The Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822) was the first of a series of encyclopaedias produced by John Loudon. 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. The entry ‘Of the Education of Gardeners’, however, was subject to several alterations. 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. 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’. 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. ‘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.
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.
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. 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.
~~The Loudons and the Gardening Press: A Victorian Cultural Industry -by- Sarah Dewis
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