On Our Cover: William Sharp's illustrations for John Fisk Allen's Victoria Regia; or, The Great Water Lily of America (Boston, 1854)

Paging through John Fisk Allen's Victoria Regia for the first time, I was struck by many things: the beauty of its colorful full-page illustrations, the meticulous detail of its botanical descriptions, and the strange fact that so many Victorian men got themselves so worked up over a flower. It was only after taking a few steps back and trying to imagine this short but power-packed volume bursting onto the scene in 1854 that I began to see how it crystalizes, in both its structure and subject matter, some key political, diplomatic, and technological forces of the nineteenth century.

The lily was "discovered" a number of times by European explorers in South America, most notably by Robert Hermann Schomburgk, on a mission funded by the Royal Geographic Society of London in the first year of Queen Victoria's reign. To honor her, Schomburgk ignored both the indigenous designation (which Allen transcribes as "Mayz de l'agua" or "Corn of the water") and the appropriate botanical nomenclature and requested that it be given her name. While Allen's history of the lily tries gamely to give these English botanists their due, it cannot help suggesting that this American flower was cultivated most successfully on American soil. Describing "the first flowering of this lily in the United States," Allen quotes Caleb Cope's account of the "excitement" of witnessing the bloom on his own grounds: "The committee on plants and flowers of the [Pennsylvania] Horticultural Society were present on the second flower blooming" and found that "the diameter of the whole [was] seventeen inches." "This is," he continues, "three inches larger than any flower produced in England. The leaves are also six inches larger than any grown there. The natural conditions of the plant in our country are, undoubtedly, more favorable than they can possibly be in England" (10). While it's difficult to see how the climate of Philadelphia approaches that of the tropics, there's really no arguing with a seventeen-inch flower grown in an artificially heated tank just outside of a major city.

The book that Allen produced about the domestication of the lily, with the help of English-born artist William Sharp, was an elephant folio, both extremely large and extremely brief (at just twelve pages of text); it not only describes "a vegetable wonder" but is itself a technological wonder (6). As Carl Zimmer explains, "Victoria Regia was the first American book to take advantage of a new printing method called chromolithography," a process of adding color to prints mechanically rather than by hand.¹ In the years after the publication of Allen's book, chromolithography would take over, radically transforming newspapers, magazines, advertising, and the prospects of popular art more generally.

Serendipitously, the lily that stars in these illustrations was itself a marvel not only of beauty but of engineering. As Sharp's illustrations show, the underside of the huge, round, rimmed leaves (which can reach six feet across and look, the English botanist Robert Spruce claims, like "green tea trays") are crisscrossed by a network of veins. "A leaf turned up," Spruce continues, "suggests some strange fabric of cast iron, just taken from the furnace,—its ruddy color, and the enormous ribs with which it is strengthened increasing the similarity" (6). The comparison with cast iron was not so fanciful, considering that these leaves were strong enough to bear the weight of an adult fitted out in flamboyant Victorian style. (One can easily, if so inclined, find entertaining photographs of women with huge hats and parasols or girls dressed as fairies balanced on lily leaves that are floating in giant tanks.) John Paxton, gardener for Lord Cavendish's estate in Derbyshire, was one of the first to get the flowers to bloom in England. And he was so inspired by the leaves' "beautiful example of natural engineering" that he used it as the basis of his design for an elaborate greenhouse in which to cultivate the lily.² There is something satisfyingly fairytale-like about this story of a flower-queen kidnapped from her tropical home and imprisoned in what amounts to a hall of mirrors.

Most famously, perhaps, the leaf that was the model for the greenhouse also inspired Paxton's design for the building that became known as the Crystal Palace, centerpiece of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and at the time, the world's largest building. The exhibition, meant to showcase arts and industry from England and around the world, seems the pinnacle of disingenuous imperial self-congratulation. "There was a disjuncture," Jeffrey Auerbach explains with some understatement, "between the symbolic meanings generated by the exhibition and the material conditions of commodity capitalism and geopolitical power, as the negative side of imperialism—the oppression, subjugation, and stripping of natural resources—was hidden behind the cornucopia of riches inside the Crystal Palace."³ The beauty of the lily hides the violence of its capture.

And yet, when William Wells Brown visited the exhibition, he did not experience the Crystal Palace as a site of colonial oppression but as a space of freedom and equality—a well-deserved rebuke to the slave-holding United States:

I was pleased to see such a goodly sprinkling of my own countrymen in the Exhibition—I mean colored men and women—well-dressed, and moving about with their fairer brethren. This, some of our pro-slavery Americans did not seem to relish very well. There was no help for it. As I walked through the American part of the Crystal Palace some of our Virginia neighbors eyed me closely and with jealous looks, especially as an English lady was leaning on my arm. But their sneering looks did not disturb me in the least. I remained the longer in their department, and criticized the bad appearance of their goods the more.⁴

Political forces are rarely as clear cut as the intrepid scholar might wish. Instead, one might say, they are intricate and tangled, like the veins of a leaf.