Novel Cultivations: Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century by Elizabeth Hope Chang (review)

Plants in late-century nonrealist fiction are not, Elizabeth Chang provocatively suggests, mere fictional objects but potential intimates, fictional subjects that introduced "new global possibilities of selfhood and self-narration to readers of popular fiction" (5). In her compelling, original, and persuasive study, Novel Cultivations: Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century, Chang invites us to consider the ways in which plants, like other nonhuman elements, make their way into fiction "from around the globe … as surely as any human character, and betray or obscure their origins as they do so" (5). Though at times part of the novel's descriptive background, plants, Chang argues, sometimes operate as a singular subject in much the same way as a minor character (Alex Woloch's reconsideration of character is cited as overtly informing her understanding of plants as both "the one and the many") (4). The kinds of questions Chang asks of novels self-consciously builds on the insights of thing theory in the Victorian novel (most notably the work of Elaine Freedgood, John Plotz, and Jonathan Lamb), which Chang terms a "rethinking of plant life" as part of the much larger story of the "nineteenth century's immersion in its stuff" (10).

Novel Cultivations intriguingly sees plants as occupying a midway or transitory status between realism and fantasy in mid-to-late Victorian fiction, focusing on those genres most likely to engage in borderline or antirealist modes: novels of detection, adventure, and gothic and scientific romance. Chang employs a neat metaphor to describe the role of plants in these fictions: "plants in books are a buttonhole between fiction and reality, existing in and following the rules of both realms" (2). The fiction here trails the facts of environmental imperialism and botanical exchange, which, as Novel Cultivations clearly establishes, were more than well under way by the time of the fictions under consideration here. The great Victorian horticulturist John Loudon estimated that in 1830 "five thousand new exotics had recently been imported into Britain," with emphasis on the recently: between 1500 and 1839 the number of cultivated plants in England went from around two hundred to some eighteen thousand, with the rate of imported plants increasing dramatically over the course of the later nineteenth century (1). Chang argues that the "global" origins of English nature are generally obscured, but the Victorian novel works to reveal the interdependence of novel and plant, British Empire and England itself. Chang deftly shows how "questions of exoticism, foreignness, selfhood, and subjectivity" were potentially understood amid the unprecedented fact of a thoroughly globalized nature (3): what Jason Moore calls an "epochal reorganization of world ecology" (11).

The novel as a form, Chang argues, evolved to accommodate the new fact of a global environment that, though it had been growing across several centuries, quickened and became more consequential in the Victorian era: a claim that, otherwise persuasive, wavers when one thinks about various late-eighteenth-century botanical exchanges that enabled new global agricultures and colonial economies. Plants enter fictions in multiple ways, and Novel Cultivations deliberately frames its methodology and its primary sources as horticultural and not agricultural, wisely focusing on the ways in which author and reader alike saw in their natural surroundings—whether country hedgerows, city streets, or private gardens—insistent and inextricable proof of the way their world was suffused with global hybridity. Victorian genre novels, Chang argues, register the spread of global empire and plant circulation as well as revise potential fictional relations between form and character. If plants in these fictions function as transitory objects between realism and fantasy, then different conceptions of personhood are possible, including the intriguing possibility of plants as characters. Plants, as Chang brilliantly argues, "become fictions themselves through acts of cultivation and importation, and … make the environment around them more fictional, by obscuring and remaking its...