it does do, is allow us to focus on what the processes accomplish and how they accomplish it, rather than on whether they are innocent or malicious. 148

Much of Flora’s Interpreter’s power thus lies in its collection of information from numerous disciplines and its imitation of many other kinds of texts. Hale’s two formal innovations—the unique arrangement of pre-existing source material and the smooth insertion of excerpts from American authors—enabled her to draw the scattered elements of a proto-

American identity into greater coherence. “Making a book (not writing it) is somewhat like preparing a dinner,” Hale notes: “the ingredients must be collected from many places, and these are usually so disguised by the preparation that little of the original flavor remains” (iv). Yet, like many composite texts from this period, Flora’s Interpreter has received criticism for preserving a little too much of its sources’ original flavors: one of the few scholars to study it in detail, flower-language historian Beverly Seaton, dismisses the volume outright as “an exploitative cut- and-paste job” (86). Hale did in fact draw heavily on Elizabeth Gamble Wirt’s Flora’s

Dictionary ([1829]) for her correlation of flowers to sentiments, and on Dorothea Lynd Dix’s

The Garland of Flora (1829) for the idea of indexing poems according to plants and for some of the poetic material.89 Indeed, in her preface she owns, “there is nothing new attempted, except in the arrangement, and the introduction of American sentiments” (iii). Nevertheless, her calculated imitation and echoing of earlier texts manifests what Meredith McGill calls an “exuberant understanding of culture as iteration and not origination” (4), and as I will argue, Hale’s arrangement of Flora’s Interpreter’s components not only models this iterative culture-building process, but also prepares readers to continue it.

Genre mixture at work

While some flower books align themselves with a particular subgenre—the botanical

89 Hale cites these two volumes in her preface, as well as “Nuttall’s ‘Botany’” (most likely Thomas Nuttall’s 1827 An Introduction to Systematic and Physiological Botany) and “Eaton’s ‘Manual’” (perhaps Amos Eaton’s 1829 Manual of Botany for North America). 149 primer, the poetic anthology, or the volume of moral instruction, for example—Flora’s

Interpreter draws upon so many of these as to make it impossible to classify under any one particular heading. And because it merges these fields so deftly, Flora’s Interpreter resonates with many genres already popular among consumers of printed books, a feature favorable to sales, and to the circulation of Hale’s particular agenda. Assessing the significance of this

Figure 1. Sample page of Flora’s Interpreter with labeled components. interplay requires such a

range of considerations that

it will be helpful first to

build a portrait of the text

in broad strokes, a snapshot

to bear in mind through the

remainder of my analysis.

A glance at a typical page

of Flora’s Interpreter

reveals that each entry

within the text showcases

seven or more components,

drawn from as many

differing discourses (figure

Figure 3.3 Sample page of Flora's Interpreter with labeled components 3.1). These include the common and scientific names of flowers, their Linnaean classifications, their botanical description and provenance, their corresponding meanings or “sentiments,” a brief verse linking the flower to the sentiment (usually by a well-known European author), and a longer poem on 150 the sentiment itself by an American author. Each of these components connects the book to a separate cultural antecedent, but replicates those antecedents in a new context that enables them to make new meaning.

Thus, even as the volume echoes multiple genres it manages simultaneously to celebrate and subvert each one, such that it gains credibility, context, and currency from the many kinds of texts it seems to be, but derives its real power from not actually being any of them. Consider the following characteristics. Most definitely Flora’s Interpreter utilizes classic tropes of the woman’s book—it seizes upon the well-established tradition of pairing women and plants,90 combining it with material characteristics typical of publications engineered for this era’s female readers. Small in size (sixmo, about

5x7″), even its standard-issue yellow paper cover bears a highly decorative engraving of elegant script and a bouquet of flowers (figure 3.2). Many surviving copies sport even more lavish bindings as well as personalized inscriptions, testament to their cachet in the thriving, and often feminized, market for gift books.

Still, especially coming from a woman who would build her career on Figure 3.4 Frist edition standard-issue binding of Flora's Interpreter (1832), with printed paper-board covers. (Library Company of Philadelphia) her savvy for addressing female

90 Many excellent studies on the historical linkage of women and plants have informed my argument. See Fara, George, Shteir, Page and Smith, King, and Lynch. 151 audiences, Hale constructs Flora’s Interpreter in markedly less gender-specific ways than one might expect. The “sentiment of flowers” that became firmly associated with women’s popular culture in the second half of the nineteenth century held a much more gender-neutral appeal in the 1820s and 30s, a fact Hale celebrates by explicitly addressing male and female readers in her preface, and dedicating her book “to the young men and women of America.” She cites male- and female-authored works as essential models and resources for her work, and she anthologizes poetry by both genders.

A similar kind of genre tease appears in Flora’s Interpreter use of scientific taxonomy and its arrangement according to plant species, elements that evoke the botanical manual or

Flora. Distinct from herbals (texts documenting practical and medicinal uses of plants), botanical manuals emerged in the eighteenth century to outline new systems of plant identification and classify individual plant species, for professional audiences and laypeople alike—audiences which, to strengthen my previous point, included both men and women. Flora’s Interpreter opens in this spirit, with a section of “Botanical Explanations” that clarify technical vocabulary for flower parts (calyx, corol, pericarp, etc.) and flower shapes (raceme, panicle, corymb, etc.), and set forth the Linnaean system classes and orders. Despite its boldly scientific start, however, the botanical elements introduced in this introductory section remain rather understated in the rest of the text, Hale’s professed “aim being rather to stimulate curiosity respecting the subject of

Botany, than to impart instruction in the science” (ix). Indeed, on most pages of Flora’s

Interpreter the science occupies so much less space than the sentiment as to appear a perfunctory effort to “mingle a little of the useful even with trifles” (iv). The tendency of these technical botanical references to blend into the background allows other textual elements greater prominence, yet their presence matters immensely nonetheless: in their function as section 152 headings the botanical elements dictate the overall organization of the text and also embrace a worldview that values order and clarity and celebrates the nineteenth-century ideal of modern progress.

The elastic push-and-pull of genre quotation occurs again in Flora’s Interpreter’s gesture toward the illustrated florilegium,91 a form that adds to the sense of technical rigor in the volume but tempers its starkness through beauty.

Botanical illustration grew immensely both in scientific importance and general popularity during this period, when colonial exploration and advances in botanical science coincided with innovations in printing technology that allowed for mass production of images.

Detailed renderings of plants had significant scientific value as they conveyed and clarified vital information far more effectively than words, but they also had artistic consequence and could

Figure 3.5 Georg Dionysius Ehret, "American Turk’s-cap lily" c.1740s. be stunningly beautiful (figure 3.3). By (Victoria and Albert Museum)

91 The term “florilegium” is used differently by different historians; Gill Saunders uses it to describe “characteristically seventeenth-century production[s]” that had no scientific purpose or intent to analyze, but instead catalogued the valuable plants cultivated in the gardens of wealthy patrons (41, 49). Jack Kramer, however, identifies Georg Dionysius Ehret’s Hortus Clifortianus of 1737 as the first “manor-house-library flower book,” one which contributed to a “great demand for the beautifully crafted book, especially the botanical volume, which could be left on a library table” (34). Certainly, as botanical exploration fueled development of the science in the eighteenth century, the nature and use of plant-illustration evolved—but standards for beautiful as well as useful plant-images remained high.

153 the mid-eighteenth century lavish florilegiums, whether hand-painted, printed, or both, were much sought after for home display (at least by those who could afford them) and by the mid- nineteenth century publishers enthusiastically marketed good-quality colored botanical prints to the middle class as well.92 Even books not dependent on images for clarification increasingly touted their number of colored plates,93 which consumers valued then, and today, as decorative objects and as patterns for their own artistic expression in drawing, painting, and embroidery.

As it does with the botanical manual, Flora’s Interpreter clearly seizes upon elements of the florilegium to amplify the text’s potential resonance, at least to a point. It contains only two color plates: a frontispiece featuring a mixed bouquet and a plate inserted in the middle featuring three roses. These two plates bear no obvious relationship to the actual text as they do not illustrate any particular passage or concept, but they do bear the stamp “Eng’d for Flora’s

Interpreter,” thus emphasizing their intentional integration into the overall project. Interestingly, though images became cheaper to produce over the text’s 30-year lifespan, only one more plate

(a decorative title page) was ever added, and only for a brief time.94 Such a consistently spare ratio of plates to text suggests, on the one hand, publishers’ desire to maximize profit through only a modest investment in production value. On the other hand, though, including the images

92 Jane Webb Loudon’s series The Ladies’ Flower Garden offers an insight into the schemes publishers adopted for making such illustrations affordable; rather than giving images of one plant species at a time, its prints feature bouquets of related species, as I discuss in Chapter 1. 93 Twamley published numerous books of original drawings and poetry; The Romance of Nature, or The Flower Seasons Illustrated (1839) perhaps gives the clearest idea of the kind of image-heavy illustrated flower-book that might have circulated in the same market with Flora’s Interpreter. The anonymously published Flora and Thalia (1835) is a useful example of a modest poetry collection heavy with colored plates. 94 The 11th edition from 1842 features the same lithographed and hand-painted plates as the first edition, the lithograph showing definite wear (black lines barely visible). The 1848 edition features a new frontispiece, but the same second plate of roses, both chromolithographed. In the 1850 edition the roses have become the frontispiece, a new image has replaced the second plate, and a decorative title page has been added. An 1853 edition features the same plate designs, but no decorative title page. An 1865 edition features the same frontispiece as the 1848 edition and same middle plate as the 1853 edition, with no decorative title page. 154 links the work to a rich and specific textual history and to a particular kind of book use; it expands potential applications of the text well beyond reading.

In a similar vein, Flora’s Interpreter (as its title suggests) most overtly embraces the kind of book use associated with a dictionary of flower language, a genre first popularized in 1819 with Charlotte La Tour’s Le Langage des Fleurs, yet Hale pulls this rug out from under her readers too, not because the book doesn’t deliver a code to the meanings of flowers (it does), but because this code occupies an auxiliary rather than primary role. As stated earlier, Hale’s wholesale quotation of Wirt’s plant meanings has led to some of the harshest indictments of

Flora’s Interpreter, judgments that might be justified if building fluency in the Language of

Flowers were Hale’s main objective. But it is not: the overall organization and distribution of materials in each entry suggests that the flower definitions perform a largely structural function—without the meanings, there would be no link between the flowers and the American- authored poems, because more often than not these poems have little to do with flowers. Of course, evaluating flower language as merely mechanical cannot fully account for its role in

Hale’s agenda, since as we will see, the history and invention of that system serves national poetry in a host of subtler ways. Nevertheless, from the outset the arrangement signals a crucial point: for Hale at least, the interpretive acts that prove of greatest significance in her text pertain to something other than plants.

This is perhaps why, then, of all genres established at the time of its publication, Flora’s

Interpreter bears most actual resemblance to the poetic miscellany, an assortment of poems by many authors, collected in a single volume. Lyric poetry, not plant identification or meaning, occupies the greatest amount of space and holds the position of highest authority in the text. It is also the concept around which all the other ideological elements cohere: the words anthology and 155 florilegium both literally translate to a “gathering of flowers,” and from the Middle Ages onward collected writings, especially poems, took on this figurative significance.95 Hale was not the first to make the flower-poetry association more literal,96 but unlike her predecessors who sought for poems specifically about plants, she broadens the focus by collecting poems about plants’ sentiments. Hale argues that since “Flowers seem intended naturally to represent pure, tender, and devoted thoughts and feelings,” and since “the expression of these feelings has been, in all ages, the province of poetry, […] to the poets we must refer, in order to settle the philology of flowers” (iii). By prompting the expression of feeling, she suggests, flowers bring writers of all creeds and nationalities into natural fellowship—a perfect model for uniting diverse populations into a sense of community.

Yet designating Flora’s Interpreter a miscellany must acknowledge certain key qualifications. Although the poetry takes precedence in Flora’s Interpreter, the text differs significantly from most miscellanies of the eighteenth century and from nineteenth-century counterparts such as the literary annual in its precise orientation rather than indiscriminate array.

As Andrew Piper points out, more typical miscellanies display an unruly mingling of high, low, and even outlandish components through which the reader herself might forge her own connections (122); as such, they facilitate a highly democratic mode of reading. By contrast,

Flora’s Interpreter displays a calculated design that extends from the repeated template of each entry into the text’s three separate indexes: one of flower names, one of flower meanings, and one of American authors. This organizational strategy highlights the book’s national

95 The Digital Miscellanies Index tracks over a thousand miscellanies published in Britain between 1700 and 1800, which reflect the tastes of both very high and very low culture. Many feature titles that play on the notion of gathered flowers (wreaths, garlands, bouquets, nosegays), though almost none before the 1820s have anything to do with actual plants.

156 significance, but also governs readers’ movement through the text in a kind of benevolent dictatorship.

Meticulous arrangement and thematic unity notwithstanding, however, the text performs similar social work to the miscellany in that it creates a space of common inheritance and ownership, a kind of literary public works.97 Hale intended her mixture of textual elements to validate and promote the voices of her fellow Americans, and her preface emphasizes their participation and joint emotional stake in the effort. “I hope the endeavor to select […] some of the finest specimens of American poetry […] will be acceptable to our community,” she wrote—

“if we shelter and cherish our flowers, they will soon beautify our republic” (iv). The success of

Flora’s Interpreter’s many editions, and the frequency with which readers imitated it with similar publications of their own, suggests that feelings of communal ownership and contribution could and did attach even to highly-organized, carefully-managed texts.

Hale’s ability to create this sense of sharing and collectivity rests at least partly in her particular editorial ethos, a persona that took on authority not as a dispassionate intellectual but as a woman of the people; however, I submit that Flora’s Interpreter’s remarkable power to sustain that interconnection and extend it so effectively across cultures and generations centers in its many acts of generic replication and (as the remainder of this chapter will show) in the further cultural replications that these multiple genres allow. Put another way, Flora’s Interpreter draws upon the structures of meaning already present in familiar objects and systems, and through remixing them, endows them with fresh significance. Woman’s book, botanical manual, illustrated florilegium, floral dictionary, poetic miscellany—Flora’s Interpreter is all of these and none of them, its composition engaging readers constantly with the text’s intermediality, its

97 Piper argues that miscellanies particularly respond to “a social need to have literature in common” (127). 157 own potential alterities.98 In refusing to homogenize its antecedents, Flora’s Interpreter keeps their otherness dynamically in play, a crucial move for crafting a brand of nationalism defined not in opposition to the other, but as a replication of it, a new generation.

Enlisting botany in the service of nationalism

Bearing in mind the numerous genres, discourses, and signifiers at work in the text, we can now examine in detail their implications. First, let us consider the plants. Far more than just a clever twist on the anthology’s “gathering of flowers,” this blending of poetry with plants harnesses both the logic of science and the mystique of orientalism, two of the most effective forces of ideological conquest to emerge from the colonial period. Both Linnaean classifications and the Language of Flowers help to clear space for American culture by serving as useful erasers:99 while effacing regionally diverse meanings of plants, they likewise obscure associations that might tie them too closely to other places or traditions.100 At the same time, plants provide a fresh context for American poetry while securing it to two venerable institutions: one the symbol of enlightenment, modernity, progress, and the future; the other the quintessence of romance, timelessness, and a storied (if fictional) past.

From at least the seventeenth century, botanical interests often led state interests in exploring and acquiring new territories, as empires sought to bring the production of important natural resources within their own borders.101 Essential to human survival and industry, plants

98 Piper describes a “fundamental intermediality [sic] of literary culture around 1800,” in which editors, and the work of editors, embodied “a larger negotiation with historical, linguistic, generic, and medial alterity” (87). 99 Michael Warner and Elizabeth Dillon have both commented on the “erasures” that necessarily took place before American culture could form (see Dillon 98). 100 Consider Anna Letitia Barbauld’s poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, which envisions an English afterlife in America so powerful that people looking at the Mississippi river would effectively see the Thames, a point I discuss in Chapter 5. 101 For the importance of botany to political projects see Schiebinger, and for its impact on perceptions of self and society, see King and Miller. 158 undergo particularly powerful entextualization and become integral, even foundational, to building shared systems of meaning. The circulation of non-native plants into new territories thus had serious implications for the formation of cultural identities. As the processes of botanical collecting, trading, acclimatizing and propagation loosened plants from their local ideological frameworks, not only did the plants themselves acquire new meaning but the cultures built around them shifted too. Indigenous peoples, immigrants, creoles, and denizens of the metropole all had to grapple with new interpretive possibilities for their own familiar plants and reorient themselves to the sudden abundance of foreign ones.

From an imperial perspective, two structures proved enduringly valuable for managing this global vegetal shakeup. At the material level was the botanical garden. While serving as useful laboratories for the study of various species, these gardens potently symbolized the empire’s power and extension. In the metropole such gardens seemed to encapsulate the whole world in miniature, neatly rendering it both comprehensible and possessable.102 Colonial botanical gardens meanwhile served as laboratories for the study of local species deemed most valuable or curious;103 without moving them outside their own climates, these gardens radically recontextualized native plants by relocating them from the “wild” into the structures of imperial rule and understanding.

With its carefully-organized miscellaneity Flora’s Interpreter functions much like a botanical garden, and Hale herself as the intrepid and patriotic botanist collecting choice pieces

102 Chelsea Physic Garden and Oxford Botanic Garden are both prime examples of seventeenth-century English botanical gardens. Large-scale iron and glass greenhouses, such as the palm house at Kew, were not constructed until the mid-nineteenth century, but smaller hothouses were in use in England from at least the seventeenth century, to shelter imported “exotics.” Gardens featuring global specimens existed in the U.S. as well, notably John Bartram’s garden in Philadelphia, founded ca. 1728. 103 Schiebinger notes that Europeans had founded a network of sixteen hundred botanical gardens worldwide by the end of the eighteenth century; these “were not merely idyllic bits of green intended to delight city dwellers, but experimental stations for agriculture and way stations for plant acclimatization for domestic and global trade, rare medicaments, and cash crops” (11). 159 of American poetry. In the spirit of her bioprospecting predecessors she gathers these

“specimens” into one tidy place, officially within national parameters, for shelter and study and even possible propagation and export. Significantly, while the text’s prominently featured poems are of emphatically American provenance, the plants attached to them come from all over the world. Overall the text thus resembles both a colonial garden focused on local specimens, and a metropolitan garden proudly displaying global ones. The international plants provide a sense of status and sophistication, a suggestion of American power, while the poems showcase the nation’s centrality to her project—its potentially vast cultural resources and influence. Hale specifies each plant’s location of origin because “a knowledge of the locality of the plant would,

I thought, assist us to judge somewhat of its character and adaptation to our gardens and greenhouses” (iii). Her argument implies that these plants either had been or could be cultivated in American soil; but regardless of whether that actually came to pass, she had already naturalized them through their attachment to American sentiment.

What botanical gardens accomplished on a physical plane (that is, the placement of plants within specific imperial or national frameworks), the Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature carried out on an ideological one. By replacing the many and varied indigenous names of each plant with a Latin genus x species designation, it brought much-needed clarity and coordination to worldwide botanical research; meanwhile, it effectively stripped away previous valences immanent in indigenous names—medicinal application, geographical distribution, or cultural significance, for example—and reordered the plant world according to European paradigms

(Schiebinger 197). Many plants would be named after prominent male botanists, thus

“embed[ding] into botanical nomenclature a particular historiography […] celebrating the deeds of great European men” (Schiebinger 198). The clinical efficiency and cultural power provided 160 through binomial nomenclature’s homogenizing influence therefore came at a price: a loss of local resonance and geospecific orientation in general, and a sort of emotional void for those either not invested in, or directly excluded from, the system, a topic I will discuss further in

Chapter 5. Hale’s blending of botany with other discourses in Flora’s Interpreter suggests she was well aware of the classification system’s culturally decontextualizing effects, but so too were a number of contemporary American botanists, particularly those interested in bringing botanical science into national rather than imperial service. The strategies these individuals employed to ameliorate the system’s shortcomings from within the professional field of botany help us better understand the originality of Hale’s calculated deployment botanical tropes outside that field, and I now turn to two of these works, Jacob Bigelow’s Florula Bostoniensis (1814) and William

P.C. Barton’s A Flora of North America (1821-23), to highlight the crisis of location, identity, and ownership that scientific botany at once brought about and endeavored to solve.

Botanists locating place in plants

First among these writers’ strategies to restore social and national valence to botanical science, it seems, is an effort to preserve or rehabilitate plant species’ connection to place.

Numerous botanical publications from this period foreground the territorial range of plants through profiles of geographic regions both large and small; such profiling makes logistical sense since botanists could not be everywhere at once and focusing on one particular area provided plenty of material to catalogue and study. Bigelow, a Harvard professor of Botany, published Florula Bostoniensis to document the plants within a ten-mile radius of Boston and to combat “the great deficiency of books relating to American plants, and […] the difficulty of obtaining foreign works of a character suited to supply this deficiency” (3). Barton, a professor of Botany at the University of Pennsylvania, published A Flora of North America (1821-1823) 161 for similar reasons, lamenting that “North American Botany has hitherto owed its greatest accessions to the learning and enterprize[sic] of foreign botanists” to whom “unhappily we have looked too implicitly, for that improvement in its character and interests” (iii). Both books seek to document a more complete picture of the American landscape for an American audience, but they also betray an anxiety about who has the right or responsibility to study and write about that landscape, and keen awareness of the structures of power and authority that support and validate such study, and for whose benefit.

Bigelow and Barton trained under the same professor of medical botany at the University of Pennsylvania (though not at the same time),104 but similarities in their education and certain opinions notwithstanding , their volumes vary as much in style as they do in scope, and offer quite different solutions to the problems outlined above. Bigelow seems to place his faith in the traditional scientific institution, and labors to address troubling issues through official channels.

Of the two works, his Florula Bostoniensis profiles a much smaller area but is undeniably the denser text, a technical volume written expressly for Bigelow’s students and published by the

Harvard University Press (an official arm of the university since 1802, with specific regulations governing the kinds of texts it could print, and for whom [Wolfe 27-28]). Its 400+ quarto pages omit images entirely, and instead offer extensive and detailed technical descriptions of Boston’s flora. To the scholarly authority evident in the volume’s organization Bigelow’s byline adds a number of institutional endorsements: Harvard’s of course, but also the Linnaean Societies of

London and Paris, showing deference to Europe as the center of scientific authority. Like Barton,

Bigelow notes a dearth of works on American botany published in America, but also expresses appreciation for gradual improvements in this area: the 1824 edition of his book acknowledges

104 Benjamin Smith Barton, William’s uncle. See further discussion in Chapter 4. 162 that “the publications of Muhlenburg, Pursh, Elliott, Nuttall, Eaton, and Torrey, with other works of a more limited character, have certainly contributed much to fill the void which existed in

American botany ten years ago” (3). Though Bigelow does not specify this in his text, all of these botanists but Pursh were either American-born, American-educated, or settled permanently in the United States, and even Pursh spent many years in the United States and eventually died in

Canada. In other words, Bigelow hints at his desire to see Americans produce works of great scientific worth, but prefers to let the publications, rather than the authors’ identities, do the talking.

In contrast to Florula Bostoniensis, Barton’s Flora of North America overlays its scientific objectivity with a tone of unmistakable patriotism, and derives its authority from both.

Addressing his three-volume work to a public rather than professional audience, Barton lists his own military affiliation (M.D. U.S.N.) alongside his academic one, and dedicates each volume to a public figure (U.S. President James Monroe, publisher and member of the American

Philosophical Society Mathew Carey, and U.S. Navy Secretary Samuel L. Southard). The book’s impressive folio pages boast numerous full-color illustrations, but shorter descriptions and comparatively fewer plants. More than a comprehensive encyclopedia of North American vegetation, Barton offers a series of snapshots: short but compelling entries meant more to draw readers in than to teach them all it was possible to know.

But draw them in to what, exactly? Barton’s soaring preface – the “commencement of an extensive national production” (dedication) – at times reads more like a manifesto than a treatise.

Like Bigelow, he desired better and more widely available information on American plants, but not content with scientific improvement in general, Barton paints it a matter of urgent national interest that Americans themselves perform this work: “Can any American examine the splendid 163 and useful work of the younger Michaux, on our forest trees, without a pang of mortifying regret, that the author of such a production was not an American?” (viii). The nation could not, he argues, fully realize its own unique identity until the government and the people assiduously pursued the charge to study, document, develop, and utilize the country’s vast resources, both natural and intellectual:

That spirit of independence […] which forms the basis of character in a true American,

has discovered its determination to emancipate itself from scientific subjugation to

foreign countries. It has striven, and continues to strive, to form for itself a scientific and

literary character, as it has long since established one for national glory. The foundation

of a national temple of learning and science, is already laid by our venerable fathers—the

literary genius of our country is no longer questioned. In its native strength it is ample

and ready to be called into requisition, while a greater degree of liberality in education

would render it operative and efficient. The materials are furnished by the physical and

moral aspect of our interesting country. The genial influence alone of national

encouragement and protection is wanting, to complete in the approaching half century, a

superstructure at once durable and gigantic. (v-vi)

This passage makes clear that Barton viewed knowledge of American plant life not as an end in itself, but as a crucial means of solidifying American “character” or “genius,” and making it

“operative and efficient.” His vision of a “durable and gigantic superstructure” suggests something more than just a stable government or even a partnership between government and educational institutions—perhaps something more like an inexorable cultural influence resulting from a synergy of economic, political, intellectual, and artistic power. In other words, something more like a fully-fledged Nation. 164

The development of this superstructure, Barton argues, would require significant investment by both individuals and government. Acknowledging the economic depression afflicting the United States at the time he nevertheless called for greater government support and sponsorship of scientific exploration, positing that these would ultimately reveal a means of deliverance from financial difficulty. He applauds the practice of “attaching scientific departments to military embassies,” which he believed would lead to “a correct knowledge of the country” and prove “of high value to our national interests” (vii). But perhaps most significantly,

Barton conflates science and literature, promoting their joint role in bringing about true and independent American greatness. Government sponsorship and military support would offer a

“spirit of encouragement” through which

[…] the native genius of our country can expand her wings, and, soaring over its

extensive and fruitful regions, return loaded with literary and scientific treasure. Hence

Americans will dwell with pride on the rising literary fame of their extensive and happy

country. They can indulge the fond anticipation, that its scientific greatness may become

the brightest charge on the escutcheon of its heraldric emblazonment. (vii)

In both this and the previous passage, it is difficult always to discern when science and literature function as separate entities, or as partners, or as stepping-stones, or as one and the same thing.

Barton innovatively melds these two at a time when the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed increasing separation of disciplines. Flower books (as well as more traditional literary forms like novels and poems) of course continued to utilize and explore scientific concepts, but as Bigelow’s Florula Bostoniensis attests, the works of highest scientific merit often adopted such a clinical tone as to render them antithetical to creative or expressive literature. Barton resists this separation, instead painting science and literature as complementary forces equally 165 necessary to the formation of culture. Yet even his argument is largely confined to theoretical discussion in the preface, as the rest of the book focuses on botanical description with only occasional historical anecdote.

Both Bigelow and Barton’s volumes thus demonstrate how the scientific process of cataloguing a region’s plants helped create a sense of place and, by extension, of ownership and identity. But, in varying degrees, they also betray the system’s most debilitating chronic affliction: emotional sterility. Even as binomial nomenclature became the botanist’s lingua franca and was promoted by advocates as passionate as Barton (who himself reached outside of science proper for the tools to do so), it regularly alienated laypeople who found it bewildering, clunky, excessively technical, and utterly uninspiring. Both fiction and prose writers throughout the nineteenth century regularly critiqued its lifelessness or remarked on its adverse effects. As discussed in Chapter 1, the character Will Wilson in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) mocks its cultural elitism (206). Jane Webb Loudon recorded optimistically in 1844 that “the prejudice against botanical names is every day declining, from the number of beautiful plants exhibited at Flower Shows which have no English appellations” (introduction). But in 1850

Susan Fenimore Cooper, as I discuss in Chapter 5, railed against it anew, claiming that “if we wish that American poets should sing our native flowers as sweetly and simply as the daisy, […] we must look to it that they have pleasing names” (87). Even Bigelow himself admitted that the lexicon could get too detailed for its own good, as increasingly fine distinctions between species led to a “continually shifting nomenclature of plants […] and the discouraging necessity which it imposes on students of the science, to unlearn continually what they have acquired” (4). In short, botanical terminology presented terms useful for understanding the world, but only in one 166 particular dimension, and only to a small and highly trained group of people—terms, in other words, especially ripe for new entextualization.

Hale locating place in poetry

In Flora’s Interpreter Hale seizes the opportunity to endow a well-established but affectively impoverished system with fresh meaning, and she does so by inverting the structure of a scientific botanical Flora—that is, she conjures the volume’s sense of place from America’s poetry rather than its plants. The flowers Hale does include are rendered as literary as possible, not only through the poetical excerpts attached to them, but also through Hale’s decision to classify them according to the Linnaean system rather than the “Natural System” increasingly preferred by contemporary scientists: “I found that Howitt, in his “Book of the Seasons,” retains the Linnaean classification,” she explains—“it was the one to which [Erasmus] Darwin adhered in his “Loves of Plants”—it is therefore most poetical” (v). Simply put, in Flora’s Interpreter what matters most is not where a plant comes from, but whether an American writer had composed verse that could somehow attach to it.

Certainly, freeing “the idioms of America” from American landscapes had some averse long-term consequences,105 but in 1832 it possessed numerous advantages. Studies of the antebellum period routinely emphasize the cultural divisions resulting from America’s various agricultural economies; a focus on plant species too closely associated with specific regions could prove polarizing. Perhaps more importantly, though, most Americans simply felt no more attachment to the majority of American plants than to global species, and perhaps even regarded them as less poignant, interesting or important. Susan Fenimore Cooper, for example, notes that

105 As I will discuss in Chapter 5, the separation of American identity from its landscapes in part contributed to the large-scale environmental exploitation connected to the idea of taming the American wilderness. Passages from the work of Susan Fenimore Cooper suggest that Americans not bonded to American landscapes often did not closely observe them or understand them, and felt little need to preserve them. 167 even farming families who had lived in America for generations often did not know the native flowers of their regions (82-83).

Moreover, global plants adapted to American soil (or American interpretation) served as useful metaphors for American society itself. To be American, at least in Hale’s estimation,106 was to experience transplantation, and she intended to establish such transplants in a viable new social ecology. In choosing to unite her audience around an “American” reading of nature rather than around American nature itself, Hale builds her version of national identity not on a location or even culture of origin, but on the power to bloom where it is planted. Such an approach stands in marked contrast to the work of many other Romantic-era editors consumed with origins (Piper names several, including Walter Scott), who labored to recover and document a “vernacular literary past,” and whose printed collections of manuscript and oral forms like ballads, folk songs, fairy tales, and myths “played an integral role in producing the creative heritage upon which the imagined communities of emerging European nation states were to be based” (Piper

85). Hale had practical reasons for her choice, of course: any coherent, white vernacular literary past(s) that had managed to emerge in the United States by the 1830s would still have been notably regional, and tracking and documenting these would likely pose particular challenges to a widowed woman editor who faced certain travel restrictions and limited institutional access.

More importantly, though, Hale’s approach conveys a distinct message of its own, that the formation of American literary identity was in progress and ongoing, and that it need not conform to traditional parameters of shared landscape or history.

106 See the discussion of Stein and Kaplan in the next paragraph. Also, as Ed White points out, the very term “nation” as used in the U.S. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries described many cultural/political entities, specifically tribes of Native Americans. Throughout her career Hale appears still to regard these different ethnic groups as separate nations from the white settlers of America. 168

Indeed, the fact that a number of Hale’s other projects and publications did invest profoundly in American landscapes and origin stories makes their absence in Flora’s Interpreter

(as well as the book’s enduring popularity) all the more significant. Jordan Stein and Amy

Kaplan rightly point out that Hale’s version of American nationhood was a white one; she advocated for the resettlement of all Africans (even American-born ones) in Liberia, and her version of the Thanksgiving story did not include Native Americans. However, I would suggest that Hale’s exclusion of specifically American origin stories and botanical examples suggests another interpretation: that her combination of international botanicals and American

“sentiments” argues for an Americanness centered neither in location nor inheritance but rather in choice and manner of expression. The template of national identity set up in Flora’s

Interpreter thus provided a remarkably accessible rallying point for diverse creole and immigrant populations. Hale’s strategy also allows for their adopted identity’s expansion and evolution, for where geographic locations may have definite boundaries, the power of people to express feelings about the world does not. And since the actual borders of the United States were in major flux at this time, it would be important for Hale to define American culture and voice expansively, leaving the door open to accommodate new territories and hordes of new settlers with all of their previous origins. Although it was premised on the exclusion of Africans and the disregard of Native Americans, Flora’s Interpreter uses global plants, Linnaean botany, and self- identified American writers reflecting on an enormous range of human feelings, to craft a picture of American identity that manages to capture both the emerging culture’s energy and optimism and the sense that this nation was already comfortable in its skin and confident of its place in the world. 169

Invoking and Inventing a History through “Oriental” flower language

Following similar logic to her use of plants and botany, Hale’s deployment of the

Language of Flowers gives an American voice to a supposedly universal tradition. Many

Romantic writers had previously explored the idea of flowers’ eloquence in general terms,107 but in the 1820s and ‘30s a new trend emerged for systematically assigning “sentiments” in a stable, readable code to particular plants. Yet while this language, like botanical nomenclature, is a modern Western invention, it performs very different work: where botany could seemingly erase a plant’s cultural past with one fell swoop, flower language offered reassurance that it was still there.

Supposedly taken from, as Hale explains, “poets and writers on Eastern manners, where flowers are, even now, the messengers of the heart” (i), the Language of Flowers constructs a mythology of timelessness, cosmic communion, and emotional intuition that matters far more than its accompanying lexicon of plant-meanings. The system likely owes its initial European conception to the writings of eighteenth-century travelers to the Middle East, in particular to

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (published posthumously in 1763) and

Seigneur Aubry de la Mottraye’s Voyages […] en Europe, en Asie, at en Afrique (1727).

Montagu’s blithe documentation of a “Turkish love-letter,” its message relayed through a series of coded objects (not necessarily flowers) tied up in a handkerchief, considerably romanticizes and misrepresents the custom of sélam, a simple rhyming game played among women in a harem;108 nevertheless the concept of communicating through things rather than words

107 Elizabeth Kent, for example, believed that all poetry ever written about flowers captured this language. She wrote, “and flowers do speak a language! A clear and intelligible language. Ask […] any of the poets, ancient or modern” (Flora Domestica xxi). 108 Seaton explains in great detail the Turkish origins of flower language, its subsequent historical development, and the debates concerning it. See Chapter IV of The Language of Flowers, a History. According to an 1809 essay by 170 immediately captivated public imagination. Through the end of the eighteenth century it lived on in various Oriental tales (usually tales of courtship), showing more and more preference for flowers as the encoded objects. In 1819 it blossomed fully into a floral dictionary and “grammar” in Charlotte de la Tour’s Le Langage des Fleurs, and inspired a passionate following throughout

Europe and the United States that would last the entire century.

For many of its devotees, the mythology of Eastern flower language extended critical relief from the suffocating vacuum of botanized plants’ empty future, renewing a vital sense of their social significance and rehabilitating their power to accumulate meaning among new groups of people. The effect was so powerful that, as I noted in Chapter 2, claims of the system’s universality only grew stronger with passing decades, despite unmistakable indications of its recent development. Hale drew on Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary (1829) as a primary source of flower meanings, and in her preface Wirt straightforwardly explains her own process of researching floral significations, fully admitting that she assigned most of the meanings herself:

It is upon the hint suggested by this oriental custom, and for the purpose of trying, as a

matter of curiosity, how far this emblematic language could be carried, that the following

collection has been made. […] Pity it is that we have no key to this mystic language of

the east. Very few of their emblems have reached us. So far as they are known, they have

been adopted in this collection. A few others have been borrowed from books and

manuscripts. To supply the residue, which constitutes the far greater number […], has

been the chief amusement out of which this petit jeu has grown. (3)

Wirt’s honesty notwithstanding, in The Language of Flowers Poetically Expressed (1847) John

Stowell Adams argues that “in Eastern lands, flowers have a language which all understand. It is

German Orientalist Joseph Hammer-Purgstall, sélam is neither a language of flowers nor a secret language of lovers, but simply a game that uses well-known sayings that rhyme with the names of various objects (62-63). 171 that ‘still small voice’ which is powerful on account of its silence” (4). Henrietta Dumont’s volume The Floral Offering (1856) similarly claims that “in the East the language of flowers has been universally understood and applied ‘time out of mind’” (6). The persistence of such fervent assertions in the face of very little supporting evidence suggests that during this period the fiction of Eastern flower language performed a function at least as important as that of the fact.

Within the nationalist project of Flora’s Interpreter, flower language supplied American poetry with the aura and allure of ancient history, even while allowing for that history’s invention. Such access to a malleable and artificial antiquity greatly assisted the formation of national culture, which required

“actively forgetting that white

Americans were, themselves, creoles rather than natives of

America” (Dillon 98). The realities of daily life in the early nineteenth century, fraught with debates over slavery and clashes between numerous native and non- native ethnic groups, consistently presented white Americans with their colonialist origins. The

Language of Flowers thus provided writers with a welcome

alternative historical context, one Figure 3.6 Sample of Flora's Interpreter's Index of Interpretations. (Google). 172 equally deep but sufficiently calming—some might say mystifying—apparently unburdened and safely distanced from controversy. The nearly two hundred sentiments featured in Flora’s

Interpreter focus solely on the broadest aspects of human experience: concepts like “Hope,”

“Uncertainty,” or even “Unpatronized Merit” (figure 3.4). Only two sentiments (Patriotism and

War) venture near sociopolitical strife, and as I discuss in the next section even these are notably subdued. Such universal ideas lend the text a reassuring sense of stability and timelessness, important counterbalances to the usual characterization of Americans as revolutionaries or as vulgar nouveau-Europeans. Through its participation in this supposedly enduring and collective tradition, American culture assumed a measure of romance, refinement, and resilience.

At the same time that it afforded a useful ersatz-history, the orientalist nature of flower- language fueled the project of domestication, one aspect of which Amy Kaplan has defined as the labor of “generat[ing] notions of the foreign against which the nation can be imagined as home” (582). Key to this process of domestication is the partnership of men and women, and, unlike scientific botanical discourse whose increasing technicality and professionalization often worked to exclude women from official institutions of meaning-making, the Language of

Flowers opened a key channel for their involvement.109 Flora’s Interpreter reveals an interesting measure of balance between these endeavors, suggesting they are not always mutually exclusive.

Where binomial nomenclature replaced plants’ previous cultural valences (which Schiebinger argues had often been the province of women) with the names of European men, flower- sentiment supplied plants anew with a social use that opened up possibilities for female

109 Hale’s championing of flower language thus sheds new light on her feminism, which historians have generally found difficult to classify since she preached domestic virtue and the language of separate spheres to women, even while developing her own dynamic and very public professional life.109 Biographer Ruth Finley argues that “Hale, above all other women of her time, speeded the thought and progress of her sex in this country” (23), but Nicole Tonkhovich reminds us that Hale “maintained the appearance of deference to masculine power throughout her long life, a fiction that masked her own intervention in and manipulation of public opinion” (32). 173 communication, challenging the conventional restrictions levied on it. It empowered a plant- culture able to characterize and include (white) women not just as sexed female bodies or beautiful flowers, but as thinking, feeling, speaking persons.

The Language of Flowers exerts its domesticating power particularly on the notorious sexuality of Linnaean botany, which classified species according to their flowers’ number of male stamens and female pistils, and although Linnaeus described these clustered organs as utterly wholesome “marriages,” much of Europe found the blatant sexuality (especially of highly unconventional polyamorous groupings110) shockingly provocative, even pornographic.111 Some authors writing for women and children adopted sanitized versions of Linnaean classification, but the problem never really resolved until the system itself gave way in popularity to the Natural

System of Jussieu.112 Hale tones down the Linnaean sexuality in Flora’s Interpreter partly by placing greater emphasis on the floral sentiments, and partly by describing plants’ reproductive organs in non-gendered physiological terms; stamens are “the mealy or glutinous knobs, generally on the end of slender filaments,” and pistils “the central organ of a flower, or properly speaking, flower and fruit” (vii). Though Hale does list the Linnaean classes and orders

(monogynia, diandria, etc.), she leaves these terms in Latin with no translation. Floral sentiment focused on the emotional experience of life, and more specifically of love, and so provided a vital counterbalance to the Linnaean system’s tendency toward sexual innuendo, a shift that,

110 These group “marriages” gained even more notoriety when brought vividly to life in Erasmus Darwin’s poem The Loves of Plants (1791). 111 Many scholars have written about Linnaean sexuality and the particular problems it caused for women’s involvement in botanical study; see Fara, George, Shteir, Page and Smith, Lynch, and King. 112 Antoine Laurent de Jussieu first published on his Natural System in 1789, but it took decades to gain wide public acceptance. Jane Loudon wrote in 1846, “I must confess nothing would give me more pleasure than to see botany commonly taught in girls’ schools, as French and music are at present; and I think it more than probable that in another generation it will be so—as, though the Linnaean system was unfit for females, there is nothing objectionable in the Natural Arrangement” (see Introduction to LFG, n.p.). 174 judging from its popularity among readers was not just more “appropriate” according to nineteenth-century sensibilities, but genuinely appealing.

Importantly, the layering of flower language over Linnaean botany does not obscure either system’s inherent sexuality so much as discipline it, “regulat[ing] the traces of the savage within itself” (Kaplan 582). For example, while the connection between flower language and orientalist romance evokes fantasies of forbidden love (between a girl in a harem and a lover outside, as told in the accounts of both Montagu and Mottraye [Seaton 62]), it also serves to discourage rather than idealize promiscuity. The female who escapes a seraglio to be with her one true love charts a course from forced licentiousness to free choice, just as flower language more broadly encodes the longing for durable, self-directed, monogamous unions as opposed to the destabilizing possibilities of group sex (whether in a harem or in a flower). At the same time, where sexuality associated with the decadence of Orientalism often carried with it a “fiction of sterility,” an implicit message that “for all of the sexual fecundity of the tropical geography and the tropical body, sanctioned reproduction cannot occur at this site” (Dillon 87),113 Linnaean botany offers a corrective first by focusing so intensely on flowers as sites of reproduction and second by legitimizing that function in terms of “marriage.”114 Thus flower language and

Linnaean botany round out and regulate each other, retaining the vital forces of sex and reproduction but privileging their use within the bounds of intimate monogamous relationships sanctioned by official social institutions.

113 Dillon’s passage describes accounts of the West Indies (Saint Domingue in particular) rather than the East; I am thus using the term “orientalism” broadly here, following Edward Said’s example in Chapter 2 of Orientalism, which uses the term as a homogenous referent to the Other. White also notes the emergence of “an Hispanism analogous in ways to European Orientalism” in American literature of the 1820s (78). 114 King notes that “the fact that the flower was understood to be the sexual organ of the plant, as well as the site of the plant’s marriage, created […] a ‘botanical vernacular,’” (24) an “explicit socio-sexual analogy between humans and plants” (20) that brought botanical discourse into descriptions and discussions of human courtship, marriage, and sex. 175

The dynamic reciprocation at work between botany and flower language within Flora’s

Interpreter makes them more than just alternatives of each other; more accurately they function as companions, as mates. Their union in the text provides each discourse with a new interpretive context that allows it to create new meaning, setting up a sort of yin-and-yang completeness that harnesses opposing energies: masculine and feminine, scientific and sentimental, local and cosmopolitan, modern and timeless, individual and universal. As each system checks the other’s excesses, both become more stable and more fertile in their ability to inspire and circulate aspects of American identity and idioms of its expression.

Using British verse to launch American poetry

Of all elements in Flora’s Interpreter, though, the one seemingly most at odds with the project of American nationalism is the presence of British and European verse. In keeping with

Flora’s Interpreter’s careful organization, these verses appear in the same position and ostensibly serve the same function each time: to substantiate the link between each flower and its meaning (figure 1). Hale’s preface lays bare this structural relationship, explaining “The authorities for the signification of each flower are usually from European writers, […] but in the sentiment which the flower […] is intended to convey, I have preferred, exclusively, extracts from American poets” (iv). Charged with the burden of proof, the European verses all contain direct references to their respective plants, leaving American poems free to meditate solely on the sentiments—far more prolific territory.

More than just facilitating a wide topical reach, though, the juxtaposition of British and

American verses sets up an active reciprocation of authority essential to the collection’s success, one that at that moment would have been impossible through American verse alone. American poets writing and publishing prior to 1832 had done so primarily as satellites to a European 176 conversation. Hale claims that only one publication considering their work collectively as

Americans had ever appeared before hers: George B. Cheever’s American Common-place Book of Poetry (1831). Yet Cheever focused only on religious verse, and even in promoting it he perpetuated the common perception, held by Americans and Europeans alike, of its scarcity and general inferiority.115 Hale fought this stigma in part through an appeal to broader tastes. Where

Cheever offered only the grave “evergreens of our literature,” she gathered “its roses”: poetical reflections on the whole of human experience, not bound to Christian orthodoxy but instead broadly “incorporate[d] with our love of nature and flowers” (iv). Such a survey “had never been attempted,” she claims, “and was to me far the most important consideration” (iv). With her collection, Hale sought to retrain the eyes of American readers, so accustomed to seeing only the ordinary, useful, or profitable in their own productions.

Yet even the “many fair specimens of this kind, flourishing in a land that has been stigmatized as producing nothing but corn and cotton, the tobacco and potatoe [sic]” (iv) could only fight half the battle, because ultimately Hale meant to do far more than “promote a better acquaintance with the beauties of our own literature” (iii). Her deeper ambition, the development of a truly robust American literary tradition, would depend on readers’ ability not just to encounter or even enjoy American poetry, but to “shelter and cherish” it (iv)—that is, to treasure it, advocate for it, and finally incorporate it into popular imagination. And while she urges readers to take up this charge as a matter of civic responsibility, the text’s structure gets the

115 Cheever’s preface records, “It is true, that there are more good prose writers in our country than there are poets; but it would be strange, indeed, if enough of really excellent poetry could not be found to fill a volume like this. It is not pretended that every piece, in the following selection, is a stately and perfect song […]; but every lover of poetry will find much to delight a cultivated imagination, and much to set him on thinking; and every religious mind will be pleased that a volume of American poetry […] presents so many pages imbued with the feelings of devotion (3). […] All the pieces in this volume are of the purest moral character; and, considering its limits, and the comparative scantiness of American poetry, a good number of them contain, in an uncommon degree, the religions and poetical spirit united” (5). 177 process well under way by linking each poem to a host of already-resonant elements: the flowers, sentiments, and perhaps especially the lines of British literature insofar as Flora’s Interpreter introduces readers to the American poets, but with several hooks on which to secure their own affective ties.

American audiences’ veneration of British literature, then, presents Hale not with an obstacle but a valuable tool, often bringing to the volume a sense of familiarity and maturity.

Hale’s reasons for seeking plant-meanings in European poetry, she explains, “are obvious. They are an elder people, and antiquity in the language of Flora has weight and influence as well as in other etymologies” (iv). Invoking and including such “ancient” sources secures American poetry to a reassuring foundation of common knowledge and a tradition of common ownership, since

“The choice extracts from the British Poets are, of course, open to every writer, and are often used” (Hale 1848 iv). The juxtaposition of these elements with American ones displays, on every page, the commonalities between each tradition and repeatedly underscores American worthiness to mingle with Britain’s best.

Meanwhile, the British verses facilitate Hale’s emphatic categorization of American poetry as separate and unique, with important purposes of its own. In “introducing many choice extracts from the British poets, whose works I admire and honor as British” (1832 iv), Hale suggests a fundamental contrast to what she honors as American: that is, verses with power “to place these truly classical specimens of the Old World literature in a new light, by linking them, as it were, with the hopes and loves of our ‘own green forest land’” (1848 iv). At its most radical,

Flora’s Interpreter frames a campaign not simply to express American idioms, but wholly to reinterpret British ones. 178

Yet importantly, one aspect that has rendered the text so enduringly effective in promoting American poetry is that Hale does not segregate these national literatures but rather juxtaposes and combines them in subtle ways. Hale deliberately excludes much information that might identify a given excerpt as decisively American or British: for example, she excises poem titles such that passages focused on particular American locations or on events in American history could ostensibly describe any number of events or places. The aforementioned entries on

Patriotism and War make this clear. Hale assigns Patriotism to the Nasturtium with an excerpt from “Bidlake,” that is, the Reverend John Bidlake, an English clergyman: “Bright the

Nasturtion [sic] glows, and late at eve / Light, lambent, dances o’er its sleepless bed” (Hale

[1832] 111). The passage communicates little about patriotism, and had served equally well in

Dix’s The Garland of Flora to signify “Wit.” The adjoining American poem (by Whittier) expresses patriotism much more clearly, but while it passionately praises the “Land of my fathers,” nowhere does it mention America directly; readers must themselves interpolate this from its references to forests, mountains, and mighty rivers. Without the poem’s title (elsewhere identified as “New England”116) the words become emblematic of any person’s love for his or her homeland.

The entry for “War” does something different in offering not just a universalized example but one that actively conflates histories and identities. Attached to the “York and Lancaster

Rose” (i.e. dog-rose) the European poem describes the Wars of the Roses, which “In Britain’s hapless land […] for a whole revolving age / Drenched either rose in kindred blood” (158). The subsequent American poem by Thomas Gray Jr. evokes the American Revolutionary war in lines like “Ours are no hirelings, trained to the fight,” and “o’er the proud heads of freemen our star-

116 Whittier’s poem bears this title in The Boston Book (1837). 179 banner waves” (159). Again though, without a title117 the poem could refer to almost any soldier defending a homeland—and even if readers did recognize hints of the American revolution, its layering with the Wars of the Roses would remind them that both were kindred wars in which bloodshed was especially tragic, and peaceful reconciliation (on new terms) most desirable and beneficial. Hale’s conscientious treatment of this subject seems a deliberate effort not to flaunt cultural separateness or superiority, but to trace parallels and common resonances in British and

American history. Together the war excerpts suggest a cyclical pattern to human experience – a shared well of inspiration – while each poem deepens and inflects the interpretation of the other.

In refusing to pit the former country against the new one or previous memories against those immigrants were creating in America, but in also markedly honoring and celebrating the new nation’s cultural achievements, Flora’s Interpreter stands in marked contrast to some of its contemporaries; if indeed it was the first collection of American-authored secular poetry, more straightforwardly nationalistic volumes, like The Boston Book (1837) and Songs, Odes, and

Other Poems on National Subjects (1842), soon joined it. The Boston Book sought to communicate its eponymous city’s “liberal, republican, national, and Christian spirit” through its history and its writers (v). Along with the Whittier and the Gray poems under their proper titles, it features poems like “Our Yankee Girls” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, “To the Bunker-Hill

Veterans” by Daniel Webster, and “The Pilgrims’ Land” by Charles Sprague. Though these are interspersed with more generic passages on home and family, the Americanness of the volume is clearly pronounced, even inescapable. Songs, Odes, and Other Poems on National Subjects focuses entirely on works of national devotion, with three volumes subtitled respectively

“Patriotic,” “Naval,” and “Military.” The naval section includes a dedication to a number of

117 In The Boston Book (1837) Gray’s poem is titled “Song of the Revolution.” In Songs, Odes, and Other Poems on National Subjects (1842) it is titled “The Revolution.” 180 specific fallen soldiers, such as “Captain Nicholas Biddle, who was blown up in the Randolph frigate, of 32 guns, near Barbadoes, in 1776, bravely fighting the British ship Yarmouth, of 64 guns.” More generally it is dedicated to the “officers, seamen, and marines” who died in the wars of 1776, 1804, and 1812, and to the living soldiers “who will yet, should there be occasion, stand as a wall of fire between their beloved country and her enemies” (“Dedication”). Gray’s poem appears in this collection under the simplified title “The Revolution,” alongside titles like “On the death of Washington” and “Country Ode for the Fourth of July.” These volumes attest to the wide array of nationalistic verses available to compilers in the 1830s and 40s, and suggest that the patriotism of Flora’s Interpreter operates under different rules.

Hale reinforces a dual focus on universalism and nationalism. For example, she validates

American authors by focusing on their names and by using the volume’s opening epigraph to frame their central importance: “A flower I love, / Not for itself, but that its name is linked /

With names I love. –A talisman of hope / and memory.” (title page)118 Setting aside the last part of this epigraph, which I will discuss shortly, the first lines suggests that flowers matter only as much as the people they represent, and hence that the interpretation at stake in Flora’s

Interpreter is less about the sentimental definitions of flowers than about the voices they amplify. More than any other textual component, the presence of American authors justifies the volume’s subtitle—“the American book of Flowers and Sentiments”—and accordingly the first edition includes nearly fifty of them, including James Gates Percival and Nathaniel Parker Willis

(the two most frequently featured poets), Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier,

William Cullen Bryant, Hannah Flagg Gould, Anna Maria Wells, Lydia Maria Child, Emma C.

Embury, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney (figure 3.5). Their names function as metonyms for the

118 In Flora’s Interpreter this passage is unattributed. Its author is Henry Glassford Bell, and it was apparently first published in the fifth volume of The Amulet, a British literary annual, in 1830. 181 nation, and their words as a national voice capable of reflecting intelligently and passionately on every subject.

Yet importantly, for most American readers in 1832 the appellations of American authors were still largely unfamiliar, and the “names they loved” were far more likely to be British. To undercut this attachment or perhaps just to favor the national writers, the volume conspicuously excludes an index of European

authors, but their names within the text’s pages nevertheless provide a crucial anchor for the volume’s ethos. True, due to their structural role, the distribution of excerpts from particular British authors reflects not necessarily their overall popularity so much as how extensively they wrote about plants;119 Shakespeare, for example, appears the same number of times as

“Evans,” that is John Evans, a Welsh surgeon whose didactic long poem

The Bees (1806) describes several Figure 3.7 First Edition index of American Authors. (Ohio State University Libraries)

119 Of named European authors, Erasmus Darwin takes the lead by far with sixteen entries, followed by Drayton with eight. Shakespeare and Evans have six, Thomas Gisborne and Charlotte Smith each have five. A few other notable luminaries like Chaucer, “Spencer” [sic], Cowper, Southey, Keats, and Clare (as well as a number of less- famous writers) have two or three entries, but the vast majority have only one, including Milton, Dryden, Byron, and “Shelly” [sic]. Wordsworth doesn’t appear at all. There are also German writers (Goethe, Kleist) and several translations of Ovid. 182 flowers. Likewise, as their function is principally descriptive, most of the lines featured from these authors are not likely to have been beloved by any but the most horticulturally-attuned readers. Still, even brief appearances by such luminaries as Chaucer, Spencer [sic], Milton,

Drayton, and Cowper serve quite effectively to conjure a sense of British literary history as a whole, and to lend Flora’s Interpreter the aura of venerability Hale sought.

As we have witnessed with many other elements in the text that invite closer inspection, however, even Hale’s different treatments of authors’ national identities, seemingly codified by their names and place on the page, proves more complex than it appears. American authors sometimes occupy in the textual position Europeans generally occupy, and because Hale often lists authors by last names alone, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate the two. Some names of European sources are as unfamiliar as those of new American artists, and numerous inconsistencies in the spelling and titling of authors’ names complicates matters even further. For instance, the American index lists several entries by a “Mrs. L.P. Smith.” But there are four entries in the European position also by “Smith,” plus one by “C. Smith” and one by “H. Smith.”

Without extensive prior knowledge or diligent searching through available print sources (or in my case, the aid of modern databases and search engines), her system poses significant challenges to precise attribution, whether personal or national.

Moreover, although American authors are indexed and British authors are not, neither are many of the American poets whose words occupy the European slot. This is particularly true of

Hale’s own contributions, always signed “Anonymous.”120 The index lists ten of these entries, all in the space reserved for American poets. It turns out, however, that she authored an additional thirty-five excerpts that appear in the European position, more than double the number of the

120 Hale names all other unknown authors by the source from which she excerpted their work (figure 3.3). 183 closest European contender, Erasmus Darwin.121 With a total of forty-five entries Hale quotes herself more than she does any other single author in the volume, a fact she clearly endeavored to camouflage even in later editions when her identity was known. To judge from her usual level of comfort in the public arena (the title page, for example, boldly identifies “Mrs. S.J. Hale, Editor of the ‘Ladies’ Magazine’ and author of ‘Northwood,’ ‘Sketches of American Character,’ &c.,”) it is likely Hale’s selective anonymity stems far less from conventions of female modesty than from a calculated deployment of authorial personae. In addition to muting her presence, which at best might have appeared overbearing and at worst an admission of scanty source material, her namelessness allows Hale to masquerade as both a British and American everyman: applied to lines in the American section of the page the term “Anonymous” suggests budding literary aspiration, its merit confirmed through collection in a new source; in the European section, it conveys a sense of reverence and common ownership, as though the words through their own power have endured long in collective consciousness. Like the flowers in the epigraph, the name evokes both hope and memory, and reveals them as two sides of the same coin.

Collectively the repeated layering, conflation, and impersonation of British and American identities in Flora’s Interpreter yield a constructive confusion that underscores their joint importance to a new national literary culture. The harder it becomes to track exactly who is

American and who is European, the harder it is to care one way or the other: as with strokes in an impressionist painting, it is a question of overall effect. Hale’s design confidently broadcasts an independent cultural identity, while benefiting considerably from its resemblance to European productions; the echoes of familiar discourses crucially reinforce the new culture’s image of

121 As explained in footnote 87, Hale claimed these entries in a footnote to the 1848 edition, and though all editions of Flora’s Interpreter retain the name “Anonymous” some collections by other editors that anthologize the excerpts list Hale specifically as the author. 184 stability and transmitability, while the text re-embeds these discourses in a new context where they both acquire new meaning and greatly assist in assigning it. Most interestingly of all,

Flora’s Interpreter reveals how processes of entextualization serve to break down as many (and sometimes even the very same) categorical boundaries and definitions as they strive to build. It is this that makes possible the paradox so emblematic of nineteenth-century British and American literature(s)—their existence as two distinct traditions, but often also as one and the same.

Pursuing “Social Reproduction” through material format

Taken as a whole, the concatenation of scientific, orientalist and literary elements at play in Flora’s Interpreter constructs an American national discourse defined against, within, and in command of foreign elements. Yet impressive as it is, the vigorous discursive interplay so apparent on each page of Flora’s Interpreter would remain finished, and thus static, if confined strictly to the book’s textual bounds. The actual work of creating and sustaining a new American culture had to happen outside the book, and thus perhaps the most powerful legacy of Flora’s

Interpreter is the way it helped transform consumers (of literature, of taste, of identity) into producers. Hale was passionately committed to “social reproduction,” or the shaping of generations of subjects/citizens who will keep the operations and ideologies of a particular culture up and running (Dillon 83). Hale articulates this goal in the concluding lines of her preface: “To the Youth of America I commit my book. May it inspire our Young Ladies to cultivate those virtues which can be truly represented by the fairest flowers; and our young men to cultivate their minds, till our land shall become beautified by the spirit of Taste, and our literature brilliant by the creations of Genius” (v). An apt phrase, “cultivation” encompasses the project of culture-construction, from processes of domestication to the yielding of domestic 185 products (including virtue, taste, and genius). But the means to disseminate and enact this message lay not Flora’s Interpreter’s internal logic, but in its material platform: the gift book.

Once stigmatized as banal commercial productions, gift books have lately received attention as uniquely effective cultural technologies. 122 Beautiful but relatively affordable, decorative but useful, mass-produced but personalizable, they appealed to consumers as much or more for their object-status as for their content. Most importantly, however, gift book formats shaped particular physical, social, and behavioral interfaces with their content that powerfully impacted readers’ cultural perceptions. For example, surviving copies of Flora’s Interpreter often bear personalized inscriptions: stamps, in effect, of the giver’s identity and approval. Such personal endorsement likely carried more weight than the claims of distant writers or publishers, and combined the sense of an intimate reading circle with that of a reading public at large.

Likewise, gift books like Flora’s Interpreter fostered social reading practices, since groups might gather around the book to invent or decipher floral messages, or simply to entertain each other by reading aloud. They also encouraged social writing practices by providing white space for readers to fill in themselves: the third edition of Flora’s Interpreter proudly boasts increased

“blank spaces for quotations, or those original remarks, which it is often convenient to permit in a book of this kind” (introduction). Piper notes that such inviting blanks, common features in certain publications of the period, “frame the book as a shared space” and contribute to a “culture of intellectual ownership” (127-128)—qualities, in short, exactly suited to the work of building and sustaining a new American identity.

In short, Flora’s Interpreter’s status and use as a gift book helped ensure that it became part of the setting, soundtrack, and rhythm of everyday home and social life. Not meant to be

122 See Harris and Piper. 186 devoured at once, from start to finish, instead it invites casual grazing and (given its three indexes) targeted foraging—in other words, serial, repetitive, and habit-forming patterns of consumption. The linkages between poetry, botany, and the language of flowers multiplied the book’s potential uses, the probability that it would be picked up, and the chances that a reader’s perusal of one aspect might lead to discovery of another. Displayed, perhaps, on a center table123 it would become a familiar and reassuring part of the household furnishings, as the names of poets within it became familiar household names.

Considerable evidence attests, moreover, that Flora’s Interpreter did in fact initiate its own strain of sustainable cultural reproduction. Significantly, the volume flourished during the height of the craze for a different kind of gift book, the literary annual. Publishers of these highly ornamental commemorative volumes often seized upon the format’s inherent horticultural pun, naming their publications after flowers124 and emphasizing the newness, freshness, and rarity of materials in each installment. Even as readers snapped up these books, however, they expressed increasing anxiety about their ideological flimsiness and inescapable commerciality, along with a collective desire for something more enduring. The Young Lady’s Book (London 1829, Boston

1830) dramatizes this concern explicitly in its opening scene, and somewhat ironically advertises itself as a remedy for it through a conversation between two young women, their aunt, and a family friend with literary aspirations:

“I hope you do not intend to inflict another Annual upon us,” said Penelope.

123 Seaton notes that “most sentimental flower books were intended for the center table, that institution of cultural responsibility in nineteenth-century homes. Books for the center table were not only there so that the family could amuse themselves on winter evenings; they were there to signify the gentility of the women of the family” (19). 124 Rudolph Ackerman’s The Forget-me-not (1823-1847) is the most famous example, but others abound. 187

“By no means,” replied the Editor; “So far from following the beautiful, but much-beaten

track of my predecessors, it is my intention to offer the present-giving public a

PERENNIAL—an evergreen, that will not be merely looked at and laid aside forever, but

will attract notice and merit attention at all times and at all seasons; —not such a mere

bouquet of flowers as, however rare or beautiful, seldom tempt their warmest admirers to

a second inspection, and which are always dethroned, even if they hold their ephemeral

sway for a year, by other blossoms, presented by the same hands, at the return of the book-

budding season;”—

“But,” interrupted Aunt Elinor, […] “to drop my nephew’s flowery metaphors, a volume

which, although rich in beautiful embellishments, shall be so useful and instructive, as

well as amusing, that it will, in all probability, be as often in the hands of every young

lady of sense who possesses it, three or four years hence, as within a month after its

publication.” (12)

Although Flora’s Interpreter does not contrast itself so explicitly with annuals, like The Young

Lady’s Book does, it insists on its merit as “neither the offspring of caprice nor of speculation” and declares an intention to deliver a volume of “lasting value” (Hale preface). Considering that serial publication constituted the majority of Hale’s editorial work both before and after Flora’s

Interpreter’s debut, her commitment to releasing new editions of the same work over such a long period of time signals a departure from her usual modus operandi. Her other publications, The

Lady’s Magazine and Godey’s Lady’s Book, regularly featured new poems from American authors (which Hale made liberal use of in Flora’s Interpreter [figure 4]), but Flora’s Interpreter aimed to give those verses a more permanent home and to reinforce their value through 188 repetition. Hale referred to her collected poems as “roses” rather than “evergreens,” but the idea remained the same: they would continue to bring beauty and refreshment, year after year.

Thus, part of the genius of Flora’s Interpreter is the way it satisfied readers’ desires for both the old and the new, and used those qualities to further inspire and sustain American creativity. As previously indicated, the inclusion of European verses gave the volume its initial sense of perenniality, a crucial anchor for the American poems often drawn from more ephemeral sources like magazines and newspapers (figure 4). As years passed and new editions appeared, these American poems began to take on their own aura of timelessness; meanwhile, however, each revision of the text incorporated new compositions that helped preserve the volume’s freshness. In the third edition (1834) Hale notes with pleasure that “The circle of

American literature is every year expanding, and fresh flowers of poetry, more appropriate to express the signification of the flowers of nature, are gradually appearing” (introduction). Her dedication to both familiar and unknown poems met with enough public enthusiasm to support eleven editions of Flora’s Interpreter in its first ten years (plus one British printing125) and further expansion over the following two decades in the hands of three more publishers.126 In a sense, Hale’s commitment to re-publishing the same text and readers’ commitment to purchasing it created a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: their desire for an American body of literature that could stand the test of time, coupled with their willingness repeatedly to reproduce and consume it, essentially brought it into being.

125 I have not yet been able to fully ascertain whether Hale authorized this London printing, but evidence suggests she did not. Published in 1836 under the title The Book of Flowers, it does announce Hale as the author and retains the text’s structure and inclusion of American poets, but excises almost all direct emphasis and explanation of Hale’s Americanist project. Her ambivalence regarding this publication emerges in the introduction to her 1848 edition of Flora’s Interpreter: “We feel quite at liberty to select whatever is best and brightest from the productions of British genius for this work, because FLORA’S INTERPRETER has been republished in London, and, under the title of “The Book of Flowers” sold largely without any remuneration to the author. It is quite probable this new and enlarged work may have the same honour” (iv). 126 I have listed key editions under Works Cited, the latest of which was published in 1865. 189

Outside of its own lengthy and dynamic life in print, the extraordinary impact of Flora’s

Interpreter is manifested in the multitude of similar literary projects it inspired, both directly and indirectly, well into the final years of the nineteenth century.127 Hale’s claim in 1848 that “the many imitations of our plan, as well as the extensive and steady demand for the book, have equally proved its excellence,” is substantiated in publications like The Flower Vase (1844), whose author Sarah Edgarton acknowledges that “‘Flora’s Interpreter,’ – the best of the flower books – has been our guide” and who asks only that her own little volume “may have its day with the rest” (preface). In effect, Flora’s Interpreter provided its audience with both a model and a uniquely resonant vehicle for many different kinds of literary endeavor: for putting forth one’s own writing, or the writings of one’s own community (as Edgarton puts it, “sources not attainable to the mass of readers”), or even for repackaging and recirculating excerpts from existing volumes—something Hale occasionally found frustrating,128 but that nevertheless testifies to the format’s power to reinforce common American ownership of its literature.

In a time of social fragmentation, then, the sophisticated combination of textual and material elements in Flora’s Interpreter not only labored to draw the European settlers of

American states and territories into a more coherent cultural identity, but succeeded in empowering them to continue that work. Hale offered Flora’s Interpreter to the public as a

“talisman of hope and memory” (title page) and it reveals how suggestible memory (especially collective memory) can be—selective, certainly, but also omnivorous in its ability to absorb,

127 Though tracing direct lines of influence is difficult, my own research has led me to at least twelve American publications that similarly combine American poetry or literature with the language of flowers, or scientific botany, or both. Seaton lists close to 25 such American publications, plus another 45 that more broadly combine plants with literary projects. Her bibliography of such books published originally in England, France, and other parts of Europe (and perhaps circulating in the U.S.) during the nineteenth century numbers over 200. 128 Hale’s 1848 introduction claims that the quality of the American selections in her text “can never be equaled in any work of this kind—because we had the first choice of the field; unless, indeed, our imitators take our selections bodily from FLORA’S INTERPRETER, as some of them have already done to an extent which is very obvious” (iv). 190 redefine, and redeploy. The combination of Hale’s passionate nationalism, her unique interpretation of transnational components, and her canny usage of a conventional platform (the gift book) thus invite us to consider the nuances of national identity formation at the figurative level, and show us how elements that can seem jarringly foreign or tiresomely familiar are not only comfortably at home there, but also essential to the creation and transmission of new meaning.

In effect, Flora’s Interpreter performs the work of the idiom: it harnesses the pre-existing and the literal to express something colloquially unique. Seen this way, the “idioms of America” encompass far more than the words of American poets; they include all processes that enlist and entextualize extant vessels of meaning to create a different kind of internal fluency and signify particular belonging. Hale’s recasting of transnational and traditional elements figures an

American essence defined not by geographical boundaries, specific historical moments, or precise cultural origins, but instead by its ability to interpret: that is, to translate a world of possibilities into shared American expression.

191

Chapter 4

Poems, Plates, and Plants: The Art of Illustration in Romantic Flower Books

In her 1840 publication Flowers and their Associations, Anne Pratt wrote that “It has been said of birds, that they are the poor man’s music; and we may observe of flowers, that they are the poor man’s poetry” (3). This statement encapsulates a complex set of ideas observable across the flower book genre as a whole; variations of the argument that flowers not only inspire poetry, but actually are poems themselves, appear repeatedly in this genre , often supported with remarks on the universal human fascination with flowers visible in most known societies. By this reckoning, flowers are not simply objects, or even plant organs with particular physiological functions, but something far more profound—symbols and catalysts of transcendent experience and insight. To poets, philosophers, and anthropologists in this period, flowers embody explorations of the relationship between nature and artifice, the process of emotional expression, the possibility of communication between humans (or humans and other beings and things), and the potential to access profound but ineffable somethings beyond average human apprehension.

Even writers of botanical reference works, devoted to objective observation of physical structure, seem drawn to this realm of metaphor and symbolism, where plants come to represent geographical spaces and national identities, the drive to reproduce and defend offspring, and the theorization of complex systems at work just outside the observational capacity of current technologies.129 That flowers constitute access points to higher understanding (spiritual, emotional, or scientific) thus appears the general consensus among writers of many disciplines in the early nineteenth century.

129 See Chapter 3 for more discussion of these concepts in botanical reference works; Linnaeus famously identified the sexual role of stamens and pistils in flowers but referred to them as “marriages”; William P.C. Barton and Jacob Bigelow both highlight plants as representative of place. The idea of plant intelligence, particularly plants’ responses to temperature and light, was also beginning to be explored in more detail in this period. 192

Yet determining the most effective way to reproduce, approximate, or share the sublime insight flowers offer, particularly in the vicarious world of text, is much less clear. The questions facing creators of flower books in the Romantic period evoke the entire philosophical history of mimesis: just as important as what the flower itself is and does is the question of what its representatives (usually words or images) are and do. And because this genre blends words and images so extensively and in such broad variation, it makes these attendant questions all the more urgent and their answers more difficult to pin down. Some volumes depend heavily on visual representations of flowers, touting the number of skillfully rendered and colored images, sometimes even going so far as to reproduce them exactly to scale. Other volumes eschew images altogether, preferring prose and verse as the best translators of, so to speak, the floral experience. Some strongly encourage readers to interact with real flowers, occasionally including spare blank pages for the pressing of specimens, and even without such pages, readers, drawing on their own volition, often pressed blossoms into such books. Many of these publications blend all three illustrative agents—poems, plates, and plants—and the genre as a whole offers no general consensus as to which acts best as a conduit to truth (that is, to whichever truth a particular book might be striving to reach).

While it presents certain challenges to modern readers, the broad variation of approaches to illustration within flower books in fact signifies one of the genre’s major contributions: its dynamic exploration of the philosophy of representation during a time of great innovation and experimentation in each of the three key areas the books strive to combine—botanical science, poetic and artistic theory, and print technology. All of these experienced major growing pains during the Romantic period, and in bringing them together in one place flower books inevitably reflect those complexities. For this reason the books are as enlightening and valuable for their 193 apparent tensions and conflicts as they are for their synergies and resolutions. This chapter explores instances of friction and dissonance, as well as instances of powerful resonance that flower books create and reinforce between images, words, and actual plants in the real world. At a basic level these texts reveal intimate links between the technical history print-text production and developments in Romantic-era philosophies of art, science, and metaphysics. In their most successful forms, though, they use poems, plates, and plants to create a structure of integrated illustrational resonance—flowers are poems and paintings; paintings and poems are flowers— and this interdependent community of agents building layers of meaning that work together chronicle imperfectly effable concepts that no single piece could fully capture on its own.

Mixing the media of illustration

As explained in the introduction to this dissertation, flower books descend from a wide variety of textual antecedents—and each of these parent-genres carries its own history and tradition of plant-word-image relationships. These include bibles and other philosophical meditations (rife with plant metaphors and parables); poetical or theological anthologies (i.e.

“gatherings of flowers”); utilitarian and scientific works like herbals, almanacs, botanical treatises or volumes of pressed and dried plant specimens (known as hortus siccus, “dry gardens”); and image-forward genres like emblem books, high-brow floral paintings and lavish florilegia, as well as more quotidian drawing manuals and pattern books. Flower books utilize and recombine these varied traditions in countless ways, and perhaps the tendency among scholars to undervalue (or miss completely) the most fascinating contributions of these books stems from a habit of judging them by the standards of a given parent-genre. Flower book creators are rarely “experts” in any of the fields they labor to combine, and placing their works in 194 the same category as those produced by the most highly-trained botanists, most skilled artists, and most prestigious or moneyed institutions, simply doesn’t make sense.

When we give flower books their own space, contiguous but distinct from these other genres, we can far more justly appreciate their pioneering spirit, for they offer a host of experiments in mixed media, in the deepest sense of that term: not only do they play with the materials of representation (ink, paint, print, words), but the philosophies of representation as well. Botanists, poets, and artists do not all see or value the same things in flowers, let alone in images or words; a scientist’s verbal descriptions will differ significantly from those of a dreamer, just as an art collector might value different images than a moralist. In other words, different purposes privilege different modes of illustration—descriptive, aesthetic, or symbolic, broadly speaking—and bringing them together in any combination poses myriad philosophical and technical challenges, as the remainder of this chapter will attest.

In light of the innumerable definitions and functions of plants, pictures, and words observable across the flower book genre, perhaps a more useful concept with which to begin is illustration itself—an expansive term that highlights the interrelated nature of all three. The

Oxford English Dictionary cites seven definitions of illustration in use in the early nineteenth century, allowing it to connote whatever illumines the mind, beautifies or adorns, confers honor or distinction, or enhances clarity. A great number of flower books explicitly announce some form of illustration, and while book titles don’t often specify which definition of the word they intend, they often do indicate the chosen illustrative agent, such as “illustrations from the poets,” or “illustrated with colored plates,” or “illustrated by figures of the natural size.”130 Such subtitles provide valuable clues as to what materials the author or editor considered the primary

130 See Kent’s Flora Domestica (1823), Maria Jackson’s The Florist’s Manual (1822), and William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis (1817). 195 concepts, and which he or she intended to adorn, illuminate, or clarify those concepts. In other words, the phrases provide an initial framework for understanding what parts of a text the author considered to be illustrations, and what kinds of relationships result among those illustrations, their subject matter, and their readers or viewers. An author’s statement of what-illustrates-what provides only a springboard, however. Not only are those relationships fluid and often reciprocal, but most illustrations slide frequently between their various potential functions, sometimes performing several at once: this period’s most celebrated botanical renderings, for example, combine great beauty with technical information, distinguishing the makers and owners of such works as much as the texts that contained them.

Flower books in particular welcome and even revel in this sort of multivalent illustration, partly as a result of the many traditions of illustration they inherit from their parent-genres, which themselves are rarely fixed. Flower painting, for example, enjoyed the exalted status of high art in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but as such it still assumed various styles from painstaking realism to more roughly suggestive picturesque drama. By the nineteenth century the popularity of flower painting as a genteel ladies’ pastime demoted the art to the status of decoration, though as such it was no less adored among Victorians, and certainly no less varied in style, symbolism, and function.131

In what we might expect to be more stable utilitarian genres, such as the herbal that strives to document medicinal and other uses of plants, philosophies of illustration still vary widely. Medieval and early modern herbals feature images that range through periods of exacting realism as well as of stylization so extreme that the pictures bear no resemblance to known

131 For further discussion of the progression of floral illustration see Walpole A History and Dictionary of British Flower Painters, 1650-1950. (2006), and for an examination of flower painting in the Victorian era, see Kramer, Women of Flowers: A Tribute to Victorian Women Illustrators (1996). 196 species. The evolution of such conventions was also not linear: Blunt and Raphael note, for example, that while naturalism had become firmly established as the preferred mode of hand- painted manuscript illustration by the mid-1400s, woodcut herbals from a half-century later

(1480 to 1530) “almost without exception perpetuate the crude, stylized, and derivative figures of a remote past” (113). The role of images in plant-texts thus depended as much on the capabilities and indeed the traditions of the technology used to produce them as it did on general taste.

Though naturalism also eventually became the norm in printed image-illustrations for herbals and works of botanical science, the question remained (and indeed remains) as to whether realism or idealism more effectively conveyed the most relevant information. Plant images made to appear as perfect or complete as possible from a botanical standpoint rarely match individual specimens in nature, which might be broken, withered, diseased, or bug-eaten

(Blunt and Raphael 125). Yet plants portrayed in such realistic terms could obscure vital pieces of descriptive information. Tension exists as well between schematic representations which might be flattened or feature dissected portions, and more naturalistic ones striving to give an impression of the living plant in three dimensions. And then there is the question of scale, which some volumes attempted to reproduce so precisely that their enormous size destined them only for the richest collections and still required that the largest plants be represented in pieces in order to fit on the page.132 No matter which style an editor-author chose to adopt, and no matter the skill of the artist employed, a complete illustration of a single plant’s physiological characteristics would depend either on composite images (in which a single picture depicts a

132 One example of such a book is William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis: Containing a History of The Plants Indigenous to Great Britain, illustrated by figures of the natural size (1817). Its pages measure approximately 50cm, and while the smallest plants take up only a portion of this (leaving one to contemplate the luxury of such expansive white space), other plants had to be segmented to fit. 197 plant at various stages in its development, perhaps with buds, flowers, and fruit all at the same time), on a series of images (usually too expensive to produce or hope to sell), or on a partnership between images and words.

The balance of power between verbal and pictorial illustration in herbals and botanical manuals swings widely through the course of its history. Production costs notwithstanding, images gained significant ground in the early modern period, as seen in the famous herbals of

Otto Brunfels and Leonhard Fuchs,133 who depended on their artists to convey most of a plant’s pertinent details. The first notable progress in modern verbal illustration134 appeared in 1539, with the publication of Hieronymus Bock’s New Kretter Buch, which featured written descriptions of a plant’s development and appearance at different stages of its lifespan (Blunt and

Raphael 129). The utility of Bock’s text reaffirmed the value of verbal illustration in general, which would become increasingly important to botanical science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as it developed into a distinct discipline with more specialized and unified vocabulary. It testifies to the power of this vocabulary that even as the industrial revolution made the creation of images faster, better, and less expensive, numerous botanical treatises of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dispose with them altogether (Saunders 8). Botanical images did continue to hold significant value, of course, but their increasing availability to non- professional audiences gave them a more amateur and popular cast; images became the stuff of practical, descriptive, decorative, or reference works rather than the principle tools of objective science.

As complex as it is, the history of word-image-concept relationships in herbals and botanies is but one of many threads woven into nineteenth-century flower books; however, it

133 Otto Brunfels’s Herbarum Vivae Eicones (1530-36) and Leonhart Fuchs’s De Historia Stirpium (1542). 134 Blunt and Raphael claim Bock’s verbal descriptions as the first of their kind since those of Theophrastus (129). 198 provides important insight into the diverse range of illustrative conventions that feed into the genre’s ideology. Flower books take these traditions and remix them, with the important distinction that they strive not simply to illustrate plants, but to convey what plants illustrate to us. An ambitious undertaking in any circumstance, achievement of this goal in the early nineteenth century required extensive collaboration between numerous writers, artists, craftspeople, and businessmen each working to define their roles in the overall process of bookmaking. The remainder of the chapter therefore considers how print technology and the economics of publishing influence illustrative construction, and concludes with three case studies that exemplify these forces at work and their potential for widely differing outcomes.

Plants in Print: technology’s influence on the philosophy of illustration

Relationships between primary concepts an author wishes to explore and secondary illustrations he or she uses to do so (whether pictorial or verbal, and whether aesthetic, descriptive, or symbolic) originate partly in the author’s intent, but they depend just as heavily on the technological and economic constraints of printing. In the Romantic period, letterpress printing on a platen press remained the dominant technique until the invention of the rotary press in 1843, though stereotype135 offered revolutionary shortcuts to the painstaking process of composing blocks of movable type each time a new batch of copies was needed. Then as now, adding images to these printed texts required more sophisticated technology than text alone, vastly complicating the processes of composition and editing, and multiplying the amount of time and the cost of materials invested. Images were expensive to produce and to buy; more than one editor found himself in dire straits after investing too heavily in them.136 Such prohibitive

135 Stereotype was invented in 1725, but not widely adopted until the first decades of the nineteenth century. 136 Two famous examples include the Royal Society’s Historia Piscium (1686) whose failure nearly prevented the publication of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, and Robert John Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1799-1807), discussed below. 199 costs help explain why many flower books and even botanical reference books include no images at all, as well as why botanical science developed an increasingly minute descriptive vocabulary—verbal illustration is far more print-friendly. Still, the technologies available for producing images evolved significantly over the course of the nineteenth century, feeding the public’s hunger for them, as well as printmakers’ desire to make their wares available to middle- and lower-class consumers.

Scholars readily acknowledge the variety of media used to produce such images— woodcuts, metal engravings, lithographs—but more significant to my argument are the ways that these production processes influence the modes of illustration in which such images operate, that is to say, the way the illustration relates to the concept at hand. In the codex format of a flower book, readers would encounter printed images in one of two ways: set into blocks of text and thus fully integrated into each page, or rendered on entirely separate sheets of paper interspersed with sheets of text. Each method possessed its own conventions, ones that would have influenced book creators’ choices as well as readers’ interpretations. Images set directly into blocks of text are often stock images, since the stamps used to produce them would be saved and reused just as any other piece of movable type. Thus, although they can be placed in closer physical proximity to their relative words, they are more likely to perform a loosely symbolic rather than strictly representational function.137 On the other hand, images produced on separate sheets often signal a greater investment in specific representational fidelity, but such images must be placed further from their relative words.138 Of course there are exceptions to these rules which I will discuss in

137 Cormack and Mazzio note that the costs of creating woodcut images in the early modern period, for example, dictated that “[pictorial] illustrations were as likely to be symbolic in function as representational,” with the same generic images appearing multiple times within a text but serving different purposes in relation to their immediate contexts (17). 138 In botanical illustration, Blunt and Stearn note that “this loss of unity was largely compensated for by the additional precision and detail which the copper plate made possible” (99). 200 a moment, but generally speaking, a reader might expect in-text images to be more generalized, and images on separate plates to be more specific to the work.

Interestingly, these conventions find counterbalance in the reader’s mental processes as she encounters and interprets such images. A given image exists on a page (by itself or set into text), while the reader reads words that she assumes somehow relate to it. Regardless of whether it is a stock image or a minutely descriptive one, it will perform a primarily aesthetic and symbolic function until the reader finds the words that explicitly connect to it (e.g. “this is a lovely image that generally evokes the kind of text I am reading”). The further an image is placed from the words that relate specifically to it, the greater the space of play in the reader’s mind, where the image can perform multiple functions before being assigned a particular one.

So, while in-text images are more likely to be generic and embrace multiple meanings, their proximity to words hastens the reader’s ability to assign them particular meanings; by the same token, images on separate plates introduce a wider space for interpretive play, even as they offer greater specific representational fidelity. 201

The exceptions to this convention can signal an author’s desire to encourage or restrain such play. Robert John Thornton’s New Family

Herbal (1814) incorporates two hundred fifty-eight unique woodblock engravings directly into the text so that each image rests as closely as possible to its label and description (figure 4.1). The specificity of each image, in such proximity to its verbal description, strives to eliminate ambiguity and speedily lock in a particular meaning—a valuable feature in a text meant for home medical use and in potentially life-threatening situations. This format Figure 4.8 Sample page from A New Family Herbal (1814) showing a specific image (rather than a stock appears occasionally in more literary flower books image) created for placement within a body of text. too, such as Flores Poetici (1833), a manual on how to grow “poetic flowers” (figure 4.2). In contrast, many flower books incorporate images on separate plates with no labels at all, so that in spite of their realism or descriptive accuracy they can function more like stock images, resonating with the text as a whole rather than with one single piece of it

(figure 4.3). This treatment underscores the genre’s

Figure 4.9: Sample pages from Flores Poetici (1833). varied aspirations, its quest for simultaneous (Winterthur Library). 202 relevance as a guide to identifying and interpreting real plants, as a springboard for more open- ended philosophical contemplation, and as a beautiful object in itself.

Exciting as it would be to imagine such sophisticated intentionality resting solely with a given author or publisher, it is likely that most decisions about images resulted from a wide variety of social, economic, and technological circumstances. The kind of images selected for a text determine the level of collaboration required to bring them into existence. For both types, an artist and craftsman would have to be employed to draw the image and engrave it in wood or metal (or later in the century, to prepare a lithographic stone). After this step, Figure 4.10 Unlabeled plate from Flora's though, a single printer could manage stock-images set Interpreter (1848). (Winterthur Library) into blocks of text, while engraved or lithographed plates often required a separate, specialized team of professionals, perhaps operating in an entirely separate printing house. Enhancing either kind of image with color usually required yet another artist or team of artists to fill in the outlines with watercolor, which could vary in quality from flat patches of one or two tones to skillfully nuanced gradations of multiple hues. Binders, booksellers and consumers too could affect the final arrangement of texts and images, particularly images on separate plates, since publishers attempted to reach buyers of every class by offering expensive deluxe copies with more images, or spartan copies with few or no images at a discounted price.139

139 See Winship 61 for a discussion of publishers offering different binding options at various prices. And see my discussion of Flora’s Dictionary below, for large variations in plates accompanying copies of the same edition. Finally, consider that Charles Tilt (discussed below in the section “Resonant illustration”), made his fortune by producing affordable lithograph prints, and an advertisement placed at the end of The Romance of Nature notes, 203

Bearing these complexities in mind, then, we begin to see how flower books embody a process of meaning-making that seizes many new opportunities offered within print culture, and also reveals their unruliness. Despite improved technologies for mass-producing superior and affordable images and thus more frequently linking representative pictures to words, much of the more playful, or even accidental or serendipitous relationships between text, pictures, and concepts remains. Far from working smoothly or consistently in partnership, printed words and images can compete for domination of the reader’s attention and primacy in the work’s overall meaning, and frequently depend on loose associations and the reader’s imagination to bring them into harmony.140 Whether they employ only poetical illustration (as in Elizabeth Kent’s Flora

Domestica), or pictorial illustration (as in Jane Loudon’s Ladies’ Flower Garden), or both, flower books often seem to revel in the interpretive leaps they make when dovetailing various texts, images, and concepts, feeling no need to explain how, for example, a given flower attained a certain meaning, or how exactly a given poem expresses that meaning, or what meaning (if any) is communicated through a bouquet of unidentified flowers featured in an accompanying plate. With so much interpretive responsibility given to the reader, the mixedness of these works even allows a certain measure of variability between copies or editions to remain faithful to their aims.

At the same time that the flexibility of the genre welcomes and even benefits from the variation that the vicissitudes of print technology could introduce, there are instances when it becomes problematic. As I discussed in Chapter 3, flower books differ significantly from true

“C. Tilt has constantly on sale an extensive assortment of GROUPS and VASES of FLOWERS, designed with the greatest taste, and coloured in a style far superior to the Drawings generally offered for sale, and at less than one fourth their prices; averaging from 1s to 2s 6d each print.” 140 This is perhaps not unlike the word-image relationships Katherine Harris sees in literary annuals, where authors like Leticia Landon occasionally do “anything but illustrate the engraving” (See Harris 19). 204 miscellanies in their adherence to specific topic and to organizational structure. To maintain that structure’s integrity—that is, to preserve its interpretive function—not all possibilities of print served equally well. This is one area of print history that flower books so effectively illuminate: they highlight both where the print technology fell short of authors’ aspirations, but also where an overexuberant embrace of its strengths could actually impede the creation of meaning. Put more broadly, flower books offer critical insight into instances when the available materials of print illustration affected, for better or worse, various philosophies of illustration as they developed in this period.

Seeing, writing, and printing in color

One aspect of illustration that proved a major challenge to flower book authors, editors, publishers, and printers, whether they worked with images or solely with words, was the quest for consistent representation of color. Seeing and interpreting color are integral aspects of the human experience, but while it is safe to say that color has affected and interested humans since we first evolved our particular visual capabilities, it is also true that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a shift in the way people attempted to understand and represent it. In 1704

Isaac Newton published Opticks, his study of the spectrum found within white light when refracted through a prism, and though not without opposition, his ideas became the foundation for modern color theory in most of its scientific and technological applications. Perhaps the most notable of Newton’s challengers, Goethe founded an influential legacy of his own in his Theory of Colours (1810). Over time certain aspects of Goethe’s theory proved scientifically unsound, but he did succeed in pointing out Newton’s method as only one of many ways to observe and understand color. While Newton focused solely on the optical spectrum (colors isolatable within white light), Goethe probed aspects of human color perception in a wide variety of 205 circumstances, including the interactions of light and darkness, the behavior of colors in media other than light (paint in particular), and the effects of color on human emotions and psychology.

Newton and Goethe’s debates on color are of special interest in the question of illustrating flowers, both visually and verbally. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poems, prose descriptions, paintings, and prints the dichotomy between a purely analytical isolated- variable approach and a more exploratory multidisciplinary approach is clearly apparent. As some of the most strikingly colorful elements found in nature, flowers often arrest viewers’ attention with their various hues—but flower enthusiasts in various capacities struggled during this period to know whether to embrace the emotional power and potential significance of floral color, or to compartmentalize it as but one of many interesting botanical aspects, to be noted and considered but not privileged. Maria Jackson’s Florist’s Manual, or, Hints for the Construction of a Gay Flower-Garden (1816), for example, indicates that owners of private grounds felt the draw of science so strongly that they often sacrificed color, a primary pleasure of flower gardens, in their quest for more comprehensive botanical representation—generally with disappointing results. “Without the frequent repetition of the same plant,” she argues,

it will be in vain to attempt a brilliant flower-garden, […] as in the judicious mixture of

every common colour the art of procuring it consists. Hence, […] the solicitude of those

who wish to complete the superstructure must not be for rare species, but for new colour,

so that the commonest primula which presents a fresh shade of red, blue, yellow, &c.

ought not to be esteemed more valuable than the most rare American plant which does

not bring a similar advantage. (7-9)

Though careful to point out her focus on “the moderately-sized flower-garden” rather than on extensive pleasure grounds (22), Jackson insists that no part of it should fail to display “the 206 prevalent colours of the season (10). Her volume includes a list of plants organized primarily by month and color, first with February-May and then May-August divided into reds, blues, yellows, and whites (59-87). Interestingly, though at one point she acknowledges that “red” means the “shade from pink to scarlet,” and that “blue” includes purple as well (84-87), she never lists the exact tone of any particular species—its color-family is deemed sufficient.

Jackson assures readers that knowledge and methodical arrangement of these “tints afforded by each season” will maximize the potential of their flower gardens to charm and refresh viewers all year long (4). At the same time, however, she seems to seek a measure of balance or reconciliation between competing strains of thought by emphasizing the compatibility of her color-forward method with the incorporation of rarer species. As long as color remains the priority, she concedes, rare species can be incorporated into a garden scheme with pleasing effect

(23). In the contested space of the garden Jackson seeks for common ground with scientists and collectors, but she firmly defends pleasure as one of the garden’s primary functions and maintains that color (even color so broadly defined) will achieve it.

The question of color-priority in flowers extended to another classic form of display: cut or potted arrangements. In Flora Domestica (1823) Elizabeth Kent quotes passages from several poets who meditate on the beauty of such displays in vases, garlands, and wreaths, noting that

“even in language, we have a finer idea of colours, when such are placed together as look well together in substance. Do we read of white, purple, red, and yellow flowers, they do not present to us so exquisite a picture, as if we read of yellow and purple, white and red” (xxix). Even in the highly visual medium of floral display, though, general taste for a more scientific approach in this period had also given rise to an entirely different style; Kent qualifies her initial thoughts on the subject by noting, “what is here said on the subject of arrangement is of course addressed to 207 those who are unacquainted with botany; those who study that delightful science will, most probably, prefer a botanical arrangement” (xxxi). Rather than combining plants by color or form, botanical arrangements grouped plants according to their particular branches of scientific classification, a useful method for identifying common characteristics across related species, but one that posed numerous design challenges for those still aiming to achieve visually pleasing results.141 Kent suggests at the very least that those drawn to botanical arrangements consider the size of each plant, “observing however to place the smaller plants of each division next to the spectator, and thus proceeding gradually to the tallest and most distant; so that the several divisions will form stripes irregular in width” (xxxi). In spite of her own enthusiasm for botanical science, Kent thus indicates that the cerebral elegance of botanical theory in some ways works against more instinctive aesthetic sensibilities like symmetry, proportion, and felicitous combinations of color, and that the absence of the latter will be keenly felt.

These examples show that in the Romantic period color held, at best, an ambiguous place within scientific study. Even though the color of a plant’s flowers or leaves is often what first attracts notice in the wild, and despite enormously high stakes for accuracy in verbal botanical descriptions (since any variation in individual plant specimens would be scrutinized as grounds for new classification or market-value), many people nevertheless viewed the allure of color as a threat to empiricism. Indeed, color proved one of the latest elements of botanical science to be correlated and catalogued with the same amount of rigor and specificity given to other aspects of plant physiology. Decades after botanists the world around could converse with each other about pistils and stamens, classes and orders, and extensive lists of Latin plant names, there remained

141 This is as true for drawings and paintings of botanical arrangements as it is for actual arrangements of cut flowers; Jane Loudon’s Ladies’ Flower Garden series was lauded for its ability to showcase the aesthetic qualities of botanical arrangements while still representing the plants faithfully; see discussion in Chapter 1. 208 little consensus regarding the nomenclature of color. Settling on precise descriptions was complicated, of course, due to the natural variation in tones which often occurs over the lifespan of a single plant, or across members of the same species depending on each one’s particular growing conditions. But the problem also rested in the unique color-perceptions of individual humans’ eyes. As William P. C. Barton noted in 1821,

few botanists describe colours accurately, owing to the general confusion and erroneous

ideas which prevail in the minds of most persons, relative to the names of different tints.

Few are particularly attentive in scrutinizing the various shades of the standard or

characteristic colours; and fewer still take the pains of studying the inclination of one

shade toward its kindred tint, or the falling of the remote tints of the standard colour into

its neighboring hues. Hence, in minute descriptive botany, perpetual confusion occurs

between blues and purples, of different intensity, yellow and orange, reds and red

purples, browns and greys, greys and black. (xi)

The broad strokes with which Maria Jackson classified plant hues manifest this habitual generalization; if even such an avowed color enthusiast pared her description of plant hues to red, blue, yellow, and white, then clearly there was vast room for improvement. Two men in particular took definitive steps to correct this problem, eminent German geologist Abraham

Gottlob Werner, and Scottish flower-painter Patrick Syme. In 1774 Werner published a comprehensive color scheme for classifying minerals, which Syme then adapted and expanded in

1814 to correlate all of the natural sciences, including “zoology, botany, chemistry, mineralogy, and morbid anatomy” (Syme 3).142 Werner’s system named seventy-nine tints, but even then left

142 Werner’s book is titled Von den äußerlichen Kennzeichen der Foßilien (1774), and it was translated into French by Claudine Guyton de Morveau (née Picardet) (1790), and into English by Thomas Weaver (1805), before Syme adapted and expanded it in 1814 as Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours. 209 out purple and orange as distinct hues, placing them in the families of blue and yellow. Syme expanded Werner’s scheme to one hundred and eight tints, which he believed would encompass

“the most common colours or tints that appear in nature” (5). Though he concedes that his system does not account for metallic colours “as every person is well acquainted with the colour of gold, silver, brass, copper, &c,” and nor does it attempt to deal with the “play of colours” (11) seen in an opal or the feathers of a pigeon’s neck, Syme maintained that his hundred and eight tints “may Figure 4.11 Color Table of Greens, a sample of Werner and Syme's color charts, as reproduced in Barton's A Flora of be called standard colours, and if the terms pale, North America, Vol.1 (1821). (Google Books) deep, dark, bright, and dull be applied to any of the standard colours, […] the tints may be multiplied to upwards of thirty thousand, and yet vary little from the standard colours with which they are combined” (5-7). Werner and Syme’s hundred and eight isolated hues facilitated much greater consistency in verbal descriptions of color, and attempted to correlate it across categories of Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral (figure 4.4) to reinforce and stabilize each definition.

Producing these colors accurately and consistently on the page presented another, separate challenge. Syme’s book did contain sample blocks of color, but from separately dyed materials cut and pasted in squares; it stands as a testament that specific language for describing a given color in nature was no guarantee that it could be reproduced in print. 210

Of course, even as the prohibitive cost of image-production spurred the development of more specific language for describing color, the mass production of colored images grew increasingly important for all areas of natural history, especially botany, and the demand for such images pushed forward the development of the technologies that could accomplish it. One of the primary obstacles publishers faced was the sheer number of people required to create even simple colored images. A lone botanical artist might produce stunning portraits of flowers in oils or watercolors, but mass-producible copies of such portraits required teams of artists, printmakers, and colorists.

Though the original artists, as well as the principle engravers or lithographers are usually credited by name on printed plates, those responsible for coloring them are almost always anonymous—even though the quality of the coloring often makes or breaks the beauty, accuracy, and value of the final image. Most often, printed color images were produced by an engraver or lithographer plus a team of colorists, each responsible for applying a single color to the black and white printed image with the aid of a stencil (Winship 66). By mid-century, colored images were produced by overlaying prints of different colors, prepared on several different relief blocks or lithographic stones, a process pioneered in Europe in the 1830s.143 But the finest printed and colored botanical illustrations of the early nineteenth century, however, appear to have been painted (or at least detailed) by skilled artists working in freehand. Kramer speculates that many print colorists were women (45) though only employee records from printing houses would indicate for sure. Certainly, it would not likely have been difficult for printmakers to find employees, including women, with some practice painting flowers. It was not

143 Though chromolithography came into use in the 1830s, chromoxylography (printing in colors from wood blocks) had been practiced for centuries and generally utilized a similar process of overlaying prints in different colors, prepared on different blocks. Colored ink was also sometimes used in copperplate printing, as I discuss shortly. 211 uncommon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for amateurs to trace engravings and then paint them themselves, though “often in the crudest colors” (Blunt and Stearn 253). Teachers of botanical drawing and painting abounded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and where they could not be found or paid for, the void could be filled with botanical copy-books featuring outlines of plants with instructions on how to tint them appropriately (253).

Still, even the most advanced and ambitious printing-houses, employing the most skilled artists and colorists, faced the limitations of technology and the ruthless economics of mass- production and book marketing. Robert John Thornton’s financial ruin following publication of his ambitious Temple of Flora (1799-1807) offered a cautionary tale,144 and most publishers of botanical art thereafter took a more measured approach. William P.C. Barton’s Flora of North

America (1821-23) offers a striking case in point. The first of his three volumes boldly announces its plan “to elucidate, by the authority of coloured figures, the interesting botany of

North America” (viii), and in an effort to assure subscribers of the worth of their investment, describes in some detail the “new style of engraving adopted in the work, with a view to enhance its value” ([xxi]). Barton passionately stood behind his book as “a NATIONAL WORK exhibiting, in all its materials, specimens of American manufacture; and its execution being wholly accomplished by American artists” (xxiv; emphasis original), but he felt the lag between

American print technology and what printers were accomplishing in Europe. Thus, he emphatically points out the unique printing method employed in parts of the first volume, which

144 Thornton’s Temple of Flora is considered the most sumptuous and well-known of all flower books, though it really belongs in a category of its own. It contains 31 plates produced by a variety of printing techniques including aquatint, mezzotint, stipple, and line engraving; the images were printed in colors and then finished by hand. It’s interesting to contrast Thornton’s Temple of Flora with what was also an usually image-rich book for the time, his New Family Herbal discussed above in the section “Plants in print.” Both offer colored print images, but while the former aim for the status of high art, the latter aim for maximum utility, though in their comparative simplicity they are also quite beautiful. The books also utilize widely differing printing techniques, suggesting that Thornton (or his publishers, or both) enjoyed experimenting with these technologies, recognizing their powerful effects in the work of teaching botanical science. 212

“consists of that kind of graphic execution in which so high a degree of perfection has been attained in

France, and which has been so justly admired in the plates of Michaux’s splendid work on the Forest

Trees of North America” ([xxi]) This method,

“executed by the master graver of Mr. Cornelius

Tiebout, of this city,” involves printing the outline of an image in colored ink rather than black (usually green, brown, red, yellow, or a combination) and then overlaying it with tints applied by hand (figures

4.5, 4.6, and 4.7). Figure 4.12 "The cranberry." Table 17 from Barton's A Flora of North America (1821). (Winterthur Library). As a means of mass-production, this method

more closely approximates the subtle

variations in tone and shading seen in

individual paintings, but it was labor-

intensive, none the less. Before the

widespread adoption of lithography in the

Figure 4.13 Detail of "the cranberry." (Winterthur Library) Figure 4.14 "The Skull-Cap." Table 21 from Barton's A Flora of North America (1821). (Winterthur Library). 213

1830s, printing from engraved plates required the time-consuming steps of inking and

meticulously wiping the plates clean between each impression, an even more tedious task

when using more than one color (Wolfe 39 and Burch 88). The man hours expended in

printing alone were enough to drastically increase the price of such images, but more

work still remained before they were finished. Barton notes,

It may not be here improper to state, and the author does it without any fear of

contradiction from those acquainted with the subject, that it is the next thing to

impossible to present true imitations of plants, by mere coloured copper-plates—that is to

say, by impressions from engraved copper, in printing which, one, two, three, or even

more colours, are put on the copper. Nothing comes near to nature, and consequently,

nothing is faithful, but colours laid on the coloured impressions, by the pencil, under the

direction of persons well acquainted with the real hues of plants. (xxi-xxii)

In other words, printing alone—no matter how skilled—could not fully accomplish the job of realistic or accurate flower-image creation in color, which still depended on the expertise of trained painters, as well as the input of botanists on each stage of the image’s development.

Barton’s enthusiasm for the method had to balance with his publishers’ willingness to invest in it, and with the schedule of installments eagerly awaited by subscribers. Thus, though the colored outlines were introduced in the sixth installment of the first volume, only three such images total appear in installments six and seven, and traditional black-outline, hand-tinted images remain in use throughout.

The challenge of producing color images rested not only in the increased time, labor, and equipment needed to accomplish it, but also in the competition and lack of communication between printers and printing houses. In spite of a general sense of camaraderie that often existed 214 among printers in general (who in the United States, at least, tended to share a common English-

Protestant heritage, live near each other in tightly-knit communities, and boasted the nation’s earliest trade unions [Winship 77]), many techniques for color printing were carefully guarded, thus requiring printers to devise their own particular methods. For example, though he was a great admirer of Michaux’s “French technique,” Barton’s printer Cornelius Tiebout, “owing to the impossibility of obtaining information as to the manner of coloring abroad, […] has been obliged to make repeated experiments, [and has thus gradually brought it to the style exhibited in the present work” (xxiii; emphasis original). It is remarkable that Tiebout seems to have been totally unaware of the methods introduced in Boston only a few years earlier for the first

American book printed in colors, Jacob Bigelow’s American Medical Botany (1817-1821);

Bigelow and Barton both trained under Barton’s uncle Benjamin Smith Barton, and they exchanged letters about Bigelow’s publication, since Barton himself had simultaneously undertaken a similar work, the Vegetable Materia Medica (1817-1819). Bigelow and his printers

William B. Annin and George G. Smith had devised a far more efficient method of printing in color by engraving a resinous surface on stone, a process that eliminated the need for wiping the surfaces between each print—but the technique was never employed by any other printers in the

United States in the period immediately following, perhaps because Annin and Smith actively protected the secret of their method, or else simply wished to further perfect it before advertising their ability. In any case, it was superseded by the spread of lithography-proper soon afterward

(Wolfe 61-62).

If Barton and Thiebout knew any details at all about Bigelow’s unusual printing method, it is possible that they rejected them in pursuit of the more traditional “French style,” but specific information about European methods would have been even more difficult to obtain, thanks to 215 more firmly-established business protocols of apprenticeship and the legal protections of patents.

In England, for instance, chromoxylographer George Baxter obtained a patent in 1835 for his method of printing in colors from wood blocks, which he held until 1854 though the process had been in use for centuries, and some of his own apprentices had completed their terms of service and wanted to go into business for themselves (Burch 126-129). Though the Barton-Bigelow instance is not precisely contemporary to this example, it exemplifies the spirit of closed-mouth and proprietary policies that would have helped ensure the fame of certain printing-houses and helped keep their prices high, while also increasing the labor and time required to produce color prints in less-renowned houses due to the inefficiencies of experimentation.

Once a printer landed on a successful method of color printing, moreover, the degree of accuracy sought for in the highest-quality botanical prints still depended on the quality of the inks and watercolors available (or the recipes to make them), and their compatibility with the chosen paper. In the early nineteenth century, lists of vegetable and earth substances commonly used to produce pigments abounded in various encyclopedias, trade manuals, books of secrets and similar publications of the day (Wolfe 51), but formulas used to produce stable colors in one medium such as ink or paint did not generally transfer to another. Even similar modes of printing required different kinds or consistencies of ink: Bigelow considerably thinned the inks he used for his etched-stone prints, whereas more traditional copperplate etchings required thicker ink that would stay within the hatch lines (51).

These variations caused Barton some frustration; as noted above, he embraced

Werner’s system of color nomenclature in order to solve the problem of color description, devoting several pages in his first volume to tables of color correlation in “animal, vegetable, and mineral substances” (xi). He promised subscribers he would include actual samples of these 216 colors in the second volume of the Flora of North America, but was stymied when it came to accurately reproducing the hues under methods available to him and his publishers. The third volume offers this apology:

Upon repeated experiments with the tints, it was found that the best water colours

produced in their combinations, fading and evanescent tints—and the Author was

acquainted with no other mode of colouring them. He believes the tints of Werner’s Book

to be died [sic] by mineral solutions, and afterwards they are evidently pasted in squares,

opposite to the columns of names. Hence it was impossible for him to add the tints, which

he intended to do under the idea that they were produced by the common colours in use.

(Volume III, “Advertisement” n.p.)

Barton’s assessment suggests that Syme produced colors for “Werner’s Book” through a highly unusual medium and process (and even Syme himself left samples of metallic colors out of that publication because “they would soon tarnish” [15]). Details of production aside, though, the lesson is one that surely countless printers and publishers had to learn—that simply because colors existed in one printed book did not mean they could be easily reproduced in another, particularly a book made in a different place, with any degree of difference in equipment, materials, or expertise.

To briefly summarize, the examples I have laid out in this section offer four crucial considerations for our understanding of flower books: first, that the importance of color to understanding flowers was a matter of debate; second, that producing colored images in any manner was complicated, expensive, and technically difficult; third, that authors and publishers often carefully considered their decisions about modes of illustration; and fourth, that in spite of a general aim toward precision, illustrations (especially in color printing) involve elements of 217 experimentation, accident, and serendipity. In recognizing the rise of the flower book genre as coterminous with such a range of scientific, aesthetic, and technological developments, we can now more fully appreciate the complex questions and varied circumstances that authors, publishers, and their collaborators must have faced in planning and executing their particular approaches to illustration: What primary concepts would such books strive to convey, and would illustration clarify or beautify, or both? Would words or images better accomplish this task, and would one take priority over the other? How closely, in concept and in physical proximity, should the two be linked? What techniques offered the possibility of mass-production, who knew how to use them, and what would they cost? Should color play a role? What options could be offered to buyers to ensure steady sales?

Many flower books contain colored plates, though they vary greatly in number and production value, sometimes even across copies of the same edition. Generally the genre does not place the same emphasis on images as botanical reference works do, although works like

Loudon’s Ladies’ Flower Garden series (discussed in Chapter 1) and Flowers and Their Kindred

Thoughts (discussed below) give images an emphasis equal to that placed on text; still other flower books use images themselves as the primary “text,” with words in a supporting role.145

Regardless of the particular balance, a large number of flower books explicitly advertise their images and the methods used to produce them, suggesting that flower books offered printers valuable venues for the practice of various printing and coloring methods, and a place to show off the latest consumer-friendly developments. These advertisements also suggest a certain level of consumer demand for pictures of flowers, which were available for purchase outside of books

145 I do not examine these texts at length in my project, but two interesting examples include Anna Peyre Dinnies’s book The Floral Year: embellished with Bouquets of flowers (1847) and Frances S. Osgood’s Flower Alphabet in Gold and Colours (1845).

218 as well as bound into them (see note139 above). As an initial analysis of these wide-ranging possibilities I offer the following three case studies, which present diverse strategies of illustration from words only, to black and white images set into blocks of text, to colored plates interspersed with pages of text, and finally to chromolithographed plates in which images and words are intertwined and printed in colored ink. Certainly these examples reveal tensions, aspirations, and experiments in illustration, but more importantly, they provide us an opportunity to examine the intended or unintended consequences of such choices in the overall work of illustration—the effect they have on each book’s execution of its particular project.

Illustrational interference in Flora’s Dictionary

A particularly instructive examination of the competing forces dictating choices in how to illustrate occurs in Elizabeth Gamble Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary. First officially published in

Baltimore sometime between 1829 and 1831, the book remained popular and entered several more printings over the next twenty-five years. Though it was not the first book of floral sentiment published, Flora’s Dictionary, as I discussed in Chapter 2, was among the most extensive and influential books to assign meanings to particular plants, and thus to formalize the loose idea of floral sentiment into a full-blown Language of Flowers. At its core, the volume’s argument is that specific plants symbolize specific emotions, and when gathered and exchanged, can effectively communicate those emotions to others. For such a system to work, however, both the giver and the receiver must be able to correctly identify the flowers in question. Thus, though invested in the realm of metaphorical illustration, it also requires as much clear correlation to actual, physical objects in the real world as would a volume on medical botany. The evolution of images in the text over its several editions (as well as in various copies) offers valuable insight 219

into the challenges of accomplishing such a task, particularly when responsibilities were divided

between the author, publishers, printers, binders, and booksellers.

Here I offer an analysis of three editions, hailing respectively from 1835, 1837, and 1855.

The same Baltimore publishing family supervised each of these, Fielding Lucas Jr. managing the

1835 and 1837 editions, and Lucas Brothers the 1855 edition. Though published during her

lifetime, no edition of the book features any sort of update from Wirt herself (each retains her

original preface dated 1829), suggesting that she had little to do with decisions regarding the

layout and content of each new edition. That said, the text itself remains virtually unchanged

across editions, as does its basic two-columned layout, with the common and Latin names of

each plant listed on the left-hand side, and the sentiment and a corresponding verse printed on

the right.

Embellishments on these pages, however, evolve considerably (figure 4.8). The 1835

version is the simplest in design, its pages bordered with a single thin line meeting in a small

diamond shape at the corners. No other images of any kind are present, either on the printed

pages or in additional plates, and verbal descriptions of the plants are limited solely to their

Figure 4.15 The evolution of embellishment in Flora's Dictionary in editions from 1835, 1837, and 1855. (Winterthur Library) 220 common and Latin names. Curiously, though, as each edition invests more and more in visual illustration, it heavily favors the metaphorical rather than descriptive kind—that is, these editions include increasing numbers of generic flower pictures, but few (if any) that correspond specifically to passages of accompanying text. By 1837 those corner diamonds on the letterpress pages have been replaced with small floral garlands and the addition of page numbers. In the

1855 edition, images practically take over the printed text: inch-wide floral garlands border every page, and all of the white space visible in previous editions now features an elaborate floral design. In some ways the image-rich layout of this latest version mimics that of an illustrated herbal, where pictures of plants accompany their physical descriptions. Here, though, the floral images are purely decorative. They correspond in number to the botanical descriptions—that is, each entry about a specific flower has its own accompanying picture—but instead of conveying

Figure 4.16 Spread from Flora's Dictionary 1855 edition. (Winterthur Library). 221 the particular appearance of that flower, the image depicts a generic stylized bouquet. In fact, the total number of floral images in the book constitute only a handful, repeatedly placed wherever their size matches the size of the white space needing to be filled (Figure 4.9).

In the role of illustrations (again, defined as any element that illumines the mind, beautifies or adorns, confers honor or distinction, or enhances clarity), these images certainly function as adornments to the text, but can only be considered impediments to clarity; their placement on the page, indeed, is particularly misleading since they imply a degree of realistic correlation between word and image, but deliver only a broadly symbolic one. The resulting interaction between words and images is especially troublesome here because it challenges the fundamental semiotic function of the volume itself: the text of Flora’s Dictionary sets forth a system of floral signifiers and their meanings, a code that attaches distinct significance to hundreds of different plant species in a clear argument that they do not collapse into one overarching floral symbol, but communicate with nuance and precision. The images present in the 1855 edition work against this idea by confusing the readers’ notion of each plant’s unique physical identity; they seem to suggest that the Language of Flowers does not need actual flowers at all, only generic floral emblems.

So, what do we make of these tensions? With so little evidence of Wirt’s direct involvement after 1829, it seems reasonable to posit that Lucas Brothers simply lost sight of the volume’s original purpose and got caught up in their quest to produce a visually arresting text without the need for additional plates (though interested buyers could have these included in their copies as well, as I will discuss in a moment). Ornate as they appear, the images in the 1855 edition would have been relatively simple to produce, as they rely on a few stock images easily inserted into the formes (i.e. frames used to hold blocks of type). This was not exactly new 222 technology, as it had been in use since the earliest days of European printing, but it possessed numerous advantages over its two main alternatives, letterpress images of specific plants, and additional engraved or lithographed images: the former would require the creation of hundreds of dies (individual pieces of movable type), and the latter not only would require a whole separate production process, but also would create more work for binders and introduce greater potential for mistakes, such as missing or misplaced plates. In contrast, once electrotyped, the stock images became a permanent part of each page’s composition, making it both more visually interesting and more stable, and thus easily reproducible over time.

Thus, this is not simply a story of an author thwarted by her money-driven publishers.

Rather, the conflicting forms of symbolic and pictorial illustration in these later editions of

Flora’s Dictionary give insight into the various experiments performed with evolving technologies of image and book production in this period, and the sometimes-competing interests of the numerous entities (even beyond authors and publishers) involved in creating relationships between ideas, images, and words. Without the long-term involvement of a single author-editor, or at least an editor-in-chief dedicated foremost to honoring the author’s vision, the final appearance of a book reflects the unruly nature of compilation performed in a system with only tenuous centralized control.

The profession of publishing was only just developing in the first half of the nineteenth century, and even in its last decades most American publishers still only coordinated the myriad processes of book manufacturing, contracting with printing firms, binderies, wholesale dealers, and other establishments to produce and distribute their materials (Casper 12-13). Though

Fielding Lucas Jr. was one of the first Americans to take on this new role of publisher, he was principally an artist and cartographer, with no training or practical experience in printing 223

(“Baltimore”). The layout of letterpress pages in the earlier editions of Flora’s Dictionary probably originated with the printing house that produced it (no attribution is specifically given), even if Lucas gave his approval. The advent of stereotype and electrotype did shift this balance of control slightly toward the publisher: the 1855 edition of Flora’s Dictionary explicitly states it was printed by King & Baird of Philadelphia, but electrotyped at the Baltimore Type Foundry owned by Lucas Brothers, implying that by mid-century the company maintained its own “in- house” team of letterpress compositors. Even so, as I described above, the embellishment of the pages in this edition suggests that the design was adopted as much for ease of assembly as for visual effect, a move motivated more by the practical concerns of production than by the more visionary concerns of authorship or editing. Wirt’s project remains apparently intact in her words and in the two-column page layout, but all additions reasonably rest with the compositors, the companies who commissioned them, and the technological and economic constraints under which they labored.

Despite their slightly differing motivations, these three entities (author, publisher, and printer) remain the strongest and most stable presences in the letterpress pages of the three editions of Flora’s Dictionary discussed here; the effects of decentralization are far more apparent in the wide variation of elective materials accompanying the letterpress, including bindings, frontispieces, presentation plates, and additional plates. Publishers did generally contract in quite specific terms with binders and plate-makers about their contributions to book’s final composition and appearance, and often publishers chose to offer customers a range of options in these categories since they significantly affected the book’s final market price.

Publisher-approved bindings could include everything from paper-covered boards or wrappers to numerous colors of cloth and expensive leather (Winship 61). Additional color plates might be 224 excluded altogether, or offered solely as frontispieces or presentation plates, or interspersed in large numbers throughout the text.

Some variation across editions and even among copies of the same edition is therefore to be expected, and can be considered part of the official publishing plan. In the specimens I examined, for example, two copies of the 1835 edition146 appeared essentially the same, with standard yellow paperboard covers and no additional plates, though printed pages alternate with blank papers in pink, blue, and yellow, similar to the blank sheets sometimes found in contemporary keepsake albums (one book owner, or string of owners, more likely, used the book to press flowers, write down thoughts, sketch portraits, copy poems, stash calling cards, and even preserve a thick lock of hair [figure 4.10]).

By 1837, however, the decorative options seem to have expanded significantly: one particularly

147 sumptuous copy bears full-leather dark green covers emblazoned with a golden butterfly and Figure 4.17 Pages from a single copy of Flora's Dictionary, 1835 edition. (Winterthur Library)

146 One copy is held at the British Library; the other at Winterthur Library in Delaware. 147 This copy held by Winterthur Library, Delaware. 225 the recipient’s name, “Miss Betty F. Waller” (figure

4.11); page edges are gilded, and the blank sheets of colored paper have been replaced with fifty-eight engraved and watercolored plates. Clearly conceived as a set, these plates include a frontispiece, a presentation plate, and pictures of numerous floral bouquets all neatly indexed in the back with a list of flowers contained in each grouping. The frontispiece, moreover, credits these illustrations to “Miss Ann Smith,” placing her name on Figure 4.18 Cover of Waller copy, Flora's Dictionary (1837). (Winterthur Library). the page alongside those of Wirt and Lucas (figure 4.12). Both copies of the 1835 edition and this copy of the 1837 edition manifest coordinated forces at work, the 1837 edition in particular representing perhaps the culmination of their collaboration, every element seemingly in its rightful and intentional place.

Figure 4.19 Frontispiece and presentation plate from the Waller copy of Flora's Dictionary. (Winterthur Library) 226

Yet even here, with all elements evidently conceived as part of a whole, they compete.

Smith’s drawings of bouquets bring visual interest to the volume and, by naming each flower, the index to the plates adds a measure of clarity to plant-identification—but this index conspicuously does not include the meanings of the flowers, which again, is Wirt’s primary purpose. The complexity and irregularity of flower language grammar (as discussed in Chapter

2) makes it difficult to determine whether Smith constructed her bouquets with a message in mind, or chose flowers simply for their looks. Perhaps she meant for readers to look up Wirt’s definitions of

Figure 4.20 Frontispiece and presentation plate for the Gibson copy of Flora's each flower and decode the Dictionary (1837). (Google Books). meanings of the bouquets for themselves, but it is equally possible that Smith in composing the plates, and Lucas in commissioning them, disregarded that aspect of the volume altogether.

Though the harmony of its elements is imperfect, the Waller copy brings the numerous entities of book-publishing together to an unusual degree; by way of comparison, two other copies of the same edition make it clear that publishers’ specifications (even when they aimed to provide several options to buyers) could not ensure total consistency. A copy inscribed to Sophie

Gibson148 features generic brown calf covers, a different design for the frontispiece and presentation plate with no attribution to a specific artist (figure 4.13), only seven additional

148 This version held by the University of Michigan, available in digital form on Google Books. 227 plates, and no index listing the flowers pictured. More interesting still, a third copy inscribed to Alice

Chapman149 bears the Smith frontispiece and presentation plate, but also only seven additional plates

(unattributed and unlabeled, and none matching those in the Gibson copy) which vary widely in the quality of their coloring. On the outside, the volume appears perhaps even more ornate than the Waller copy: the royal blue cloth cover is embossed, gilded, and painted, and the spine bears a title and elaborate gilding as well

(figure 4.14). But on the inside, in addition to the variation in the colored plates, some of the letterpress pages are badly watermarked in patterns which suggest the damage occurred to certain gatherings before they were bound, rather than to the finished book.

The Chapman copy thus bears the marks of an unconventional history, of vicissitudes and decisions quite likely outside the publishers’ direct control.

Though the letterpress pages are of the 1837 edition, the inscription reads, “Presented to M. Alice Chapman from

John W. Crane Jr., Jan ’56.” A note from Crane on the frontispiece reads “New York January 15th 1856, Alice Figure 4.21 Cover and two higher-quality plates from the Chapman copy of Flora's Dictionary (1837). (Ohio State University Libraries)

149 Held by Ohio State University Libraries. 228

Chapman Westfield Mass.” It is thus unclear exactly when or where the printing and binding of all the pieces in this copy took place: not only could they have happened any time in the nearly twenty-year period between the original publication of the letterpress pages and the date of dedication, but they could bear the workmanship of binders, distributors, and even plate-printers anywhere between Baltimore and New York. Common practice dictated that only a certain number of copies of any given printing would be bound for immediate sale; the rest would be warehoused at the bindery and bound only as demand required. Once all the letterpress pages and additional plates had been printed, they would be delivered to binders, who would return several hundred copies to the publisher and warehouse the remainder in sheets, to be bound as demand required—and records indicate that it was not uncommon for even a handful of copies to be bound and returned to the publisher years, even decades, after a work’s original publication

(Winship 62). Warehoused materials, however, would be subject to all kinds of risk and damage, as the watermarked pages of the Chapman copy attest. And it is also likely that no publishing entity, whether publisher, binder, distributor, or bookseller, enjoyed keeping large quantities of letterpress material or printed plates in store rather than circulating in the marketplace, and that each would do what lay in his power to combine what materials he had in stock to make them available and attractive to buyers.150

Nor was passage of time any guarantee that a publisher would gain steadily more control over these entities. By the time the Chapman copy was presented (possibly, though by no means

150 I have not yet been able to prove this, but it seems reasonable that, given the variety of middlemen involved in the book trade, that some would buy up damaged or leftover prints from publishers or binders, and recombine/rebind them into marketable copies. Winship notes that by the 1850s Jobbers (wholesale dealers) “might act chiefly as agents, gathering orders from a number of publishers and sending them on as a single shipment to retail establishments, which maintained accounts directly with those publishers. Jobbers might also purchase books in large lots directly from publishers to be divided up and sold on their own account to retailers, who were thus saved the difficulty of establishing credit and maintaining separate accounts with multiple publishing firms” (121). 229

Figure 4.22 Cover, frontispiece and presentation plate to 1855 edition of Flora's Dictionary (Winterthur Library). certainly, the same year it was completed and offered for sale), the 1855 edition of Flora’s

Dictionary was newly available—but though eye-catching in its elaborate decoration, a number of details reveals that consistency of production and coordination between book-making bodies remained elusive. As stated earlier, the letterpress pages were produced directly under the publishers’ control, stereotyped at the foundry the Lucas Brothers owned. The volume embraces various technical innovations: in addition to the images crowding the letterpress pages, the volume is slightly larger than previous editions, and the copy I examined151 bears red leather covers with the title embossed in a highly stylized new font (figure 4.15) and a frontispiece and presentation plate printed in chromolithograph. These luxurious details contrast, however, with the remaining handful of plates; these are of the conventional lithographed and hand-painted variety, and are noticeably disjointed—they are numbered, but their numbers do not correspond to each other or to any other part of the book, and there is no index listing them. Indeed, of all the colored plates appearing in the various copies of the 1837 and 1855 editions, the only ones that seem to be expressly produced for Flora’s Dictionary are the sixty Smith plates indexed in the

151 Held by Winterthur Library, Delaware. 230

1837 Waller copy; the rest could as easily be a mix of commissioned plates, stock images, or even prints left over from other projects.

To reiterate my point, then, the bindings and additional plates found in these various copies and editions of Flora’s Dictionary tell a different story than the letterpress pages do: though the letterpress design follows a linear trajectory from spare to elaborate between 1835 and 1855, the elective materials vary widely in quality, even more than can be accounted for by a publisher’s official plan to offer various options to buyers. The iterations of Flora’s Dictionary thus clearly manifest an overarching struggle to establish or maintain harmony between words, images, and concepts, particularly when each component represents the input and motivations of a separate set of people. As such, each piece is subject to different market forces, technological innovations and constraints, and its contributing entity’s need to maximize the return on its investment. The labor and cooperation required to construct the material book itself severely challenges the formation of a consistent artistic philosophy. Thus Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary invites us to think about the complications of collaborative illustration: the difficulty interested authors faced in exploring the relationship among plants, images, and more esoteric concepts when the technologies of book production required such extensive reliance on outside parties.

Resonant Illustration in The Romance of Nature

In contrast to what we observe in Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary¸ authors did occasionally have opportunities to exert much greater influence over the various verbal and visual elements of their books. Such is the case in Louisa Twamley’s The Romance of Nature, or the Flower

Seasons Illustrated (1836). Like many flowers books, The Romance of Nature compiles materials from a variety of authors and other sources, but in this text Twamley’s conversational commentary on excerpts from “our great old Poets” (x) takes a definite back seat to her own 231 poems and original drawings. The book also represents work completed in a more extensively developed and technologically advanced print network (London), under the direction of Charles

Tilt, a more experienced image-expert publisher,152over a much shorter period of time—the book’s third and final edition appeared three years after the initial release with no major changes.

All of these circumstances contribute to the greater sense of coherence evident in The Romance of Nature. Unlike the effect in Flora’s Dictionary where the various elements combine into a sort of noise that muddles the volume’s overall meaning, The Romance of Nature brings together poetry, plates, and plants, such that each element amplifies and sharpens the others’ significance.

Twamley’s volume thus brings us much closer to the structure of integrated illustrational resonance I proposed at the beginning of this chapter, where flowers are poems and paintings, and poems are paintings and flowers, and paintings are flowers and poems, and all three combine to convey otherwise ineffable elements of human experience. Indeed, the interdependence of these players forms the essential thesis of The Romance of Nature, as its title and subtitle –The

Flower Seasons Illustrated—suggest. Each piece of these titular phrases vibrates with multifaceted but also elusive significance. What kind of Romance is she talking about? What is a

“flower season,” and how does one illustrate it? Twamley’s meanings multiply when we examine them from varying angles, surfacing in a kind of peripheral space where all the elements she calls upon can mingle together.

In essence, Twamley builds her arguments through simultaneity, synesthesia, and ekphrasis—that is, she presents readers with numerous ideas, sensory perceptions, and art forms

152 Charles Tilt began his own publishing business in 1826, but his wealth was noted by contemporaries from 1830 onward. He focused his efforts on publishing richly-illustrated books at a range of prices, and much of his wealth derived from his near-monopoly of the early lithography market in London, which he achieved by importing elaborate (but inexpensive) designs from the continent, and by purchasing the rights to previously published prints after copyrights had lapsed, then re-engraving and printing them on a smaller scale (Browning). 232 that slide and morph into each other, allowing readers to hold them all in mind at once.

“Romance,” for example, meant many things in 1836: a particular kind of narrative, a song with a personal or tender quality, a powerful thrall or emotional attachment that concludes with marriage or heartbreak, or Romantic philosophy as it was articulated through poetry and other arts of the period and which, broadly speaking, emphasizes emotional experience as a way of knowing. Twamley’s usage and reiteration of the phrase throughout the book suggest that she embraced all of these meanings. “In the following pages,” she explains, “I have sought only to express the beauty, poetry, and Romance of Nature which appear in the forms and characters of

Flowers. I have called in the aid of fiction to vary the strain for the ears of those unaccustomed to songs of simple truth; and I have, in one or two instances, ventured a half-fable, the better to illustrate my meaning” (viii). She refers to her excerpts from older poets as “records of the

Romance of Flowers” (71), and to the complete book as “an humble finger-post on the road” to

“the Fairy-realm of Nature’s Romance” (247-248). Thus, the Romance she describes is at once a place or state of mind, a powerful force on many keen minds, and an experience recorded in certain kinds of fiction, fable, poetry, and song.

If this Romance is apparent in the “flower seasons,” then illustrating those seasons must involve more than merely recording which flowers bloom at what times of year. Twamley does in fact organize her book in units of Spring, Summer, and Autumn (there is no Winter section, but poems in the Spring portion include “To a Narcissus in January” and “To a Violet Gathered on Christmas Day”), but strives to convey the feeling, not just the fact, of each season. In reality both flowers and seasons are constantly in flux; they symbolize the predictable, cyclical patterns of life, but also the inexorable passage of time. In the moment they can seem as though they might last forever, but they are fleeting and in retrospect seem to have passed too quickly. 233

Illustrating such complex experiences is no easy task—indeed, triteness when it appears in flower books might be understood as an unsuccessful attempt to do so—and Twamley’s multifaceted approach creates an unusually rich result. Using written words, paintings, and actual flowers, she strives to capture, communicate, and celebrate the profound but ephemeral experiences nature offers, in all the ways illustration possibly can: through beautifying, conferring distinction, rendering clarity, and illuminating the mind.

The resonance between plants, plates, and poems that Twamley creates in The Romance of Nature begins (if it can have a beginning) with poetry. From the outset of the work she makes it clear that she embraces an expansive definition of the term; her preface emphasizes that “the design of my work is purely poetical,” and that both the words and the pictures should direct readers’ attention to the “poetry of Nature” (vii). She uses the words poetry and romance almost as synonyms, and although we know few details about her life during this period, her conflation of the poetry nature and humans both create suggests that she read and was influenced by first- and second-generation Romantic poets. She dedicates her book to William Wordsworth, and states in her preface that while she had planned to include brief passages only from “our ancient

Bards,” she found herself “almost compelled to make an exception in favour of Shelley” (x).

Both Wordsworth and Shelley famously published their theories of poetry, definitions that often tangle the literal and metaphorical as they slide between discussions of poetry’s possible forms, characteristics, and effects, as I will discuss below.

Twamley’s philosophy of poetry, though not stated as a manifesto, echoes elements of both the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and A Defense of Poetry. She welcomes the notion of concurrence, where poetry is at once a divine something that exists partly outside oneself, the experience of encountering or recognizing that something, the expression of the encounter, and 234 the power of that utterance on others. She speaks of a “poetry of existence,” innate to some extent in all humans and particularly evident in childhood, which teaches “even the infant in the nurse’s arms to snatch at flowers, and laugh in the sunshine” (245)—in other words, poetry as an intuitive sense of wonder, joy, insight, and wisdom. And bringing all this into relationship with flowers seems to make even more literal Shelley’s assertion that “Poetry is indeed something divine. […] It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; […] [i]t is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it” (Shelley 1175). In writing and collecting writing about plants, Twamley claims only a desire to “enhance the pleasure with which [even] one person contemplates a flower” (248), but her aim in the end seems much higher—to record, and create new opportunities for, moments of keen perception that reveal the vividness and power within ordinary things and experiences.

The lithographed and hand-painted plates form an integral part of Twamley’s “purely poetical design,” not only establishing for readers a relationship between ideas and identifiable objects in the material world, but also (in keeping with Shelley’s statement) providing circumstances for readers to access poetic experience through synesthesia. Like many thinkers since the Renaissance, Twamley saw an intimate relationship between poetry and painting, each providing an only slightly varied approach to the same end. “Poets paint with the pen,” she quotes, citing Spenser’s pastoral poems as examples of “pictures of sylvan loveliness that the pencil of Claude himself could not exceed” (38). Her description is perhaps not an iconic example of ekphrasis (in which one art form literally appears within another, such as a poem that describes a painting), but it suggests Twamley believed in an ongoing ekphrastic relationship between the two, as if all poems contain paintings, and all paintings contain poems. Twamley’s 235 readers caught this thread in her work: one reviewer notes “Miss Twamley’s poems show that she is a painter, and her paintings that she is a poet.”153 The Romance of Nature includes twenty- eight plates created from Twamley’s paintings, an unusually large set of coordinated images for a single flower book. As images tend to do, they command a great deal of attention since readers more quickly perceive and interpret them than words. Twamley exerted great care that each representation would faithfully denote actual specimens of native plants, and the prints Tilt produced are crisp in color and detail. Yet despite their beauty, realism, and overall evocative qualities, the plates alone would possess only a measure of the power they gain when partnered with the text. Likewise, the plates crucially link the work to actual plants in the actual world—a site as important to Twamley’s vision of the “romance of nature” as the one created through art.

Her writings and drawings, she argues, should guide readers to the “poetry of our own meadows, and lanes, and dingles” (ix). Words and images may magnify the beauty and power of experience—they might teach a person to “see” nature rather than merely to “look” at it, that is, to perceive certain details and interpret them in a particular way154—but potent as they are, she maintains that they cannot entirely substitute for that experience.

This triumvirate of symbolic representation—poems, plates, and plants—draws upon the tradition of the “sister arts” which from at least the beginning of the eighteenth century linked poetry, painting, and landscape design;155 yet Twamley’s view tends toward picturesque

153 This review is from the Monthly Repository, on Poems by Louisa Anne Twamley, as advertised at the end of The Romance of Nature. 154 Oscar Wilde famously articulated this phenomenon in the Decay of Lying (1891), arguing that Life and Nature imitate Art, and that “Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing” (12). John Berger fleshes out this argument in Ways of Seeing (1972), but he ascribes greater importance and power than Wilde does to acts of looking, noting that “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. […] We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice” (8). 155 See Lisa Moore’s collection of resources on this topic, Sister Arts: British Gardening, Painting, and Poetry, 1700- 1832. 236 aesthetics insofar as she expands the relationship to include not just carefully planned and manicured gardens, but also wild, uncultivated places. The book’s preface indicates that she embraces a common religious belief of her time, that natural objects are the work of the omnipotent artist God. She writes, “I love Flowers as forming one of the sweetest lines in the

God-written Poetry of Nature […] awakening in our hearts feelings of wonder, admiration, gratitude, and devotion; teaching us to look from Earth to Him who called it into existence” (vii- viii). In considering “real” objects from nature also as made-objects bearing the signature of a divine being’s hands, Twamley requires us to broaden the lens through which we view and judge art’s purposes, workings, and effects. Studies of ekphrasis, for example, tend to focus almost exclusively on human-made compositions in their exploration of the ways different art forms can relate to and illuminate one another, as in the case of a painting of a garden, or a poem that inspired a landscape design. Yet if natural objects such as wildflowers also fall into the category of intentional art, the ekphrastic relationship expands: in Twamley’s book, the poems, pictures, and plants in the real world outside don’t compete, but instead, each plays key roles in describing, clarifying, and adorning one another, with little distinction between which of the three is the most important, powerful, or authentic in its ability to communicate meaning.

Twamley’s work conveys a desire to access a deeper truth beyond mere seeming, and her ekphrastic triangulation of poems, pictures, and plants plays a very important role in its ability to do so. The “songs of simple truth” collected in her work, she argues, reveal how flowers communicate “a universal language of love, beauty, poetry, and wisdom, if we read them aright”

(viii emphasis original). Her opening poem celebrates flowers as the mementos of “childhood’s guileless wealth” when she was “rich in [her] faith / That all was as it seemed—that life was truth” (2). The insights flowers offer can, she suggests, combat the uncertainty, confusion, and 237 disappointment that come with adulthood,—but only when art, literature, and actual floral experience combine their strengths and work as a community. In Twamley’s aesthetic, then, poems, paintings, and plants, must join together to make up for each other’s weaknesses, as each one possesses its own particular shortcomings in its ability to access or represent truth. Valentine

Cunningham argues that writing in particular is always “tormented by the question of real presence, by challenges to knowability,” and that ekphrastic connections between writing and images or objects help solve this problem by anchoring the conceptual to something concrete: to an “an allegedly touchable, fingerable thisness” that allows “the real presence of the made object to rub off, as it were, on its own proceedings” (61). I posit that whether made by humans or the divine, objects also spark this same kind of ontological uncertainty, hence the need to combine them with other forms through ekphrasis. Paintings, drawings, and flowers, like written language, are limited in their ability to capture whole truth. Experiencing these things by visiting a museum, buying a book, or taking a walk, helps them become more concrete for us, but

Twamley’s argument is that we need multiple “access” points, so to speak, to know these things more thoroughly—to see them more deeply and clearly.

The joint work of experiencing the natural world and reading or viewing representations of it is crucial since Twamley highlights the pitfall of relying too thoroughly on art as the only source of knowledge. Art necessarily has to interpret nature and sometimes does so very broadly.

While admitting imperfection she emphasizes that her own drawings “were invariably made from Nature,” and that “I have never been guilty of curving a stem on my paper, which I found growing straight in the field, or of magnifying a flower for the sake of gay effect […], however I may sin against the laws of picturesque effect or elegant arrangement” (xi). Her commitment to verisimilitude in her portrayals of plants shows her desire to make them as truthful and as 238 correlative to reality, as she sees it, as possible (though in book production even the most accurate drawings are subject to the foibles of printing). Combining the drawings with the poems helps expand knowability by using language to overcome the imperfections of visual representation, and to communicate aspects of truth not readily apparent in images alone.

Twamley’s plea that readers consider the drawings and poems alongside living flowers naturally lends her structure of meaning even greater potential for uncovering nature’s broader truths because they possess the greatest “fingerable thisness”—the greatest (though not a perfect) assurance that the book has drawn and then represented, as much as possible, the “real thing.” Of course, her book was not sold with a package of seeds, a live bouquet, or even pressed and dried floral specimens; she depended on readers to notice and appreciate encounters with actual flowers on their own and to bring their experience to the reading. But given the popularity of floriculture in nineteenth-century England and the fact that even in industrialized areas most people were able to spend some time walking outside, she could almost guarantee that her average reader would come across one or two of these; and, as previously stated, the fact that today we often find flowers pressed between the pages confirms that they did so. Moreover, in contrast to paintings or prints, wildflowers at least require no disposable income or visitor’s pass to access, and unlike written poetry, they require no skills of privilege, like literacy in written language, to elicit delight, or convey meaning. To briefly qualify this statement, such meaning would most likely be limited to the personal and the local; as Susan Pearce has argued, “physical objects are meaningless without social content,” [Museums 21], and although this content can emerge through use, tradition, and oral or pictorial transmission, writing and literacy hasten the process and extend its reach. I have demonstrated that flower books strive to gather, consolidate, and clarify the multifaceted social content of plants, and as I will show in Chapter 5, they 239 sometimes render their featured flowers so meaningful that they overshadow lesser-known flowers entirely and prevent them from ever acquiring social content. Finding meaning in a blossom thus depends on a complex set of circumstances. Nevertheless, Twamley dwells on the democratic qualities of wildflowers at length and in several separate passages of her preface, calling them “the true philanthropists of their race” (ix), “universal blessings accessible to all nations, climes, and classes” (vii), “indigenous to every soil and familiar to every eye” (viii).

Flowering weeds possess the advantage of being available and potentially evocative to almost everyone.

Regardless of Twamley’s desire to educate her readers and viewers as thoroughly as possible in nature’s concrete details and their related ideas, nature of course remains constantly variable, transient, and ultimately unknowable, as many nineteenth-century writers contemplated. The era’s fevered pace of scientific discovery often seemed to render the physical world only more mysterious. Many people seemed to feel, as Coventry Patmore expressed, that a

“geranium, pink or rose is thrice itself through power of art,”156 so much so that, as Alphonse

Karr noted, some might willingly “cut down a half-league of these old beech trees, to pay for [an artist’s] copy of a single one.”157 We might consider then, that rather than being “the poor man’s poetry,” flowers by themselves are simply the poor man’s poetry – evocative but somewhat incomplete, lacking permanence as well as the clearer, more nuanced significance that art and literature can articulate. Wordsworth repeatedly argues for the superiority of reflections on experiences within nature over the experiences themselves. Twamley dedicated her book to

Wordsworth, and her section on the narcissus subtly nods to his 1804 poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” in which a surprise encounter with a field of daffodils commands his attention and

156 From Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854). 157 From The Flowers Personified p.12. 240 lifts his spirits, but only reveals its true worth with the passage of time.158 That poem, in turn, echoes elements of Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the

Wye during a tour, July 17, 1798, the final poem in Lyrical Ballads (1798), where Wordsworth differentiates between the “wild ecstasies” of initial encounters with nature, and the more powerful, perpetual influence these moments can exert through memory and reflection. He describes himself as a younger man, when nature “[t]o me was all in all” (76); he sought the beauty of rocks, mountains, woods, and streams with

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye. (81-84)

Wordsworth affirms that such an approach to nature, seeking visceral stimuli without the burden of thought, does have its place: it motivates the poet to commune with nature in the first place and to enjoy it through the “glad animal movements” (75) of his own body which, as I will discuss further in Chapter 5, is a powerful method of learning. Yet five years later, he recognizes that such an attitude has limitations, because the pleasure arising from bodily experience is temporal and fleeting. As fulfilling as such pursuits might have felt in the moment, they required a feverish effort to sustain them: he sought the hills “more like a man / flying from something that he dreads, than one / who sought the thing he loved” (71-73); on his prior visit to Tintern

158 Twamley dedicated The Romance of Nature to Wordsworth, and though she never quotes any of his poetry in the work, it seems that her comment in the section on the narcissus refers directly to him and to his famous poem on daffodils. She writes: “Our own merry, dancing daffodil claims kindred with the Narcissi; and who does not love the daffodils […]? What a mine of wealth a bank sprinkled thickly with their bright golden crests, and waving leaves, seemed to us in childhood! And if only precious as the memories of such innocent delight, we must love them still. Of modern Bards, however great, I have forbidden myself to speak, but what can be more beautiful […] than these sweet verses of Robert Herrick’s? ” (66) 241

Abbey, Wordsworth had been in emotional turmoil, and the dread he flew from likely refers to those circumstances and to the knowledge that he would face them again once he departed. Thus, looking back on his earlier visit, the poet acknowledges “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no more, / And all its dizzy raptures” (84-86). For when nature is an end in itself, it also has an ending: the elevated state of feeling it offers can only last as long as one remains in its presence.

Such is the case for nature when isolated in the realm of physical experience, but as

Wordsworth recognizes “how often has [his] spirit turned” to his memories of the Wye valley, he begins to describe how these reflections —nature plus thought, or in Twamley’s terms, flowers plus the poetry of images and words—have soothed him in times of trouble, made him a kinder person, and most importantly, opened up his perceptions to a higher plane of existence and truth.

To these reflections, he observes,

I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened: —that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul: 242

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things. (37-50)

The process Wordsworth describes here presents unmistakable parallels to Twamley’s philosophy of illustration, and reveals its ultimate potential. Wordsworth argues that experiences in nature, combined with, but not overpowered by, thought and analysis, and allowed to

“harmonize” in a quiet, peripheral space of “mood,” lift away layers of confusion and bounded corporeality to reveal something transcendent. The concrete world offers powerful sensory encounters, but only the imagination can begin to perceive their full meanings; bodily perceptions find their balance in the “living soul.” For both Wordsworth and Twamley, flowers alone or only corporeal pleasure in those beauties, are not the point; they are merely guides in the quest to illuminate and clarify a broader truth, to “see into the life of things.” But in order for them to act as such, a person must transcend the initial experience of encounter and move into the realm of reflection. In short, flowers need poetry.

In Twamley’s endeavor to illustrate the “romance of nature,” therefore, she affirms that no single one of the illustrative elements she gathers in her book—not even the most concrete and supposedly real—is capable by itself of affirming either its own “thereness” or the thereness of any thoughts or emotions one might strive to make it represent. This idea challenges

Benjamin’s notion that, in an age of mechanical reproduction, only the “original” work of art retains an “aura,” i.e. a powerful presence in time and space (“Work” 3): in Twamley’s construction, not only is it impossible to pinpoint which of the three elements is the “original” and which are illustrations, it is imperative that the flowers, poems, and pictures all lean on each other to gain a greater measure of substance. Furthermore, by acknowledging that these three 243 each have individual limitations, that all are simulacra, and that they stand to gain by joining forces, readers can then begin to understand how such a community accomplishes the ambitious work of illustration, of gesturing to something far more profound and complex, but far less concrete and fixed, than anything human art or natural objects could signify on their own.

As I discussed above, The Romance of Nature’s material format helps to create and support the illustrative resonance of these elements. I’d like to discuss this here in more detail.

As we saw in Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary, the complications of printing can pit words, images, and realities against one another, but Twamley’s book manages to bring them largely into cooperation and to preserve space for mental play and individual interpretation. Though this success partly arises from the book’s more streamlined printing and publication process that I outlined at the beginning of this section, a few of her specific choices play particularly important roles. First, the placement and treatment of the images combines specificity and order with alluring open-endedness. As stated previously, Twamley created all the drawings herself, expressly for the work. They formed part of her overall vision for it, and they relate to specific sections of text. An index at the front of the book names and accounts for each plate.

Figure 4.23 Sample plates and "List of Plates" from The Romance of Nature (Google Books) 244

Significantly though, the plates themselves bear images only—no accompanying words or even plate numbers further label or identify the pictures (figure 4.16). At the same time, the placement of images on separate plates (rather than within blocks of text) fundamentally separates them from the text. Bound in to the codex with a protective leaf of tissue paper, each image maintains a considerable physical distance from surrounding words, and requires visual examination entirely on its own (figure 4.17). Thus, a reader glancing through the book encounters numerous floral images that seem to stand alone. They take some work to identify and to link to particular textual passages—and until the reader forges those links, the images are free to work on the reader’s mind and senses, and to signify any number of things.

Likewise, the separateness of the images from the text means that a reader engrossed in reading might encounter a written description of a flower, but have to envision it in her mind until she finds the picture of it. The index, though it names the plant in each plate, provides no indication of where exactly in the book it is found; readers depend either on their own prior plant-knowledge or on the book binders’ fidelity to the index order to determine the correct match. The construction of the book thus creates a time-lag between the encounter of word or image and the verification of its counterpart image or word, as well as of its actual analogue in nature. In these few vital moments of suspended meaning the reader can take stock of her own

Figure 4.24 Consecutive page spreads from The Romance of Nature, showing how the image on a separate plate creates white space. (Google books). 245 sensory perceptions and interpretations before being handed someone else’s. She herself helps construct the parallels between poems, pictures, and plants, gradually joining pieces together to form a clearer vision of the whole. In doing so she gains pleasure, illumination, and a sense of ownership over her own insights: rather than simply reading about others experiencing the

“romance of nature,” she begins to feel she is discovering its wonders for herself.

Even beyond this initial phase of linking roughly proximate images and words, the book continues to invite readers to participate in the layering, revision and expansion of meaning, because references to given flowers recur at different places and in different modes throughout the text. Consider the case of the gorse. References to this plant first appear in a poem called

“The May Morn Bouquet,” a dramatic dialogue between the milkmaid Dora and her sweetheart

Lubin who refuses to wear any flowers but gorse to the May festival. The poem is interrupted by a plate, the image of the plant, which separates the beginning of Lubin’s explanation from its conclusion: thus when we first see the image we only know that the gorse blooms in spring, summer, and fall—we don’t yet know that he has chosen it as the symbol of his undying love, because it grows in roughest conditions and blooms in all seasons. Though placed in proximity to the poem, the image nevertheless engineers a pause in the midst of reading, and then invites a turning back and forth of pages for reexamination after the poem ends, since the poem’s conclusion lends the picture more importance and interest. Indeed, the plant’s “meaning” and the most vivid details of its physical description both appear in the poem after the image:

I’ll never rob thee of lily nor rose,

While the bonny bright GORSE may be mine,

For that flower is a charter to love while it blows,

And entitles thy Lubin, wherever it grows, 246

To a kiss from those sweet lips of thine.

Nay, pout not, nor frown—though you thus prove the flower

E’en more emblematical yet—

For the golden bud lives in a weapon-girt bower,

All around and about her are guardians of power,

And countless spears valiantly set.

But as, when resolved the bright blossom to gain,

We value not spear head nor lance;

So when Lubin a kiss craves, sweet Dora in vain

May frown a refusal. Come, now to the train—

For the flaunting May-pole and the dance!

[footnote] “When gorse is out of blossom, kissing is out of fashion” –gorse being in

bloom all the year. (27)

These final stanzas of the poem reinforce the notion that the gorse is an “emblematical” flower, its blossoms and thorns vividly presented in a faithful but generic image, its metaphorical significance brought to life in the charming narrative and reinforced in the footnoted proverb.

The effect at this point is as if Twamley has declared “This is gorse, the symbol of undying love”—Fin. 247

Almost fifty pages later, however, Twamley offers a different mode of reading the gorse that invites reevaluation. Instead of a proverb that conveys the impression of a generally accepted truth, she proposes a more individualized interpretation of the flower:

[A]s the almost unfailing inhabitant of wild moor, mountain, and waste land, the yellow

Gorse is one of our familiar road-side acquaintances; and rough though it be, there is a

kind of cheeriness in its bright golden face, that makes us ever greet its seeming smile

with pleasure—I should say affection. The Gorse appears the emblem, indeed the portrait,

of many a kindly being, whose rough and even repulsive exterior so overshadows their

better [73] and brighter parts, that the careless and superficial observer would declare “all

barren:” while they who look beyond the surface, find qualities and beauties in the

friend’s mind and the flower’s scent, that prove, though “all is not gold that glitters,” the

true treasure must often be sought in the hardest rock. (72-73)

Here Twamley trades one voice—the writer of carefully-crafted fiction—for that of the “sociable gossip” (247), in which she offers her musings directly to the reader. At the same time, however, the easy familiarity of this voice assumes the authority of communal consensus, as though she is not speaking simply for herself, but for everyone. Because this tone combines multiple voices— both sociability and specificity—it feels fresher than the earlier proverb. As it did in the earlier poem, gorse still acts as an emblem, the floral equivalent of a diamond in the rough, but

Twamley’s interpretation here feels both universalized and intimate. The “us” she speaks for could refer to her ongoing relationship with the flower species, as well as with the kinds of people of whom it reminds her and / or it could include her whole readership, since it prompts us as readers to look back at the picture again (or to pay attention next time we go outside) and to consider whether we belong to the group—that is, whether we too feel any affection for the 248 flower’s “bright golden face” and “rough and even repulsive exterior.” In short, the image means something different now, and performs a different function: at first it simply clarified and adorned a charming story about other people, but here it asks us to consider ourselves and our judgments of people we know.

At the very end of her work, nearly two hundred pages later, Twamley’s final meditation on the gorse brings a third layer of interpretation, one with even more particularity, a singularity that complicates and enriches both earlier accounts. It begins by counseling “every one, but especially the young, and of my own sex, never to suffer that poetry of childhood to be effaced from their hearts; —never to fancy, with ridiculous pride, ‘Oh! I am growing up now; I shall soon be a woman, and it is childish to gather daisies, and to run about the fields” (246). In keeping with this injunction to cherish and protect an innate inclination to notice, explore, and value interactions with the natural world, Twamley then relates the story of one such interaction of her own:

I remember that when perched on the top of a high and somewhat steep bank, in the act

of gathering the branch of Gorse which I have drawn in this work, a party of most correct

looking promenaders passed along the road below me, and, hearing a rustling in the

bushes, looked up with no small astonishment on beholding a figure, they were

accustomed to see walking in the town with infinite steadiness and propriety, perched up

at a height that implied a necessity for most resolute scrambling. My amusement far

exceeded their surprise; but I have no doubt my flower-love in this instance gained me

the character of a most uncouth young person. —Be it so—I had my reward, in the

pleasure of possessing, and in some degree, perpetuating the beauty of my prickly prize; 249

and I much doubt if the line-and-rule saunter of the astonished fashionables was half as

serviceable to their minds or bodies as I found my wild scramble. (246-247)

The gorse pictured in the plate is no longer just a branch of gorse, it is this branch of gorse— associated now with this memory, this specific moment. Turning back to the plate, we view it with new eyes, realizing that Twamley’s hands brought it into initial being while she pored over an actual sprig she took from an actual bush growing on an actual hillside. The passage recalls her second characterization of the flower in that she herself has become like the plant—a

“bright” and “kindly being” whose good qualities her own “superficial observer[s]” might

“declare ‘all barren’” (72-73)—but at the same time the immediacy of her description endows the image with profound particularity and a kind of primacy, a feeling that she created the drawing of the gorse for its own sake, in its own time, and not simply to accompany passages of text.

Her final description of the gorse thus fundamentally pushes against the three previous interpretive stages she’s included: the generic universalism of the first passage, the more personal, though homiletic second analysis, and the objectivity of encyclopedic reference works, anthologies, and collections of botanical and literary “specimens” in general. The first and third feel sterile in comparison to the second and fourth: the former are too polished, too neatly tied up, too interpreted. This final moment still retains the breathless pursuit, the “wild scramble.”

Significantly Twamley’s personal impression and experience with the gorse comes at the end of the book, where it invites us to look back at those earlier interpretations—indeed, at the interpretations of all the plants collected in the work, whether verbal or visual—and realize that they also had starting points, and hence that we as readers can seek out starting points of our own. This surprising final description of the gorse sends us back to the beginning: literally, as we 250 flip back through the pages to look at the image once again, but also figuratively, as we consider

Twamley’s initial interaction with the pictured flowers, as well as the essential premise of the romance of nature, the beginning of our own potential journeys of discovery. In its specificity, this moment gestures outward to the most universal concept in the work, the idea that we too can

“possess and in some degree perpetuate the beauty” of our interactions with the natural world and the insights these provide.

In both concept and format, then, Twamley’s illustration of the flower seasons relies on layering illustrative agents so that they inflect and amplify one another, utilizing each other’s strengths to more fully convey the richness and depth of insight she suggests is there. In doing so, The Romance of Nature succeeds to a remarkable degree in actually creating that evocative loop of illustrational resonance, where ekphrasis and synesthesia, simultaneity and time-lag, allow specificity and universalism, interpretation and open-endedness to exist together. Twamley accomplishes this first, by linking literature, art, and natural objects and second, by structuring the book so that it invites the reader to move physically back and forth through the material text and to shift mentally through time and space to create layers of meaning. In other words, the format, brought about by the available print technology, helps shape the philosophical journey

Twamley prompts her readers to take. 251

Illustration that dazzles: Flowers and their Kindred Thoughts (1848)

Thus far I have demonstrated the complications and potential confusion wrought by illustration when it is handled by multiple entities, and the complexly evocative possibilities of illustration when executed by one principle author/artist with the help of an experienced and well-connected publisher. As a final consideration I will address a third book, Flowers and Their

Kindred Thoughts (1848) by Mary Ann Bacon and Owen Jones, to demonstrate, with another example, that richness and depth of possibility in illustration are not simply products of a unified vision brought into sumptuous material being. Few flower books boast such lavish and seamless production as this text, clearly conceived as a whole from its chromolithographed plates and graphically illuminated passages of printed type, to its coordinated endpapers and leather relievo binding (figure 4.18). Likewise, few flower books bring images and words into such consistently close physical proximity to—and constant interplay with—each other. And yet, Flowers and

Their Kindred Thoughts never prompts the kind of philosophical searching Twamley so passionately recommends and so effectively creates in The Romance of Nature. Indeed, if

Figure 4.25 Cover, endpapers, and title page of Flowers and Their Kindred Thoughts (Winterthur Library) 252 anything, its gorgeous illustrations have a sort of mesmerizing effect that shuts searching down and engages readers into a particular, more bounded, view.

My point then, is that the most advanced print networks and technologies can produce illustrations that appear more sophisticated, but which in some ways deliver a more simplistic artifact than the best of their earlier counterparts. As the techniques evolved to create spreads capable of drawing words and images ever closer together, the textual and cerebral space of illustrative play sometimes diminished. Flowers and Their Kindred Thoughts greatly reduces the reader’s workload, and in turn, his potential journey of discovery. In the body of the text, each spread features on the left an image of a plant intertwined with a label of the plant’s meaning in gold-inked calligraphy, and on the right a poem in the same gold ink, its margins embellished with simplified and stylized sprays of the plant (Figure 4.19). Thus plant, plate, and poem are all

Figure 4.26 Spread from Flowers and Their Kindred Thoughts (Brigham Young University Libraries) 253 available to a single glance; there is no page-turning, no holding something in mind while considering its possible applications elsewhere in the text. Even the fundamental word/image separation is bridged here, as words form parts of images, and images parts of word clusters.

This more simplistic kind of synchronization is undeniably powerful, yet it exercises a very different kind of power than the ekphrasis in Twamley’s Romance of Nature, where images, poetry, and plants describe each other to yield a broader perspective of lived experience. Here, the plates, poems, and plants overlap with a closeness usually reserved for illuminated manuscripts rather than print, but instead of pointing to each other, they all point to a single emphatic interpretation. Whereas Twamley’s ekphrasis prompts contemplation, this parallelism recalls Simon Goldhill’s description of rhetoric so impressive that “its brilliance dazzles” (5).

Instead of sparking thought, such moments stun the reader into submission and blind him to alternative possibilities (4-5).159 The spectacle in Flowers and Their Kindred Thoughts is so beautiful it becomes almost hypnotic: we look at a spread and find ourselves nodding “white flower—hope—yes…” and because each idea is self-contained on the page, we need not hold it mentally at the ready while examining subsequent spreads. This book is not about layering interpretations, circling back and through them—it delivers the interpretation. There is no journey for the reader, only the destination.

The text acquires this controlling power partly by muting the unruliest element of the poem-plate-plant triad, the plants. Certainly the exceptional quality of the book’s plant-images provides the powerful illusion of their presence; these are high-quality chromolithographs,

159 Goldhill particularly locates this power to astonish in ekphrastic texts, arguing that a brilliant visualization “gets you where it is hardest to defend” against rhetorical strategies. He explains that “[v]isualization amazes. In so doing, visualization conceals facts. Visualization is a blind. It does not merely describe or make the listener think he was there—its brilliance dazzles” (Goldhill 4-5).

254 layered prints of colored ink that yield extraordinarily realistic and beautiful detail (figure 20). (How William

P.C. Barton must have longed for print technology like this!). And yet the plants so vividly rendered in visual form are curiously emptied of any significance apart from the word that accompanies them—in the structure of meaning created on the page they are not pictures of snowdrops, fuchsias, or lilies-of-the-valley; they are renderings of Hope, Fine Taste, and Humility. The accompanying poems likewise carefully omit the plants’

botanical and common names, referring to the specimen Figure 4.27 Sample spreads from Flowers and Their Kindred Thoughts (Winterthur Library) in question only as “this blossom” or “the flower” that represents the sentiment. With their botanical identities merely implied in each spread, and stated

outright only in conjunction with their meanings in the

table of contents (Figure 4.21), the plants are present as

plants only in the faintest sense. Even if a reader should

recognize and identify the botanical specimen by sight,

the label intertwines with the image so tightly as to be

inextricable. A literate person cannot see the image and

not read the word—it is nearly impossible to separate

the two in the mental process of interpretation.

This conjoining of label and image downplays

Figure 4.28 Table of Contents for Flowers and Their the component that most easily takes on multiple kinds Kindred Thoughts (Winterthur Library) 255 of significance, the plant itself as a physical object and living being in the world. As I discussed in Chapter 3, plants are some of the most readily entextualized160 objects in many cultures; their use-values, geographical locations, seasons of flower or fruit, and physiological or visual properties make them recognizable and give them powerful and multivalent associations.

Botanical science, on the other hand, works to separate plants from their uses and associations in order to understand their biological mechanisms, to see plants as distinct entities apart from human culture. But despite the highly detailed, even scientific quality of the images in Flowers and Their Kindred Thoughts, the text as a whole pointedly omits all botanical identifiers and descriptions; likewise, it offers no sense of the plants’ cultural uses, histories, or varied associations. In short, the book has little interest in understanding flowers from multiple angles; rather, it narrows conceptions of each flower to a single, seemingly-implacable and highly abstract idea. For instance, in the spread that features a white flower labeled “Hope,” the accompanying poem reads,

I’ve seen the snow lie deep upon the earth,

blotting my garden home; I’ve felt how grief

can check the sources of the spirit’s mirth,

stopping all Nature’s inlets to relief.

Then did this bud, while I did helpless lie,

pierce the o’erhanging snows, and there did ope

at the responsive call of sympathy

deep in my languid soul, the flower of Hope.

160 As I explained in further detail in Chapter 3, the term “entextualization” comes from cultural anthropologists Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, who use it to describe the process by which an object acquires legible meaning to a particular group of people—that is, how an object becomes a readable “text.” 256

These verses focus exclusively on the speaker’s emotional state, referring to the flower only in symbolic terms: the bud cuts through the “snows” of grief, allowing hope to “bloom.” Even though in 1848 most readers would have recognized the flower in the image as a snowdrop, often hailed as the first flower of spring, its name and any details apart from the single characteristic vital to this analogy (its ability to “pierce” through the snow) simply do not matter.

The images thus become icons, and the book a small, tightly regulated system of visual emblems. The blackletter calligraphy and flat gold paint announce kinship with illuminated manuscripts, and with Byzantine and medieval iconography that in its “priestly supernaturalism

[…] disparages matter and material values” (Tansey and Kleiner 298).161 These details draw us away from the realm of actual existence, but instead of taking us to a “Fairy-realm of Nature’s

Romance” (Twamley 247), where the individual discovers another plane of being through powerful, spontaneous feelings, this book functions more like a catechism. The orthodoxy is not necessarily in the poems’ messages, but in the seeming finality of the message overall, the prescription of meanings and feelings.

Just as the narrowness of the plants’ meanings contributes to the book’s hypnotic effect, so does its curious vacancy of authorial presence. Introductory pages attribute the poetry to M.A.

[Mary Anne] Bacon, but the truncation of her name and the generalized voice she adopts in many of the poems obscure her individual identity and perspective. Thanks again to the ornate lettering and gold ink, the verses take on an appearance of canonized scripture, and the first- person narrator of the poems speaks as a psalmist whose “I” represents all of humanity. The sentiments thus presented can more freely indoctrinate the reader because they appear to be

161 Tansey and Kleiner note that “the priestly supernaturalism that disparages matter and material values prevails throughout the Christian Middle Ages, especially in Orthodox Byzantium. It is that hieratic supernaturalism that determines the look of Byzantine figurative art—an art without solid bodies or cast shadows, with blank, golden spaces, with the perspective of Paradise, which is nowhere and everywhere” (298). 257 truths that simply exist in the cosmos, rather than thoughts that originate with a person.

Moreover, since the images play an equally important role as the poems (perhaps even more important, since they are so immediately arresting while the ornate font of the poems takes a few seconds to decipher), the idea of “authorship” must extend to the images’ creators. The introductory pages cite “designs by Owen Jones,” but his “designs”—presumably paintings of the flowers—form only a portion of the work’s visual and tactile elements. First, they would have been converted into the beautiful lithographs “printed in colours at 9 Argyle Place, drawn on stone by C.L. Bateman.” Part of this process involved adding the labels or “illuminations” to the images, which some sources attribute to Henry Noel Humphreys.162 The distinctive binding, with its full calf covers ornately embossed with ivy leaves to match the endpapers, bears the label of Remnant and Edmonds. And of course, some decisions about each of these elements must have rested with the publisher, Longman and Company. Ultimately it remains unclear whose vision or voice truly takes the lead in the text, an ambiguity which helps create the volume’s emphatic and insistent claims to universality. As a whole, then, Flowers and Their

Kindred Thoughts represents both the highest standards of technical production and the philosophical limitations such lavish possibilities could introduce. In its seamlessness it appears to have sprung fully-formed into existence, but as such it closes down the spaces of readerly work and discovery. In the end it focuses readers’ attention most of all on the book as art object—on the sensory experience of looking at the pages, rather than on memories of actual encounters with flowers.

162 The listing of this text in Worldcat includes attribution to Henry Noel Humphreys, according to a source named McClean, but I have not yet been able to determine who McClean is. 258

Conclusion

As these three case studies attest, flower books teach us a great deal about illustration in the late Romantic period, both its technical and its philosophical aspects. Each book represents a different balance between poems, plates, and plants, and reveals how their triangulation had numerous potential outcomes. Such variations across the genre illuminate the complications of layering words, images, and objects in any sort of calculated combination, and they testify to the intimacy between all philosophies of illustration and the material processes used to produce, and especially mass-produce them. There are important nuances to this intimacy, of course. As flower books explore the nineteenth century’s expanding possibilities for mass-production in print, they certainly reveal the profound influence of that industry’s conventions and innovations on the physical shape of verbal and visual illustrations. Likewise they highlight the economic forces and business concerns of a rapidly evolving industry that often dictate the material process of creating, mass-producing, and distributing illustrations and keeping them consistent.

Decisions to illustrate primarily with words, or to include images whether in flat schematics or in richly dimensional color and shading—these decisions rest not in the mind or vision of any sole contributor, but instead reflect a collaboration of some person or people’s ideal, the technological power to render that vision a physical reality, and the money and resources to support all contributing entities. Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary shows us that such material considerations could at times overpower any sense of consistency, resulting in a visually pleasing but very confusing text that challenges the reader to isolate the core message within the noise.

Just as these forces powerfully affect the physical formation of illustration in print, then, the resulting form of illustration also reciprocally shapes illustrative philosophy: that is, it creates the particular interfaces and sequences through which readers encounter bits of information, and 259 dictates the cognitive processes they employ in making sense of it all. Thus the necessities of print can potentially translate into sophisticated aspects of the illustrative journey, as we see in

Twamley’s Romance of Nature, where the parameters of physical production (i.e. images on separate plates) encourage flipping forward and backward through pages, thus building layers of meaning and opening key space for the reader’s mental work and personal discovery. Similarly, if the philosophy of illustration is partly, even largely, contingent upon technology and business, then flower books stand as valuable evidence that the reverse is also true: the drive to employ certain philosophies of illustration helped streamline the printing industry and inspire technological innovation. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, flower books mix theories of illustration as liberally as they mix images and words, and their willingness to experiment in this way—to blend science, religion, art and literature—presented production challenges that required flexibility and access to a greater variety of illustrative options. The necessity for such access encouraged publishers to forge stronger ties between themselves and different groups of artists and printers, or to acquire or develop proprietary methods of their own. We witness the beginnings of this in William P.C. Barton’s aspirations for A Flora of North America, and we see a kind of culmination of streamlined illustrative collaboration in Flowers and Their Kindred

Thoughts, where numerous contributing entities work together so seamlessly as to create a printed book that hardly seems printed at all. The latter is a marvel of mass-production that, in placing its stunning beauty before the reader, makes her almost forget the processes that brought it into being. There are no gaps, no jarring transitions between plates and text—just words and images so tightly woven, so emphatic in their signification that the reader needs only to gaze.

Regardless of their level of technical or philosophical sophistication, however, flower books provide unique insight into illustration because their goal is not simply to illustrate plants 260

(as a botanical reference work or an herbal might do, in as clear verbal and visual terms as possible) but to try to articulate what plants illustrate to us: complexities of human emotional experience, our yearning for access to some higher plane of existence, our coexistence with plants—that host of silent but still somehow eloquent living beings we are only beginning to understand. As they juxtapose or blend words, images, concrete objects and abstract concepts in service of this goal, flower books invite us to question which elements do the illustrating, and what exactly they illustrate—drawing attention to the slipperiness of these categories and the ways they resonate together. Perhaps flowers are poems are pictures are flowers, but by employing all three these books demonstrate that the elements cannot fully be collapsed or interchanged directly for one another. When they compete with each other for dominance they serve as further proof that no single element alone can evoke the depth of possibility they attain when brought into harmonious combination.

261

Chapter 5

“Blindfold through the fields:” The Promise and Problem of Reading Flower Books

In her 1850 publication Rural Hours, a nature-journal focused on the Otsego region of

New York, American writer Susan Fenimore Cooper observed that

Frequently, when we first made acquaintance with the flowers of the neighborhood, we

asked grown persons—learned, perhaps, in many matters—the common names of plants

they must have seen all their lives, and we found they were no wiser than […] ourselves.

It really is surprising how little the country people know on such subjects. Farmers and

their wives, who have lived a long life in the fields, can tell you nothing on these matters.

[…] They sometimes pick a pretty flower to bring home, but they have no name for it.

The women have some little acquaintance with herbs and simples, but even in such cases

they frequently make strange mistakes; […] And yet, this is a day when flower borders

are seen before every door, and every young girl can chatter largely about “bouquets” and

the “Language of Flowers” to boot. (82-83)

Cooper’s observations provide important perspective on the cultural influence the flower book genre had acquired by mid-century. Though it achieved this influence working in tandem with technological developments in horticulture and floriculture, as well as evolving social systems that brought both books and flowers into people’s notice and within their reach, the flower book genre proliferated as never before, in a wide variety of formats and outlets. From large, multi- volume works to tiny pocket-books, and even more abbreviated forms like pamphlets and columns in periodicals and newspapers,163 these floral tributes built a strong communal ethic of plant awareness and appreciation. At the same time, however, the genre’s tendency to focus on

163 Consider Peterson’s Magazine and Godey’s Lady’s Book (provide ref to specific example) 262 plants’ aesthetic, metaphorical, and cultural qualities could at times create an incomplete knowledge—a feeling of closeness to nature even in the face of surprising ignorance regarding nature’s actualities.

This chapter explores the relationship between flower-book literacy and readers’ actual perceptions of nature during their lives. Thus far, my dissertation has attended largely to the flower book’s culture-constructing properties; clearly, flower books could and did train readers to see, recognize, value, and interpret plants within a number of different value systems, including the scientific, historical, literary, religious, national, and social. As a whole the genre offers readers the promise of deep connection to nature through these various approaches, as well as through the sensory exploration of plants—seeing, smelling, and touching them—that, as I further elucidate below, these books often encourage readers to experience, whether in wild, open spaces or more cultivated or private ones. Just as important as these points of connection to nature, however, are the bodies of knowledge (or, bodies and knowledge) these works could obscure, erase, or simply ignore, decisions that often resulted in the creation of significant blind- spots. Their ability to obscure or distort readers’ perceptions of their surroundings stems, ironically, from their ability to deepen emotional connection to the plants they feature: particularly as these books circulated among a transatlantic readership, their repeated acts of homage to certain flowers common in Europe could interrupt or replace American settlers’ process of bonding with the native landscape. The question of their influence therefore centers not in whether flower books domesticate, refine, or otherwise misrepresent nature, but in whether the (necessarily) compact and emotionally resonant version of nature they offered to readers became an acceptable, even desirable, surrogate for actuality. I argue that in training readers to look at and see particular flowers—sometimes to the extent that they figuratively superimposed 263 their images on to wholly different landscapes—flower books inadvertently helped facilitate a readerly tendency to collapse distinctions between cultures, geographical locations, and various plant species, and thus give them a powerful but skewed sense of a local communion with nature.

I will also show, however, that some flower book authors were aware of these problems and tried to address them. Mary Tyler Peabody Mann’s The Flower People (1846) works within the purview of the flower book genre by maintaining a focus on plants and the insights they can offer, but it pushes against a universalist impulse by framing those plants emphatically within a

New England household garden and meadow of surrounding wildflowers. Susan Fenimore

Cooper’s Rural Hours (1850) departs more markedly from convention, weaving threads of the flower book genre through the much wider fabric of the nature-journal and placing them in context with animals, birds, and human practices. Both of these works offer vital insight into

American landscapes in particular, and together they indicate a shift in tone and purpose, a point of divergence within the genre. While flower books that focused on plants’ aesthetic, metaphorical, and fanciful qualities would remain popular into the twentieth century, Mann and

The promise of flower books

Throughout the genre’s lifespan, flower book authors steadily reiterate a core promise that the study of plants and their related writings and activities will awaken the senses and refine sensibilities. As the self-proclaimed “compiler” of Flora and Thalia (1835) put it, “there is no study that possesses so many charms, nor any that can exceed it, in raising our curiosity, 264 gratifying our taste, or expanding our powers of discrimination” (vii). Or in the words of The

Floral Magazine and Botanical Repository (1832), “Of all amusements, the cultivation of flowers is probably the most conducive to health, and an even temperament of mind; […] their culture yields pleasure unalloyed, and they who pursue it from innate love, are seldom otherwise than happy” (3).

Somewhat less consistent, though, are the arguments these books make about whether such awakenings would stem from an individual’s actual observation and contact with plants in a particular natural environment, or simply from contemplation (in any setting) of the natural world at large. One of the earliest texts, Priscilla Wakefield’s An Introduction to Botany in a

Series of Familiar Letters (1796) clearly endorses the former, encouraging readers to venture outdoors and explore. The volume aims “to cultivate a taste in young persons for the study of nature” (iii), and specifies that one of the “many advantages” of studying botany is that “it contributes to health of body and cheerfulness of disposition, by presenting an inducement to take air and exercise” (iv). The letters, written by a young Felicia to her sister Constance, explain that “because books should not be depended upon alone, recourse must be had to the natural specimens growing in fields and gardens” (2), and accordingly the very first botany lesson begins with an excursion: “the morning being fine, tempted us abroad; botany supplied us with subjects for conversation” (3).

Wakefield’s recommendation of botany as a welcome form of outdoor exertion for women and girls reminds us that flower books are intimately connected to larger debates about class, gender, and exercise that extended from the mid-eighteenth century well into the 265 nineteenth.164 Margaret Coxe’s Floral Emblems, or Moral Sketches from Flowers (1845) illustrates the continuing closeness of that bond by quoting Hannah More’s argument that children’s “bodily recreations should be such as will promote their health, quicken their activity, enliven their spirits, whet their ingenuity, and qualify them for their mental work,” and that “a ride, a walk, a garland of flowers of her own making, a plant of her own cultivating or gathering, will form a delightful amusement to a child whose mind is in a natural state” (7-8). As I have explored in previous chapters, the air-and-exercise model of botanical study and floral contemplation echoes through numerous flower books, including Twamley’s Romance of Nature

(1839) Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Chapters on Flowers (1836) and Jane Loudon’s Ladies’

Flower Garden series (1840-43) and

Gardening for Ladies. (1841).

Despite the developing convention of citing botany as a genteel inducement to alfresco exertion, however, numerous depictions place its practice indoors (figure 5.1). For example, another early text, Maria

Jackson’s Botanical Dialogues (1797), begins inside a house where a mother names and describes the parts of plants to her children. These lessons are

Figure 5.29 Frontispiece to The Young Ladies' Book (1829)

164 We see this discussion of women and exercise in the writings of More, Wollstonecraft, and other philosophers of education, but we also see it in novels of the period. Jane Austen’s characters discuss air and exercise quite often, as has been noted by scholars including Amy King, Deidre Lynch, and Jillian Heydt-Stevenson. 266 strictly academic and cerebral; she warns “I apprize you that you will not find the first part of the study of botany particularly entertaining” (2), later explaining that “the study of either a science or a language can only be agreeable, as it is a mean [sic] to attain an end; when you enter upon the practice of what you have learnt, then will the amusement begin” (40). The children in the dialogues remain unfazed and eager; they continue their indoor lessons, occasionally consulting reference books, looking through microscopes, and recalling past outdoor experiences, as when

Charles chimes in to his mother’s description of an Orobanche Major, saying “I dare say this is the plant I once saw when I was with the gardener digging up broom” (45). Interestingly, though, the transition from study to practice in this text is not one from indoors to outdoors. The first time the children actually strive to identify the classes and orders of plants, they pore over blossoms and printed plates in an indoor alcove, with no discussion of where or how the flowers were procured. The children’s physical interaction with the natural world (assuming they had any) appears ancillary to Jackson’s characterization of botany, whether in study or practice.

It seems that a great many amateur botanists must have experienced this more closeted approach to plants, as the science increasingly developed a reputation for one-dimensional understanding of nature, singularly devoid of natural feeling. Caricatures of botanists as cold, wasteful and pointless dissectors abound in the literature of the period, both fiction and nonfiction. As Frenchman Alphonse Karr put it in Les Fleurs Animées (1847), “We may love flowers in several ways. The naturalist flattens and dries them. He then inters them in a sort of cemetery, called a herbarium, and underneath them writes pompous epitaphs in a barbarous language” (9). In The Young Lady’s Book (1829), Elizabeth Kent strives to rescue botany from its notoriety as “a mere dry study of the forms of plants” and a “sort of grave and dreary idling”

(YLB London 33) by entreating her readers to re-connect its technical elements to the joyful 267 encounters with the natural world they might have had as children, and could experience again.

“Should a young lady profess a total disregard of flowers,” she wrote,

I would ask her, if she had ever, during her infancy or childhood, been permitted to run,

sit, walk, or gather wild flowers in the green meadows? If she had ever waded, breast-

high, in the long grass, to gather Butter-cups and Sorrel? If she had ever filled her frock

with Daisies—priding herself in finding the reddest-lipped? If she had ever pelted her

young companions with balls, made on the instant, with fresh-gathered Cowslips; or slily

adorned them with [36] Cleavers (Galium Aparine), and laughed to see their repeatedly

vain endeavours [sic] to escape from their tenacious hold? […] If it should appear that

these young pleasures were wholly unknown to her, […] I should be disposed to

congratulate her, that she possessed pleasures in store, which had been denied to her

earlier youth; and to exhort her to throw off the trammels of mistaken dignity, and no

longer to debar herself from those innocent enjoyments which impartial Nature offers

alike to all. I would urge her to seek the shade of the woods, the freshness of the hills, the

placid beauty of the vallies [sic], and the flowery banks of the winding river. I would

entreat her to enfranchise herself from the thrall of Fashion and visit the spacious

orchestra of Nature. (35-36)

In recalling these “young pleasures,” Kent celebrates a kind of observation that not only takes place outdoors, but that employs the mind, the emotions, and the entire body; she echoes

Wollstonecraft’s assertion that “a girl, whose spirits have not been damped by inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always be a romp” (VRW 392). Kent’s memory places most emphasis on the sense of touch—so often neglected in botanical study in favor of sight and smell—in the pressure of grass against legs and chest, in the pelting of blossoms against face and 268 back, in the itch of cleavers poking through clothes. The foundations of such powerful observation, Kent suggests, reside in visceral, spontaneous, intimate experiences filled with joy and wonder, thus strongly corroborating Jillian Heydt-Stevenson’s argument that for women in the Romantic period “Nature offers a model union of body, psyche, and intellect that promotes happiness and encourages liberty and free will” (“Sexualities” 200).

But it is also a testament to the power of convention, and as I discussed in Chapter 2, to

Kent’s need to maintain a sufficiently respectable reputation, that by the end of the paragraph her injunction to “throw off the trammels of mistaken dignity” gives way to a more restrained sense of decorum—an invitation to “visit” nature by seeking shade, fresh air, and flowery river banks.

Visiting nature is, of course, not the same as communing with it; in contrast to the energy of activities at the beginning of the passage, the latter can all be done in one’s best clothes, as befits a proper social call. Such obvious restraint makes clear that although The Young Lady’s Book offered an unusual measure of enlightened thought about “the useful and ornamental departments of a lady’s education” (YLB Boston “Preface”),165 at its heart it is still a conduct manual meant to acquaint girls with the boundaries of propriety. The volume thus exemplifies a fundamental tension between idea and practice very common to the genre, one that reminds us that advertisements for flower books often praised their dual usefulness as field guides and as drawing-room accoutrements. On one hand they champion communion with nature at large, but on the other they urge its contemplation within safe confines, begging us to consider what kind of nature—bounded or unbounded—these books actually intend.

165 The Young Lady’s Book (1829) features chapters on botany, mineralogy, entomology, conchology, ornithology, as well as moral deportment, dress, embroidery, letter-writing, painting, music, dancing, archery, riding (sidesaddle), and “ornamental art,” which includes numerous crafts including basic lithography. 269

The answer, generally, is both—or more accurately, whichever is most readily available in one’s daily life and local surroundings. Kent may have hoped women could experience nature’s “spacious orchestra,” a place with adequate room and privacy for a woman to

“enfranchise herself” not only from the “thrall of Fashion” but of restrictive social norms too.

But since opportunities for such uninhibited exploration were limited for most women, Kent turns to the garden as an adequate starting place. In Women, Literature, and the Domesticated

Landscape (2014), Judith Page and Elise Smith argue that gardens provided women a vital space from which to negotiate between the private domestic space and the wider world. Moreover, although gardens do not constitute wild, untamed nature, they can nevertheless facilitate kinesthetic learning and host intimate plant observation through full sensory experience. In the language of conduct books Kent assures readers that gardening “offers many light and graceful occupations to a young lady” (36), such as sowing and transplanting seeds, and nurturing them with appropriate light, water, trimming, and training. Yet in the following statement, one lacking her usual enthusiasm for all aspects of gardening and one which atypically encourages passivity she notes “it is not recommended to a young lady to dig up the earth, study the modes of manuring it, or prepare compost” (36). Her wording seems calculated to voice a popular opinion that is not necessarily her own, perhaps to reassure reluctant women that gardening need not involve the dirtiest work, rather than to dissuade enthusiastic women from participating if they wished. Yet her caution here, if that’s what it is, was apparently unnecessary, given that, within a decade Jane Loudon’s Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1841) would devote whole chapters to digging and manuring, explaining that

a lady, with a small light spade may […] succeed in doing, with her own hands, all the

digging that can be required in a small garden […] and she will not only have the 270

satisfaction of seeing the garden created, as it were, by the labour of her own hands, but

she will find her health and spirits wonderfully improved by the exercise, and by the

reviving smell of the fresh earth. (8-9)

Loudon’s double emphasis on women working with their “own hands” suggests that in order to acquaint herself with nature a woman need not seek out rugged places, but only to corporeally participate in (rather than merely observe) the work of gardening. Her invitation, and Kent’s as well, was not simply to experience nature, but to more fully experience one’s self within it.

Loudon and Kent argue for gardening as a balanced partnership between nature and culture, but scholars have recently noted that even before the Industrial Age proper, technologies of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries shifted the balance ever further toward the latter. Many found this transition both exciting and alarming: Anna Letitia Barbauld observed that as “Science and Art urge on the useful toil / New mould a climate and create the soil” (299-

300) people viewed nature with less humility; they “On yielding Nature urge their new demands

/ And ask not gifts, but tribute at her hands” (303-304). Major scientific developments brought about the creation of greenhouses and hothouses that supported the rearing and transport of exotic plants and of the fructification of local plants out of season. Florists’ greater understanding of propagation, plant-breeding and hybridizing techniques led to the development of numerous “vegetable monsters,” the actual botanical term for plants engineered for double or multiple blooms. As Lynch asserts, the garden in particular had become “a site in English culture where, paradoxically, the talismanic term “Nature” seemed to many to lack its usual luster and usual stabilizing force” (695), and the question of whether these areas fully qualified as “natural” became ever more fraught with debate. If Nature includes the wild and the domesticated, the hybridized and improved, then it is of course everywhere; its vastness—its ability to 271 overwhelm—encouraged humans who were trying to explain it to debate contentiously over its definition.166 On the whole, though, flower books refrain from entering these debates, or at least from taking any one side with too much vigor. Generally, however, these books do recommend readers to begin their more detailed observations of nature in those areas closest to the pathways of daily life, without much concern that for most people, even those residing in the country, these areas had long been influenced and shaped by human cultivation. By encouraging readers to wander and work in gardens, or to notice any plants in any location whether indoors or out, flower books fostered a vital element of nature-appreciation; in an increasingly industrialized environment, they provided a push in the opposite direction, a keener awareness of the existence of plants, of their importance to human life on numerous levels whether physiological, cultural, political, emotional, or spiritual. Flower books distill the complicated concept of Nature into something manageable, palatable, and—above all—memorable.

Instead of attempting to catalog all of Nature or to define its boundaries, flower books both focus on what is near home but in and of themselves also provide a kind of surrogate

Nature, a nice little pocket-sized proxy. For example, Kent’s Flora Domestica’s (1823)

“directions for the treatment of plants in pots” was derided in some circles as evidence of the

Cockney School’s shallow and flimsy connection to real wilderness, but Kent herself casts it as powerful form of synecdoche. “As I reside in town, and am known among my friends as a lover of the country,” she wrote, “it has often happened that one or other of them would bring me consolation in the shape of a Myrtle, a Geranium, an Hydrangea, or a Rose-tree” (xiii). Though few in number and varied in culture, these plants stand in for nature as a whole; as Kent explained, “Such persons as are condemned to a town life will do well to obtain whatever

166 Lynch describes in particular the debates between botanists and florists, naturalists and gardeners, which are at least in part class-based (botanists being the upper-class, and florists the middle-class). (697). 272 substitute for a garden may be in their power; for there is confessedly no greater folly than that of refusing all pleasure, because we cannot have all we desire” (xxxii). And like the potted plants,

Kent’s book itself becomes a sort of substitute nature, a document that aims not for comprehensive coverage, but for bringing a manageable number of plants into familiarity, where they can loom large enough to grant nature a palpable presence.

As they encourage local observation, these flower books do not overly concern themselves with what is and is not purely or comprehensively “natural;” instead they focus on what stories are worth telling, what sentiments are worth sharing—these being, they imply, at least as valuable a way of communing with nature as is scientific study. Though many books of floral sentiment include elements of technical botany, the enthusiasm in some volumes seems rather thin: In Flora’s Interpreter (1832) Sarah Hale claims “I hoped my experiment would give an increased interest to botanical researches among young people” (iii), but expresses a much more passionate interest in helping acquaint those same youth with American literature.

Likewise, the compiler of Flora and Thalia (1835) put forth her volume “not as a scientific work, but one of moral amusement, which may possibly lead the reader to a study of botany”

(vii). Dorothea Dix expresses a hope that The Garland of Flora (1829) might “give a new, or stronger interest, to Floral pursuits” (a curiously vague phrase), but she also claims her book to be “useful as a storehouse of poetical sentiment and imagery” that would show “in what various lights these favorite works of creation have been viewed in various ages, and [display] the endless colors and shadows of association, which genius has thrown over them” (preface).

Recalling that scientific botany had a reputation for lifelessness, the literary anecdotes amassed in flower books seem by comparison far more vivid—and if both botanical and literary study were to take place mainly in domesticated spaces, and if botany and literature both render nature 273 into a representation of itself, it seems to matter little whether a person seeks to comprehend that nature through scientific diagrams of roots and blossoms or literary illustrations of plants’ historical and emotional significance. The biggest difference between these methods resides in their effect on the imagination and memory: many people find it difficult to remember diagrams and scientific vocabulary without some mnemonic aid, but narratives tend to linger in the mind.

Whether or not literature-botany offers a more complete or reliable conduit to communion with nature is a question for another place, but when it comes to methods of imprinting awareness of individual plants into memory, literature possesses a distinct advantage.

The problem: proxy versus particularity

To recapitulate then, flower books operate much like many contemporary technologies of the early nineteenth century—greenhouses, botanical manuals, floriculture, gardens—that blended nature and culture and heavily mediated nineteenth-century people’s conceptions of the natural world. In short, the books present a version of nature that combines claims about the virtues of exploring it with a clear measure of scientific and aesthetic distance. They might offer

“nature” as a tidily-structured collection of classes and orders, or as a meekly domesticated grouping of potted or bedding plants, or as a prompt to human thought and emotion, or even as distilled and abstracted amusements or games. The latter include the Language of Flowers, flowers as fortune-tellers (as in Hale’s Fortuna Flora [1848]), and the popular “Dial of Flowers,” a sort of clock that reveals the time of day based on which flowers’ blossoms were open or shut.

Regardless of form, each of these approaches renders the nature in question accessible and memorable. They all make it “stick.”

Rather than striving to determine precisely where a given book swings on the pendulum of accessing raw nature or taming and refining it, we might more fruitfully inquire whether, and 274 to what extent, the nature flower books provided to readers became accepted as a viable psychological alternative to the actual nature around them. Literature often provides an escape from reality; for instance, Dix in The Garland of Flora (1829) invites her readers to “come sit by me, and bright Fancy with her fair imaginings shall likewise come; and oh! She shall lead us in pleasant paths—through flowery ways; --the storm may rage abroad; the winds hold high festival above; but the spirit, the spirit is not captive; —away, away, […] and for a time walk in an

Earthly Eden” (1). It is no surprise that people find pleasure in such respites from life’s harsher elements, but evidence suggests that the fantasy created in flower books was one nineteenth- century readers tended to linger in for much, much longer than “a time.”

The creation of the alternate reality is somewhat inadvertent, however: a curious side- effect of the effort to make readers familiar with actual reality. This is not to say that flower books succeeded in presenting a “true” version of nature free from mediation; as with any exercise in perception they merely present lenses through which to examine natural phenomena, capable of distorting as well as clarifying the objects in question. Nevertheless, flower books do endeavor mightily to provide readers with nuanced, multifaceted conceptions of individual plants by employing several different lenses in quick rotation and recording the results in numerous concrete details. Given the vastness of nature and its endless supply of detail ripe for further inquiry, however, any book that strives to make nature’s characteristics known can only cover so much ground. Thus while flower books possess remarkable power to forge psychological bonds to the pieces of nature they do discuss, the complications I attend to here occur because they don’t form bonds with the pieces of nature they exclude.

To be more specific, flower books provide such a richly textured and psychologically vivid rendition of nature that they create a satisfying sense of closeness: the nature they highlight 275 might at times feel like enough. Indeed, each approach they offer—botanical science, cultural history, the Language of Flowers—saturates these books with information. Hence, although most volumes seek to establish patterns of observation and reflection that readers could follow in order to process their own encounters with other plants and landscapes, many of the books’ own explorations are so replete with detail, so serviceable and apparently sufficient, that seemingly few readers felt the need to continue that work to a significant extent. Instead, as I will show, they often imprinted the fully-formed vision of nature from the books onto their (sometimes very different) surroundings. Thus, the proxy nature I describe is not the substitution of a “false” nature for a “real” one, or even a universal for a specific; instead, it is a superimposing of one set of familiarized particulars on top of another unknown, unacknowledged, or less familiar set.

This kind of layering especially emerges when the realities of local climate and plant-life appear adequately similar to the examples in books. Few people would mistake the deciduous trees of a temperate landscape for the palms of a tropical one, for example, but the differences between various temperate landscapes are subtler. Not surprisingly, then, the surrogate nature found in European flower books held particular sway among readers in the northern United

States. As I discussed in Chapter 3, Americans by the mid-nineteenth century had a strong print culture of their own; even so, European English-language literature and its corresponding oral tradition still heavily mediated American perceptions, including perceptions of their local animals and plant life. In her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven Anna Letitia Barbauld contemplates the possibility of Britain’s lasting influence on American thinking, boldly prophesying that

Nations beyond the Appalachian hills

Thy hand has planted and thy spirit fills: 276

Soon as their gradual progress shall impart

The finer sense of morals and of art,

Thy stores of knowledge the new states shall know,

And think thy thoughts, and with thy fancy glow;

[…]

Beneath the spreading Platan's tent-like shade,

Or by Missouri's rushing waters laid,

"Old father Thames" shall be the Poets' theme,

Of Hagley's woods the enamoured virgin dream,

[…]

In Thomson's glass the ingenuous youth shall learn

A fairer face of Nature to discern (83-88, 91-94, 97-98).

Barbauld envisioned an American landscape so fully filtered through the lens of British literature and thought, that any scene or view would automatically serve as a memento of a counterpart in

England. All rivers, in effect, would signify the Thames. Four decades later Susan Fenimore

Cooper observed just how fully—and how literally—Barbauld’s prophecy had been fulfilled: to

Cooper, Americans in 1852 still seemed “half aliens to the country Providence has given us,” remaining in surprising ignorance of local flora and fauna while

English reading has made us very familiar with the names, at least, of those races which

people the old world. […] Thus it is that knowing so little of the creatures in whose midst

we live, and mentally familiar by our daily reading with the tribes of another hemisphere,

the forms of one continent and the names and characters of another are strangely blended

in most American minds. And in this dream-like phantasmagoria where fancy and reality 277

are often so widely at variance, in which the objects which we see and those we read of

are wholly different, and where bird and beast undergo metamorphoses so strange, most

of us are content to pass through life. (Essays 21)167

In articulating this peculiar disconnect between lived and imagined experience, a phenomenon she also likened to walking “blindfold through the fields” (22), Cooper reveals just how potent and lasting this misperception—this blindness in the guise of seeing—could be.

In Rural Hours (1850), Cooper explores in greater detail the ideological and material effects of Americans’ “English reading” as it inflected (or replaced) exploration of their own

American plots. In the passage I quoted in the first paragraph of this chapter she relates the surprising fact that although Otsego’s local farmers and villagers lived more intimately with the natural world than many in the industrial age, they seldom could recognize or identify the region’s native plants and animals. Yet Cooper carefully points out that those at a loss to identify local flora and fauna were not ignorant in general, and especially not in matters of horticulture; elsewhere she notes with characteristic specificity that farmers and villagers cultivated grains, potatoes, cabbage, onions, Indian corn, cucumbers, peas, beans, lettuce, pumpkins, and squashes, while house yards overflowed with berry bushes, roses, hollyhocks, sunflowers, pinks, bachelor’s buttons, sweet-peas, marigolds, poppies, asters, and phlox (77-78). The use- and exchange- values of many such plants partially explains their popularity. Yet other plants, the ornamental flowers in particular, earn pride of place in the gardens Cooper observes not only for their beauty but for their mythos, a socio-literary history that infuses them with significance.168

167 From Cooper’s preface to the American edition of British writer John Leonard Knapp’s Journal of a Naturalist (1852).

168 I rely on a particular definition of the term mythos throughout this chapter; the OED describes it as “an ideology, [or] a set of beliefs (personal or collective).” Rather than myth or mythology, which connote a level of fictionality in stories used to symbolize ideas or explain phenomena, mythos more broadly signifies something’s overall 278

It is this mythos that flower books so effectively create, disseminate, and perpetuate. In the passage I quoted at the beginning of the chapter Cooper specifically acknowledges the cultural resonance of the Language of Flowers, the codified system of “meanings” given to certain flowers popularized in books like Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary (1829) and Hale’s Flora’s

Interpreter (1832). The latter was in its 14th edition by 1848 when Cooper was writing Rural

Hours, and beloved as ever thanks in part to a new section, the fanciful parlor-game Fortuna

Flora (discussed in Chapter 2), that Hale appended to it that year. Yet as I showed in Chapter 3, most of the flowers in Flora’s Interpreter are not North-American in origin, and thus the deep cultural significance that the Language of Flowers lent to its featured plants had only a broadly symbolic link to many of the lesser-known native plants in the American landscape. Cooper shows that while Otsego farmers attached importance to many plants in this period—commodity crops and ornamental flowers alike—they cultivated, valued, and recognized comparatively few

American natives. Their emotional distance from the environment that existed just beyond their plots (and their books) suggests they faced difficulty in building a viable mythos for local species; at the same time, because this distance contributed to the cavalier attitude with which many nineteenth-century settlers imposed their will on the landscape (a topic I discuss later in the chapter) it demonstrates in the starkest physical terms just what formidable world-shaping power an enduring imported mythos could wield.

meaningfulness. As I state above, mythos emerges from a socio-literary history; it relies on both the ways people think and talk about something as well as the ways they use or interact with it in actuality. A rose, for example, has a particularly robust mythos because these factors have combined for centuries to endow it not merely with “a meaning” (like “love”) but with a deep, rich, multivalent significance—with cultural value.

279

Print and the perpetuation of imported mythos

Given their alleged desire for greater political independence from Europe in the eighteenth century and cultural independence in the nineteenth, Americans maintained their grip on European plant mythos for a surprisingly long time.169 Importing, acclimatizing, and successfully propagating foreign plants often requires a great deal of work, worry, and expense, yet it seems to have proved more often the rule than the exception for American settlers. In the eighteenth century, while imperial powers routinely deployed botanists on bioprospecting expeditions to their colonies to identify plants potentially useful to the empire,170 colonists themselves did the opposite, carefully carrying little pieces of Europe to cultivate in the soil of their new settlements. By the nineteenth century, even in communities generations beyond initial immigration and intimate interaction with local nature, imported plants still thrived, not least because print culture continually reaffirmed their value.

If Americans did fulfill Barbauld’s vision of planting their continent with a British hand, it happened at least in part because flower books attached people emotionally and psychologically to plants of the old world, while supplying scientific information that distanced all but the botanically-educated from the plants of the new. Certainly, flower books regularly do include plants from the Americas and other regions outside Europe—but since so many of these were new to Europeans and formerly-European settlers, their most potent, and sometimes their only, legible cultural context for these people was their botanical classification. As Cooper notes,

169 Indeed, I would argue that European and other foreign gardens still, in the twenty-first century, hold greater imaginative sway in the United States than any indigenous form, often in spite of serious environmental obstacles to their creation. English cottage gardens are still idealized in popular paintings (those of Thomas Kincaid come to mind) and people often try to recreate them even in inappropriate climates like the arid Mountain West. California gardens are often called “Mediterranean,” or feature Asian influences. What, indeed, is a truly “American” garden? 170 See Introduction for a more extensive definition of this term. Broadly, it describes how imperial powers sought to find or to cultivate valuable plants within their own territories in order to reduce dependence on foreign imports and fuel further expansion of power. 280

“Unhappily, a large number of our plants are new discoveries—new, at least, when compared with Chaucer’s daisy, Spenser’s coronation flower, or Shakespeare’s ‘pansies and herb o’grace’—and having been first gathered since the days of Linnaeus, as specimens, their names tell far more of the musty hortus siccus, than of the gay and fragrant May-pole” (87). This botany-first introduction to American plants meant, in short, that Americans often found it difficult to bond with the native plants around them, at least in part because the plants bore such unfamiliar, unattractive and complicated names.

As I discuss at length in Chapter 3, Linnaean nomenclature tended to erase the local or native plant-lore often embedded in indigenous plant names. As Schiebinger states,

[e]ighteenth-century botanical nomenclature served as an instrument of empire detaching

plants from their native cultural moorings and placing them within schema

comprehensible first and foremost to Europeans. With the rise of modern botany, a

uniquely European system of nomenclature developed that swallowed into itself the

diverse geographic and cultural identities of the world’s flora. (224)

Certainly Cooper saw these newly-assigned Latin names as inadequate to fill the emotional void that the schema of botanical classification created; more often these names acted as barriers to immigrants valuing local plant species. True, some plants impress themselves on the memory regardless of their appellations, like the “pretty flower[s]” that Otsego farmers sometimes bring home, even though “they have no name” (RH 83). But for less showy plants, or even for showy ones in less-arresting stages of their development, evocative names could provide vital mental traction, distinguishing individual species from more general “vegetation.” Yet Latin nomenclature did little to help the general public tell plants apart from each other; if anything, the seeming incomprehensibleness of the system conveyed an even greater sense of 281 homogeneity. After all, assigning a scientific identity to a plant is a fundamentally different process than that through which a plant acquires common identity. The former is the work of a moment, and (especially for those not fluent in Latin) a signification of otherness; the latter is a process of repeated observation, recognition, evaluation, and sharing—and especially of considering the plant’s relation to the self. In short, the emergence of common identity requires both interaction and time, and without those elements any number of species may continue to blur into the background.

Other sources corroborate Cooper’s observation of American ignorance of their own native plants. In Beauties of Flora and Outlines of Botany (1848) John B. Newman, relating the story of John Bartram, a Pennsylvania Quaker whose notice of a single violet eventually led him to become “the most noted botanist of the New World” (iii), laments that,

There are as many Violets in our fields at present as when John Bartram made his

examination, and as sure of producing the same effect on others as they did on him, could

they but command observers. And not these flowers alone, for thousands more of every

species surround us, quite as well deserving our attention, but sharing in the universal

neglect. America, rich in all that constitutes wealth, lacks not the treasures of Flora; but,

on account of want of knowledge, immense sums of money are annually sent out of the

country […], which better information of our own resources would save. (iv)

Newman’s mid-century critique of Americans’ disregard toward the details of their immediate surroundings, contrasts somewhat with the optimism expressed fifteen years earlier in David and

Cuthbert Landreth’s The Floral Magazine and Botanical Repository (1832), where they proudly claim that pre-revolutionary America’s “one or two collections of indigenous vegetables” had grown into “many private collections of vegetable treasures, with nurseries for their increase and 282 dissemination, which would not be discreditable to the old world” (5). The combination of these two viewpoints—one mourning a lack of local botanical awareness and the other lauding gardeners’ successful efforts to cultivate native plants—thus paints an interesting picture: despite

Landreth’s praise, the improvements in American botanical gardens and nurseries of the 1830s apparently did not translate into a general increase in public knowledge of, or appreciation for, more than a handful of indigenous American plants in the following decades.

The Landreths offer some insight into the conundrum of Americans’ limited ability to bond with native nature. As Philadelphia nursery and seedsmen171 they wrote with the perspective of horticulturists rather than botanists—focusing on the richness of plants under cultivation, rather than on the comparatively vast number of undomesticated plants still in the wild. They also celebrate the virtues of gardening, noting that “next to the pleasure to be derived from beholding Plants and Flowers, as disposed indigenously o’er hill and dale, is the gratification arising from their culture and protection” (3). In the Landreths’ characterization gardening may sit one slight step lower on the pleasure scale than the act of viewing wildflowers, but while “beholding” is passive, unspecific, and uninvested, “culture and protection” offer far more active, intimate, and memorable interaction with the plants. If indigenous plants are merely looked at, while domesticated plants (local or foreign) are nurtured and protected, then it stands to reason that people would assign greater value to the latter.

Significantly too, acts of culture and protection apply just as readily to literary flowers: those plants that writers immortalize in readers’ minds literally become part of that society’s culture and enjoy the protection of its increased awareness.172 So, if Americans were only in the

171The D. Landreth Seed Company is still in existence, self-proclaimed as “the oldest seedhouse in America.” It was founded in 1784 (www.landrethseeds.com). 172 Of course increased awareness can sometimes lead to exploitation rather than protection, but, as I will argue later in the chapter, awareness is the first step toward value, and value fuels the desire to protect. 283 habit of beholding (rather than, as Newman suggests, observing) indigenous plants, and meanwhile had far more concrete, memorable interactions with those plants circulating in either the horticultural or literary marketplaces, it is no wonder that their blindness toward American species—even the ones at their very doorsteps—proved persistent.

Although oral traditions did assist in the spread of plant meanings between Europe and the U.S. both within and across languages and cultures, Cooper does pinpoint an especially powerful mechanism for mythos transfer that occurs in the act of reading. Numerous scholars173 have noted how the influx of printed pamphlets, books, magazines and other print sources in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, emanating from Europe but also produced in the

U.S., greatly assisted the coherence of geographically-dispersed imagined communities. Piper points out that the translatability of print sources was one of their most distinctive features, which allowed them to “foster a transnational sensibility of local differences” (Piper 6). In the

United States, however, a dearth of Native American print sources meant that very little lasting translation was happening between indigenous groups who already knew, valued, and felt connected to American plants, and immigrant groups largely unfamiliar with them. Meanwhile, the too-easy translatability of “English reading” dangerously collapsed differences between the

U.S. and Europe into the aforementioned “dreamlike phantasmagoria” (Essays 21). Wholly different species from each continent were often called by the same name, as in the case of the cowslip (actually a marsh marigold in the U.S.), or the robin redbreast (actually a thrush).174

Faced with a seemingly blank continent, whose native peoples and their indigenous knowledge, beliefs, and practices were rapidly disappearing—or being ignored—Americans filled the

173 See Benedict Anderson, Andrew Piper, and Meredith McGill 174 Cooper says of the marsh marigold “the country people call it cowslip, though differing entirely from the true plant of that name” (30) and she describes at length the difference between English and American robins (11-12). 284 emptiness through practices Cooper often saw as grossly inadequate (as with scientific nomenclature) or incorrect (as with the cowslip). Imported plant mythos impaired Americans’ sense of difference between their local and former habitats.

As a testament to the power of literary planting, note that print sources circulating in

America certainly included an ethic of valuing wildflowers above florists’ flowers, “improved” bedding plants, and hothouse exotics. Yet since many passages praising wildflowers come from

European writers, the messages carry strange and unclear implications. For example, The Young

Lady’s Book, originally published in London, was reprinted in Boston in 1833, where Elizabeth

Kent’s message has a different valence:

A very pretty garden may be formed of native plants only. […] To those who reside in

London, and love the country, there is a charm in our native plants, that is wanting in

exotics, however beautiful: they are associated with a variety of rural objects; and bring

before the imagination, the fields, woods, hills, and dales, whence they were taken. A

bunch of wild flowers is a gallery of landscapes: Daisies and Butter-cups represent fields

and meadows; Germander, Speedwell, Herb Robert, and Hawthorn, are thick bushy

hedges and grassy banks; Blue Bells and Primroses are shady woods; the water Violet

and Yellow Iris are standing pools; the Marsh-Marygold is a running brook; and the

Forget-me-not, a gentle river; the Blue-bottle and Corn-campion are fields of rising corn;

and the delicate Vervain is a neighboring village. Some flowers, by association, take the

form of mills, or hay-stacks; and I have known them even to portray the features of a

friend. (57-58)

Kent makes a powerful argument here (as she does in Flora Domestica) for flowers as portable mementos of their places of origin, but while she describes specimens traveling only from the 285 countryside to the city, plants’ potent synechdochal quality meant that immigrants often brought these same bits of home to American gardens where they became themselves the “exotics” rather than the “native plants.” Reading this passage, Americans might then have been torn between two now-opposing possibilities, first a decision to translate this passage into an homage toward

American landscapes and indigenous wildflowers and an inducement to transplant some of these into their own gardens—or instead, a tendency to secure the English plants and landscapes of

Kent’s description even more firmly in their imaginations and in their gardens as the much longed-for ideal, and eventually to consider them as virtual natives, even in the newly-adopted environment.175 Of the two options, the former requires sophisticated, deliberate thinking, while the latter occurs almost subconsciously.

To review then, literature makes visible things legible to the mind’s eye,176 potentially helping to turn mere beholders into keen observers. Regardless of what plants actually surround a person, he or she may not value them, correctly identify them, or even see them if they have no cultural or personal significance. But it also matters a great deal what literature gets read where, what details it focuses observation upon, and what elements it leaves out.

These factors of literary focus, print circulation, and translatability have material effects on a culture’s connection to the flowers it prefers at any given historical moment. In Les Fleurs

Animées (c. 1830), a satirical collection of stories, essays, and lessons in botany translated and published in New York as The Flowers Personified (1847), Taxile Delord lays out a history of

175 To complicate matters further, Cooper describes a large number of imported plants that have naturalized themselves in American soil, and even become invasive species. These include the vast majority of weeds in American fields and gardens, as well as medicinal herbs like catnip, mint, horehound, and tansy “which have already become so common as to be weeds” (65). See also Cooper’s discussion of a woodland border, described near the end of this chapter. 176 See, again, Oscar Wilde and John Berger on how Art mediates our perceptions, helping us to both “look” and to “see” (I discussed this in Chapter 4). 286

“the Fashions of Flowers” in France from the middle ages onward, arguing that “If we would form a correct opinion of the ideas, manners, and habits of a nation, we have only to look at its bouquets” (220). In his tongue-in-cheek description, literature above all dictates tastes in particular flowers. The late-eighteenth-century, he argues, witnessed a transition in which people became “tired of shepherds and shepherdesses, of avenues and lambs,” and “began to discover that there were flowers which perfumed the meadow, the hedge, and the footpath” (224). His humorous overstatement emphasizes the extent to which literature influenced this shift: he claims that only when “the eighteenth century in a mass exclaimed, with Rousseau, ‘Une pervenche!’177

[did] the existence of periwinkles first [become] known to the people” (224). The tastes of

Delord’s own day, he laments, are harder to pin down but no less influenced by popular writers:

At the present time, every one has some particular flower, whose pretensions he is

urging. Georges Sand pleads for the rhododendron. Alphonse Karr puts forward the

forget-me-not. De Balzac has invented the coltsfoot. Victor Hugo pronounces, as often as

he has opportunity, in favor of the asphodel. Eugene Sue goes only for tropical flowers.

Alexander Dumas has not, as yet, made choice of a flower. For some time, however, the

aloe seems to be gaining a place in his novels. Auguste Barbier has addressed some

charming lines to the daisy. Brizeux, by his poem, Marie, has secured many partisans for

the broom-flower. From all this, come parties, factions, and revolutions among the

flowers—each occupying the throne but a moment, and then giving place to a rival. There

is confusion among the flowers, as there is among ideas, opinions, and modes of faith.

[…] Observe now, how the reign of each flower has corresponded with some particular

177 “A periwinkle!” A passage in Rousseau’s Confessions relates a mountain walk in which Rousseau spotted a periwinkle flower that reminded him of Madame de Warens, his tutor and lover, who had taught him the name of the plant thirty years earlier. 287

phase of society, during the sixteen years last past. You still remember the time when

people were sentimental, after the fashion of the northern poets; when it was the custom

to read Werther anew, and to admire Novalis. This was the heath-phase. The clematis-

phase succeeded that, and then came the lilac-phase. Then rural pictures and scenes of

country life, were all the rage, for Valentine had just set the fashion. […] Now, we are in

the phase—Faith! I should find it difficult to tell what phase. We are in the mid-sea of

eclecticism. Each one makes his own gods, and worships them. (225-227)

Though he refrains from stating it directly, Delord’s comically hyperbolic description critiques social responses to weightier issues, most likely the numerous governmental successions and tumultuous overhauls in France following the revolution. “Flowers are the expression of society”

(220) he says, a society whose impressive façade thinly veils confusion, disunity and a fundamental emptiness. Ultimately he cites the dahlia “as particularly the living symbol of our age. It affects every color and shade, and is incredibly prolific. Yet the plant is sterile from its very abundance,178 and monotonous by reason of its variety. And is not this the nineteenth century? –a century fruitful in change and revolution, yet possessing, in reality, neither expression nor originality” (228). Delord’s sardonic weariness of showy yet ineffective social movements prefigures the lines made famous by Alphonse Karr, his collaborator on Les Fleurs

Animées: “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”179 But even beyond the scope of French politics and fashion, Delord’s criticism of society’s fickleness and caprice, its lack of groundedness and rootedness, has particular significance for my argument.

178 After dahlias’ introduction to Spain in 1789, European plant breeders experimented extensively with hybridization techniques that developed many new varieties of the flower, including varieties with numerous rows of petals. (As noted earlier in the chapter, the botanical term for such artificially enhanced blossoms is “vegetable monsters”). Though they are not strictly sterile, hybrid dahlias cannot reliably produce duplicates of themselves from seed, and must be propagated by tubers or cuttings. 179 From Karr’s satirical journal Les Guêpes, January 1849. 288

Delord reveals how floral fashions provide apt symbols of social attitudes, but also he exposes, perhaps unwittingly, the effect of these social attitudes on the visibility and value of plants and landscapes, and their power to stand as a proxy for local indigenous nature even in highly artificial circumstances. For instance, Delord testifies to the ease with which plants can go native: that is, how fluidly even imported species can become synonymous with the cultures that adopt them. Of the dahlia and camellia he notes “one has the Dutch embonpoint,—the other, the stiff, assuming gait, and pallid beauty of England” (228), but in fact both species originated in far distant corners of the globe, the dahlia in Mexico and the camellia in China and Japan. The camellia had never grown on European soil prior to the mid-eighteenth century, and the dahlia arrived even later, at the century’s close.180

Lines of commerce certainly helped tie these imported plants to the cultures of their new countries (the camellia conjures an image of England because that nation’s gardeners and nurserymen most successfully propagated and marketed it), but importantly, even considered as

“English” and “Dutch” flowers, the plants still retain a measure of their exoticism that is key to their popularity and effect on the psyche. As Delord notes,

These flowers are foreigners [to France]; and is it not one of the most marked features of

our age, to care for nothing which is not foreign? […] We must not be astonished,

therefore, to find the flowers of France put, so to speak, under the ban of the fashionable

world. […] The mignionette, the lily, and the pink, those truly national flowers, are

completely forsaken, except that, now and then, you will see some country fellow

venturing upon the Boulevard, with a rose or a pink in his button-hole. On the other hand,

180 The camellia was first successfully grown in England in 1739 by Robert James, Lord Petre. His gardener James Gordon was the first to introduce camellias to commerce. The Dahlia was introduced to Spain in 1789, and to England’s Kew Garden in 1798. 289

dandies are seen sporting enormous cactuses. The ladies sometimes still admit the

violet—but it must be the violet of Parma,—or the jessamine, as it is Spanish, —or the

heath, because it reminds them of Scotland. (228)

Though Delord confines his observations to French culture, a similar critique applies to tastes in the early United States, which, as I have discussed both here and in Chapter 3, still generally deferred to Europe as the site of highest-quality scientific knowledge and artistic and material productions in the first half of the nineteenth-century. But Delord here reveals an attribute of the foreign that is entirely separate from questions of quality or the authority of the metropole: dandies in cactuses aside, floral fashions stem not simply from plants’ novelty but from their ability to spark the imagination, to remind one of something. In short, from their mythos.

Popular literature set in particular European landscapes almost certainly had a hand in promoting region-specific flowers. The Romantic period witnessed a surge of interest in vernacular ballads and folklore, thanks in part to the work of writers like Goethe, Schiller, and

Scott in collecting, transcribing, and publishing local tales.181 The period also gave rise to the

“national tale,” the historical novel, and the Gothic, genres in which geographical settings play vital roles as they anchor stories of epic struggle and triumph within particular locales.182

Romantic poetry too bears this same grounded quality, often springing from specific landscapes like the Lake District or the Alps. Such captivating narratives and poignant meditations, and especially the circulation of these into new territories, helped plants associated with any storied region reverberate in more ways than mere appearance or fragrance. Instead, they conjured an entire aura, beaming forth romance and high adventure, longing, loss, courage, triumph and, to

181 See Andrew Piper Dreaming in Books 97-109 and Susan Stewart “Notes on Distressed Genres,” who, among others, have written on the importance of folklore to the rise of the national tale and the historical novel. 182 See Ina Ferris “From national tale to historical novel: Edgeworth, Morgan, and Scott” in The achievement of literary authority (1991) (105-36). 290 again use Piper’s term, local difference. Wearing or displaying such flowers expressed fashion, history and fantasy, and sympathy and solidarity.

Given the immense psychological power these stories could attach to plants, it is no wonder that Americans, like the French, often eschewed the local for a taste in foreign flowers, nor is it surprising that the former tended to paste the names of these exotics onto wholly different local species. American plants, meanwhile, seemingly remained invisible: while even those disregarded French flowers in Delord’s account retain an essential significance as “truly national flowers,” the United States had few, if any, viable indigenous counterparts. Beyond commodity crops like tobacco, cotton, and corn, American flora continued in the minds of many immigrants and their descendants as a homogenous and unstoried lump.

Thus, despite the wealth of vegetation—the sublimely evocative wilderness— surrounding North American settlers, and their intimate daily interactions with this environment everywhere but the most urban centers, the circulation of foreign literature and the dearth of stories set in local American landscapes created and perpetuated a much stronger cultural connection to the wildernesses of other places. A handful of American writers were at work on this problem, of course: James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Sarah Hale all published narratives of New England settings in the first part of the nineteenth century, but a proliferation of stories set in American landscapes and observing them closely did not happen until the second half of the century, with Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Melville.

Even then, it was a challenge for writers to remove the lens of Old World literature.

I conjecture that American settlers often found the literary nature of other places more appealing than their own for several reasons. First, proxy-nature could possess psychological and pragmatic advantages over the more varied and complex living landscapes, one of which is the 291 illusion of comfort, comprehension, and control. As discussed in Chapter 1, flower books combine botanical science and literary anthologizing to present nature as a carefully-curated collection in which every piece has a place and purpose in the structure and adds up to an intelligible whole. Some immigrants, no doubt, faced with a meaningless landscape and an attendant identity crisis would have sought to bring such reassuring order back to the universe as swiftly as possible. Proxy-nature offers a quick and efficient way to process the looming

Unknown into something more familiar, and though it can lead to severe misperceptions it shows that even the feeblest of parallels between what is bewildering and what is recognizable (like the marsh marigold and the cowslip) can provide immense reassurance.

Second, as I also explore in Chapter 1, collections, and nature collections in particular, can create an appealing sense of immortality, suspending the idea of death even as they inflict it on collected specimens. Proxy-nature is just such a collection, and it affords the same chimera— a key psychological escape from the anxiety of scraping out a living in actual nature. An

American farmer might prefer stories of foreign wilds to tales about his own untamed landscape because in them he could find respite rather than reminders of the life-and-death significance of his daily toils. On the other hand, perhaps these storied foreign landscapes provided a sense of romance and heroism easily superimposed on local surroundings, where it could add greater purpose and perspective to the often myopic labor of survival. Either way, the idea of connection and communion with an idealized “Nature” would have been all the more important considering that much of a colonist’s work involved destruction in the process of clearing land of its previous inhabitants—whether animal, vegetable, or human. As Susan Stewart argues, “the body of lived experience” must submit to change, transformation, and death, whereas “the idealized body implicitly denies the possibility of death—it attempts to present a realm of transcendence and 292 immortality, a realm of the classic” (133). To relieve the stress of such pitiless labor, importing classic European plants and their accompanying significance could have provided a form of anesthesia, numbing people to the facts of their large-scale environmental impact because it provided a smaller version of nature for them to cherish up close (in books or gardens) and kept the rest of nature at a convenient emotional distance. It allowed people, in Cooper’s words, to look “upon a tree as an enemy” (132) while still professing a love for flowers. Ironically, the supposedly tender imported plants and peoples proved far more hardy, invasive, and ultimately destructive, than ever could have been imagined.

Whatever the particular causes for its popularity, the proxy nature found in flower books fed Americans’ longing for communion, comprehension, and appreciation of nature even as it hobbled their ability to clearly perceive their own environment. In Stewart’s terms, it replaced

“the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological” with “a nostalgic myth of contact and presence” (133). In short, planting flowers imported from “home,” and re-reading/re-citing the mythos of the homeland horticulture through flower books and related literary and print sources, separated immigrants and generations of their progeny from a fresh experience with the native nature surrounding them, even as it professed to connect them with Nature per se.

A rededication to particular landscapes

Books on the language and sentiment of flowers, in particular those that proliferated in the United States on the model of Sarah Hale’s Flora’s Interpreter (1832), as I discussed in

Chapter 3, seem especially to have developed an intense focus on the most well-known English garden flowers and wildflowers, with very little attention to local indigenous American flora.

They also often convey an increasing level of abstraction from actual Nature and a focus instead on human interactions and events (as Hale’s 1848 addition of “Fortuna Flora” to Flora’s 293

Interpreter attests). However, we also see movements from within the flower book genre to remedy some of these trends—books that work to create a psychological attachment specifically to local landscape, and that strive to lend plants enough sense of embodiment and complexity that they resist immediate transfer into mere symbolism.

The Flower People

One such book comes from teacher and educational reformer Mary Tyler Peabody

Mann,183 a key figure in early circles of New England Transcendentalism. First published in

1842, The Flower People became a popular text in American homes, remaining in publication until 1899.184 Something of a cross between a botanical primer, a field guide, a moral and religious tract, and a fanciful children’s tale, it relates the story of a young girl named Mary who one day hears the flowers talking to her. The Flower People has not received much scholarly attention compared to Mann’s later writings, and those who have written on it tend to focus on its place within Mann’s developing theories of education for children (especially girls) and her particular brand of Transcendentalism. 185 Placing this work in context with the flower book genre sheds further light on its cultural resonance as well as on the ways in which it strives to redirect readers’ attention and habits of thought—to anchor the philosophical, emotional, and moral contemplations typical of flower books to a firmly embodied, minutely specific physical reality.

183 The Flower People was written and published before Peabody’s marriage to Horace Mann in 1843, but almost all scholarly work on her life and writings refer to her by her married name. I will do the same. 184 Portions of the text were published much earlier. The first two chapters appeared in Elizabeth Peabody’s journal The Family School in 1836 (Ard 218). New editions came forth in 1843, 1846, 1847, 1862, 1875, 1888, and 1899. Peabody at first identified herself only as “a Lady,” but later she lists herself as “Mrs. Horace Mann” and indicates the identity of the illustrator as well, Mrs. G.P. Lathrop, daughter of Peabody’s younger sister Sophia and her husband Nathaniel Hawthorne (Ard 218). 185 See Ard and Marshall. Ard notes “The Flower People was […] the beginning of a lifelong project of encouraging women’s immersion in science as a means for personal and professional development” (227). 294

To begin this quiet revolution, The Flower People first makes valuable use of the genre’s conventions. The book opens in familiar territory, an early spring day in Mary’s family garden where she encounters the very best-known and most storied flowers. A glance at the Table of

Contents assures readers they will feel comfortable among the snow-drops, crocuses, violets, and narcissi, flowers that feature prominently in almost every flower book, and to which Mann devotes entire chapters of attention. Within the chapters, however, important distinctions emerge.

Though Mann does occasionally recount some popular tales of these plants from Greek mythology or verses of Shakespeare, she specifically steers away from the kind of universalized floral meditations favored in similar works and instead creates a story that is geographically and temporally distinct. Each in its turn, the flowers tell Mary how they came from far distant places to be planted in this particular New England garden. The melancholy snowdrop shivers in the crusty snow and it pines for the milder climes of its native France. The crocus tells of its home in

Asia. The hyacinths, tulips, and crown imperials all proudly reminisce on their glory days as prized possessions of Persian sultans and European royalty. All of the garden flowers featured in the first half of the book are clearly, even emphatically, immigrants.

Though a great many flower books mention the geographical origins of plant species, few so vividly or compellingly illustrate the histories, journeys, technologies, customs, and markets that bring such diverse non-native plants together in a humble family garden—and likewise, few books register the oddness of their combination or the occasional uncomfortableness these plants might feel living in a harsher climate among strange bedfellows. For instance, after telling Mary about the “sunny valleys where our home is,” the snowdrop sighs, “I was so rudely snatched away that I had not time even to look back and nod farewell […]. I was shut up in a tin box, and remember nothing more, till one day, on reviving, I found myself in a little earthen jar, riding 295 over the earth in a flying castle. […] It was very desolate” (11). An iris relates how it was sent to

Mary’s father by a family friend held prisoner in Austria. The hyacinth, once treasured by a princess, explains how “One day [the princess] exchanged me, and many of my sisters, for a

Tulip, and I was thrown into a pit, from which I was afterwards drawn out, and sent, with many other flowers, to this country. […] I wish I could understand why I was one day so valuable, and the next so insignificant” (68). Though the hyacinth prefers living in the open air to a residence even “under the most splendid roofs made by the hand of man,” it also struggles to adapt to its new home, since “in this foreign soil, a slight neglect destroys my health and vigor, and often I have not strength to open my bosom to the blessed sun” (69). The tales of these flowers indicate that as aliens, they sometimes need special care to survive; they depend on the affection of their caretakers, which love the hyacinth explains “is the only consolation that exiles can have for the lost heaven and the lost earth of home” (70). Through these narratives Mann thus makes clear the various human systems and artifices that enabled creation of this “natural” place. The pre- existing cultural significance of the garden plants brought about their eventual planting in New

England, but Mann’s version of their stories includes details that acknowledge their separateness from the extant American landscape. They coexist with it, but do not replace it.

Indeed, one of the most important innovations of The Flower People rests in its commitment not only to the much-loved garden plants, but to the host of indigenous species outside the garden. When Mary ventures into the meadows beyond her house she finds a multitude of flowers intensely eager to talk to her: “All the flowers wished to speak at once, and as they called Mary from every side, she knew not which way to turn” (101-102). Although by the mid-nineteenth century these plants had acquired botanical classifications, they generally had not yet accumulated narratives; to most viewers they simply formed part of a vague vegetative 296 ambiance. Mann’s stories go beyond merely identifying the plants, to endow them with more memorable characters.

Given the dearth of narrative material for American plants and the large number of species, her task is formidable. Where the familiar garden plants had enough known history to fill a chapter apiece, Mann groups American plants together in only four chapters (“May wild flowers,” “July flowers” “August flowers” and “Autumn”). Within these she gives voice to over fifty species, several of which also describe many of their “cousins.” The chapter “May wildflowers,” for example, introduces Uvularias, Erythronium (Dog’s tooth violet), Butter-cups

(Ranunculus), Trillium Erectum, Trillium Cernuum, Convallaria Racemosa (Solomon’s Seal)

Convellaria Stellata, Convellaria Multiflora, Cowslips (caltha), morning and evening primrose, geranium, columbine (Aquilegia), celandine, trientalis, Arethusa, Mountain laurel, and rhododendron. As this list suggests, the challenge of maintaining readerly interest in such a litany lies not only in its length, but in the foreignness of botanical nomenclature. Again, as mentioned above, American plants could variously possess several common names or none at all, and, distasteful as it was to many readers, Latin nomenclature provided the most reliable means of designation. But in the quest to anchor these species in the imagination, how does one foster readerly sympathy with a Trillium cernuum or a Trientalis?

Mann uses several tools to keep readers’ attention and build mythos for these less familiar plants. Where possible she does fluidly weave in both their common and Latin names, creating a narrative style that does not honor one consistently above the other. Sometimes she introduces plants first by their Latin names, and only interlaces the common names later, so that the more official name becomes the more familiar one: thus the Nymphaeas only at length admit to being identified as Lotus flowers, and the Anagallis to being denominated pimpernel or poor 297 man’s weatherglass. Other times, plants Mary at first calls by their common names tell her their

Latin names as important means of clarification. The cowslip, for example, “said her other name was Caltha, which was the Greek word for goblet” (112); though Mann does not mention it, this vital information distinguishes the species from the European cowslip, which is a kind of primrose. Similarly, a “pert yellow Butter-cup” tells Mary “that her real name was Ranunculus.

She did not add that she was named from a frog, which would have been the whole truth, but said it was not true that she made butter yellow, and she wished no one would call her Butter-cup any more” (103). On the other hand, the Columbines prefer their common appellation; one “said she would tell Mary her book-name if she would never call her by it. […] ‘Botanists call us

Aquilegia,’ she said, ‘because our spurs look something like an Eagle’s claws. They call us

Pajarillas in Spain, which I like better’” (116). Annoyance, dislike, pride, and fondness toward both common and Latin names are all permitted frank expression.

In their varying attitudes the plants thus sympathize with Mary and the reader, but they also help both parties submit themselves to learning and using these names. The anemone particularly registers this combination of candor and resignation as she explains the names of all her cousins:

My other name […] is Nemorosa. I am so called because I grow in woods and shady

places. […] Thalictroides—I can hardly pronounce such a long word—has smooth,

roundish, heart-shaped leaves, like Meadow Rue, from whom she is named. I should like

this name better than that long Latin one. I wish flowers could name themselves. But it is

very pretty, and grows on an umbelled flower stalk. Lancifolia’s leaves are lance-shaped,

and scalloped on the edge. Narcissiflora’s are palmate, something like the shape of your

little hand. Alpina’s are winged, and Virginiana’s are very much like mine. I have a 298

cousin Caroliniana, who lives in warmer countries than this; --sometimes she has twenty

petals! Sylvestris is often called a Snow-drop, her flowers are so white and drooping. (60-

61)

The anemone’s introductions also convey Mann’s immersion-approach to teaching the meanings of various Latin phrases. Rather than explicating the language itself, she weaves in details that assure the uninitiated that each term contains some valuable piece of information, whether it be the shape of the plant’s leaves, its usual habitat, or its resemblance to another plant. The reader can thus freely move forward through the narrative, absorbing these details almost subconsciously until they begin to coalesce into a recognizable pattern. In other words, the system allows the reader to maintain interest in the plant even before its name makes complete sense.

Where plants have been named for people, Mann includes bits of their stories as well.

“The deep purple Gentians […] told Mary that their virtue was first discovered by Gentius, a king of Illyria” (200). The Gerardias say “they were named from a dear old gentleman, who many, many long years ago, had a garden full of flowers of all sorts, whose lives he had written in a great book, which was full of pictures, and they thought their pictures must be there” (201).

Linnaeus named the Gerardias in tribute to English botanist John Gerard who lived two centuries before him, but Linnaeus by himself is far less interesting than is his desire to pay tribute to someone else. These stories thus are not about the person who actually assigned the names, but instead about their namesakes. This important distinction reveals that even a brief narration of this identification process endows the names with emotional resonance and casts the male- dominated, scientific system of plant-naming in a more approachable light. The Gentians acquire the romance of classical antiquity, while the Gerardias adopt the attitude of children fond of a 299 grandparent. The plants seem proud of their histories, proud to claim them and assimilate them into their sense of self.

As they relate their histories, the plants all seem keen to specify their place of geographical origin, and their status as natives or immigrants to the landscape—but while this is important to Mann’s project of clarifying plant identities and avoiding the phantasmagorical collapse that so often blended and misidentified species in peoples’ minds, she also testifies to the stunning power of plants to survive transplantation, to integrate and thrive in new areas, and even to colonize new territories on their own. Mann pitches this in positive terms as the resilient power of life. The anemone, a native of Greece, explains this proliferation as a kind of emotional instinct: “it is not pleasant to be solitary. Once I lived entirely alone in this meadow; but I did not enjoy the sun or the wind half as much as I do now when I am surrounded by my children. These are all my children, covering the meadow as far as you can see” (56). Some plants, like sweet peas, adapt so well to change that as “Man travels far and wide on this large globe, […] he can take us with him [205] and plant us wherever he chooses” (204-205). But the sweet pea also notes that many plants transport themselves: global entities, “[t]heir winged seeds gaily float on the breezes and the tempests, and it is their joy to make the “desert blossom as the rose” and clothe the mountain tops with verdure. […] That graceful elm that throws its branches over the wall, could alone furnish seeds enough to cover with trees this and many other worlds” (205,

207). Mann may exaggerate seed-dispersal in elms, but the description is heroic, miraculous, and above all, memorable. All of these strategies of dealing with awkward nomenclature and geographical and cultural transplantations and distinctions underscore Mann’s core approach to mythos-building: she gives the unfamiliar plants relatable and memorable personalities, and she emphasizes their resourcefulness and resilience, often in the face of challenging circumstances. 300

In the quest to make these plants stick in readers’ minds, this deeper rendering of plants’ identities—names and relevant information translated into characters and stories—is even more important than providing accurate visual images—and it testifies to the power of narrative that pictures of plants, which many readers might consider essential to forming an attachment to them through text, matter comparatively little to the process. The images Mann does include in her text seem at times more a hindrance to accurate plant identification than a help: each picture includes three or four plants and a list of names, but with no indication of which goes with which (Figure 5.2). Matching them up depends on the reader’s prior knowledge of at least some of the plants, and a process of Figure 5.30 Sample Illustration from The Flower People, 1846 elimination beyond that. edition. Facing p.161. (Google Books).

The difficulty of interpreting these images, however, reveals the power of Mann’s storytelling to create readerly investment in unfamiliar plants before clear pictures of them have formed in readers’ minds. Even the most detailed and accurate visual and verbal scientific descriptions of plants often create only curiosity at best, a mild interest that rarely lasts beyond the turning of a page. Mann’s stories, on the other hand, forge an attachment that lingers in the mind, one that might drive readers to confirm plant identities through both the accompanying images and other resources like plant guides, botanical reference works, or best of all an actual 301 walk through the meadows with a knowledgeable person.186 Instead of merely memorizing plants,

Mann makes readers wish to meet them, to experience their presence. She creates hope in her readers even for transformative experiences, the kind Mary has when she unexpectedly discovers a brook “fringed with spikes of the gorgeous

Cardinal flower, which to Mary was all glorious”

(170). Shouting for joy at the sight of “their bright colors, flashing in the sunshine,” she carefully gathers some to transplant to her own garden, but their effect on her imagination, very Figure 5.31 Image from The Flower People, 1846 Wordsworthian, lasts far beyond even this: edition. Facing p. 171. (Google Books)

Years after, when she grew up and lived within the brick walls of a city, and was not so

happy as now, the vision of that sparkling brook and its thousand splendid flowers, would

make her forget her sorrows for a time, and be again a happy child, wandering in the

gardens of nature, listening to its voice, and learning wisdom and gratitude. (172)

The text of The Flower People does include an image with this account (figure 5.3), featuring the

Cardinal flower together with two other flowers, the dog’s tooth violet and dog’s bane—but again, no clear indication of which flower goes with which name. The point is, ambiguity in the image matters much less when the narrative creates such a powerful emotional bond to the plants in readers’ minds, which then engenders a fervent desire to experience their presence.

186 While I cannot speak for the book’s effect on all readers, I found myself Googling nearly every species I came across, so great was my desire to confirm the identities of the plants I read about. 302

In addition to making the plants themselves memorable, Mann maintains the specificity of their contexts; The Flower People conveys a firm sense of embodied physical space, where each individual blossom is its own self, in some phase of its own life cycle. This approach sets the work apart from mainstream flower books that tend to view plants as ever-present symbols of universal concepts; though it certainly deals with universal ideas, it does so on a local scale where their consequences are starkly apparent and vitally important. For instance, while many flower books use flowers as symbols of death and rebirth, Mann repeatedly and quite starkly uses this trope to drive home a powerful sense that, while broken flowers may come back again another year, their individual deaths in this particular moment matter very much. The sprightly anemone explains that “The reason I look so young is, that every year I put on new garments, and flowers never feel old, as people do. But I have had some sorrows, […] for the cows sometimes trample upon my dear children. I see them all again every spring, to be sure, but it grieves me when their beautiful summer lives are cut short” (57). It is one thing, then, for a plant to senesce into the end of its life cycle, and quite another for its life to be snatched away.

In The Flower People, such tragedies occur often, and even those brought about by natural causes seem shocking and sad; combined, they reveal complexities in nature that resist easy sentimentalization. A May rainstorm kills a Painted Lady butterfly who was about to pollinate an amaryllis (139). Less beneficent insects prey on the plants, and on each other. Mann includes a surprising observation of a ladybug who attacks a butterfly and takes it to her nest where, “when [its] wings were once broken […] it would be easy for a company of lady-birds to tear her to pieces” (150). In the fall, a maple leaf expresses gratitude that the butterflies laid no eggs nearby, since “I have seen many unfortunate leaves torn from their birth place, because ravaged by the worm” (215). The verbs Mann uses to describe the workings of nature reveal 303 ruthlessness rather than serenity, and show that the same mechanisms that perpetuate life—rain, insect pollination, laying eggs—often also mete death.

Mann presents these natural deaths realistically, and as part of nature’s natural course; in contrast, she illustrates several plant-deaths at human hands that convey a sense of specific, immediate environmental responsibility. Instead of reproducing a common flower-book sentiment like “all things must die,” Mann communicates that “this plant died because you killed it.” This ethic distinguishes The Flower People from other flower books almost from the opening pages, as the snowdrop recalls her native valley where a small “girl […] who loved Snow-drops

[…] used to tear us up by handfuls and carry us into the house where we could not see the sun or drink the dew, but we stood in glass vases many days, and there died for want of food” (11-12).

The melancholy flower likewise expresses her dislike of botanists, since one who once visited the garden “stooped down and [...] pull[ed] off my poor sister’s petals, and threw them on the ground” (15-17). Through these stories Mann offers a pedagogical lesson in how even time- honored human habits and customs can exact a great price from other living things. The deaths she describes, juxtaposed against iconic scenes of childhood joy and innocence, forcefully highlight Mann’s injunction to see nature in its specific details and to respect it as fully in one’s awareness and treatment of individual blossoms as in one’s appreciation for the whole.

The Flower People thus stands apart from many flower books that take sentimental approaches to death or overtly religious perspectives in that its moral elements focus on human treatment of the natural world more often than on humans’ treatment of each other. Moreover, the text’s ethics often emerge through complex circumstances rather than straightforward claims.

Only rarely does Mann deliver the kinds of statements often found in other publications of this kind—that violets are modest (48), or that “Anemones are like some people, who are blown 304 about by every wind” (60). More often, the flowers present the heroine, Mary, with interesting situations or challenging questions through which she must work her way to develop her own codes of belief and behavior. For example, while Mann critiques the needless or excessive human use or destruction of nature, she nevertheless supports the Christian view that God created Nature for the good of mankind. Thus, while some flower-deaths are pointless and tragic, others are willing and peaceful. A maple leaf preparing for autumn proclaims “ I have breathed forth those qualities of air which are beneficial to the atmosphere; I have inhaled those which would injure such delicate lungs as yours, and I have prepared the way for the ripening of the all important seed that [will] […] perpetuate my race;” his destiny, he says, is “to do good and give pleasure to man, for whose growth in love and wisdom this sweet world is made.” The maple leaf “die[s] content” because it completed its life-cycle (223), but Mann attributes similar contentment even to some premature plant deaths, including those from human causation. An iris describes the privilege flowers feel in comforting human sorrow, even at the cost of their own lives:

Perhaps you think flowers need not trouble themselves about the sorrows of men; but we

were made to minister to their happiness, and to console them when in affliction. […] We

are even willing […] to go into the darkened chamber of the sick, though it shortens our

lives […]. If I had been left to grow wild in my native fields, I might never have known

any thing of human sorrow; but I will not regret even my beloved home, since I have

given the solace of sympathy to the unfortunate. (94)

As Mary listens to the plants’ various viewpoints, she must mull over difficult questions. If it is okay to pick an iris for a sick-room, is it okay to pick a columbine for May-Day? And though 305 plants give pleasure to man, doesn’t throwing snowballs (which earlier in the story killed a crocus) do the same?

Layering numerous situations like these throughout the text allows Mann to present religious and social arguments with nuance, to avoid dogmatism, and to allow Mary, and by extension the reader, space to ponder without dictating her (or our) conclusions. For example, instead of a straightforward approach to religion that might take flowers as clear evidence of

Christian principles (as we saw in the works of Coxe or Tonna in Chapter 2), Mann uses flowers to present a somewhat contrasting, even pagan view that Mary has to reconcile with the lessons she has been taught and her own emerging beliefs. This approach manages to retain Christian and moral interpretations without totally overpowering the attention to specific and local nature, and in exchange the details of these children’s own natural environments open the religious doctrines to multiple meanings, which then inflect the plants’ social significance. Mann’s flowers have a fundamentally different understanding of existence than the one she ultimately promotes.

Their perceptions extend mostly to physical stimuli and events of the moment—they understand light and darkness, rain and wind, and especially the power and warmth of the Sun, but not the causes behind these things. As they talk to Mary about their observations and experiences, she herself must decide how they fit within a more expansive philosophical picture. For example, describing to Mary the night-blooming cereus, baffled that any flower would open outside the light of day, the leaf asks,

“[her] splendid flowers open just as our father, the Sun, sinks away from our sight, —did

she never see him, do you think? […] [and] before the Sun rises again, all that life has

fled, and he is denied the happiness of seeing his loveliest child. His warmth vivifies her;

his beams draw her from the dark earth; why does she not show herself to him? When 306

you gaze into her deep chalice, his very rays seem to be imprisoned there. […] Yet he

beholds her not. Can it be that the light is not his? Is there any other source of light?”

“It must be God’s light,” said Mary.

“Is God your Sun?” said the Leaf.

Mary did not answer, for she was thinking deeply. (219-220)

The leaf’s questions inspire deep thought because they point out situations where physical realities suggest potential spiritual interpretations, but ones that may not precisely or totally align. Mann gives both Mary and the reader space to think, rather than stamping on a fixed interpretation. Yet instead of destabilizing faith in cosmic truths, these moments of restraint convey a sense that such truths are too complex for simple translation into temporal terms. Thus if, as Patricia Ard has observed, “Mary’s garden […] becomes the site from which observations of the immediate lead one to universal truths” (221), it is vitally important to note that Mann does not always chart a perfectly clear pathway between the immediate and the universal, or state what exactly those truths entail. Indeed, the book concludes with a fundamental contrast between the existences and perceptions of humans and flowers. Mary’s mother mourns the loss of her youngest child, and “Mary saw that the flowers were made happy by this world, and that her dear mother was not; but her mother told her she would not change places with the flowers, for they could not live forever or learn wisdom” (225). The point seems to be, then, that plants do not, indeed cannot, offer perfect allegories. The limits of their perceptions bring important open- ended questions to the surface.

Taken as a whole, then, The Flower People offers an effective exploration and innovation of the flower book genre that manages to honor many of the genre’s distinctive qualities while striving to remedy some of its biggest problems. Mann’s narratives bring personality and 307 significance to American plants, even those with challenging or uninspiring Latin names. The specificity of her observations and storytelling resists the mainstream tendency to treat nature simply as a philosophical concept or reflection of human emotions, and provides a powerful sense of human impact in the natural world, of human culpability and environmental responsibility. Mann’s is not the “nature” of “anywhere,” but the specific nature of right here, with all its history as intertwined with human events and emotions, past and present—a princess who tired of her hyacinths, a boy throwing snowballs among snowdrops, a girl transformed at the sight of scarlet lobelia, and the lobelia transplanted by her hand. Through all these means The

Flower People labors most of all to distinguish, rather than collapse, important differences— whether between plant species of similar appearance or name, between geographical regions of plant origin, or between the sometimes messy, brutal and contradictory material world and the possibility of more cosmic, harmonious, and ineffable truths.

Rural Hours

I have referred several times now in this chapter to Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural

Hours (1850), since her comments on the general state of environmental awareness in her region—the popularity of botanical study and floral literature notwithstanding—provide key insight into the flower book genre’s place within, and influence on, American nature and culture in the mid-nineteenth century. As we have seen, Cooper diagnoses the problems of literature- induced proxy-nature with remarkable clarity and directness. Here I will show how she crafts

Rural Hours as a remedy for this problem, and though she would almost certainly not have considered her book a “flower book” in the vein of most others in my study, I posit that Rural

Hours provided readers an important model for a new kind of plant awareness, and a fresh 308 approach to writing that women interested in literature, nature, and culture could put forth to influence the world. This was a model, in short, for a different sort of flower book.

Chronologically the latest book in my study, Rural Hours came forth at (and perhaps helped bring about) a significant turning point for the flower book genre as a whole. Though precise lines of influence are difficult to trace, after 1850 flower books’ curious mixedness seems to distill itself into more distinct strains. Books that focused on the language, sentiment, and poetry of flowers continued in popularity, but became further abstracted from nature’s realities; botany likewise remained popular as a subject of study for women and children, though the lines that separated amateur “botanizers” from professional “botanists” grew more rigid.187 With Rural

Hours Cooper introduces a new branch of floral observation to the United States that would powerfully influence Thoreau’s Walden and all the works that follow in its tradition and eventually become known as “nature writing.”188 As I will show, Cooper’s philosophies clearly situate her in the tradition of European and American Romantic writers, but in some ways she also anticipates attitudes expressed by Realists painters, such as Constable or Monet, later in the century. Both Romanticism and Realism push back against their respective eras’ established ways of seeing, but where Romantics sought fresh perspective through individual feeling and perception, Realists strove to strip away cultural mediations altogether, engaging in what art historian Linda Nochlin calls a “struggle against schemata” (20) in order to depict (they argued) simply what “is.” In Rural Hours Cooper employs elements of both modes, attending carefully to her own subjective experience in nature, but also committing herself to objective observation of her particular landscape’s details.

187 See Keeney, The Botanizers: Amateur Scientists in the Nineteenth Century. 188 Thoreau published Walden four years after Rural Hours and cited it as a particular inspiration. Johnson and Patterson discuss Cooper’s vital role in developing nature writing into a full-fledged genre. See introductions to RH and Essays. 309

Before Rural Hours could help effect such cultural shifts, however, it first had to reach publication, a step accomplished in large part due to its affinities with established conventions and genres of women’s writing. Cooper initially presented the work to her father James

Fenimore Cooper, whose letters reveal both his admiration for the text’s fundamental ethic and personality, and his concern with its unconventionality. He commended his daughter for “the purity of mind, the simplicity, elegance and knowledge” of her work, which he assured her would “produce a strong feeling in your favour with all the pure and good,” but his confidence in the book’s marketability was more measured. He cautioned “I have now very little doubt of its ultimate success, though at first the American world will hesitate to decide” (xii).189 Privately he expressed the same concerns to his wife, noting “It is not strong perhaps, but it is so pure, and so elegant, so very feminine and charming that I do not doubt, now, of its eventual success—I say eventual, for, at first, the world will not know what to make of it” (xii). Fenimore Cooper’s confidence in Rural Hours grew in the following months as he worked more closely with the manuscript and negotiated its publication with publishers both in New York (Putnam) and

London (Richard Bentley), but his advocacy in that regard understandably follows the same pattern—focusing praise on elements of the writing that fit expectations of women’s writing and target audiences. He assured Bentley “Do not be afraid of it” (xiii).190 The publishers, for their part, aimed the book at the high-end gift market. Putnam offered both a plain edition and a fine edition, the latter of which compares in size, heft, and beauty to contemporary literary annuals— perhaps 7x9” tall and wide, 2” thick, with full leather binding, embossed and gilded lettering on the front, back, and spine, gilded page edges, and twenty-one lithographed and hand-painted

189 These letters date from February 28 1850, and March 3 1850. 190 May 18th, 1850. 310 plates. Both editions sold well, the fine edition even better than expected, and Cooper told his wife, “It will be the presentation volume of the season” (xiii).191

Such details—Rural Hours is larger, covers many subjects in addition to plants, and does not mention flowers in its title— show that while it departs more dramatically from the typical flower-book format among the works I have addressed in this study, it still retains several key elements of the genre’s spirit and modus operandi that I have explored in previous chapters.

Clearly, it adopts a medium well suited to women authors’ public intervention. It also incorporates the practice of collecting and curating information from a variety of outside sources; the “great deal of curious information” drew from more than thirty previously published works of history, ornithology, botany, zoology, landscape design and gardening, geology, natural history, philosophy, and travel, not to mention Cooper’s many references to poetry and other aesthetic literature.192 And of course, Rural Hours focuses most intently on the same topic that occupies all flower books—that quest to understand the profound and ineffable relationship between humans and the natural world that tugs so powerfully at the soul that it finds expression in the arts and practices of virtually all human cultures.

Even as it respects these goals and incorporates these strategies, however, Rural Hours introduces several important innovations. Not only elegant and “feminine,” it presents a manifesto for women’s education and public involvement, for Cooper’s perspective is vast, even when centered in her home or home region. Her subject matter, though securely tethered to her daily life and experience in and around Cooperstown, New York, ranges over an expansive array of topics, geographical areas, and periods of history. She offers a local perspective, but also a cosmopolitan one: having spent her youth from age thirteen to twenty living and being educated

191 September 19th, 1850 192 See Johnson and Patterson’s list of Cooper’s sources in RH 311 in Europe, her writing draws upon all the authority and cachet of European culture and knowledge, but employs it to decipher a multitude of details that make her own American landscape unique and distinct. In this effort she demonstrates considerably more patience than would the later Realists—she does not, like Monet, wish she had been born blind, or like Pisarro, propose burning down the Louvre (Nochlin 20, 36). Instead, as a lover of “English reading” herself, Cooper uses British literature to inspire and legitimate her project even as, strand by strand, she also carefully separates its tendrils from those of American provenance; the result is a richly contextualized but far more accurate portrait of her country’s unique botanical life.

At times Cooper delivers a female perspective, providing insight into spaces and social events that might have remained closed to male participants. For example, she records a surprise home visit from three Indian women from the Oneida tribe who stay for tea (108-110). In another, she spends the day at a working farm in the company of the farmer’s aged stepmother, and describes in particular detail the women’s labor and its fruits: indoor furnishings, the setup of the kitchen, the provenance and preparation of foods, the spinning wheel and piles of wool that would be spun, woven, dyed, and made into cloth by the six step-daughters (95-101). At times

Cooper voices some of the conservative platitudes of her day: admiring the farm women’s industriousness, she notes “it is certainly pleasant to see women busy in this way, beneath the family roof, and one is much disposed to believe that the home system is healthier and safer for the individual in every way. Home, we may rest assured, will always be, as a rule, the best place for a woman; her labors, pleasures, and interests, should all centre there, whatever be her sphere of life” (99-100).

Despite Cooper’s occasionally apparent conservatism, however, the text as a whole tempers her more rigid statements through insights into the way she herself inhabits her home 312 and her womanhood—the breadth and depth of her interests and knowledge, and the ways she connects her observations of local scenes to what she knows of global history and culture, science, and even business and economics. A walk in the woods, for example, prompts an extended reflection on the forests and trees of the Otsego region (125-135) that considers all of these angles. The passage begins with a broad meditation on the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual experience of exploring woods, and then proceeds to relate this particular forest’s history, including the changes wrought by generations of European settlers. Cooper discusses the forest’s composition of specific evergreen and deciduous species, she describes local practices of felling and harvesting trees, she considers the effect of these practices on both the landscape and the lumber market, and she offers specific suggestions for improvements to those practices that could lead to greater sustainability and preservation of natural treasures.

In relating all this information Cooper goes beyond reporting and reflecting by offering a pointed critique based on principles drawn from wide-ranging aesthetic, moral, and economic arenas. Current practices of deforestation, she argues, do not make sense on any of these fronts, but especially not the economic:

In these times, the hewers of wood are an unsparing race. […] It is not surprising,

perhaps, that a man those chief object in life is to make money, should turn his timber

into bank-notes with all possible speed; but it is remarkable that any one at all aware of

the value of wood, should act so wastefully as most men do in this part of the world.

Mature trees, young saplings, and last year’s seedlings, are all destroyed at one blow by

the axe or by fire; the spot where they have stood is left, perhaps for a lifetime, without

any attempt at cultivation, or any endeavor to foster new wood. One would think that by

this time, when the forest has fallen in all the valleys—when the hills are becoming more 313

bare every day—when timber and fuel are rising in prices, and new uses are found for

even indifferent woods—some forethought and care in this respect would be natural in

people laying claim to common sense. (132)

In a plea for more sustainable practices and to support her claim that “few American farmers are aware of the full value and importance of their wood” Cooper demonstrates the research she’s done by quoting State Reports for New York on actual dollar values of farm produce, animal stock, and lumber carried to tide-water on the Erie canal in 1835, showing that at $4,770,000

“the forest yielded more than the stock, and more than half as much as the farm lands; and when the comparative expense of the two is considered, their value will be brought still nearer together” (132-133). Her thesis, then, is that more wealth could be generated over time if landowners would approach their woods as long-term investments rather than one-time cash-ins, and more mindfully harvest their trees.

Having buttressed her argument with the weight and credibility of economics, she now further strengthens her points by asserting that “independently of their market price in dollars and cents, the trees have other values: they are connected in many ways to the civilization of a country; they have their importance in an intellectual and in a moral sense” (133). She argues that beyond their utility as shelter and food, and even as vitally important construction materials for roads, bridges and houses, and fuel for heat and steam power, living trees (especially mature ones) add more beauty and value to a person’s property than any costly furnishings one might procure. Furthermore, wanton destruction of anything made by God “betrays a reckless spirit of evil” (134), while on the other hand, a willingness to protect living trees or plant new ones “rises above the common labors of husbandry, and speaks of a generous mind” (134), for trees extend their refreshing powers not only to “the band of household friends, to our neighbors—ay, to the 314 passing wayfarer and stranger,” but also to future generations (134-135). Taken together, the diversified elements of Cooper’s argument yield a critique that is not only passionate but also well-informed and highly logical. In other words, her “feminine” “purity of mind,” as her father described her, does not preclude knowledgeable engagement with complex topics, or the need to examine such topics from multiple angles.

Cooper also draws on another genre in this work—the journal format—in order to support her project in several ways: at the most practical level, it offers a structure for tracking and communicating quotidian details that retains their context and connectedness within a larger scene (that is, flowers first and foremost form part of a walk down a lane, rather than part of a botanical family). Likewise, the details in Cooper’s observations keep their everyday quality, with their broader significance emerging slowly, in layers. These factors contribute to Cooper’s blend of Romantic and Realist modes of observation: her assiduous attention to concrete details allows her to produce a more objectively “realistic” rendering of her locale, while the intimate nature of the journal allows for more subjective reflection and feeling. Further, like travel writing, to which it is closely related, journal writing offered a venue for women writers, though of course, it attracted writers of both genders, and as Elizabeth Fay argues, we more fully appreciate women’s contributions to these fields when we “pars[e] [their] underlying patterns beyond obvious similarities to or differences from men’s writing” (78). Cooper likely recognized society’s belief in the mode’s suitability for women, but she draws upon far more than that as she puts it to sophisticated use. Indeed, although part of Cooper’s research involved daily observations, the journal does not merely reproduce the structure of her notes. Cooper’s devotion to nonfiction throughout Rural Hours (no invented characters or talking flowers here) disguises 315 the format’s vital employment of artifice: it compresses and presents two years’ worth of observation and extensive reading as the extemporaneous record of a single year.

The shape and scope of Rural Hours does take up a specific journal tradition in its emulation of works by two British naturalists, Gilbert White and John Leonard Knapp. Though she never quotes these men directly and came to know their work best in the years after Rural

Hours was published, Cooper greatly admired White’s Natural History and Antiquities of

Selborne (1789) and in 1855 she edited an American edition of Knapp’s Journal of a Naturalist

(1829), where she argues that both writers’ works “belong to a choice class; they are to be numbered among the books which have been written neither for fame nor for profit, but which have opened spontaneously, one might almost say unconsciously, from the author’s mind”

(Essays 17). Cooper’s praise of White and Knapp strongly recalls Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads 575) but that she would so identify the work of naturalists, not poets, says much about her own literary philosophy—one that emphatically roots the expression of feeling within accurate and attentive observation of material realities. Both White and Knapp focus on physical details in their home regions, near Southampton and Gloucester respectively. The Natural History of Selborne presents a series of letters, each centering on a particular feature of the locale, such as soil, trees, or fossils. Journal of a Naturalist has a somewhat looser structure, passing freely within the course of a few pages from discussion of the area’s remnants of Roman roads, to hints of its pre- existing forest, to the composition of its soil, to the produce of its dairies. While both writers occasionally ruminate on the physical and philosophical significance of such information, offering, in Knapp’s words, “reflections […], notes […], meditations […], [and] infinite variety 316 of description and narrative,” their emphasis remains fixed on “constant observance of rural objects” and “plain observations of nature” (iii).

Rural Hours takes up this torch wholeheartedly, ranging over numerous topics as the day’s activities present them, and no matter the meditations inspired thereby, always returning to close observation of material details. Cooper’s command of language and powers of description often yield beautiful passages, but these she firmly anchors to pragmatic concerns, straightforward journalism, and reference to the latest and most authoritative sources.193 Rochelle

Johnson classes Cooper with Henry David Thoreau as unique among American Romantic writers for her commitment to an aesthetic based in nature’s material reality, rather than its metaphorical potential (Passions 2-3) and Thoreau himself cited Rural Hours as one inspiration for Walden, which he published four years later. And although Cooper says in her preface that she makes “no claim whatever to scientific knowledge” [3]), she certainly emphasizes an empirical approach, which she manifests in her assiduous reportage and analysis. And though she writes no poetry of her own, numerous quotations throughout Rural Hours do attest to her love for and her extensive knowledge of verse: one particularly impressive section—strongly reminiscent in style of flower books like Kent’s Flora Dometica—offers a historical analysis of poets’ references to Autumn from classical Greece and Rome to contemporary English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

But even as she admires these verses, Cooper regards them with a critic’s eye, wary of some artist’s tendency to obscure, distort, or substitute generalizations for more specific observation. In clear support of Romantic writers’ rejection of some Neoclassical tropes she notes that only in the last “fifty or sixty years” (207) had poets begun to see Autumn’s beauties

193 Johnson and Patterson discuss some of the difficulties Cooper likely faced in getting access to the primary source books she needed, and her tenacity in tracking them down, as Cooperstown was at that time quite remote. She tasked her father with collecting many of them (RH xi). 317 and represent them accurately without skewing the season either toward summer or winter; she approvingly observes that “all descriptive writing, on natural objects, is now much less vague and general than it was formerly; it has become very much more definite and accurate within the last half-century” (208). The change, she argues, potentially constitutes a leap forward for civilization itself:

people had grown tired of mere vapid, conventional repetitions, they felt the want of

something more positive, more real; the head called for more of truth, the heart for more

of life. And so, writers began to look out of the window more frequently; […] they

learned, at length, to look at nature by the light of the sun, and not by the glimmerings of

the poet’s lamp. And a great step this was, not only in art, but in moral and intellectual

progress. (208)

Cooper clearly strives in her own work to contribute to this progress, to strip off veils of cultural and artistic traditions that might muddy accurate perception and representation. The style of her language notably avoids sensationalism and sentimentalism, two trends of descriptive writing popular in a lot of literature of the 1840s and 50s. In 1855 John S. Hart praised Cooper for eschewing “extravagant embellishments” and “ecstacies” in order to create pictures of American life with “no colouring but that which every object necessarily receives in passing through a contemplative and cultivated mind” (qtd in RH xv). Put another way, Cooper avoids describing things merely for the sake of description, or praising beauty for beauty’s sake; her observations frequently center on a question or curiosity she then endeavors to understand, or a natural phenomenon she strives to explain. 318

The book’s closing passage attests to this detail and observation-oriented aesthetic, a meditation on winter sunsets that, she perceives, offer “some of the softest and sweetest skies of the year”:

At such times, a warmer sun than usual draws from the yielding snow a mild mist, which

softens the dark hills, and rising to the sky, lies there in long, light, cloudy folds. The

choicest tints of the heavens are seen at such moments; tender shades of rose, lilac, and

warm gold, opening to show beyond a sky filled with delicate green light. These calm

sunsets are much less fleeting than others: from the moment when the clouds flush into

color at the approach of the sun, one may watch them, perhaps, for more than an hour,

growing brighter and warmer, as he passes slowly on his way through their midst; still

varying in ever-changing beauty, while he sinks slowly to rest; and at last, long after he

has dropped beyond the farther hills, fading sweetly and imperceptibly, as the shadows of

night gather upon the snow. (327)

In this passage Cooper’s language recreates a dynamic experience of beauty for the reader, but it also provides interesting technical and scientific insight into the ways weather, snowpack, temperature, and other atmospheric factors each contribute to that experience. Thus Johnson and

Patterson, attuned to Cooper’s influence on the development of nature writing as a genre, note that her descriptions of “pleasing scenery” take on “a redeeming ecological depth” (RH xx), thanks not only to her attention to material details but to their interconnectedness, their causes and processes, and their evolution over time (xxi). Once again the journal format plays a key role in Cooper’s ability to capture such depth as it places the element of time front and center. Where a large number of flower books adopt a season-based structure focusing on plants that bloom in a given time of year, Rural Hours expands that more limited framework by bringing the same 319 plants and animals to view throughout the year, showing their changing aspects as the seasons progress. This more capacious approach provides more complete portraits of the subjects it considers, and renders vast amounts of information far less imposing and more accessible than, say, an encyclopedic approach; the details unfold organically and unhurriedly, gradually accumulating meaning more often than declaring it.

In using time as an organizational structure Cooper also firmly anchors her occasional meditations on the recent and ancient past, and her musings on possible futures. Thus, even as the journal format foregrounds the passage of time within a specific place, it also allows a great deal of play with time and space, allowing Cooper to range far beyond the daily scenes of

Cooperstown and place them in a much wider global and historical context. One journal entry begins, for example, by describing a drive past farms of ripening grain, then proceeds to discuss some weeds commonly found in American corn and wheat fields, and then ponders for a considerable time on a certain weed not yet found in America: the red corn poppy.

Were Cooper to restrict her focus solely to what she saw or experienced on her drive, this sudden shift to a profile of the poppy and its European history and related literature would have no place in her work. Instead, she describes the European poppy-bee who lines its burrow with bits of the scarlet petals, she recalls Old World fables, mythology, and verses of poetry that so frequently pair the poppy and wheat, and she instructs the reader about the association of poppies and wheat in a current French fashion for trimming straw bonnets. Finally she brings the discussion back to the American fields, noting that “in spite of this general prevalence of the poppy throughout the grain-fields of the Old World, and its acknowledged claim to a place beside the wheat, it is quite unknown here as a weed. With us this ancient association is broken up” (124). And suddenly the grain-fields of New York snap back into focus, distinct and unique. 320

In this moment and many others like it throughout the book, the fiction of the journal achieves a bit of magic. Cooper clearly spent quite a bit of time gathering information from books and personal interviews (she notes “we have frequently asked farmers from different parts of the country if they had ever found [the poppy] among their wheat”), but all of it—the present images, the curious absences, and all the history that makes them curious—all appear to pass through Cooper’s mind on the course of that drive. And indeed, once those details were gathered, perhaps they would have done so: thinking is so much faster than writing. But by taking days, even weeks’ worth of research and writing and presenting them as the thoughts of a single drive, the artifice creates a moment of seemingly spontaneous complexity that layers multiple registers of knowledge.

This instance also points to another important aspect of Cooper’s journaling style, the balance she strikes between moments of personal expression and moments of detached observation—or put another way, moments that treat the reader as a listening audience, and others that treat the reader as if he or she were a participant in this journey. For example, though she writes with a first-person perspective, she employs either the plural “we,” or avoids personal pronouns altogether through statements like “Walked in the woods today”; the “we” suggests a community and the absence of any pronoun suggests informality, but also offers the possibility for the reader to put her or his own self into the narrative. As a result, Rural Hours reads very differently from Knapp’s Journal of a Naturalist in which he freely and frequently refers to himself as “I.” Knapp’s presence dominates his narratives; he is the main character and the hero of his story. Cooper’s style, in contrast, maximizes a relationship with her readers and her subjects. In such moments Rural Hours specifically becomes a sort of communal narrative, meant to appear as more than one person’s story. 321

Occasionally, though, Cooper’s voice rings through loud and clear, in bold opinions and critiques and even gentler moments of insight and reflection that are unmistakably hers. Her commitment to material detail, accurate observation, and a determination to look at nature “by the light of the sun” yield for the genres of the flower book and of nature writing, which as I showed above, she helped invent, an invigorating take on plants that avoids tired tropes and finds inspiration in even the most prosaic of actualities. Examining Rural Hours after volume upon volume of its flower-book predecessors, so many of which open with snowdrops, crocuses, and violets, a reader finds this passage delightful because its striking originality revitalizes the genre:

The first plant that shows the influence of the changing seasons in this part of the

country, is very little like the delicate snow-drop, or the fragrant violet of other lands.

Long before the earliest trees are in bud, or the grass shows the faintest tinge of green, the

dark spathe of the skunk-cabbage makes its way in the midst of snow and ice. […]

[A]lthough a very common plant, many persons familiar with its broad glossy leaves in

summer, have never seen the flower, and have no idea how early it blossoms. (9)

The passage epitomizes Cooper’s commitment to empiricism as its own kind of poetic sensibility. One cannot imagine skunk cabbages taking any place at all in most lyrical or literary tributes to flowers, let alone pride of place as the first flower of spring! Yet such it is, and so

Cooper treats it, with no equivocation or embarrassment. Her detailed description of the bloom— a dark sheath variegated with purple, light green, and yellow, surrounding a spadix “not unlike a miniature pineapple […] covered with little protuberances, from each of which opens a purple flower”—brings out its beauty and wonder, providing important counterweight to the plant’s more familiar “strong, offensive odor” (9). Cooper’s exhaustive precision allows readers to look 322 closely at the things they think they know, and she signals from the book’s very outset to expect meticulous observation in the following pages.

As her treatment of the skunk cabbage suggests, part of Cooper’s quest in Rural Hours is to correct misperceptions about the local landscape and its inhabitants, but she also strives to nurture and enrich the emotional bonds people have already established with their environment.

Both goals become particularly clear in her discussion of American plant names. Cooper persistently differentiates between plants of two different species when they have come to be called the same name, but she passionately defends the importance of using plants’ common names, Latin nomenclature being, in her estimation, “very little fitted for every-day uses” (83).

In a five-page invective she critiques not only the clumsiness and ugliness of these names, but also their strangely inorganic construction (since they tend to focus on the names of scientists rather than on features or uses of the plants). She writes,

Now can one believe that if the daisy, or the Marguerite, had been called Caractacussia,

or Chlodovigia, it would have been sung by knightly troubadours and minstrels, in every

corner of feudal Europe? Can you fancy this flower, “so yong, so fresh of hew,” to have

delighted Chaucer, under the title of Sirhumphreydavya, or Sirwilliamherschellia, or

Doctorjohnsonia? […] Or conceive for a moment some Perdita of the present day,

singing in her sweetest tones: “Here’s flowers for you – Pyxidanthera, Rudbeckia,

Sclerolepis, Escholtzia, that goes to bed with the sun.” […] Do you suppose that if she

had gone on in that style, Florizel would have whispered, “when you speak sweet, I’d

have you do it ever?” No indeed! […] But if we wish those who come after us to take a

natural, unaffected pleasure in flowers, we should have names for the blossoms that

mothers can teach their children before they are “in Botany;” if we wish that American 323

poets should sing our native flowers as sweetly and as simply as the daisy, and violets,

and celandine have been sung from the time of Chaucer or Herrick, to that of Burns and

Wordsworth, we must look to it that they have pleasing names. (86-87)

For Cooper, naming a plant performs a very different action than simply identifying it, and science alone provides at best only a partial and highly artificial interface with nature that, as this passage suggests, repels the organic formation of mythos so necessary to plants’ visibility and value. Plants with more evocative names, on the other hand, possess a magnetism that continues to attract cultural significance in a variety of ways: they more readily take part in intimate intrapersonal relations like a mother teaching her child or lovers wooing; they accumulate rich associations appealing to writers who then reinscribe and reinforce their cultural meanings; and ultimately they build a sense of heritage—personal, local, and geographically distinct—that can be passed on to future generations. Cooper shows that European plants hold such sway in the

American imagination because they possess these advantages, and she suggests that, with time and dedication, American plants can wield similar power. Latin names have their place—Cooper uses them in text and in footnotes to identify the species she discusses—but more often she strives to honor the “pretty, natural names” (84) of plants that hearken to a time “before people were overflowing with science” (83). Unarguably, these common names do far more to spark the imagination and lodge themselves in memory, and woven throughout Cooper’s accounts of rambles through the woods and fields they add both to the specificity and the lyrical quality of her language. Ground laurel, whortleberries, moose flowers, and squirrel cups intersperse her descriptions of early May (44-45), and even weeds like evening primrose, silkweed, and field sorrel (65) bear names that bespeak the relationships people have built with the plants as they observe their habits and features. 324

Yet while Cooper respects common usage as an important kind of authority, she nevertheless warns against its tendency to err, to collapse key differences, and occasionally to reflect poor taste. American violets abound in “some fifteen different sorts,” all of which differ from English violets in their total lack of scent (48). The term Mooseflowers actually denotes several different varieties of Trillium, each with “a scientific name of its own” (49). And the chick wintergreen, Trientalis Americana, bears “a name which is an insult to the plant, and to the common sense of the community. Why, it is one of the daintiest wood-flowers, with nothing in the world to do with chicks, or weeds, or winter. […]. Discriminating people, when they find its elegant silvery flower growing in the woods beside the violet, call it May-star; and so should everybody who sees it” (52-53). This last bit of censure points to one of Cooper’s most important messages: the need for Americans to consider their legacy, and to take steps to shape it into the best possible form. Names not only have the potential to speak volumes, but once solidified in common usage they can also last indefinitely; the responsibility of establishing them is therefore a sober one. To employ that influence to greatest effect, Cooper tasks her readers to call upon their powers of observation and discrimination to forge a relationship with nature that is at once organic (emerging from actual interactions), accurately attuned to details, and worthy of passing on to further generations.194

This attention to legacy applies just as much, and perhaps even more, to practices as it does to names, particularly because proxy-nature can mislead people into thinking that they have a keen appreciation of nature. We have seen already that Cooper notes a general ignorance of

194 Cooper also speaks at length about names of places and people: “Was there ever a region more deplorably afflicted with ill-judged names than these United States?” she asks. “Strangely enough, this subject of names is one upon which very worthy people seem to have lost all ideas of fitness and propriety; you shall find that tender, doting parents, living in some Horridville or other, will deliberately, and without a shadow of compunction, devote their helpless offspring to lasting ridicule, by condemning the child to carry through the world some pompous, heroic appellation, often misspelt and mispronounced to boot.” (299) 325 local, indigenous plant identities even at the height of popularity for the Language of Flowers— but she also shows how this same kind of false nature-appreciation translates into damaging practices, some annoying and others grave. On the lighter side Cooper cites the lamentably common practice of flower stealing, a crime with perpetrators of all ages. She describes three of these—a little girl; a “full-grown man, dressed in fine broadcloth to boot;” and a group of young women “elegantly flounced”—all guilty of reaching through fences and helping themselves to the blossoms of carefully-cultivated gardens. The man, she supposed, “was probably on his way to present himself and his trophy to his sweetheart; and we can only hope that he met with just such a reception as was deserved by a man who had been committing petty larceny” (80). The stories go beyond Cooper’s dismay over these people’s lack of “good manners, or good morals,” to illustrate symptoms of a disturbing disconnection. She maintains that “No one who had a flower border of his own would be likely to offend in this way” or “he would not do so unwittingly, at least; and if guilty of such an act, it would be premeditated pilfering. When people take pains to cultivate fruits and flowers themselves, they have some idea of their value”

(80). One must appreciate nature aesthetically and materialistically, she suggests, refraining from treating its productions merely as collectible or disposable objects.

In response Rural Hours helps readers to become acquainted more holistically with nature, understanding and respecting each of its productions and features as living, changing things in process of their respective cycles. Cooper accomplishes this through layered observations of the same species during different seasons of the year, but in the course of her writing she also gradually expands her sense of the protection we should offer to nature, eventually extending the same respect she claims for cultivated beds on private property to the species of plants she finds in the wilderness. Initially, Cooper often describes her outings to 326 gather wildflowers, including increasingly rare varieties. She exults over a patch of moccasin flowers in bloom, noting that “frequently, the season has passed without our seeing one, but this afternoon we gathered no less than eighteen of the purple kind, the Cyprepedium acaule of botanists. The small yellow, the large yellow, and the showy ladyslipper have also been found here, but they are all becoming more rare” (68). It is unclear what Cooper plans to do with these blossoms, whether to study and preserve them, transplant them, or simply place them on display, though the lack of further mention makes the latter seem most likely. A later flower-hunting incident, however, indicates an evolution in her ethic. She walks out in search of the “large two- leaved orchis, a particular plant, which we have watched for several years, as it is something of a rarity, having been seen only in two places in the neighborhood. We found the large, shining leaves lying flat on the ground, in the well-known spot, but someone had been there before us and broken off the flower-stalk” (103-104). It is evident that she feels heartbreak in witnessing this mutilation, though again she does not indicate whether she herself planned to harvest this flower or simply observe it. Her brutal verb suggests the latter; whoever the orchis-hunter was, he or she violently and carelessly breaks, rather than “gathers” this rarity. Sadness and loss echo through her closing words: “The handsome, large purple-fringed orchis is also found here, but we have not seen it this summer. The country people call it soldier’s plume; it is one of our most showy flowers” (104).

The passage, in revealing that Cooper’s disappointment over the missing flower is proportional to the patience, interest, and anticipation with which she had for so long observed the plant’s growth, suggests that careful observation of nature’s wonders over time leads one to ascribe them greater value, increases one’s awareness of that thing’s existence as a distinct entity, and intensifies one’s desire to protect and thereby allow it to fulfill the measure of its 327 creation. The impulse is, in essence, the precise opposite of the impulse to collect: As I discussed earlier in this chapter and at length in Chapter 1, many theorists view collections as extensions of the self and as instruments and implements of death. Here, though, Cooper’s priorities appear to shift away from a desire to possess the flower, and toward a sense that it deserves to live undisturbed, both for its own sake and the sake of other viewers; she seems to experience the radical “unselfing” effect that Scarry attributes to beautiful things, the “generous-hearted impulse” and increased sense of justice that dictates both the plant’s right to life and her own obligation to let others observe it. In short, the object of her interest attains even greater value outside of Cooper’s possession than within that assemblage. Rural Hours thus examines the coexistence of people and nature, but while it attends as much as any flower book on nature’s effect on humans, it resists the tendency to see nature merely as a mirror reflecting human emotion and instead devotes unprecedented attention to the flip side, the impact of human beliefs and practices on the landscape and the lives of plants and animals. Cooper strives to lace her observations with optimism, but, taken as a whole, the text presents a solemn warning: mentally bonding with abstract nature while ignoring real nature has potentially disastrous results for all, humans included.

Indeed, Cooper builds a collective identity for all living things in the linguistic terms she uses to link plants, animals and people in her writing. In her critique of “English reading”

(Essays 21) she refers to plants and animals as “creatures,” “races,” and “tribes” that “people the land.” In other passages we see these associations repeat as Cooper muses on the rapid loss of all native populations, plant, animal, and human. Briefly she laments the “painted warrior[s]” who

“but yesterday […] peopled the forest” (RH 58), but her sorrow for their disappearance surfaces again in her description of a woodland border: 328

The border of an old wood is a fine ground for flowers. […] In such spots we also meet a

mingled society of plants which it is interesting to note. The wild natives of the woods

grow there willingly, while many strangers, brought originally from over the Ocean, steal

gradually onward from the tilled fields and gardens, until at last they stand side by side

upon the same bank, the European weed and the wild native flower. These foreign

intruders are a bold and hardy race, driving away the prettier natives. It is frequently

remarked by elderly persons familiar with the country, that our own wild flowers are very

much less common than they were forty years since. Some varieties are diminishing

rapidly. (49-50)

Here, her analysis of invasive species among plants clearly doubles for the same insidious phenomenon among humans; of all “diminishing varieties” of beings she discusses in Rural

Hours, Native Americans are the starkest example. The absence of these earliest inhabitants haunts this work because the deaths of the native plants and peoples share an important link: the latter held the key to the former, the disappearance of species and of myth signaling the evaporation of the value system that would have made native plants visible, significant, and much more likely to be preserved. Put simply, the absence of mythos clears the way for extinction—precisely because so few people will notice.

By the same token, Cooper suggests that a mythos springing from the ground of a local environment can render that habitat not only visible, but crucial to the area’s welfare. She points to this in her reverence for Native American place names, since “the Indian, the very opposite of the Yankee in this respect, never gives an unfitting name to any object whatever” (303). Not only do these names unite beauty and meaning, she argues, but they record the vital history of an indigenous human-nature relationship, and remind us to recognize what has been lost and what 329 can yet be saved. Where above she links the disappearance of native humans to that of native plants, here she also links Native American place names with a charge to protect all living things.

Since a

name is all we leave them, let us at least preserve that monument to their memory; as we

travel the country, and pass river after river, lake after lake, we may thus learn how many

were the tribes who have melted away before us, whose very existence would have been

utterly forgotten but for the word which recalls the name they once bore. And possibly,

when we note how many have been swept from the earth by the vices borrowed from

civilized man, we may become more earnest, more zealous, in the endeavor to aid those

who yet linger among us […]. (303-304)

As vestiges of myth, these names retain psychological potency. And though borrowed from a pre-existing culture, they become important parts of the new cultural narrative Cooper calls for— reminders that this landscape is not Europe, and that achieving a more balanced and sustainable existence for all living things within this environment will require meeting it on its own terms.

Conclusion

In Rural Hours Cooper not only critiques the neo-classical aesthetic that emphasizes generality, convention, and tradition, she fosters and nurtures the delicate processes, even ones occurring within herself, that will build a robust new native story of nature—a mythos that strives to inspire keener awareness of American plant and animal life and a greater sense of their relevance within American culture. Essentially she argues that for Americans to clearly perceive their land and their place in it, they must take the time to see those species that imported imaginative history and commodity culture have obscured and build a personal relationship with them. “There is a pleasant task awaiting us,” she writes. “We may all, if we choose, open our 330 eyes to the beautiful and wonderful realities of the world we live in. Why should we any longer walk blindfold through the fields?” (Essays 21).

In Cooper’s conception, just as literature helped secure that blindfold in the first place, it will play a vital role in taking it off. Americans, she suggests, must do more than simply recognize and catalogue the differences between continents and species; they must in fact

“write” (figuratively and literally) their distinct local environment into visibility and significance. Cooper shows that in part, this shift toward clearer perception involves recalibrating a multitude of small but significant actions that establish relationships and accumulate meaning, long before that meaning translates into art. Where Sarah Hale’s Flora’s Interpreter aimed to kindle Americans’ interest in their own artistic productions, Rural Hours strives to accentuate and effect change in even more foundational areas, such as observing plants and animals over time and in context, becoming aware of natural cycles, giving fitting names, and discerning and correcting damaging practices.

Just as importantly, though, Cooper models a vital element of mythos-building simply through the act of narrating her own habitation of a unique and richly textured environment. In recording and recounting the story of her present, with careful attention to its many contexts—historical, geographical, biological, cultural—Rural Hours begins to endow its details with presence that readers previously may not have granted them. In short, the narrative’s devotion to tracing the daily patterns of a social being building her own relationships with specific aspects of her surroundings, the text builds a sense of local rather than imperial culture, makes its details memorable and meaningful, and prepares readers to do the same.

Thus Rural Hours crafts a new kind of relationship with European influences, showing that “English reading” need not hinder perception as long as readers don’t accept it as a 331 substitute for the nature at their own front doors. Cooper’s frequent references to European authors and works in Rural Hours offer basis for comparison rather than definitive guides. Or put another way, she explores the distinctions between the respective landscapes of her reading and her reality, rather than clinging to—or worse, forcing—parallels. Undeniably, the British literary tradition nourished, shaped, and helped legitimate Cooper’s own authorial voice, but her dedication to the concrete detail of her own country—to the beauty, occasional tragedy, and immutable power of things as they actually appear to her—reveals the nuances specifically of her village landscape with a perspective that is at once highly original and deeply contextualized. In short, Cooper demonstrates how the past can enrich, but need not dominate, the processes of present perception.

Perhaps most important of all, Rural Hours suggests that the quality of our present observations has ethical and logistic repercussions on our daily operations of survival, and on the very creation of our identity, the niche we carve out for ourselves in the vast and bewildering chaos of existence. Moving beyond a generic proxy-nature and building a relationship with actual nature promises a wider awareness of ambient characteristics that can yield a more thorough understanding of our place among them. It follows that such an understanding would include a more accurate conception of and respect for all the other beings with whom we share space. In that respect, Rural Hours becomes far more than a national project meant to distinguish the United States from Europe. More broadly, it models a pathway toward environmental awareness that involves not simply knowing about nature but becoming acquainted with it on its own terms, and that engenders a desire to protect and share it. In sum, Rural Hours points out key areas from whence a genuinely grounded national identity—and by extension, genuinely 332 national art—can spring, showing that insights into the most universal parts of our souls emerge from the astonishing specifics of the local.

333

Coda

This dissertation has endeavored to illuminate several aspects of the flower book genre that reveal its significance to writers and readers in the Romantic period: its role in building shared systems of meaning, ethics, and identity; its importance to women’s education, public participation, and permission to articulate diverse viewpoints; its complex blending of numerous textual antecedents and ability to link these to nationalism; its use of a particular material format well-suited to the dissemination of ideas among a popular audience; its susceptibility to the foibles of the period’s print technology and publication, but its equal potential to unify textual and extra-textual elements into sophisticated philosophical arguments; and finally, its substantial ability to direct readers’ attention to certain aspects of nature, to shape (sometimes problematically) their perceptions of local environments, and to empower readers to recognize and correct misperceptions. Having thus laid a foundation for a broader appreciation and understanding of the genre’s cultural influence, I will briefly identify (in no particular order) a few possible arenas for further analysis.

My first chapter gestures toward a relationship between flower books and novels, and throughout my dissertation I consider the genre’s resonance with certain philosophical positions that we frequently associate with poetry, but much more could be done to examine how a complex characterization of flower books sheds light on references to flowers and plants in novels and poems, and expands our perception of their commentary on broader issues. I have not yet come across (though I hope to!) any specific scenes in novels where characters read or refer to flower books, but several instances of characters’ interactions with flowers come to mind.

Austen’s novels predate the proliferation of the flower book genre, but we nevertheless might consider Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey who has “just learned to love a hyacinth” 334

(163), or Fanny Price in Mansfield Park who “visits” the books and plants in her private sitting room to “giv[e] air to her geraniums” (120-121). Ann Bronte likewise presents a curious flower scene at the end of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, when Helen Huntingdon leans out her window in winter to pluck a “christmas rose” for her suitor, Gilbert. More broadly, we might investigate what place flower books could occupy in the object-ridden world of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, or consider whether the genre, along with related writings of activists like John Claudius Loudon, could have influenced Dorothea Brooke’s interest in planning improvements to tenants’ cottages at the beginning of Middlemarch.

Much historical work yet remains to be done that could greatly enrich this study. Some of this pertains to the actual production of flower books; for instance, scholars (including myself) seem convinced that women participated in processes of printmaking especially as colorists, but a closer examination of publishers’ records would greatly assist to substantiate this assertion.

Likewise, historical profiles of certain publishing houses would help contextualize the flower books they produced in the scope of their wider agenda—their target audiences, their approach to marketing, their production budgets and technological abilities, and their philosophical leanings.

Much could be done to flesh out our understanding of women writers’ relationship to these publishers by unearthing written correspondence, receipts, and other evidence to reveal the extent to which they interacted, during both the process of translating manuscript to print, and the process from print to book. Finally, I have noted a few reviews of flower books from magazines, but we might research a larger sample to gain a better sense of critics’ responses to them, and their understanding of the genre’s purpose and place.

In Chapter 5 I argued that flower books had a substantial ecological impact, for better and for worse; there is room for expansion of this idea, particularly through considering the genre’s 335 influence in the Anthropocene. Scholars have placed Susan Fenimore Cooper’s writings in a canon of eco-critical nature-writing that includes Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and Edward Abbey; it could be useful to consider other flower book writers in a similar light—Elizabeth Kent, for instance, whose correspondence with John Clare influenced his writing. In a slightly different vein, future scholarship might connect flower books to developments in scientific and philosophical understandings of plant sentience—that is, of plants as living beings capable of communication and feeling. Elaine Miller’s book The Vegetative Soul and Catherine (Kate)

Rigby’s writings on Ecopoetics could provide a useful critical starting point.

I have offered an initial analysis of the genre’s transatlantic circulation and influence, but this I have limited largely to interactions between Great Britain and the U.S. Eastern Seaboard.

As I also indicated, however, the study of botany and the transmission of art and ideas about plants was a truly global affair, and much more research remains to be done on flower books in this wider context. Points of entry include examination of flower books published in or about other locations in Europe and the United States, such as the American South or the Rocky

Mountains; South America (as noted in my introduction, Seaton identifies titles from Peru and

Brazil); and Australia, since Louisa Twamley emigrated to that country and later published Some of my Bush Friends in Tasmania (1860). Another approach could more broadly consider flower books’ use and transmission of ideas about foreign cultures; I offered a reading of the genre’s deployment of “Eastern” flower language, but the books also intersect with Western notions about the Caribbean, Africa, India,195 China, and Japan—particularly the latter two, since flower books feature numerous flower varieties, like the beloved camellia japonica, that originate in

195 As a beginning, one might consider Schiebinger’s insightful reading of the West Indian Peacock flower, or Judith Carney’s book In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (2011). I know curiously little about how India’s culture and plants inflected flower books (and vice-versa), but suspect it forms an important part of this wider discussion. 336 these regions or are named for them, and since these countries developed a lively trade in botanical prints that coincided with a developing English passion for Asian, particularly

Japanese, artistry. Shoberl’s The Language of Flowers includes a brief but fascinating reference to “the floral alphabet of the effeminate Chinese,” (vii) and Appendix A notes a set of Japanese books on ikebana—i.e. the art of flower-arranging—as well as a stunning collection of Chinese botanical prints held at Winterthur library.

Finally, although I occasionally gesture toward later developments in the genre, my direct study concludes with books produced in the 1850s. Yet Seaton’s catalog of flower book titles makes clear that flower books remained popular throughout the nineteenth century: their annual publication numbers only begin to decrease in the 1880s. I posit that the nature of the genre changes in these later books, but I have not yet examined them closely enough to know exactly how. Victorian England has a reputation for even more intense flower-worship than that exhibited in the Romantic period, so it would be interesting to place later flower books in context with the Arts and Crafts movement, with Pre-Raphaelite philosophy, and (as I gestured toward in chapter 5) with the Realist movement in painting; one might also consider how these books comment on later nineteenth-century constructions of gender and the expression of emotion.

Future work on American flower books would need to account for numerous changing conditions in the United States, including effects of the Civil War, of westward expansion, of cultural and artistic developments surrounding New England Transcendentalism and American

Romanticism more broadly, and of a more technologically advanced, widespread, and economically consolidated print culture. Two interesting points of entry include Louisa May

Alcott’s Flower Fables, and Frances Osgood’s numerous flower books (Osgood had a famous friendship with Edgar Allen Poe). I am also interested in the newspaper columns of Sara Willis 337

(sister of Nathaniel Parker Willis) for their ironic deployment of flower-culture via her famous pen-name, Fanny Fern.

As I continue to investigate some of these avenues, I hope my work inspires other scholars to do likewise; together we may continue to elucidate the genre’s far-reaching effects, as well as its ability to embody numerous influences and empower the expression of complex viewpoints.

338

Works Cited

Primary Texts

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Dix, Dorothea Lynde [attr.]. The Garland of Flora. Boston: S.G. Goodrich and Carter & Hendee, 1829. Dumont, Henrietta. The Floral Offering, a Token of Affection and Esteem. Philadelphia: H.C. Peck and T. Bliss, 1856. Edgarton, Sarah. The Flower Vase, Containing The Language of Flowers and Their Poetic Sentiments. Lowell, MA: Powers and Bagley, 1844. Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda. Ed. Katherine J. Kirkpatrick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Embury, Emma C. The Language of Flora. New York: Riker, Thorne & Co., 1854. Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. Jennifer Foster, Ed. New York: Broadview Press, 2000. Gilpin, William. Three Essays: On picturesque beauty; on picturesque travel; and on sketching landscape. London: R. Blamire, 1794. Hale, Sarah J. Flora’s Interpreter; or, the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. Boston: Marsh, Capen, and Lyon, 1832. ______. Flora’s Interpreter, or The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. 3rd ed. Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1834. Print. ______. Flora’s Interpreter, and Fortuna Flora. Boston: Sanborn, Carter, Bazin & Co., 1848. Print. ______. Flora’s Interpreter, And Fortuna Flora. Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey and Company, 1853. Print. ______. Flora’s Interpreter, And Fortuna Flora. 3rd rev. Boston: Chase and Nichols, 1865. Print. ______. The Book of Flowers. London: Saunders and Otley, 1836. Hooper, Lucy. The Lady’s Book of Flowers and Poetry. New York: J.C. Riker, 1842. Hunt, Thornton, ed. The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1862. Jackson, Maria Elizabeth. “The Florist’s Manual, or, Hints for the Construction of a Gay Flower-Garden. A New Edition. London: Henry Colburn, 1827 Jones, Owen and Mary Ann Bacon: Flowers and their Kindred Thoughts. London: Longman & Co. 1848. Print. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. J.H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Press, 1970. Kent, Elizabeth. Flora Domestica, or the Portable Flower Garden. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1823. ______. Sylvan Sketches, or A Companion to the Park and the Shrubbery. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1825. Knapp, John Leonard. Journal of a Naturalist. Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1831. 340

Loudon, Jane Webb. British Wild Flowers. London: William S. Orr & Co., 1846. Second Edition. Print. ______. The Ladies’ Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals. London: William Smith, 1842. ______. Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1841. Loudon, John Claudius. The Gardener’s Magazine and register of Rural & Domestic improvement. 19 vols. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1826-43. Print. ______. The Magazine of Natural History. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1829. Mann, Mary Tyler Peabody. The Flower People. 1842. Hartford: H.T. Wells, 1846. Memoirs of the Rose: Comprising Botanical, Poetical, and Miscellaneous Recollections of that Celebrated Flower. In a series of letters to a lady. London: Francis Westley, 1824. More, Hannah. “Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education.” British Literature 1780-1830. Edited by Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. pp.220-223. ______. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. Vol. 1. London: T. Cadell Jr. and W. Davies, 1799. Newman, John B. Beauties of Flora and Outlines of Botany, with a Language of Flowers. New York: Edward Kearney 1848. Osgood, Frances S. The Flower Alphabet in Gold and Colours. Boston: S. Colman, 1845. Osgood, Frances S., Ed. The Poetry of Flowers and Flowers of Poetry; to which are added, a simple treatise on Botany, with familiar examples, and a copious floral dictionary. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1858. Pratt, Anne. Flowers and their Associations. London: C. Knight, 1846. Print. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” British Literature 1780-1830. Edited by Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. pp.1167- 1178. Shoberl, Frederic. The Language of Flowers, with Illustrative Poetry; to which are now added The Calendar of Flowers and The Dial of Flowers, 4th edition. London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street. 1835. Syme, Patrick. Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours: With additions, arranged so as to render it highly useful to the arts and sciences, particularly zoology, botany, chemistry, mineralogy, and morbid anatomy. Edinburgh: Printed by James Ballantyne and co. for William Blackwood (Edinburgh) and John Murray Albemarle street, and Robert Baldwin, Paternoster Row, London. 1814. The Christian Florist. Chelsea: J. Davis, 1832. Landreth, D&C. The Floral Magazine and Botanical Repository. Philadelphia: D & C Landreth, 1832. 341

The Flower Book. Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1833. The Young Lady’s Book: A Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits. London: Vizetelly, Branston, and Co. 1829. The Young Lady’s Book: A Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits. Third Edition. Boston: Lilly, Wait, Colman and Holden, and Abel Bowen. 1833. Thatcher, B. B., Ed. The Boston Book: Being Specimens of Metropolitan Literature, Vol. 2. Boston: Light & Stearns, 1837. Thornton, Robert John. A New Family Herbal: or Familiar Account of the Medical Properties of British and Foreign Plants. 2nd Ed. London: R. and R. Crosby and Co, 1814. Print. [Tonna], Charlotte Elizabeth. Chapters on Flowers. London: Printed for R.B. Seeley & W. Burnside, 1836. ______. Personal Recollections. London: Seeley and Burnside, 1841. Twamley, Louisa. The Annual of British Landscape Scenery: An Autumn Ramble on the Wye. London: W.S. Orr and Co.; Birmingham: Wrightson and Webb, 1839. ______. The Romance of Nature, or the Flower Seasons Illustrated. London: Charles Tilt, 1836. Print. Wakefield, Priscilla. An Introduction to Botany in a Series of Familiar Letters. Fifth Edition. London: Darton and Harvey et al, 1807. White, Gilbert. The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the Country of Southampton. London: B. White and Son, 1789. Wilde, Oscar. The Decay of Lying. Virgil.org. 10 Sept. 2016. pp1-17. Willan, Rhoda Maria [attr.]. Flora Parvula; or, Gleanings Among Favorite Flowers. London: B. Wertheim, Aldine Chambers, 1847. Wirt, Elizabeth Washington. Flora’s Dictionary. 1829. Baltimore: Fielding Lucas Jr., 1835. Print. ______. Flora’s Dictionary. Baltimore: Fielding Lucas Jr., 1837. ______. Flora’s Dictionary. Baltimore: Lucas Brothers, 1855. Wollstonecraft, Mary. “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.” British Literature 1780-1830. Edited by Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. pp.369-370. ______. “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” British Literature 1780-1830. Edited by Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. pp.371-412. 342

Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” British Literature 1780-1830. Edited by Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. pp.573-581. ______. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1979. ______.”I wandered lonely as a cloud.” British Literature 1780-1830. Edited by Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. p.601. ______. “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.” British Literature 1780-1830. Edited by Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. pp.571-573. ______. Ode on Intimations of Immortality from recollections of early childhood. ______. The Ruined Cottage. ______. “The Tables Turned.” British Literature 1780-1830. Edited by Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. p.571.

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Appendix A

List of Flower Books Examined for this Study

All but three of these books I have personally seen and held, thanks to Special Collections at the British Library, the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library, Winterthur Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the University of Colorado, and The Ohio State University. (The others were recommended to my notice because they were in Wordsworth’s personal library, now preserved and maintained by the Wordsworth Trust). The physicality of these books is, as I have argued, crucial to understanding their power and functions, but I am also heavily indebted to digitized versions that prolonged my ability to access and analyze the texts—this dissertation would have been immeasurably more difficult to complete without them!

I also wish to point out that this is by no means intended as a complete list of flower books. Beverly Seaton’s The Language of Flowers, A History contains a large catalogue of titles that covers greater span of time and location, and is an invaluable resource. My list, though less comprehensive, contains several titles not found in hers, suggesting that many more flower books yet remain to be explored.

For some of the books I have listed several editions, particularly if these indicate that a given work circulated both in Britain and the United States, or if I devoted sections of particular analysis to the development of a work through various editions. All of the books in this list contribute to the overall cultural awareness of flowers that makes flower books cohere as a genre, but a handful of them seem, in my opinion, to fall outside the generic parameters I have drawn. I have placed these in a separate list.

A Lady. Flora and Thalia or Gems of Flowers and Poetry. American edition. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1836. A Lady. Flora and Thalia, or, Gems of Flowers and Poetry. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1835. Adams, H.G. [Henry Gardiner]. The Language and Poetry of Flowers. [c.1853]. Philadelphia: J.R. Lippincott & Co., 1866. [Adams, John Stowell]. The Language of Flowers, Poetically Expressed; Being a Complete Flora's Album. New York: Leavitt & Allen, 1847. Alcott, Louisa May. Flower Fables. [c.1855]. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1898. Bacon, Henry. The Sacred Flora, or flowers from the grave of a child. Boston: A. Tompkins and B.B. Mussey, 1845. Bacon, M.A. [Mary Anne] and Owen Jones. Flowers and their Kindred Thoughts. London: Longman & Co., 1848. Carter, Sarah C. Lexicon of Ladies' Names, with their Floral Emblems. Boston: J. Buffum, 1852. 349

Chauncey, Mary, ed. The Floral Gift, From Nature and the Heart. Worcester [MA]: Jonathan Grout, Jr., 1847. Cleaveland, N. The Flowers Personified: Being a Translation of Grandville's Les Fleurs Animees. New York: R. Martin, 1847. Cooper, Susan Fenimore. Rural Hours. 1850. 4th ed. New York: George P. Putnam, 1851. Coxe, Margaret. Floral Emblems: or, Moral Sketches From Flowers. Cincinnati: Henry W. Derby & Co, and New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1845. Davis, Mary Ann. The Wild Flower Wreath; A collection of Miscellaneous Poems. Birmingham: n.p., 1835. Dinnies, Anna Peyre. The Floral Year: Embellished with Bouquets of flowers, drawn and colored from nature. Each flower illustrated with a poem. Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1847. Dix, Dorothea: The Garland of Flora. Boston: S.G. Goodrich and Carter and Hendee, 1829. Dumont, Henrietta. The Floral Offering, a Token of Affection and Esteem. Philadelphia: H.C. Peck & Theo Bliss, 1856. E.W.B and Aza Curtis. Flowers: A Series of Short Poems. London: published by subscription, 1827. Edgarton, Sarah Mayo. The Flower Vase, Containing the Language of Flowers and their Poetic Sentiments. Lowell [MA]: Powers and Bagley, 1844. Embury, Emma C. The Language of Flora. New York: Riker, Thorne & Co, 1854. Flower Stories and Their Lessons: a book for the young. London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1849. Francis, G.W. [George William]. The Little English Flora: A Botanical and Popular Account of All our Common Field Flowers. London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. 1839. Friend, Hilderic. Flowers and Flower Lore. London: W.S. Sonnenschein, 1884. Grandville, J.J. and Alphonse Karr, and Taxile Delord. Les Fleurs Animees. [c.1840] Bruxelles: A. Delevau, 1852. Griffin, Mary M. Drops from Flora's Cup, or the Poetry of Flowers, with a floral vocabulary. Boston: Hill & Brodhead, 1846. Hale, Sarah. Flora's Interpreter, and Fortuna Flora, revised and enlarged, with new illustrations. Boston: Sanborn, Carter, Bazin & Co., 1848. _____. Flora's Interpreter, and Fortuna Flora. Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey and Company, 1853. _____. Flora's Interpreter, and Fortuna Flora. 3rd revision. Boston: Chase and Nichols, 1865. _____. Flora's Interpreter, and Fortuna Flora. Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey and Company, 1850. _____. Flora's Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. Boston: March, Capen, and Lyon, 1832. 350

_____. Flora's Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. 2nd ed. Boston: March, Capen, and Lyon, 1832. _____. Flora's Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. 3rd ed. Boston: March, Capen, and Lyon, 1834. _____. Flora's Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. 6th ed. Boston: March, Capen, and Lyon, 1838. _____. Flora's Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. 7th ed. Boston: March, Capen, and Lyon, 1839. _____. Flora's Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. 9th ed. Boston: March, Capen, Lyon, and Webb, 1840. _____. Flora's Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. 11th ed. Boston: March, Capen, Lyon, and Webb, 1842. _____. Flora's Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. 14th ed. Boston: Thomas H. Webb and Co, [1842]. _____. The Book of Flowers [reprint of Flora’s Interpreter]. London: Saunders and Otley, 1836. Hanson, J. Wesley. Flora's Dial: Containing a Flower Dedicated to Each Day in the Year, and an appropriate poetic sentiment for each flower. Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey & Co., 1849. Henderson, P. The Seasons, or Flower-Garden: being a selection of the most beautiful flowers. London: R. Ackermann, 1806. Hoare, Sarah. Poems on Conchology and Botany. London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1831. Hooper, Lucy, ed. The Lady's Book of Flowers and Poetry. New York: J.C. Riker, 1842. Jackson, Maria. Botanical Dialogues. London: J. Johnson, 1797. _____. Sketches of the Physiology of Vegetable Life. London: John Hatchard, 1811. _____. The Florist's Manual, or, Hints for the construction of a Gay Flower-Garden. 1816. 2nd ed. London: Henry Colburn and Co., 1822. _____. The Florist's Manual, or, Hints for the construction of a Gay Flower-Garden. 1816. A new edition. London: Henry Colburn, 1827. Johns, Rev. C.A.. Flora Sacra. London: J. Parker, 1840. Keese, John, ed. The Flroal Keepsake, with Thirty Engravings Elegantly Colored from Nature. New York: Leavitt & Allen, [1852-1855]. [Kent, Elizabeth]. “The Florist.” The Young Lady's Book: a Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits. 1830. 3rd ed. Boston: Lilly, Wait, Colman and Holden and Abel Bowen, 1833. _____. Flora Domestica, or, the Portable Flower Garden. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1823. _____. Flora Domestica, or, the Portable Flower Garden. 2nd ed. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1825. 351

_____. Flora Domestica, or, the Portable Flower Garden. A new edition. London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Co., 1831. _____. Sylvan Sketches; or, A Companion to the Park and the Shrubbery. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1825. _____. Sylvan Sketches; or, A companion to the park and the shrubbery. London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1831. La Tour, Charlotte. Le Langage Des Fleurs. 10th ed. Paris: n.p. 1865. _____. Le Langage Des Fleurs. Brussels: n.p. 1842. _____. Le Langage Des Fleurs. Paris: n.p. [c.1820] Landreth, D & C. Nursery and Seedsmen. The Floral Magazine and Botanical Repository. Philadelphia: D&C Landreth, 1832-1834. Langhorne, Dr. The Fables of Flora. 1771. A new edition. London: Crosby and Co., 1804. _____. The Fables of Flora. 1771. London: T. Rickaby, for E. and S. Harding, 1794. Loudon, Jane. The Ladies' Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals. 1840. 3rd ed. London: William Smith, 1842. _____. British Wild Flowers. 2nd ed. London: William S. Orr & Co. [c.1858]. _____. The Ladies' Flower Garden of Ornamental Bulbous Plants. London: William Smith, 1841. _____. The Ladies' Flower Garden of Ornamental Perennials. 1840. 2nd ed. London: William S. Orr & Co., 1849. M.S. Culled Flowers. London: Ball, Arnold & Co., 1839. [Mann, Mary Tyler Peabody]. The Flower People. Hartford and Boston: Tyler & Porter and E.P. Peabody, 1842. Martin, M. Aime. Le Langage Des Fleurs. Bruxelles: Louis Hauman et Compe, 1830. Memoirs of the Rose. London: Francis Westley, 1824. Merrill, N.H. Rufus. My Flower-Pot. Concord [MA]: n.p., n.d. Newman, John B. Beauties of Flora and Outlines of Botany, with a Language of Flowers. New York: Edward Kearney, 1848. Osgood, Frances S. ed. The Floral Offering: A Token of Friendship. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1847. _____. ed. The Poetry of Flowers and Flowers of Poetry. 1841. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1858. _____. The Flower Alphabet in Gold and Colors. Boston: S. Coleman, 1845. [Perkins, Elizabeth Steele] The Botanical and Horticultural Meeting, or, Flora and Pomona's Fete. 2nd ed. Birmingham: Beilby, Knott, and Beilby, 1834. Pratt, Anne. Flowers and their Associations. London: Charles Knight and Co., 1840. 352

_____. The Field, The Garden, and the Woodland. London: Charles Knight and Co., 1838. Roscoe, Mrs. Edward. Floral Illustrations of the Seasons. London: Baldwin & Cadock, 1831. S.W. [by the author of the Wild Garland.] The Meadow Queen; or, The Young Botanists. London: William Darton & Son, 1836. Shoberl, Frederic. The Language of Flowers, with Illustrative Poetry, to which are now added the Calendar of Flowers and the Dial of flowers. 7th American, from 9th London ed. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1846. _____. The Language of Flowers. 10th ed. London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street, 1846. _____. The Language of Flowers. 4th ed. London: Saunders and Otley, 1835. _____. The Language of Flowers. London: Saunders and Otley, 1834. Snow, Elizabeth. A Bouquet of Wild Flowers. London: published by subscription, 1843. The Bouquet: Or, Flowers of Poetry. 2nd ed. London: Joseph Graham, 1844. The Christian Florist, 2nd ed. London: Seeley and Burnside, 1835. The Christian Florist. Chelsea: J. Davis, 1832. The Diamond Florist. London: Hailes, Ackerman & Co. and C. Bellamy, 1836. The Flower Basket; or, Poetical Blossoms: Original Nursery Rhymes and Tales. London: n.p., n.d. The Flower Book. Philadelphia: American Sunday School Union, 1833. The Lotus, or the Faery Flower of the Poets. Edinburgh: George A. Douglas, 1830. [Tonna], Charlotte Elizabeth. Chapters on Flowers. London: R.B. Seeley & W. Burnside., 1836. Twamley, Louisa Anne. Flora's Gems: or, the Treasures of the Parterre. London: Charles Tilt, 1837. _____. Some of my Bush Friends in Tasmania. London: Day & Son, 1860. _____. The Annual of British Landscape Scenery, An Autumn Ramble on the Wye. London: W.S. Orr and Co., and Birmingham: Wrighton and Webb, 1839. _____. The Romance of Nature, or The Flower Seasons Illustrated. London: Charles Tilt, 1839. Tyas, Robert. Flowers and Helraldry, or, Floral Elmblems and Heraldic Figures. London: Houlston and Stoneman; Edinburgh: J. Menzies; Dublin,: S.J. Machen, 1851. _____. Flowers from Foreign Lands: Their History and Botany. London: Houlston & Stoneman, 1853. _____. The Hand-Book of the Language and Sentiment of Flowers. 1840. A new edition. London: Houlston & Stoneman, 1845. _____. The Sentiment of Flowers: or, Language of Flora, embracing an account of nearly three hundred different flowers, with their power in language. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1840. W.F.R., Album of Flowers. [London: W&H Rock], 1837. 353

Wakefield, Priscilla. An Introduction to Botany in a Series of Familiar Letters with illustrative engravings. 1796. 5th ed. London: Darton and Harvey, Vernor and Hood, J. Walker, and J. Harris, 1807. Waterman, Catherine H. Flora's Lexicon: An Interpretation of the Language and Sentiment of Flowers. 1838. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Herman Hooker, 1840. Willan, Rhoda Maria]. Flora Parvula, or, Gatherings among Favorite Flowers. London: B. Wertheim, and Aldine Chambers, 1847. Willcocks, T. Flora Poetica, or, Poetry on Flowers. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, & Co. and Byers and Devonport, 1834. Wirt, Elizabeth Washington. Flora’s Dictionary. 1829. Baltimore: Lucas Brothers, 1855. _____. Flora’s Dictionary. 1829. Embellished by Miss Ann Smith. Baltimore: Fielding Lucas Jun., 1837. _____. Flora's Dictionary. 1829. Baltimore: Fielding Lucas Jr., 1835.

Other books and printed material from the period relating to the cultural interest in flowers (botanical reference works, gardening manuals, flower painting manuals, and a few odds and ends) : Barton, William P.C. A Flora of North America. Illustrated by colored figures drawn from nature, vol. 1. Philadelphia: M. Carey & Sons, 1821. _____. A Flora of North America. Illustrated by colored figures drawn from nature, vol 2. Philadelphia: H.C. Carey & I. Lee, 1822. _____.A Flora of North America. Illustrated by colored figures drawn from nature, vol 3. Philadelphia: H.C. Carey & I. Lee, 1823. Bigelow, Jacob. Florula Bostoniensis: a collection of plants of Boston and its vicinity. 1812. 2nd edition. Boston: Cummings, Hilliard & Co. University Press - Hilliard & Metcalf, 1824. Brown, G.A. [male]. A New Treatise on Flower Painting, or, Every Lady Her Own Drawing Master. 3rd edition. London: G. Riley, 1799. Chinese Export Watercolors, a.k.a. Chinese Trade Pictures, c. 1790-1860. [Winterthur library. Contains numerous botanical images, beautifully rendered and colored.] Comolera, Melanie. A Collection of Studies of the Most Beautiful Fruits, Flowers &C. From Nature. London: published by the Authoress, 1829. Curtis, William F.L.S. Flora Londinensis: containing a history of the plants indigenous to Great Britain, illustrated by figures of the natural size. A new edition. London: George Graves, 1817. Doyle, Martin, and L.D. Gale. The Flower Garden, or Monthly Calendar of Practical Directions for the Culture of Flowers. 1st American ed. New York: Moore & Payne, 1835. Elliot, Mary. Early Seeds, to Produce Spring Flowers. London: William Darton, 1824. 354

Everard, Anne. Flowers from Nature, with the Botanical name, class, and order, and instructions for copying. London: Joseph Dickinson, 1835. Flora Londinensis; or, the Flower-Garden Displayed. London: n.p. n.d. Flower Tokens. New York: n.p. [c.1847]. [a keepsake album featuring images from Gradeville’s Les Fleurs Animées] Johnson, Louisa. Every Lady her Own Flower Gardener. 1839. New Haven [CT]: S. Babcock, 1844. _____. Every Lady Her Own Flower-Gardener. London: William S. Orr & Co., 1839. Loudon, Jane. ed. A.J. Downing. Gardening for Ladies; and Companion to the Flower-Garden. 1st American, from the 3rd London edition. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1843. _____. The Ladies' Companion to the Flower-Garden. London, William Smith, 1841. Loudon, John Claudius. The Gardener's Magazine. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1826-1828. _____. The Magazine of Natural History. London: Longman, Orme, Brown and Green, 1829. Maund, B. The Botanic Garden, or Magazine of Hardy Flower Plants, cultivated in Great Britain. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy; Dublin: Westley & Tyrell, and Edinburgh: W. Whyte & Co., 1827. Morris, Richard, FLS. Flora Conspicua: A selection of the most ornamental plants. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1826. Series of Japanese Flower Arrangements [Ikebana] consisting of four volumes. [mid-c19] [Winterthur library. All text in in Japanese.]. The British Florist; or, Lady's Journal of Horticulture. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846. Whiting, J.B. Manual of Flower Gardening for Ladies. London: David Bogue, 1849.

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Appendix B

This graph shows known dates of publication for all books Beverly Seaton lists in her annotated bibliography of books on the language of flowers, and her bibliography of miscellaneous flower books in The Language of Flowers, A History (203-217). It can only be considered a rough estimate of flower book popularity at any given time since it only shows first editions, and since the appearance of the data changes considerably when represented in two-year or five-year segments, etc. Nevertheless I believe it is a useful starting point for understanding the circulation of flower books in Europe and the U.S. during this period.