Day 267: The Loudons and the Gardening Press

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

Day 221: The Honourable Company

Although for much of the seventeenth century the Dutch and English were bitter rivals throughout the East, on the long voyage to and from Europe hostilities were usually suspended. At the Cape and at St Helena ships of the London Company amicably exchanged news and provisions with those of the V.O.C. Hadah was postman for both Companies; and occasionally Dutch and English ships actually sailed together.

This was not the case with the Portuguese. Anywhere outside European waters Spain/Portugal continued to regard the ships of the Protestant powers as little better than pirates and, peace treaties notwithstanding, they jealously maintained the exclusive character of their eastern bases. In the Arabian Sea further English endeavours at Surat and Swalley between 1612 and 1620 were seen as a direct challenge to Portugal’s maritime supremacy on the very threshold of its eastern metropolis at Goa. The Portuguese would respond vigorously. But once again a purely Indo-centric reading of these engagements is misleading. At stake was a dominant role not just in India’s external trade but in that of all the trading coasts of the Arabian Sea including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Naval battles in the Gulf of Cambay would have counted for little had not the Portuguese also been challenged at Hormuz, Goa, and a host of lesser ports from the coast of Mozambique to that of Malabar. Hostilities would last for twenty years; and they would embrace the whole trading world between Africa and India.

In 1612, blissfully ignorant of Sir Henry Middleton’s débâcles at Mocha and Surat, the Company had despatched two more ships for Surat, the Twelfth Voyage, under the command of Thomas Best, a highly experienced master mariner. The commander, or ‘General’, of an East India Company fleet controlled two distinct establishments, the one nautical and headed by his subordinate captains and masters and the other commercial and headed by one or more chief merchants. Almost invariably commanders were appointed on the strength of their performances during a previous voyage; and usually they were merchants who had thus acquired some knowledge of navigation. Hence the ideal commander should be part sailor, part merchant and, if possible, part ‘man of fashion and good respect’. But Thomas Best was just a sailor. Presumably the loss of the Ascension had convinced the directors that amongst Gujarat’s treacherous mud banks navigational skills were more important than social graces. The difference is evident in Best’s journal which triumphantly belies the idea that seventeenth-century travelogues were necessarily discursive and entertaining. True to his calling, Best merely kept a log.

Terse and laconic as it is, it is nevertheless odd that this document contains no mention of the fleet’s first contact with the Portuguese which occurred in the Mozambique channel north of Madagascar. In what may be a reference to it, Best elsewhere refers to ‘the goodliest ship thatt ever I sawe’ as being a Portuguese carrack ‘with a tower of ordnance beseeming a castell’. From the journal of one of his subordinates it appears that there were in fact two such ships off Madagascar, each of over 1500 tons and each intent on putting its tower of ordnance to good use. Broadsides were exchanged and at least three Portuguese killed before Best ‘steered away his course’. ‘For yt was contrarie to commission to meddle with them in respecte of peace we have with their king.’ But the English crews were ‘prepared to feight’ and if they felt somewhat cheated by Best’s delicacy, their rancour would be short-lived.

Best reached the mouth of the Tapti river in September 1612, only six months after Middleton had been ordered to sea by Mukarrab Khan. The news that all the English factors had been withdrawn was depressing enough but when word arrived of Middleton’s retaliatory activities in the Red Sea, Best despaired. The news affected him ‘like a drinke of cold water to a man on a cold and frostie morning’. Already two of his factors had been captured by the Portuguese. As soon as he could secure their release he was all for beating a hasty retreat towards Bantam.

But his remaining factors were more sanguine and Best, reckoning they knew their own business best, sensibly deferred to them. It seemed that for once the Moghul officials were being positively obliging. Perhaps they were worried that Best might follow Middleton’s example and blockade their shipping in the Red Sea. Perhaps they had simply reevaluated the advantages of a new trading partner and a new source of largesse. At all events a farman granting interim trading rights was immediately forthcoming, a promise was made that within forty days it would be ratified by Jehangir, and the English were invited to send another representative to Agra to negotiate a permanent agreement. It was as if the dismissals of Hawkins and Middleton had all been a terrible mistake. Within days of the fleet’s arrival new emissaries and a new letter from King James were on their way to Court. So were some of the presents known to please the dilettante emperor. There were paintings ‘espetially such as discover Venus’ and Cupid’s actes’ and there were various musical instruments in the care of Lancelot Canning, a virtuoso on the virginals, and Robert Trully, a cornettist. The latter found high favour with Jehangir. He converted to Islam and eventually blew his cornet in half the courts of India. Not so Lancelot Canning. The virginals proved too insipid for Moghul tastes and the mortified Canning, a distant kinsman of India’s future Viceroy, is described as having ‘dyed of conceitt’.

Best meanwhile repaired to Swalley to await Jehangir’s confirmation of the farman. As usual during any period in port the crews took to drinking and gambling. Even at ill-appointed Swalley Hole two men were ducked from the yard-arm for swimming ashore on the Sabbath and getting ‘drinking drunke with whores ashore’. Instructions issued to the commanders of all Company fleets proscribed such conduct in the most vigorous terms. But as with the injunctions against private trade, those against blasphemy, gaming and drunkenness were habitually ignored. They may be seen as implying not that the English seafarer of the seventeenth century was a God-fearing paragon of Puritan virtues but exactly the opposite.

It took the arrival of an impressive Portuguese fleet to bring the Swalley revellers to their senses. There were four galleons (warships, smaller than the cargo-carrying carracks but larger than any of the English vessels) and twenty-five inshore frigates. They had been dispatched from Goa and their instructions were to disperse the new English challenge by force of arms.

In the engagements that followed – and in those fought by ships of Richard Downton’s fleet two years later – the Portuguese were apparently the stronger. They had more ships and their ships had more men. They were also larger and, under full sail, faster. But they were of deeper draught, less manoeuvrable, poorly crewed, and under-gunned. Portuguese tactics still relied heavily on grappling-irons and fire-ships, the idea being to panic the enemy and then get alongside him for a full-blooded boarding in which higher superstructures and numerical superiority must prove decisive.

But all this assumed that men-of-war were just floating castles and that their defenders would always heave to and fight it out. This was not how the English had frustrated the Armada and, according to a disgruntled Portuguese account, it was not how Best chose to conduct his battles in the Gulf of Cambay.

~~The Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company -by- John Keay

Day 113: Book Excerpt: Blood On The Tracks

The Murder of Thomas Briggs

Where better to start than with the first murder on a moving train in Britain? This provoked what – up to then – was the greatest manhunt in British legal history.

You have to imagine Mr Thomas Briggs. He was an aldermanic figure, the epitome of Victorian middle-class respectability. In 1864 he was sixty-nine years of age, tallish, silver-haired, immaculately dressed and sporting a flowing white beard. Altogether, he was a most distinguished-looking gentleman. He was the chief clerk of Robarts, Lubbock & Co., a banking house in the City of London, a position which he had only obtained through a long career of diligent duty and unassailable probity.

He was wearing the kind of clothes he normally wore when travelling to and from work. These included a distinctive high silk hat. He also had an expensive-looking gold chain stretched across his capacious midriff, the chain being attached to a fine gold watch in his waistcoat pocket. He carried a bag in one hand, and a stout walking stick in the other.

On 9 July 1864, a Saturday, he left the office around half-past four and travelled to Peckham, south of the Thames, for dinner with his niece and her husband. Briggs was a widower and he made the pilgrimage to No.23 Nelson Square, now Furley Road, every week. They ate well. They always did. It was still light at half-past eight when he left, his bag now empty because its contents had consisted of little presents for the niece of whom he was very fond. He boarded a horse-bus back to King William Street in the City. He then walked briskly (that was his way; he was very fit and strong for his age), to Fenchurch Street station where he climbed into a first-class compartment on a train of the North London Railway.

He caught the train with a couple of minutes to spare but no one else joined him in the compartment at Fenchurch Street. The train pulled out five minutes late at 9.50p.m. to start the roundabout route to his destination at Hackney via Shadwell, Stepney and Bow. Much of the route ran on low viaducts which gave a bird’s eye view of the rooftops of poor inner-city housing and the myriad of small, often rather noxious, industrial premises and workshops then so characteristic of that part of London’s East End. Hackney, however, was a cut above, boasting a respectable gentility.

The North London Railway had only just over thirteen miles of its own line, but its trains also ran on over fifty miles of line belonging to other companies. The North London Railway had an importance out of all proportion to its size because its small network linked the main lines coming into London from the north and west with the City and with the docks in the east. Its first London terminus was at Fenchurch Street via the circuitous route taken by the train conveying Briggs, but later it opened up services running more directly into the Broad Street terminus. This was a substantial station adjacent to Liverpool Street and which stood where the Broadgate development now is.

It may have been a small company but it was a proud one, and it had little time for the lower end of the travel market. Until 1875 it only catered for first and second-class passengers. It possessed a fleet of small but powerful 4-4-0 tank engines and its four-wheeled carriages were quite luxurious by the standards of the time.

It was a warm evening and almost totally dark as the train trundled along. A weak light in the ceiling provided only partial illumination. Briggs had worked all day, had eaten well, and was dozing fitfully. At Bow he exchanged brief pleasantries through his open carriage window with an acquaintance called Lee, who later averred that there were two other passengers in the compartment. One he described as thin and dark, the other as stoutish, thickset and lightly whiskered. Lee remembered being mildly surprised to see Briggs travelling at such a late hour. He was also surprised by the appearance of the other occupants of the carriage; they did not look like first-class passengers. Later, when he was in the witness box, he admitted that he had had a drink or two in a local pub. The general feeling in court was that ‘a drink or two’ actually meant several, or even many, drinks.

The train pulled out of Bow, being due to arrive at the next stopping place, Victoria Park, Hackney Wick, in a few minutes. The train was now four minutes behind time. The next compartment to that occupied by Briggs was also first class and was occupied by a draper called Withall and a female traveller. They were not together. As the train was approaching Hackney, Withall described how he heard a sudden and strange howling noise, reminiscent of a dog in distress. His unknown female companion made a remark to the same effect. In another compartment close by, a female passenger had the unpleasant experience of being spattered with drops of blood that came in through the open window. She later said that she had heard no untoward noises.

When the train arrived at Hackney, two young men-about-town, Henry Verney and Sydney Jones, were waiting to join the train to travel to Highbury, and they stepped into the compartment in which Briggs had started his journey. It was empty but, although it was very poorly lit, they soon realised that a lot of blood was scattered around the compartment. A number of personal items could be seen. These were a black leather bag and a walking stick. Under the seat lay a black beaver hat, so squashed that it looked as if someone had stood on it. Thoroughly alarmed, they managed to get the attention of the guard who directed them to another compartment.

The guard was intensely irritated by this turn of events. The train was already late and the North London Railway prided itself on the punctuality of its trains. He gave the compartment a quick visual going-over, enough to make it obvious to him that it had very recently witnessed foul play. He locked the compartment and gave instructions for a telegraph message to be sent to the superintendent at Chalk Farm, the station where the train terminated. There the carriage was uncoupled and shunted into a siding to await examination by the police.

Meanwhile the driver of a train proceeding in the opposite direction saw a dark object lying close to the track near the bridge over the ‘Duckett Cut’. This waterway, more correctly known as Sir George Duckett’s Canal, joined the Lea Navigation to the Regents Canal at Old Ford. It had opened in 1830. The train was brought to a halt and the guard, engine driver and firemen all descended to track level to investigate. They found that the object was the body of a man, battered, bloodied and still alive, although only just.

With considerable difficulty, they carried him down to the street where they were fortunate to encounter a police officer going around his beat. He summoned assistance and a doctor was soon on the scene. His initial impression was that the injuries on the left-hand side of the man’s head had probably been sustained by his fall from a train. However, two violent blows had fractured his skull. Briggs’s inert body was first of all taken to a nearby pub which did unusually good trade as the news got around. It was later transported to his home in Clapton Square where he died late the next evening. He never regained consciousness.

This horrible murder stirred up a hornets’ nest of outraged headlines and articles in the newspapers. ‘Murder on the Iron Way’ thundered one newspaper truthfully, while another, tending more to hyperbole asked, ‘Who is safe? If we may be murdered thus we may be slain in our pew at church, or assassinated at our dinner table’. This first railway murder emphasised just how vulnerable passengers in compartments could be to the depredations of malefactors, even in the biggest city in the world.

~~Blood On The Tracks: A History Of Railway Crime In Britain -by- David Brandon And Alan Brooke

Day 110: Book Excerpt: Medieval and Early Modern Science

1. Alchemical Poetry in Late Medieval England

In the fifteenth century, on the threshold of the early modern period, England witnessed tremendous political, social and cultural change. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge operated amidst a growing number of academic institutions in the British Isles and in continental Europe—the Scottish universities of St. Andrews (1411) and Glasgow (1451) were part of a surge of new academic foundations—and headed the vibrant international scholarly exchange characteristic of the pre-Reformation period. The scholarly study of natural philosophy thrived alongside medical doctors’ attempts to contain epidemics, a general enthusiasm for astrological intelligence and its applications, and an increasingly vigorous flow of scientific information to a wider range of audiences. Scientific communication evolved amidst the contemporary cultivation of poetry that inspired Chaucer’s successors, John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, as well as James I of Scotland. Meanwhile, craftsmen continued to work under the guardianship of the guilds while adding literacy to their set of professional skills.

Alchemy, a craft based on an intricate theoretical system, intersected naturally with university disciplines concerned with natural philosophy on a theoretical level, and with some crafts on a practical level. Not organised in a guild, it was commonly practised both by those who came into contact with alchemical lore in bibliophilic environments (scholars, clerics, medical doctors, etc.) and by craftsmen engaged with metals, furnaces and the modification of substances (smelters, smiths and workers in the mining industry). Sophistication of practice and individual emphasis on theory or practice necessarily varied between these groups as well as from one individual to another. But in the fifteenth century in particular craftsmen with alchemical leanings refined their knowledge in a newly revived combination of word and deed, in the workshop and on paper. It was in this environment, and  in the course of just a few decades, that Middle English alchemical poetry became the most emblematic, successful and current expression of the craft and its teachings.

The written world of alchemy into which alchemical poetry was introduced looked back upon a relatively homogeneous tradition. Although medieval manuscripts may be quite diverse in content and written expression, it is possible to discern two main types of medieval alchemical literature: firstly, ancient, traditional, Arabic or Greek texts, often theoretical in nature. These ancient texts had passed easily into the Latin tradition of the Middle Ages, which added large corpora of pseudonymous alchemica, populated under the names of ancient authorities, to the body of literature. They continued to be circulated, adapted and applied in the fifteenth century. This part of alchemical literature (both ancient and imitated) was associated closely with the high culture of writing, monasteries and, in the later Middle Ages, academic contexts. Secondly, medieval alchemical literature included texts written in, and for, the workshop. This pragmatic, applied body of texts consists of recipes and working notes, often of more imminent and recent origin than the traditional texts mentioned before. They were frequently noted down either in blank spaces of theoretical manuscripts or, as time passed, in dedicated volumes and craft recipe collections, so-called books of secrets, many of which are lost to the historical record. It was particularly this latter branch of alchemical writing that produced Middle English alchemical verse.

If a novelty in alchemical writing in the fifteenth century, Middle English alchemical poetry was nevertheless based on an ancient tradition, one that defined its genre and medium: like all medieval scientific poetry alchemical verse evolved as an adaptation, imitation, translation and continuation of classical didactic poetry. Poetry had been the preferred educational medium of classical Rome and was reintroduced to the canon of elevating and instructive writings in the course of the humanist revival of late medieval Europe. Didactic poems by Lucretius and Pliny, Manilius and pseudo-Aristotle enjoyed a particularly enthusiastic reception. The world of knowledge preserved in the extensive body of medieval scientific poetry developed to be rather more inclusive than either an ancient or a modern concept of science and its objects would imply. Poetic works relating to medicine and botany, to astronomy, astrology and cosmology, were joined by technical poetry, e.g. on masonry, by rhymed culinary recipes and household books, by grammatical rules and other items related to academic education and the artes proper, as well as encyclopaedic poetry, an extensive digest of various branches of scientific knowledge. Writers of the late medieval and early modern periods also accepted alchemical recipes among the subjects worthy of versification, both enthusiastically and for the last time in history.

~~Medieval and Early Modern Science -ed- J.M.M.H. Thijssen and C.H. Lüthy