Arpf

Loudon Lunch

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 27^th -28^th 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.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.