Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture by Theresa M. Kelley (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 625 belief that he was “a good poet—but a better historian, & the better for having been accustomed to feel & think as a poet” (CLRS 1024). Stuart Andrews thus points decisively towards a reassessment of Southey as Ro­ mantic historian, prime-mover towards a Romantic poetics of culture. Tom Duggett Xi’an Jiaotong—Liverpool University Theresa M. Kelley. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. Balti­ more: Thejohns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+342. $55. In recent years, a good deal of important work has been done on the close relationship between literature and the rise of natural history as a dominant cultural activity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of these studies have focused upon the close ties between natural history and colonialism, and rightly so, because the sheer number of specimens, illus­ trations, and descriptions of foreign natures that appeared in Britain at the time was inseparably bound up with the increasing commercial and impe­ rial reach of Britain. The excitement occasioned by new natures, especially foreign plants, was driven by the spectacular rise during the eighteenth century of the science of botany and the emergence—across a wide spec­ trum of British society—of an extensive cultural interest in gardening. These changes, along with rising inland exploration, the expansion of global trade, and improvements in print technology, made it possible for plants (and illustrations of them) to flood into Britain like never before. The love of plants was integrally bound up with scientific networks and with the plant trade, as the science of botany became a dominant element in the aesthetics and consumer habits of an imperial nation. In her deeply engaging and erudite book Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Cul­ ture, Theresa M. Kelley acknowledges this account of the hegemony of botany during the Romantic period, but she wants to tell a different story. Against the emphasis upon the ways in which scientific taxonomies con­ stituted a means ofsurveying and controlling natures from a distance, mak­ ing plant knowledge exchangeable among scientists while supplying shop­ ping lists for consumers, Kelley is interested in those aspects of botany during the Romantic period that were not about consumption, utility, and control, but instead were transgressive in undercutting imperial and taxonomic certainties. This is a book in which the figurative dimensions of plants do not function, as others have argued, to store and consoli­ date power, but instead to emancipate those who view or read them. Kelley is committed to seeing figural errancy and difference as inherently SiR, S3 (Winter 2014) 626 BOOK REVIEWS emancipatory, and to finding in close reading a fonn of freedom. She con­ sequently asks us to see and understand Romantic plants in a different way by encouraging us to consider the ways in which the formal and material nature of plants create productive uncertainties and instabilities about their identity and being. “For romantic writers and botanists,” she writes, “strange plants invited an attraction to material and figurative differences that pushed against epistemic mastery. . . . Equally invisible and equally unclassifiable . . . are the aesthetic pleasure and invitation to figure that move just beneath the surface ofglobal botanizing as a commercial and im­ perial venture” (1—5). Kelley’s book is populated by plants whose material and figurative natures, in the hands of writers, illustrators, and, one should stress, an outstanding literary critic, undercut scientific and epistemological certainties. The Romantic fascination with plants can often seem just as strange and alien to us as the plants that they so avidly collected, exchanged, described, illustrated, and sought to classify. Take, for instance, Mungo Park’s excited account ofhis discovery ofa miniscule moss specimen growing in the heart of Africa. In one of the most famous botanical passages in Romantic travel literature, Park recounts how, having been robbed of all he possessed and left abandoned “in the midst of a vast wilderness . . . naked and alone; sur­ rounded by savage animals, and men still more savage,” he was tempted to give up and “lie down and perish” in despair, when suddenly “the extraor­ dinary beauty of a small moss, in fructification, irresistibly caught my eye.” Although the plant “was not larger than the top of one of my fingers...