Cultivating Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century English Gardens

2000 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. Lustig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Demographic Changes ◽  
Botanical Gardens ◽  
Social Agenda ◽  
Horticultural Practice

The ArgumentThe popularity of botany and natural history in England combined with the demographic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century to bring about a new aesthetics of gardening, fusing horticultural practice with a connoisseurship of botanical science. Horticultural societies brought theoretical botany into the practice of gardening. Botanical and horticultural periodicals disseminated both science and prescriptions for practice, yoking them to a progressive social agenda, including the betterment of the working class and urban planning. Finally, botany was incorporated into systems of education, reinforcing the union of theory and practice.Three garden plans from the 1790s, 1835, and 1846 illustrate the embodiment of this theory and practice in the design of private suburban gardens. These horticultural/botanical gardens, described in the second half of the article, represent a neglected side of botany's bifurcated descent from Renaissance collections of curiosities into horticultural gardening and herbarium-based systematics.

True and Proper Pictures

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-142
Author(s):  
Karen Polinger Foster
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Botanical Gardens ◽  
Historical Landscape ◽  
Pictorial Structure ◽  
Medical Treatises ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter assesses the representation of exotica in European art. This depiction sheds considerable light on the constructs of veracity and the bounds of imagery, from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. In addition to their subsidiary but vital roles in historical landscape and commemorative narrative, exotica served as the principals in natural history illustration. Among the first works with detailed, if schematized, illuminations of flora and fauna were religious texts and medieval editions of ancient medical treatises. These largely didactic presentations of European plants and animals provided the pictorial structure for the earliest renderings of exotica. Whether artists drew them from life in the course of their travels, viewed them in menageries and botanical gardens, or based their illustrations on collections of dried or stuffed specimens, they placed their subjects against uniformly plain backgrounds. Land mammals, aquatic creatures, and plants were suspended in a pristine world, while birds were shown perched upon accessory branches.

Edward Blyth, John M'Clelland, the curatorship of the Asiatic Society's collections and the origins of the Calcutta journal of natural history

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Mathew
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Asiatic Society ◽  
Part Time

This paper explores the origins of the Calcutta journal of natural history (1841–1848) and the search from the 1830s for a permanent curator for the collections of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Edward Blyth (1810–1873) was appointed, even though John M'Clelland (or McClelland) (1805–1883), who founded the Calcutta journal of natural history, had acted as part-time curator of the collections for two years before Blyth's arrival in Calcutta. An analysis of the Society and the journal allows reconsideration of the significance of natural history in India in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Dupont family: collectors, dealers and naturalists in nineteenth-century Paris

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Mearns ◽  
Laurent Chevrier ◽  
Christophe Gouraud
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family History ◽  
Natural History ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Anatomical Models ◽  
The Family ◽  
Small Collection

In the early part of the nineteenth century the Dupont brothers ran separate natural history businesses in Paris. Relatively little is known about their early life but an investigation into the family history at Bayeux corrects Léonard Dupont's year of birth from 1795 to 1796. In 1818 Léonard joined Joseph Ritchie's expedition to North Africa to assist in collecting and preparing the discoveries but he did not get beyond Tripoli. After 15 months he came back to Paris with a small collection from Libya and Provence, and returned to Provence in 1821. While operating as a dealer-naturalist in Paris he published Traité de taxidermie (1823, 1827), developed a special interest in foreign birds and became well known for his anatomical models in coloured wax. Henry Dupont sold a range of natural history material and with his particular passion for beetles formed one of the finest collections in Europe; his best known publication is Monographie des Trachydérides (1836–1840). Because the brothers had overlapping interests and were rarely referred to by their forenames there has been confusion between them and the various eponyms that commemorate them. Although probably true, it would be an over-simplification to state that birds of this era named for Dupont refer to Léonard Dupont, insects to Henry Dupont, and molluscs to their mother.

Peeping at nature with the Reverend Charles A. Hall FRMS (1872–1965)

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Visual Appeal ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Simple Language ◽  
Quality Production

Attention is drawn to the contents, pedagogic style and visual appeal of the 17-volume “Peeps at nature” series published by A. & C. Black between 1911 and 1935. Edited by the Reverend Charles Albert Hall (a Swedenborgian minister), who also contributed most of the titles, this series was a quality production but one that was cheap enough to be readily accessible to young readers. Its volumes were written in simple language and included colour pictures. With time, the flamboyant artistry of the covers that so characterized the earlier volumes was replaced by more muted designs, possibly to reduce production costs. Later contributors abandoned anthropomorphism and the moralizing tone of many nineteenth-century popularizers of natural history, although styles of writing varied between the early and later contributors to the series, becoming less technical with time.

Correspondence between Adolphe Brongniart and Robert Schomburgk: trading natural history collections for honours

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-336
Author(s):  
PIOTR DASZKIEWICZ ◽  
MICHEL JEGU
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Herbarium Specimens ◽  
British Guiana ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
German Naturalist

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses some correspondence between Robert Schomburgk (1804–1865) and Adolphe Brongniart (1801–1876). Four letters survive, containing information about the history of Schomburgk's collection of fishes and plants from British Guiana, and his herbarium specimens from Dominican Republic and southeast Asia. A study of these letters has enabled us to confirm that Schomburgk supplied the collection of fishes from Guiana now in the Laboratoire d'Ichtyologie, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. The letters of the German naturalist are an interesting source of information concerning the practice of sale and exchange of natural history collections in the nineteenth century in return for honours.

Clothing in Context — Nineteenth-Century Dress and Textiles in the Thomas Hardy Archive

Costume ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Famous People ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Textiles And Clothing ◽  
Insight Into

This article will consider how dress, textiles, manuscripts and images in the Thomas Hardy Archive illuminate his writing and reveal the accuracy of his descriptions of clothing in novels including Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Rural clothing, fashionable styles, drawings and illustrations will shed new light on his writing through providing an insight into the people's dress he described so eloquently in his writing. The textiles and clothing in the Archive are also significant as nineteenth-century working-class dress is relatively rare. Everyday rural clothing does not tend to survive, so a collection belonging to Hardy's family of country stonemasons provides new opportunities for research in this area. Even more unusual is clothing reliably provenanced to famous people or writers, and such garments that do exist tend to be from the middle or upper classes. This article will show how the combination of surviving dress, biographical context and literary framework enriches understanding of Hardy's words and informs research into nineteenth-century rural dress.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

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