Novel Cultivations

Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century

Elizabeth Hope Chang

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780813942490
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Shortlisted for the Best Book Prize from the British Society of Literature and Science

Nineteenth-century English nature was a place of experimentation, exoticism, and transgression, as site and emblem of the global exchanges of the British Empire. Popular attitudes toward the transplantation of exotic species—botanical and human—to Victorian greenhouses and cities found anxious expression in a number of fanciful genre texts, including mysteries, science fiction, and horror stories.

Situated in a mid-Victorian moment of frenetic plant collecting from the far reaches of the British empire, Novel Cultivations recognizes plants as vital and sentient subjects that serve—often more so than people—as actors and narrative engines in the nineteenth-century novel. Conceptions of native and natural were decoupled by the revelation that nature was globally sourced, a disruption displayed in the plots of gardens as in those of novels.

Elizabeth Chang examines here the agency asserted by plants with shrewd readings of a range of fictional works, from monstrous rhododendrons in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Mexican prickly pears in Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm, to Algernon Blackwood's hair-raising "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" and other obscure ecogothic tales. This provocative contribution to ecocriticism shows plants as buttonholes between fiction and reality, registering changes of form and content in both realms.

1

Detecting the Global Plant Specimen

It is after we know that Franklin Blake stole the Moonstone but before we know why he stole the Moonstone that we first encounter the enigmatic doctor’s assistant Ezra Jennings. Jennings’s sudden and dramatic appearance at the close of Wilkie Collins’s novel’s June 27, 1868 number—“I turned round, and found myself face to face with Ezra Jennings,” records Franklin Blake—prefigures the several kinds of interventions Jennings will make into The Moonstone’s narrative.1 First, his actions direct the plot: Jennings gives Blake the crucial history that helps Blake piece together the disordered fragments of Dr. Candy’s memory into a chronologically sensible account of the Moonstone’s theft. But Jennings’s appearance also offers a physiognomic intervention. His “gipsy complexion, his fleshless cheeks, his gaunt facial bones, his dreamy eyes, his extraordinary parti-coloured hair”—all these make Jennings the most distinctive example of hybridity in a text greatly concerned with the interchange between the foreign and the domestic.2 That Jennings is crippled by an opium addiction acquired as a consequence of a painfully debilitating illness has made his hybridity all the more compelling to critics.3

Building on his two better-discussed plot functions—narratological and racial—we further find Jennings making a third, botanical intervention. Though Blake initially encounters Jennings at the scene of the crime, the Verinder manor house, they immediately depart for a country stroll to escape the disapproving reception that everywhere greets the socially outcast medical assistant. As they leave behind “the last houses in the town,” Collins uses the natural setting to advance multiple plot strands. Blake narrates:

Ezra Jennings stopped for a moment, and picked some wild flowers from the hedge by the roadside. “How beautiful they are!” he said, simply, showing his little nosegay to me. “And how few people in England seem to admire them as they deserve!”

“You have not always been in England?” I said.

“No, I was born, and partly brought up, in one of our colonies. My father was an Englishman; but my mother—We are straying away from our subject, Mr. Blake; and it is my fault. The truth is, I have associations with these modest little hedgeside flowers—It doesn’t matter; we were speaking of Mr. Candy. To Mr. Candy let us return.”4

From this disjointed moment of botanical appreciation, Blake concludes “that the story which I had read in his face was, in two particulars at least, the story that it really told. He had suffered as few men suffer; and there was the mixture of some foreign race in his English blood.”5 What thus might seem initially to be a slight and easily dismissed moment in the voluminous plot of the novel thus becomes the clearest articulation of Ezra Jennings’s personal history and his singular importance to the mystery’s resolution. Jennings’s ability to literally fill in the gaps of the meddling Mr. Candy’s feverish confession is foreshadowed here by his apparent botanical completion of a partially expressed narrative of global migration. In both cases, Franklin Blake’s ability to find narrative resolution relies on a presumptive reading of the other man’s obscure sorrows. Jennings’s responsive attachment to particular elements of the natural environment seems to satisfactorily (for Blake at least) delineate the details of his character in lieu of more traditional descriptive methods.

And yet, readers may find this explanation of Jennings’s personal history less than satisfactory, given that we never even receive any useful details about the substance of his “associations” with the flowers, which could themselves hardly be more generic in their description. Indeed, their lack of naming seems a deliberate choice by Collins to critique the methods of amateur natural historians: what The Moonstone’s key narrator and butler Gabriel Betteredge disapprovingly calls the upper-class habit of “spoiling a pretty flower, with pointed instruments, out of a stupid curiosity to know what the flower is made of.”6 We may then see Jennings’s lack of precision about the name of the flower as paradoxically the most genuine part of his story—an assessment with which contemporary reviewers agreed. The Athenaeum’s review of the novel concludes: “Ezra Jennings, the doctor’s assistant, is the one personage who makes himself felt by the reader. The slight sketch of his history, left purposely without details, the beautiful and noble nature developed in spite of calumny, loneliness, and the pain of a deadly malady, is drawn with a firm and masterly hand; it has an aspect of reality which none of the other personages possess.”7 Lacking aristocratic privilege and blocked from professional advancement by his birth and appearance, Jennings circles the outskirts of the economic and racial boundaries of the novel’s characters and readers, seeking entry through his epistemological recoveries. As Jennings’s act of selection transforms the indeterminate “wild flowers” into a presentable “nosegay,” we understand not only that something important is taking place but that recognition of this importance is itself an establishing mark of moral character.

Though this aesthetic transformation from flower to nosegay is also a termination (at least from the plant’s perspective), the cultivations that make these roadside blooms worthy of remark imbues them with narrative significance that resonates beyond their individual life span and the novel’s momentary focus on their growing conditions. In this chapter, I will use brief examples from The Moonstone and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty” to make a larger set of claims about cultivated flowers in fiction of mystery and detection. One of the key contributions from these new fictions of detection, of which The Moonstone was famously deemed “the first, longest and best” by T. S. Eliot, was their renovation of narrative setting to accommodate the detective’s method of reading.8 Just as Franklin Blake sought to reconcile “the story . . . read in [Jennings’s] face” with “the story that it really told,” readers of detective novels practiced recognizing plants and other objects seemingly hidden in the descriptive background as intermittently foregrounded objects of crucial epistemological and narrative significance—in other words, as clues. While plants are obviously only one category of many possible clue-objects present in the developing detective genre, such epistemological spotlighting of plants as clues has satisfying resonances with the larger history of Victorian horticulture. Developing alongside the burgeoning English garden, the detective novel could take special advantage of the new qualities of cultivated plants in the Victorian age: both their complex global origins and also their increasing ability to register as singular specimens with particular wants and needs.

This is in contrast to a traditional novelistic understanding of plants as generic, multiple, and domestic—all qualities uncongenial to fictional representation as foreground rather than background elements. Plants with no individual human contact made little difference to narrative, even if their presence was implicitly necessary or significant to ongoing daily life. But plants that needed or accepted cultivation—into economically, scientifically, aesthetically, or emotionally significant forms—demanded notice, in novel plots as well as in many other kinds of literature and art. Cultivation amplified meaning and significance, but it also created such meaning in the first place as it brought together human priorities with plant interests, and gave increasing epistemological weight to plants to advance such priorities (or act against them) on their own.

Thus, the assimilation of new foreign cultivars combined two equally essential elements for the environmental developments of detective fiction in general, and the clue in particular. The first requirement was the presence in readers’ lives and gardens of actual exotic plants, shipped into England via glass cases designed for the nineteenth century by Nathaniel Ward and cultivated in gardens according to the advice of a rising class of Victorian garden experts like John and Jane Loudon—historical developments that I will explain in the first part of this chapter. Equally required, however, was a vocabulary of representational and figurative language necessary to pinpoint not only the color, fragrance, and ideal growing conditions of the plants but also the language of sympathetic connection found in narrative prose that could link a perceiving consciousness with an exotic specimen. The second part of my chapter, building on that environmental history of plant exchange, explains further the renovations in narrative form that granted plants a new and singular narrative significance, as clues specifically and as storytelling prompts more generally. Detective novels, intent on pulling background into foreground, helped establish and popularize this vocabulary and language in a way that more explicitly equated the ontological status of plants and persons, categories which in detective and other kinds of genre fictions now shared the responsibility of conveying the story as it was really told.

The new era of cultivation made flowers come from everywhere and be, at least potentially, for everyone, as Jennings’s roadside reverie has already shown in miniature. In the final section of the chapter, I will draw together the environmental history of the first section and the explanations of narrative form in the second section to consider other flower-inspired meditations: first in Doyle’s detective story “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty” and then, moving beyond detective fiction, in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Frank Kingdon-Ward’s nonfictional The Romance of Plant-Hunting (1924). In all of these examples, the reveries prompted by plants were mnemonic—the flowers inspired the recall of a narrative already known but forgotten or not fully understood—but also globally revisionist. The advent of imported exotics meant that these reveries now connected flower-admirers and their memories to environments around the world, even if the flower being admired is not itself a recent immigrant. The territory within which Collins, and the detective novelists that follow him, plot their stories already depends for its constitution on global specimens, meaning that all kinds of flowers given individual attention, foreign and domestic, have the capacity to prompt reflection that links local with global. And, as Collins’s description makes clear, all kinds of characters connect to and are connected by the world of cultivated flowers that surround them. As I argue in the conclusion to my chapter, such connections are valuable for the global horticultural networks they create as well as for the model of environmentally responsive narrative that ecological modernity allows.

A wide survey of the varieties of horticultural influence upon fictional beings is already present in The Moonstone, made evident by the innovative structure Collins uses to relay the story of the jewel’s unwitting theft and unexpected recovery through an assemblage of narratives from a range of characters. “Don’t you see how happy I am? I’m going to the flower-show, Clack, and I’ve got the prettiest bonnet in London,” declares the thoroughly unhappy heroine Rachel Verinder, partaking in the outward rituals of aristocratic female society despite her inward disgust with their hypocrisies.9 The pious Miss Clack, not convinced of Rachel’s propriety, scorns equally Rachel’s public visits to the flower show and Rachel’s mother, Lady Verinder’s, private enjoyment of her apartment’s flower-filled window boxes; as Clack disapprovingly narrates, “Lady Verinder was extravagantly fond of these perishable treasures, and had a habit of . . . going to look at them and smell them.”10 Clack exploits the Verinder family’s sensory pleasures for personal ends, hiding unwanted religious tracts among the window flowers even as she continues to malign her relatives’ irreligiosity. The transitory beauties of the flowers also signal to the reader and to Franklin Blake, the intradiegetic compiler of these stories, Lady Verinder’s rapidly approaching death, a portent to which Miss Clack is as blind as she is to the aesthetic beauties of the windowbox blooms. Equally oblivious to the impermanence of floral treasure is the novel’s true villain, Godfrey Ablewhite. His secret life as a “man of pleasure,” possessed of all the tasteful markers of that sensational position, includes “a conservatory of the rarest flowers, the match of which it would not be easy to find in all of London”—a pleasure paid for with Ablewhite’s ward’s inheritance and, ultimately, with Ablewhite’s own life.11

Most readers of The Moonstone, however, will best remember the professional detective Sergeant Cuff as the novel’s premier horticulturalist. Indeed Cuff, unable to fully solve the novel’s central mystery—“It’s only in books that the offices of the detective force are superior to the making of a mistake,” he wryly observes—does succeed in retiring to the countryside to take up his father’s gardener profession as a leisured hobby, where he achieves what he understands to be his greatest victory.12 “[Cuff] has grown the white moss-rose, without budding it on the dog-rose first. . . . Mr. Begbie the gardener is to go to Dorking, and own that the Sergeant has beaten him at last,” relays the butler Betteredge with customary excitement.13 Ian Ousby suggests Collins found inspiration for Cuff’s obsession with roses in the real-life gardening fascination held by Sergeant Aldophus “Dolly” Williamson, who worked on the Constance Kent murder case in 1860 and was promoted to be Chief Inspector of the detective force by 1865;14 a periodical profile describes Williamson as a “quiet, unpretending, middle-sized man . . . often with a sprig of leaf or flower between his lips. . . . His talk, for choice, was about gardening, for which he had a perfect passion; and his blooms were famous in the neighbourhood where he spent his unofficial hours.”15

But Cuff’s specific horticultural subplot also appears to be an almost direct repudiation to John Loudon’s 1838 claim in his massive encyclopedia of British plant life, the Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, that “the white moss, unless budded on the dog rose . . . will not, in general, grow well: its sickly appearance, in some situations, may often be traced to its being worked on some improper stock.”16 John Loudon, with his wife Jane probably the most influential popular horticultural writer of the early Victorian age, directed the course of Victorian connections to cultivated nature through his promotion of gardening as a cultural practice whose educational and moral effects elevated both amateur and professional gardeners alike, as Sarah Dewis has shown.17 As a result, the effect of the Loudons’s prodigious textual generation was not only to increase the number of volumes on the practice of gardening available to interested readers.18 It was also to create and expand a category of literary production that simulated in great physical detail the prospect of an improved lived environment. The language needed to propose such alteration, and the narrative of semifuturity that his texts relied upon, provided readers with a new conceptual and rhetorical mode of imagining the world of plants that they inhabited as intimately connected to the human minds that fostered their growth.

Thus Cuff’s subplot, and the text of the gardening manual it is drawn from, both make in miniature a proposition for the claims that real-life environmental manipulations had upon the possibilities of fiction, in which “sickly appearance” might be “traced” to improprieties of many kinds using scientific and professional techniques. Detective novels, like natural history writing, seem to propose the structuring assumption that plants, taken as single specimens, both convey and conceal vital information about the nature of the surrounding world. The apparent assumption of detective fiction that the inductive method was of crucial importance for epistemological regulation of oneself and one’s environment matches the ongoing expectations of the amateur and professional naturalists who chiefly regarded their environment as a series of embedded stories waiting to be discovered and told.

This was, for many writers, framed as a novel development of the Victorian age and, implicitly or explicitly, understood to be the work of global circulation. The naturalist and genre novelist Grant Allen explains in his 1881 essay “The Daisy’s Pedigree” that the era’s “new view of nature invests every part of it with a charm and hidden meaning which very few among us have ever suspected before.”19 Assuming the dual draws of both nature’s “charms” and “hidden meanings” as mutually productive qualities requires that we consider the connection between people and plants to include both emotional and epistemological priorities. This was an equation intuitive for Victorians both real and fictional, among the characters of The Moonstone and in the detective stories that followed. But it could not have become intuitive with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Detecting the Global Plant Specimen
• 2. Strange City Gardens
• 3. Strange Country Gardens
• 4. Acclimatization Abroad
• 5. The Sentient Specimen Returns
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index