Curiosity, Commerce, and Conversation in the Writing of London Horticulturists during the Early-Eighteenth Century
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This dissertation explores the social and literary worlds of horticulturists
who lived, worked, and wrote in early-eighteenth-century London. The period
witnessed not only a growing market for printed books and pamphlets about
gardening, but also the emergence of the nurseryman as a distinct commercial and
cultural identity. In many cases, trading nurserymen also published horticultural
writing, their texts exploiting the publicity of representation both in order to
persuade readers of the quality and reliability of their goods and services, and to
evidence a wide range of intellectual interests and social aspirations. At the same
time, increasing numbers of more gentlemanly authors had recourse to nursery
and physic (or botanical) gardens and their curators as authoritative sources for
their own manuals of horticulture and treatises of natural philosophy.
Part one addresses the publications produced by nursery-gardeners and
seedsmen during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Through
close-readings of texts by George London and Henry Wise, Thomas Fairchild, and
John Cowell, chapters one and two examine how such men sought to represent
themselves as polite and precise practitioners of gardening successful in their
businesses, sociable in their dispositions, and curious in their approaches to the
natural world. Chapter three embellishes these themes by describing the
genealogy and formation of the Society of Gardeners, a voluntary association of
horticultural tradesmen.
Part two (chapters four and five) locates these broad arguments more
specifically, by presenting a biographical account of Richard Bradley, the most
important and prolific horticultural writer of the 1710s and 1720s. Combining
published and manuscript resources these chapters interrogate pivotal moments in
Bradley's career, demonstrating how its undulating trajectory was shaped by the
opportunities and limitations afforded within the spaces of physic gardens (both
real and projected), and ultimately turned on his capacity for manipulating
contemporary practices and conventions of curiosity and sociability.
Authors
Coulton, RichardCollections
- Theses [3930]