Archive for March, 2010
|Loudon Lunch
Friday, March 19th, 2010
Late in the day I agreed to contribute entries on gardening magazines for the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism. This led to many pleasant hours in the University of Reading periodicals archive and the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library, where I made my re-acquaintance with Jane Webb Loudon. I knew her as the author of The Mummy! a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), an extraordinary novel written to support herself in her late teens, which imagined not only the fashion and invention of the far future but the social change that would accompany them. The strict word count meant that I had to leave out the heated exchange between George Glenny, the contentious and argumentative editor of horticultural magazines in the 1830s and 40s, and Webb’s husband, JC Loudon:
“[…] his old woman is a mischievous beldam, and that the plates in question never appeared anywhere till they were published in the Horticultural Journal. We hate old women at the best of times, but a lying old woman is abominable, and the sooner Loudon shakes the hag off the better” (Desmond, 1980:90)
No-one else speaks of Jane Webb Loudon in this way but little is really known about her. Her daughter reports that she burnt all her personal papers just before her death and any reference to her own accomplishments in her husband’s biography is brief and modest. However, the evidence of the vituperative nature of early popular periodical publishing, which JW Loudon entered as the editor of The Ladies’ Magazine of Gardening (1841), caught the imagination of Andrew King who asked me to research more about early professional women writers in this field for Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. While doing so, and feeling that I was working on something relatively obscure, I came across three other colleagues who I know from studies in twentieth century science fiction, gothic and the supernatural and children’s literature, who have all worked on Loudon and all bemoaned the gaps in our knowledge. So Andy Sawyer and I met for our long awaited Loudon Lunch to see how we could bring researchers together to resolve this situation.
Andy Sawyer, the librarian for the Science Fiction Foundation collection at the University of Liverpool, is particularly interested in the relationship between Mary Shelley and Jane Loudon as they formulate an English vocabulary for speculative accounts of the future. “You can’t”, Sawyer says, “mother science fiction twice, so there has to be a more nuanced way to think about the early contribution these women writers made to science fiction”. Both of us are interested in Loudon’s early years as a writer, her role as a salaried contributor for the prominent editor Jerdan, her friendship with Catherine Crowe, and her early involvement with a number of cultural figures: John Martin and his family, Wilkie Collins, the Howitts and the Landseers as well as the editor Tom Taylor who would be so important for Punch. Andy Sawyer directed me to the Crowe/Larken collection at the University of Kent and to Lucy Sussex, who has a chapter on Crowe in her forthcoming book for Palgrave Macmillan, Women Writers and Detectives in the Nineteenth Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre.
Tracking down materials as well as finding experts in the different fields in which Loudon wrote has proved an interesting trail to follow. Bea Howe’s popular biography of Jane Webb Loudon (which Heath Schenker describes as highly fictionalized) had the benefit of drawing on her adolescent daughter’s diary. However, just beginning to contact researchers who might be interested in contributing to a conference on Loudon’s life and work has revealed a manuscript which has recently come into the possession of Sheffield Hallam University. Alan Rauch, contemporary editor for the The Mummy and author of Useful Knowledge, The Victorians, Morality and the March of Intellect, is hopeful that someone will find the correspondence between Loudon and Walter Scott. It would be interesting to know more about Loudon’s father and his possible connections with scientists in eighteenth-century Birmingham. Further investigation of Loudon’s dealings with the publishers Bradbury and Evans might reveal unknown creative ventures from her later years.
I am very fortunate to be working not only with Andy Sawyer but also Georgina O’Brien Hill, who had originally planned a conference on later nineteenth century women and science fiction. Her colleague Michelle Parslow has worked on both Loudon and fin de siècle women’s science fiction and was inspired by the discussion at the ‘Utopian Spaces of British Literature and Culture 1890-1945’ conference held at the University of Oxford in September last year. By combining fictional and educational engagements with science, we can bring together several different academic approaches and areas of knowledge in order to understand women’s contribution to these genres during the nineteenth century. The life, work and example of Jane Webb Loudon has enabled us to compose a call for papers that should be meaningful to a large number of different networks: those interested in popular science, the periodical press, the articulation of social reform across the nineteenth century, gardening, education, natural history, professional writing, the development of science fiction and the formation of Victorian domestic sensibility. So a conference is set for 27th -28th June 2011 at Trinity University Leeds and we are very fortunate to have Matthew Beaumont, Alan Rauch, Andy Sawyer and Ann Shteir as plenary speakers.
For me it is Loudon’s tales of fauna rather than flora which have stayed with me as she addressed myth and anecdote with her own observations. The tales she tells of natural history look at the place of domestic animals in everyday life, during a time in which their cultural welfare undergoes immense social change. She notes “the agacity of the cat in detecting criminals” (1851:50) and their need to revenge human cruelty. In doing so she reveals her own life in her writing: “my mother had a servant who disliked cats exceedingly, and particularly a large black cat which we had, which she was in the habit of beating whenever she had the opportunity. The cat disliked the girl but was always afraid of her: one day, however, when the girl was carrying some dishes downstairs into the kitchen, and had both her hands full, the cat flew at her, and scratched her arms and face severely” (1851:51).
Nickianne Moody, ARPF Convenor, Liverpool John Moores University.
For references see Loudon bibliography; additions gratefully received.
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Happy World Book Day
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
WBD isn’t quite as commercialised as Christmas, but its sponsors – The Publishers’ Association, The Booksellers’ Association and National Book Tokens – definitely want to establish reading and book buying as a habit at an impressionable age. WBD is a celebration of reading for pleasure. Originally designated in 1995 by UNESCO, it is usually celebrated on the 23rd April, following the local custom in Catalonia where roses and books were given to loved ones on St George’s Day. In Britain and Ireland it is usually celebrated in the first week of March and since 1998 has been associated with the donation of free £1 book tokens for children. World Book Day Ltd is a registered charity which encourages schools and libraries to hold events and some of the most innovative events this year are an ‘Extreme Reading’ photo competition being held by a school in Wales where staff and students are hunting for weird and wonderful places to enjoy a book; WBD parades (I wonder just how many will dress up as Harry Potter or the Gruffalo); a competition to design a bookbag; and a ‘Can’t Read Won’t Read’ event to help the struggling reader. All of these events might be relevant topics for the 14th Annual ARPF conference ‘Popular Fictions: Selling Culture’.
WBD is one of a range of initiatives to entice the reluctance reader into the bookshop which have been promoted by the book trade, i.e. reading groups, government strategies such as the ‘Year of Reading’ and literacy charities which enable authors to meet their young readers. The most successful of these has to be The Big Read in 2003. The BBC’s involvement was central for this community outreach programme as it offered high profile television coverage alongside other media platforms, with participation by the general public at external events, such as those still being continued by WBD. The Big Read promoted the message that celebrities and ordinary people were passionate about reading and confident about the pleasures of popular books.
Discussions during that year as the nation debated its favourite books, found that participants regularly commented on disappointing comparisons between childhood and adult reading; they saw adult reading as governed by a literary paradigm that legitimates intellectual pleasure but dismisses the emotional pleasures of childhood experience of books. Research which had informed the government’s 1999 Reading and Literacy Campaign adopted a strategy of jettisoning books and the chore of a book at bedtime in order to motivate parental involvement and support for a far more functional approach to their child’s reading (Broadbent, 2000).
So although WBD focuses on children and very young potential readers, who may enjoy the bounce and rhyme sessions held today at local libraries, the charity is also thinking of the third of people in the UK identified by a 2005 Bookseller survey as never reading books. The research discovered that readers were polarised between being non-readers (34%) and heavy readers who read on average over half an hour a day and bought between 30 to 40 books a year (Dean 2005). So WBD Ltd returns us to the pleasures of reading. The cartoon motifs for the pages of the charity’s website affirm the relationship between reading and consumption, showing a girl eating sweets but not taking her eyes from the comic in her lap. Books are larger than the children who read them, and a boy in a car is surprised by the book he is reading, while one girl reads while flying accompanied by her co-pilot cat. That reminds me: WBD heralds the coming of another important feast day, for Gertrude of Nivelles, the patron saint of cats and catlovers, on March 17th. I hope that you enjoy either or both of these celebrations.
Nickianne Moody, ARPF Convenor, Liverpool John Moores University.
Broadbent, T (2000) ‘Reading and literacy- how advertising mobilised parents to help improve the reading ability of their children’ Advertising Works 11 World Advertising Research Centre, Henley-on-Thames
Dean, J (2005) ‘Readers like us’ The Bookseller, February 11 ‘Expanding the Market Supplement’
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