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COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University
TO THE MAJORITY OF LITERARY SCHOLARS, THE FIELDS OF ROMANTIC LIFE science remain, along with their speculative import for future inquiry, subjects at once peripheral, discrete, and arcane. Published work on romantic life science by literary scholars even in recent years has been constrained, understandably, by the need to address the canonical writers and their somewhat familiar scientific associations--to Wordsworth's reading of Erasmus Darwin on the senses and his use of geometric symbols; to Coleridge's evocations of German natural philosophy and his interest in Blumenbach's theory of race; to Blake and prevailing theories of generation; to Byron, Cuvier and the catastrophists' obsession with revolutionary chaos; to the Shelleys, Davy's chemistry, Erasmus Darwin's botany, and vegetarianism; to Mary Shelley, monstrosity and obstetrics; to Keats, brain physiology and radical medicine. (1) Surely romantic life science deserves more, and more ranging, attention from us? And surely there could be many more studies of the literary consequences of this fertile science as we address an expanded canon? This essay, with collegial exhortation, will survey those subjects and avenues in the fields of romantic life science that can be mined, fruitfully, in future literary and cultural studies of the period. It will propose topics that are broadly philosophical as well as those that are specific to a given science; it will note exemplary but neglected work from the 1990s and earlier decades that remains both useful and seminal, along with primary bibliographical sources that can support future work; it will also attempt to shift the focus of inquiry away from the canonical and anglocentric to the pioneering scientific ideas shared by English and European life scientists of the period, and to the unexplored cultural concerns engendered by their speculations and propositions concerning life.
The Romantic Conception of Life (2003) by Robert J. Richards, with its wide-ranging and original discussions of the subject, is an ideal place to begin further study. Greg Garrard's 1997 essay, meanwhile, serves as an exemplary piece on the broad and speculative implications for the romantic period of botanical natural history detail. Impossibly titled "An Absence of Azaleas: Imperialism, Exoticism and Nativity in Romantic Biogeographical Ideology," Garrard's essay is an ingenious evocation of the social and political implications of the humble but originally exotic rhododendron in Britain. Brought to England from Asia (purportedly) in 1763 as a curious shrub, cultivated at Kew Gardens that soon-to-be "synecdoche of empire" among other "exotics" from British trading places, hybridized and introduced into the British countryside of Cumberland and Snowdonia during the romantic period, the rhododendron is now considered an alien junk weed (in all its nine hundred varieties!) by English Heritage gardeners; it is at once too native to English soil and not British enough in its origins; a harmful consequence of experiments in colonial hybridity, it is something to be rooted out or "clensed" from the Lake District. (2) Natural historian Carl Linnaeus deserves first blame here for he, first, sought to grow bananas, coffee and other tropical fruits in frigid Sweden, and lusted for coconuts that would sprout in Nordic air--as he declared, "should coconuts chance to come into my hands ... it would be as if fried Birds of Paradise flew into my throat when I opened my mouth." In Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (2000) Lisbet Koerner traces how Linnaeus sought to feed Sweden's peasants and advance his nation's natural history and gustatory empire through the agriculture of exotic fruits. Koerner's research is useful in its implications here because British natural historians followed Linnaeus' example in exotic cultivation, and they specifically used his theory of gradual acclimatization in alien environments for their own experiments in adaptation. (3)
Linnaean trials of acclimatization were preceded, of course, by the easy transportation of living plants between parallel geographies and conducive climates by the botanists of the Portuguese and Spanish empires. Tobacco and red chili plants from the Americas, and peanut and sweet potato tubers from Africa, brought to the Moghul court in sixteenth-century India by the Portuguese, found an immediate home in the subcontinent and soon came to flourish as "native" plants and indispensable agricultural products of the country to later generations and conquerors. The pineapple, "discovered" in 1513 in South America by "stout Cortez" and brought to Europe as the most succulent of exotic fruits, also found cultivation through Portuguese husbandry in the orchards of Madras and a favored place on the Moghul emperor Jehangir's breakfast table (4)--even as it began its inexorable passage from mere gustatory delight to become that symbol of fertility and connubial bliss used to decorate the bedposts of Victorian Britain. The stories of the cotton seed, the rubber plant, the Asian poppy flower, and the quinine tree (like the stories of breadfruit and sugarcane), stories which began in earlier centuries and then came to have special import in a romantic and increasingly imperial Britain, have yet to be written. Also yet to be traced in broad literary and cultural terms are the passages of botanical forms such as these between Britain's colonies, their movement from exotic wonder to useful colonial product, and from fond hybrid to noxious import, each according to the shifting political and social (and medical) imperatives of empire and its aftermath.
The cargo of the H.M.S. Bounty--whose mutinous crew found poetic immortality in Byron's tale of utopian ambiguity and Englishmen homesick in paradise (The Island, 1823)--was an uprooted forest of breadfruit trees from Tahiti. These trees, carefully bound and watered and far more valuable than any human cargo, were intended for transplanting and cultivation in the Caribbean islands, and they stand as substance and symbol of a widespread romantic familiarity with the practices of inter-colonial acculturation by contemporary botanists and natural historians. When Sir Joseph Banks became President of the Royal Society in 1778, he made his office the official repository of exotic specimens from South America, Asia and Africa; he actively solicited from travelers like Alexander von Humboldt and missionaries like Reginald Heber those specimens of rare exotic life intensely poisonous plants, brilliant tropical mollusks, giant Pacific clams, iridescent geiger-tree beetles, deadly electric eels--culled dead or alive, and then disseminated these remarkable items among British laboratories and gardens for study and cultivation. Kew Gardens, under Banks's supervision between 1772 and 1820, served as a botanical clearing house and advanced laboratory for the thousands of new plants arriving in Britain during each shipment cycle. Banks's journal of the trip to the South Pacific on the H.M.S. Endeavour with Captain Cook 0768-71) and his Florilegium...
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