Fantastical Flora: Cryptobotanical Imaginaries in Victorian Fin-De-Siècle Literature

1 Fantastical Flora: Cryptobotanical Imaginaries in Victorian Fin-de-Siècle Literature Submitted by Marc Xavier Ricard to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English In September 2020 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature: ………………………………………………………….. 2 Acknowledgments Thank you so much to Paul Young and Andrew Mangham for your nurturing supervision during these four years. I could not have asked for more diligent or supportive supervisors & I feel my growth as a researcher during this time can be almost solely attributed to your guidance and support. Thank you for putting up with me! I’d also like to thank the many other faculty members at the department of English who I’ve had the privilege to get to know in a professional and personal capacity during my eight years as a student here. When I began my undergrad in 2012, I never dreamed I could have made it as far as a doctorate, and it’s thanks to the welcoming and accessible research environment at Exeter that I was able to realise that this was something I could, and wanted, to do. I also want to thank my fellow PGR students from the College of Humanities and beyond for creating such a wonderful and supportive network that has been a constant inspiration and solace during the various ups and downs of the PhD. Special mention to fellow Virgo and hair-worker-extraordinaire Heather Hind, who has offered me support and friendship more times than I can possibly count - I hope you only know success! I am most grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this project, as well as to the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, for making a large portion of this research possible. Finally, I’d like to thank my parents for always believing in my abilities & providing me with the opportunity to reach my potential, I hope I can make you both proud. 3 Abstract This study examines instances of imaginary plant life, or ‘cryptobotany’, in the late- nineteenth and early twentieth-century. It draws on a diverse range of sources from Transatlantic literary and visual culture – including fictional and non-fictional prose, poetry, newspapers and periodical culture, drawing manuals, horticultural guides and advertisements – in order to examine the significant and pervasive way in which visions of new, fantastical vegetable kingdoms, containing a seemingly limitless variety of weird and wonderful plants, gripped late Victorian and Edwardian culture and society. By contextualising these visions with relation to contemporary aesthetic, economic, scientific and socio-political discourses, the thesis considers why and how such imaginative representations of plant-life proliferated, with a particular focus on the capacity of these representations to articulate and sustain expectations, hopes and fears concerning the ongoing planetary impact of industrializing, globalizing modernity. As such, the study contributes to the emergent strand of scholarship that recognises plants as worthy of critical attention, providing as it does so an ecologically- informed frame through which to re-examine speculative narratives of the late- Victorian period. The thesis is presented as six chapters arranged around three thematic concerns: cryptobotanical commodification, progress and aberration. The first two chapters concern plants that were imagined to have enormous social benefit to modern, metropolitan civilization. Focusing on discourses of energy and hygiene, the chapters unpick how beneficial qualities of plants were used to address fears of entropy and contamination that proliferated at the fin-de- siècle. Chapters three and four are interested in the phenomena of ‘improving plants’; from aesthetics to horticulture, these chapters examine the various ways that plants were being transformed and idealised in the period, and the impact these new ideas had on conceptions of the natural world and the human subject. Finally, chapters five and six detail queer or otherwise deviant plant imaginaries. Drawing from gothic fiction, imperial romance and decadent literature, the chapters explore how these entanglements with imagined plants were used to expand the limits of perception, from interrogating possible hybridity between flora and fauna, to the ability for plants to resist the systems of knowledge and control discussed in earlier chapters. Together, these case 4 studies make manifest the imaginative plasticity of vegetable life in the period, offering insight into how plants were employed to confront issues as diverse as sustainability, evolutionary lineage and aesthetic self-expression. 5 Table of Contents Introduction ___________________________________________________ 6 Chapter One _________________________________________________ 30 Chapter Two _________________________________________________ 52 Chapter Three ________________________________________________ 84 Chapter Four ________________________________________________ 118 Chapter Five ________________________________________________ 153 Chapter Six _________________________________________________ 185 Conclusion _________________________________________________ 220 Bibliography ________________________________________________ 227 6 Introduction The nature writer Richard Mabey’s The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination (2015), describes the Victorian era as the period in which we had been most enchanted by the wonder of plants, when “the general public had been agog, astounded by one botanical revelation after another” and that “respect for [plants] as complex and adventurous organisms reached its zenith in the late nineteenth century” (Mabey 3). Great advances in both the organisation and dissemination of knowledge through the professionalization of botany and taxonomy, along with the unprecedented influx of new species discovered and cultivated as a result of imperial and commercial globalisation converged to create a moment of unprecedented change. By the end of the century, trade and exploration had ensured that Britain was a nation that positively respired exotic flora, as an abundance of recently discovered plant products circulated through the Empire: spices and chocolate filled its pantries, rubber lined its industries and quinine coursed the veins of imperial commanders in malarial climes. At the same time that these strange new plants were becoming household names, the influx of botanical wonders also heightened interest for even greater vegetable wonders. Indeed, credulity and intrigue had risen to such a pitch that tales of fantastical flora, which at another time would seem miraculous or beyond belief, were increasingly being seen as not only possible, but imminently attainable by the same channels that brought the world tea, orchids and coca. A sense of the degree to which people had become accustomed to the fantastical in tales of plant life can be seen in accounts of popular hoaxes related to plant discoveries. The example below, tucked away in a short article on insect-catching plants published in an 1891 edition of The Royal Horticultural Society Journal, attempts to sort fact from fiction when it comes to these unusual species: certain plants […] are specially adapted for catching and retaining many small insects, the decomposition of which is beneficial to the plants […] and this is where so much misconception has arisen, for popular writers have seized on the subject as one exactly suited to the fluent pens and prolific imaginations of contributors to daily and weekly papers. Exaggeration has crept in, and most extravagant notions have been 7 formed on the subject. People have come to regard the so-called “carnivorous plants” as vegetable monsters, constantly lying in wait for their prey […] To such a length has this gone that when the shelves in the porch of the Orchid-house at Kew were railed off, and the poor plants were protected from the too attentive visitors anxious to test the meat-consuming abilities of the Dionaeas and Droseras, a report was spread (and it was gravely repeated in a widely circulating paper) that the railing was intended to preserve the onlookers from any possible accidents which might befall them if the plants were in an especially famished condition (Castle, 407) The excerpt provides a vividly detailed picture of an intersection of imaginative, print and material worlds in the late nineteenth century, from which a number of deductions can be made. From Castle’s account, there seems to have been an outbreak of “vegetable monsters” in popular media in the 1890s and these fantastical plants were deemed to be a “subject […] exactly suited to the fluent pens and prolific imaginations” of writers in periodicals. What’s more, these stories were met with sufficient credulity that they spilled over from the pages of said periodicals into the real world, with readers wanting to see the meat-eating powers of these plants with their own eyes. Yet in spite of these enlightening inferences, to the uninitiated modern reader the same passage must also lead to number of perplexing questions: Why is this appearing in the RHS journal? How many stories repeated this hoax? Just how many visitors attempted

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