The Loudons and the Gardening Press: A Victorian Cultural Industry by Sarah Dewis (review)

In this volume, Sarah Dewis investigates the work of the husband and wife team John Claudius Loudon and Jane Webb Loudon, both prolific authors whose publications, in Dewis’s words, contributed to “gardening and democratic discourse” in significant and previously unacknowledged ways (1). Dewis conducts new archival work on John Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine (1826–44) and situates this title in the context of nineteenth-century print media, with sustained attention to the role of illustration and the relation of text to image. Given its extensive attention to print culture, this book will be of interest to scholars working on book and media history and its relationship to urban spaces and landscape design.

The origins and publication of the Gardener’s Magazine are the primary focus of the first three chapters. Chapter 1 considers John Loudon’s conceptualization of the gardener’s role in an entry on gardeners’ education that appeared in his Encyclopedia of Gardening (1822). This entry presents the gardener as a “secular saint” who self-educates with the help of a bourgeoning print culture, and it anticipates Loudon’s professionalization of the gardener figure in the Gardener’s Magazine (30). Chapter 2, “John Loudon as Editor,” situates this professionalization in terms of Loudon’s reformist aims and documents his efforts to win a dedicated readership for the Gardener’s Magazine in the face of competition from other horticultural periodicals. The relationship between text and image is the focus of chapter 3. Dewis argues that the diversity of images in the Gardener’s Magazine reflects the class diversity of its readership, and she pays close attention to the economics of image production. Chapter 4 considers Loudon’s vision of the “Gardenesque,” an alternative to William Gilpin’s notion of the picturesque that sought to shift the terms of an observer’s contemplation from being based on an elite notion of aesthetics to a more democratically imagined foundation in scientific knowledge. Loudon promoted this notion of the Gardenesque in his publications as well as in his landscape and cemetery designs. By using a variety of print formats, Loudon ensured that his democratic ideas would have the “widest possible circulation” (166). This also enabled him to promote his interest in making spaces reserved for the elite more accessible to the general public.

Chapters 5 and 6 consider the Loudons’ contributions to periodicals aimed primarily at female readers. Dewis shows how John Loudon’s Suburban Garden and Villa Companion presented scientific and aesthetic knowledge not available in other periodicals aimed at women; in this way, he enabled women to become not only passive consumers but also active producers of this discourse in their homes and gardens (179). Dewis closes chapter 5 by showing how the Loudons’ publications encouraged this active production by women through the inclusion of engravings by Loudon’s sisters Jane and Mary Loudon. Chapter 6 is devoted to the contributions of Jane Webb Loudon, who assisted Loudon with his gardening publications and edited the Ladies’ Companion, at Home and Abroad for six months. While previous scholarship has tended to situate Loudon’s work as firmly entrenched in mid-century class and gender ideology, Dewis convincingly shows how her editorship exposed contradictions in those class and gender expectations and invited women to take part in literary and scientific discourse (195, 235).

Each chapter of Dewis’s book provides a helpful introduction and summary of the chapter’s primary argument as well as reproductions of pages, illustrations, and mastheads from the Loudons’ publications; it also features a detailed bibliography of archival material. If, at times, some readers may wish for a more developed thread of argumentation linking the different chapters, many more will welcome the new scholarly avenues opened up by this multidisciplinary study. The Loudons and the Gardening Press is a valuable contribution to scholarship on nineteenth-century print culture.