Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel by Anna Burton (review)

Plants have recently emerged as a topic of interest in Victorian studies, with work by Sukanya Banerjee, Alicia Carroll, Elizabeth Chang, Ann Garascia, Devin Griffiths, Kate Flint, Lynn Voskuil, and Lindsay Wells all drawing our attention to how Victorians’ lives were entangled with the lives of plants. Much of this work has focused on herbaceous, aquatic, and exotic flora, or on plants in horticulture, agriculture, and science. Anna Burton’s Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel thus offers a welcome arboreally focused contribution to this emergent field in Victorian environmental humanities.

Burton compellingly outlines a “silvicultural tradition,” or “a web of writings about trees that are enmeshed in their constant cross-referencing and borrowing from one another,” which she argues informs nineteenth-century literary and nonliterary texts alike (2). This circulation of arboreal knowledge amounts to “an ongoing inheritance of silvicultural authority” in a “retrospective and enduring tradition of no fixed origin” (13). But while Burton notes that the cultural circulation of texts about trees has been ongoing (she shows, for instance, the continued influence of John Evelyn’s 1664 Silva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees), she argues that the silvicultural tradition was particularly important from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, when Britons experienced a heightening of “arboreal awareness” due to “significant and lasting developments in the perception, perambulation, and utilisation of environment” (13). Burton identifies the picturesque theorist William Gilpin’s work, especially his influential Forest Scenery (1791), as an early “greenprint” for nineteenth-century engagements with trees (5). She traces the cultural ramifications of Gilpin’s highlighted sites, especially the New Forest; aesthetic formations, such as clumps; and biographies of singular, extraordinary trees, such as the Cadenham Oak. Forest Scenery became a “palimpsest, to be plundered or added to,” and Burton traces its repackaging by less canonical natural history writers, such as William Howitt and Mary Roberts (23). This early chapter on Gilpin convincingly establishes how nineteenth-century texts about trees operated in an intertextual “mycorrhizal network” of mutual reference (14).

In the chapters on literary works that follow, Burton examines the function of trees as boundary spaces and nexuses for “improvement” in Jane Austen’s novels (68); traces how Elizabeth Gaskell’s works, especially Ruth (1853) and North and South (1854–55), engage with discussions of trees’ noxiousness or healthfulness; and analyzes Thomas Hardy’s portrayal of trees as “arboreal strata” (152) in The Woodlanders (1886–87) and as sites for navigating both space and memory in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Throughout her analyses, Burton focuses on repeated motifs of connection and adaptation, as she limns how these writers engage with, and add to, the nineteenth century’s silvicultural tradition. The Hardy chapters are especially valuable, particularly Burton’s revelatory reading of The Woodlanders’ old trees as quasi-geological strata.

However, I did find myself questioning the book’s lack of engagement with critical plant studies, such as work by Monica Gagliano, Matthew Hall, Luce Irigaray, and Michael Marder, among others, which would have offered a useful framework for some of the questions of arboreal scale and human-plant interconnection that Burton pursues. Similarly, recent work on the Victorians’ interactions with plants has often emphasized plants’ implication in imperial projects (from the planting of indigo in India, as Banerjee has analyzed, to the global movements of flora that have interested Chang and Voskuil). While this work has tended to focus on herbaceous plants, trees were similarly implicated in empire (with the disastrous H. M. S. Bounty expedition to introduce breadfruit to the West Indies perhaps the most famous example of Britons’ imperial movements of trees in this period), and the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a massive importation of exotic trees and shrubs to Britain. These foreign-originating trees, and Britain’s engagement with plant imperialism more broadly, are missing from Burton’s analysis. They are largely missing from the novels she...