The Loudons and the Gardening Press

A Victorian Cultural Industry

Sarah Dewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317025085
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

Through close readings of individual serials and books and archival work on the publication history of the Gardener's Magazine (1826-44) Sarah Dewis examines the significant contributions John and Jane Webb Loudon made to the gardening press and democratic discourse. Vilified during their lifetimes by some sections of the press, the Loudons were key players in the democratization of print media and the development of the printed image. Both offered women readers a cultural alternative to the predominantly literary and classical culture of the educated English elite. In addition, they were innovatory in emphasizing the value of scientific knowledge and the acquisition of taste as a means of eroding class difference. As well as the Gardener's Magazine, Dewis focuses on the lavish eight-volume Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838), an encyclopaedia of trees and shrubs, and On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries (1843), arguing that John Loudon was a radical activist who reconfigured gardens in the public sphere as a landscape of enlightenment and as a means of social cohesion. Her book is important in placing the Loudons' publications in the context of the history of the book, media history, garden history, urban social history, history of education, nineteenth-century radicalism and women's journalism.

Chapter 1

Who Are the Gardeners? The Radical Origins of the Gardener’s Magazine

The Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822) was the first of a series of encyclopaedias produced by John Loudon.¹ Published by Longman, it incorporated the history, aesthetics and science of gardening and was the first and most comprehensive of its kind in Britain. The section, ‘Statistics of Gardening’, describes the social science of gardening, and John Loudon argues that the future of gardening will depend on the improvement of taste amongst patrons of gardens and on the education of gardeners. The entry concerning the patrons remained substantially unchanged throughout the editions of the Encyclopaedia produced within John Loudon’s lifetime.² The entry ‘Of the Education of Gardeners’, however, was subject to several alterations.³ Both the 1,500-page Encyclopaedia and the 15-page entry on gardener’s education were initially well received by the Literary Gazette in October 1822.⁴ Given that this was just three years after the Peterloo massacre and in the context of repressive government measures to maintain law and order, it was still a far from safe time to postulate radical ideas. A critical review did not appear, however, until 12 years later in 1834, when a new edition of the Encyclopaedia, in 20 monthly parts (December 1833 to July 1835) was published, making it accessible to a broader audience. The radical stance of the entry had become more evidently problematic due, perhaps, to greater awareness by the Tory press of the potential actualisation of democracy. Other factors may have been the increased polarisation of the interests of the middle classes and the labouring poor after the failure of the Reform laws of 1832 to extend the voting franchise to the majority of working people, and the enactment of Poor Law legislation of 1834.

In this chapter I look at the intellectual context of ‘The Education of Gardeners’ and the origins of John Loudon’s ideas. I argue that the explicit secularism and his educational agenda, which he believed would lead to a wider dissemination of wealth, endow the gardener with emblematic status. At the same time, the fusion of Calvinist and Enlightenment discourses suggests the development of an educated gardener whose life will be one of struggle and restraint. This struggle might, in turn, be a reflection of John Loudon’s own life. Because ‘The Education of Gardeners’, as originally published in 1822, serves in part as an early manifesto for the Gardener’s Magazine (founded four years later), I am placing this chapter at the beginning of this book.

In May 1834 an article appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine entitled ‘Loudon on the Education of Gardeners’.⁵ I consider John Loudon’s entry in the light of this article as it highlights those elements which, given the political changes of the intervening 12 years, might affect the reading of it. Blackwood’s was a Tory monthly that had been set up by the publisher and printer William Blackwood in order attack the dominant position in the periodicals marketplace of a rival publisher, Constable. The successful Whig oriented quarterly the Edinburgh Review was published by Constable, and the Quarterly Review, published in London, was its clear Tory opponent. William Blackwood’s immediate quarry was another of Constable’s periodicals, the ‘tottering’ monthly Scots’ Magazine.⁶ ‘Christopher North’, one of Blackwood’s most vociferous and long-standing contributors, was the author of the article that contained edited extracts from Loudon’s encyclopaedia entry.⁷

The critique by ‘North’ of John Loudon’s views was taken up by some amongst the gardening press including James Rennie (1787–1867), briefly editor of the Magazine of Botany and Gardening (1833–37), who reprinted much of North’s attack in June 1834 and commented,

We have often wondered that nobody has hitherto taken the trouble to unmask the shameless wholesale plagiarisms, the vulgar filthy language, and the utter ignorance and presumption which issue from the book manufactory of Bayswater, and pollute the taste and unhinge the principles, religious, moral and political of gardeners and others, who unthinkingly drink their poison.⁸

James Rennie was the first professor of natural history and zoology at Kings College, an institution initially established to support Anglican-based education in London in opposition to the secularism of University College. An Anglican cleric, both Rennie’s editorship and his professorship were terminated in 1834. He was vituperative about all the work produced by John Loudon’s publishing enterprise, which included the Gardener’s Magazine and articles by Jane Webb Loudon. Her initials ‘J.W.L.’ had first appeared within the pages of the Magazine in 1830, soon after her marriage to John Loudon.⁹ George Glenny (1793–1874), the editor of the Horticultural Journal and Florists’ Register, also made several personal attacks on John Loudon and his family as we shall see in later chapters.¹⁰

The Education of John Loudon

From the age of 11 to 14, John Loudon attended school in Edinburgh on a part-time basis while he worked as an apprentice to a local nurseryman and landscape designer, John Mawer. He taught himself French and Italian, and, from 1803, after his arrival in London, German, Hebrew and Greek. Between 1798 and 1802, however, while apprenticed to another gardening company in Edinburgh, Dicksons and Shade, he attended the university. The absence of a degree from Edinburgh among the list of other qualifications he generally displayed on his publications, suggests that he did not gain a degree.¹¹

His principal teacher at Edinburgh was Andrew Coventry, who held the first official university post for agriculture in an English-speaking university from 1790.¹² Coventry gave a series of lectures on agriculture that are infused with botany, chemistry and geology. Whether John Loudon attended the lectures or not, they indicate the views of his teacher:

It is surely not presuming over much to hold every student of agriculture, especially at an university such as this, and living too in an age of liberal enquiry, to be more or less informed concerning the general principles of ‘natural’ philosophy or more properly speaking mechanical philosophy, and of chemistry and concerning the vegetable and animal kingdoms, besides somewhat concerning husbandry and the common business, or the ordinary way of conducting regularly the affairs of life.¹³

The importance of a scientific approach to the study of agriculture, in addition to understanding traditional horticultural methods and animal husbandry are emphasised by Coventry. The beliefs that knowledge in one area can feed into and stimulate knowledge in others and that practical measures can benefit from theoretical knowledge are evident. I quote the passage in full because this scientific approach to farming and gardening was adopted by John Loudon. In a later lecture, Coventry privileges the ‘durable economy’ over ‘shifting taste’ in the planning of the farm estate.¹⁴ He refers to the disagreements between writers on aesthetics including William Gilpin, Humphry Repton and Uvedale Price. In succeeding chapters I will show how the ideas on aesthetics developed by John Loudon in his publications, are closely linked to the science and economy of landscape.

John Loudon’s pedagogical interest, however, might originate from his Scottish background. As early as 1809, when he was a practicing farmer at Great Tew, Loudon had established an agricultural college. Education and training had provided tangible economic benefits in Scotland, where the shortage of productive agricultural land necessitated training to provide alternative occupations. A relatively literate population was able to take up alternatives to farming partly because Calvinist principles had encouraged the development of reading in Scotland.¹⁵ Bible studies were part of the curriculum for the widespread network of primary schools that had been set up by the eighteenth century as Richard Altick has pointed out in his history of the development of mass reading culture.¹⁶ More recently, Jonathan Rose has noted that one of the ‘highest literacy levels in the world’ had been achieved in parts of Scotland by this time.¹⁷ As might be expected from a non-Anglican, John Loudon’s syllabus (1809) was based on ‘Lancastrian’ non-sectarian principles, favoured by radical thinkers James Mill and Francis Place.¹⁸ The Bible in England was generally taught with the assistance of the Church of England’s gloss and commentary, known as the ‘Madras’ system, devised by Andrew Bell.

The initial definition of education given in the Encyclopaedia is broad and secular. It recalls the ideas of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), whom John Loudon first met on his arrival in London in 1803, thanks to Coventry’s letter of introduction:

By education is generally understood that portion of knowledge which is obtained at schools; but we shall use the term in a somewhat more extended sense, and consider it as the means which may be employed to render a man competent for performing the part which he undertakes to perform in life with increased satisfaction to himself and others. Education may thus be considered as extending to everything which operates on the body or mind, from the earliest period of our existence to the final extinction of life.¹⁹

John Loudon argues (like Bentham) that education will benefit society as well the individual. It will enable a person to increase his skills and pass them onto others and it will increase his capacity for enjoyment by laying the intellectual foundations that might also help him through physical debility or old age. Operations ‘on the body or mind’ suggest a link between impressions on the body created by external objects that connect to the mind and develop into complex ideas. This was the predominant psychological model of the Scottish Enlightenment, developed by David Hume, Francis Hutcheson and George Turnbull.²⁰ Known as associationism, it implies that it is our experience that makes us human. Equally, John Loudon’s description might also be influenced by Bentham’s theory of the effects of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ as the primary motive for action.

John Loudon argues that the gardener’s future will depend largely ‘on education, on his desire of raising himself, and on incessant application’.²¹ The principle that it is the duty of every man to fulfil his potential for civilisation is utilitarian in its broadest sense and may have been one of main reasons for the hostile reviews of Tory commentators. However, these ideas, exemplified by the Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man by Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, were in circulation in the scientific circles (including James Sowerby...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Who Are the Gardeners? The Radical Origins of the Gardener’s Magazine
• 2 John Loudon as Editor
• 3 Image and Text in the Gardener’s Magazine
• 4 National Discourse: John Loudon, Activism and Landscape
• 5 Domestic Discourse: John Loudon, Periodicals for Women and the Book Manufactory
• 6 Jane Webb Loudon, Editor and Author of Garden Publications
• Conclusion
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index