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 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