The Social and Cultural Value of the Apple and the Orchard in Victorian England
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The social and cultural value of the apple and the orchard in Victorian England Joanna Crosby A thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. Department of History University of Essex Date of submission with corrections – January 2021 (Total word count: 79,840) Joanna Crosby January 2021 Abstract This thesis argues that the apple and the orchard were of greater significance to the Victorians than has been previously realised. This thesis brings together an investigation into the economic value of the apple crop and its associated goods and services, with an exploration of how the apple and the orchard were represented and received in cultural and social constructs. This thesis argues that the economic worth of the apple was greater than the commodity value of the raw crop of apples. That value itself has been underestimated due to the difficulties of calculating the amount of land used for orchards and the profit obtainable. The apple had a wider economic value, helping to expand the sectors of commercial horticulture, domestic gardening and food. Representations of the apple and of orchards drew on Classical landscapes, Christian allegory or the pre-Christian cultures in Europe to give authority to the meanings of an apple placed in a painting. These associations were brought together in the writing about, and the actual performance of, wassailing in the orchards at Christmas. The conclusions state that the economic value of the apple was greater than had been previously thought, and that the network of apple-related trades and livelihoods was extensive. The conclusions from the social and cultural investigation were that the appreciation of the apple was at its height in Victorian England, when the Victorians responded to increasing industrialisation and urban growth by using the apple symbolically to represent values of ‘Englishness’ through an idealised rural past. There was tension between the symbolism of orchards in landscape and genre paintings and the Christian associations of the apple with sin and deceit. (275 words) 2 Joanna Crosby January 2021 Contents Introduction 4 Methodology 8 Victorian awareness of the deep history of the apple. 10 Chapter One: The nineteenth-century orchard as a place of 15 change. Chapter Two: From the orchard to the kitchen; nineteenth- 50 century urban apple supply and consumption Chapter Three: Apple growers, developers and opinion makers 89 Chapter Four: The Christian apple: the cultural significance of 119 the apple to ideas of Englishness, and the apple’s place in Victorian Christian iconography. Chapter Five: The Mythical orchard – representation of apples 162 and orchards in the Classical and Romantic movements. Chapter Six: The anarchic, traditional, re-imagined wassail 198 Conclusions 223 Acknowledgements 226 Bibliography 227 3 Joanna Crosby January 2021 Introduction This thesis argues that the apple and the orchard were of significance to Victorian culture and society, in a way that was not directly related to the value of the apple as a material commodity. This argument is tested by considering three questions; what happened to the apple as a commodity during the Victorian era, how was the apple used and represented, and where did it fit into society and culture. The structure of this thesis has been determined by its thematic methodology, arising from the interlinked nature of these three questions. This thesis determined that the economic value and the cultural reception of the apple are the core and the flesh of the same fruit. Any slice through nineteenth-century social history requires consideration of both. However, many attempts at maintaining this close relationship in a suitable structure for this thesis resulted in considerable overlap and repetition of the argument. Therefore, this thesis arrived at an unorthodox but effective structure, and one which facilitates the extremely interdisciplinary nature of this study. Part One considers the ‘material apple’, and seeks to answer the questions of what happened to the apple as a commodity, and how was the material apple used and represented. The three chapters of this section consider the commercial orchard as a place of change and progress, the supply chain and processes necessary to bring the apple to the urban consumer, and finally the influence of the nurserymen, horticultural experts and illustrators who turned the apple from a basic food into something to be prized and celebrated. Part Two examines the cultural apple, attempting to answer the questions of how the apple was represented, and what was the place of the imaginary or symbolic apple in culture and society. The three linked chapters first consider the orchard in genre art as an expression of Englishness before examining the Christian symbolism of the apple. The second chapter in this section considers in which other cultural movements the apple had symbolic value, before the final chapter looks at the melding of all these aspects in the ceremony of the wassail. Naturally both parts of the thesis are linked, and refer to economic and cultural elements where necessary to emphasis a point. The apple is unique in that its cultural history is linked to, yet not dependent on, its economic value, while its cultural value works independently from associations with the apple as a culinary object. The apple is a point of intersection between the material and economic improvements in agriculture, and the morally improving effects of activities such as gardening and hobbyist fruit cultivation, high culture 4 Joanna Crosby January 2021 and education. However, in order to examine Victorian society through the apple, and draw out these narratives and connections it has been necessary to chop the apple up, rather brutally, into these two halves. The Victorian era was chosen for study because orchards from that time are nearly all vanished, but remain tantalisingly within the memory of local landscapes. They live on in the varieties of apples that are still cultivated, and in maps, field plans, text, art and visual culture. There is a surfeit of material, and it has been a challenge to consider the apple as a ‘thing’, the study of which could inform our debates about the Victorians, rather than re- writing or adding to the history of the apple. The botanic history of the apple has been studied before by eminent figures including Victorian ‘pomologists’. Their work is of course discussed in detail, particularly in Chapter Three and where relevant throughout this thesis, while the work of recent experts such as Morgan, Juniper and Mabberley has been essential background to this study and was used as a starting point for studying the primary sources from the era. 1 The history of the apple, and the extent of the Victorians’ knowledge of their ‘English’ fruit, is outlined in a section following this introduction, since it forms an essential background to understanding the habits and decisions of nineteenth century orchard growers and apple consumers. 2 The Victorians claimed the apple for their own, and this thesis will show that the ways in which it was embedded into the mytho-historic narrative of England’s past is a remarkable feat of consistent myth building and invention. This examination of the apple and the orchard in the nineteenth century has uncovered a particular narrative of the Victorian view of what it meant to be ‘English’, both in the idealised rural past and in the rapidly urbanising nineteenth century. How the qualities of Englishness have been implied in works of art about orchards is a new area of study. Although Part Two of this thesis argues that the apple was used with care and deliberation as a symbol across many works of art, there have been very few thematic studies of the apple positioned entirely within art or cultural history; the most recent and comprehensive survey being Claire de Torcy’s La Pomme dans l’Art in 2013. 3 This 1 Joan Morgan and Alison Richards, The New Book of Apples (London: Ebury, 2002). Joan Morgan is one of the foremost apple experts; she has been awarded the Royal Horticultural Society’s Veitch Memorial Medal, is one of only fifty recipients of the Institute of Horticulture Award for ‘Outstanding Services to Horticulture’ and an Honorary Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Fruiterers. Barrie E. Juniper and David J. Mabberley, The Story of the Apple (Portland: Timber Press, 2006) and The Extraordinary Story of the Apple (Royal Botanic Gardens Kew: Kew Publishing, 2019). Dr Juniper works in Plant Sciences at Oxford University and is largely responsible for tracing the apple’s earliest history. 2 The section on the early history of the apple is indebted to the work of Morgan and Juniper in particular. 3 Claire de Torcy La Pomme dans l’Art (Paris: Groupe Eyrolles, 2013). 5 Joanna Crosby January 2021 beautifully illustrated, and well researched, book is more for the coffee table than the library, but it fills a place in the canon of apple literature that no other studies have done. 4 There was no deliberate spatial constraint on this research, beyond concentrating on England. 5 A few examples from American literature have been used, but to compare the treatment of apples in America with that of the domestic fruit industry would have been a different thesis altogether. Examples from England have leaned towards London, the Home Counties and East Anglia. This is due to a preponderance of examples from that area, since the Home Counties were full of fruit nurseries, market gardens and commercial orchards. The West Country is discussed in relation to its cider crop and the practice of wassailing. The East of England is not famous for orchards, and has suffered the greatest loss of orchard land in the twentieth century. However, the author’s haptic knowledge of these orchards allows the validity of texts to be assessed against what works on the ground.