Monsters under Glass

A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present

Jane Desmarais

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781780239750
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789140453
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Monsters under Glass explores our enduring fascination with hothouses and exotic blooms, from their rise in ancient times, through the Victorian vogue for plant collecting, to the present day.
Our interest in hothouses can be traced back to the Roman emperor Tiberius, but it was in the early nineteenth century that a boom in exotic plant collecting and new glasshouse technologies stimulated the imagination of novelists, poets and artists, and the hothouse entered the creative language in a highly charged way. Decadent writers in England and on the Continent – including Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde – transformed the notion of the hothouse from a functional object to a powerful metaphor, of metropolitan life, sexuality and being, replete with a dark underside of decay and death; of consciousness itself, nurtured and dissected under glass.
In this beautifully illustrated, wide-ranging and vivid study, Jane Desmarais charts the history and influence of these humid, tropical worlds and their creations, providing a steamy window on our recent past.

REFERENCES

Introduction

1 Quoted in Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray, The Decadent Gardener (Sawtry, Cambs., 1996), p. 59.

2 Joel-Peter Witkin, quoted in Frans Schouten et al., Grotesque: Natural Historical and Formaldehyde Photography (Amsterdam, 1989), p. 15.

3 Roy Strong, epigraph to catalogue, François Houtin: Brocéliande Forest of Dreams, exh. cat., Francis Kyle Gallery, London (2013).

4 Suzanne Braswell, ‘Mallarmé, Huysmans, and the Poetics of Hothouse Blooms’, French Forum, XXXVIII/1 (Winter 2013), pp. 69–87: p. 69.

5 Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2010), p. 120.

1 Heat and Light: The Rise of the Hothouse

1 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford, 2008), p. 175.

2 Ibid., p. 176.

3 John Abercrombie, Abercrombie’s Practical Gardener (London, 1834), p. 420.

4 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘A Philosophy of Furniture’, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, VI/5 (1840), pp. 243–45: p. 244.

5 There was an influx of new species, including dahlia, bluebell, Easter lily, cosmos, yarrow, gladiolus, strawflower, Japanese iris, zinnia, morning glory, tigerlily, kousa dogwood and poinsettia. See Amy H. King, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford, 2003), p. 74.

6 Quoted in Brent Elliott, Victorian Gardens (London, 1986), pp. 30 and 31.

7 John Ruskin, Præterita (Orpington, 1886), vol. I, p. 67.

8 The Times, 1851, quoted in Jeffery Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (London, 1999), p. 160.

9 National Magazine, I (1851), p. 206.

10 Quoted in D. Kellaway, ed., Women Gardeners (London, 1995), p. 68.

11 Guy de Maupassant, ‘Bibelots’, in Chroniques (Paris, 1980), vol. II, p. 183. Quoted in Emily Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets: Fetishism, Prostitution, and the Fin de Siècle Interiors’, Assemblage, IX (June 1989), pp. 6–19: p. 14.

12 See Lynn Voskuil, ‘The Victorian Novel and Horticulture’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, ed. Lisa Rodensky (Oxford, 2013), pp. 549–68.

13 Celebrated monster-plant writers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century include H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Louisa May Alcott, William Hope Hodgson and, later, H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. See T. S. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, XXIII/3 (2012), pp. 460–79.

14 Sarah Whittingham, Fern Fever: The Story of Pteridomania (London, 2012).

15 Rebecca Stott, Theatres of Glass: The Woman Who Brought the Sea to the City (London, 2003), p. 111.

16 E. and J. de Goncourt, Journal de la vie littéraire, II (25 December 1867), cited in Marion Baudet, ‘Le Jardin décadent: de l’intimité dévoilée à l’intimité dévoyée’, in Jardins et intimité dans la littérature européenne (1750–1920), ed. Simone Bernard-Griffiths et al. (Clermont-Ferrand, 2008), p. 357: ‘luxe tout nouveau . . ., et qui n’a pas plus de vingt ans de date’.

17 Phyllis Hastings, The Conservatory (London, 1973), p. 16.

18 Sarah Maguire, ‘The Florist’s at Midnight’, in The Florist’s at Midnight (London, 2001), p. 1.

19 See Michael Waters, The Victorian Garden in Literature (Aldershot, 1988), pp. 125–9.

20 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London, 1851), vol. II, pt 3, p. 104.

21 Lecture 2, section 87. In his notes to this lecture, he mentions Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal as a book he wanted to buy: see M. M. Mahood, ‘Ruskin’s Flowers of Evil’, in The Poet as Botanist (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 147–82.

22 William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris (Cambridge, 2012), vol. XXII, pp. 89–90.

23 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Essays and Studies (London, 1875),...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• one: Heat and Light: The Rise of the Hothouse
• two: ‘Aromatic and Tainted’: The City as Hothouse
• three: Blooming Buttonholes and Flower Fetishes
• four: Florientalism and the ‘Scented Ways’
• five: Paradises and Torture Gardens
• six: Flowers of Evil: The Fleur Fatale
• seven: Mind under Glass
• eight: Weeds
• REFERENCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX