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Bibliophilia: Book Matters

Plants, Water, Salt, Coal: The Archival Strata of the Victorian Photographic Book

Plantes, sel et eau : l’archive stratigraphique de l’album photographique victorien
Ann Garascia

Résumés

Cet article interprète le thème du volume « Bibliophilia : Le livre, la matière et le vivant » en s’attachant aux étonnants objets où l’univers du livre rencontre le monde végétal au XIXe siècle, sous la forme spécifique des albums photographiques expérimentaux nés de la Ptéridomanie, l’engouement pour les collections de fougères préhistoriques ou contemporaines. La collection botanique est généralement perçue comme l’aboutissement d’un processus d’extraction consistant à prélever les plantes vivantes dans leur environnement pour les conserver dans l’espace sec et clos de différentes sortes de livres, allant de l’herbier scientifique à l’album domestique. En m’appuyant sur le potentiel de préservation de l’extraction écologique, je montre que l’album photographique constitue une forme de collection botanique qui conserve la mémoire de l’environnement dont proviennent les plantes, plutôt qu’elle ne l’efface. Cet article est consacré à l’album de Cecilia Glaisher, The British Ferns (1855) dont j’étudie les procédés photographiques, la matérialité et la composition des clichés. Différents environnements ont inscrit leur présence dans l’ouvrage de Glaisher où perdure leur trace invisible : les milieux naturels liés à la pratique culturelle anglaise de la collection de fougères, l’écosystème régional du Kent, ainsi que les couches stratigraphiques du temps profond de l’Angleterre. Pour rendre compte de ces divers espaces-temps, mon cadre théorique inclut les nouvelles matérialités, l’histoire des médias et l’histoire du livre, et je m’appuie sur leur intérêt commun pour les récits autres qu’humains. Parce qu’il préserve l’histoire végétale, géologique et humaine, l’album photographique intègre de multiples aspects de la pensée environnementale victorienne et met en lumière le défi que posent les écologies extractives à une histoire du livre anthropocentrée.

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1In his 1861 Footnotes from the Page of Nature, botanist Hugh MacMillan describes England’s famed coal seams dotted with plant fossils as a book of nature: the “coal-bed,” MacMillan explains, “is, in fact, a hortus siccus [herbarium] of extinct cryptogamic vegetation” (8). This is not a book of plant corpses; rather, to read a page of “strangely preserved plants” from the coal bed-herbarium awakens “a vista of the ancient world” that layers long-term vegetal, geological, and chemical developments: “seasons of successive growth, and the immeasurable years or ages which passed while decay, maceration, and chemical changes prepared the fallen vegetation for fuel” (8).

Figure 1. Cecilia Glaisher. “Holly-Fern”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Salted paper print from a photogenic drawing contact negative. Four specimens, lantern composition. 449mm × 304 mm.

© Fitzwilliam Museum.

2Botanist-photographer Cecilia Glaisher’s 1855 photographic series, The British Ferns, stages a visual counterpart of MacMillan’s musings. Set against an ecru background, her multichromatic “Holly-fern” fronds (Figure 1) waver between stone brown and pale green. The subtle greens anchor the ferns to their Victorian present, while the tawny impressions visually invoking fossils relocate the plants to England’s carboniferous period. Not simply remnants of the past, these ancient ferns would eventually metamorphose into coal seams – the fuel of the British empire. The shifts in color also narrate the perils of vegetal extraction as a memento mori of an inevitable plant-death jumpstarted by moving them from their wild states to Victorian homes. These layers of interpretative possibilities pose the question: how do we unearth and extract the vegetal-geological stories of England’s ferns dwelling deep within Glaisher’s prints?

3This essay interprets the special issue’s theme, “Bibliophilia: Book Matters,” through interconnected bodies of 19th-century books and plants, specifically the experimental photographic book objects inspired by the “Fern Craze,” a fad that fanned the desire for ferns in prehistoric and contemporary forms. Botanical collecting is typically viewed as an extractive process that removes living plants from their native environs, placing them within the dried, enclosed spaces of different books objects, ranging from institutional herbaria to domestic albums. Tapping into the preservative potentials of ecological extraction, I argue that the photographic book advances a model of botanical collecting that memorializes, rather than effaces, these environs of the extracted plants. Taking Glaisher’s British Ferns as my subject, I map out processes of photographic creation, focusing on the material condition of the prints and their composition techniques, to demonstrate how different environmental milieux write themselves into and linger unseen within Glaisher’s prints: the “wild states” of England’s fern collecting cultures, Glaisher’s local ecosystem, and England’s deep-time stratigraphic layers. To access these otherwise-unseen spaces and times, my readings advance a theoretical framework that entwines eco-materialisms and book history through their shared commitments to non-human narrative modes. In simultaneously preserving vegetal, geological, and human histories, the photographic book forms a multi-layered model of Victorian environmental thought that recognizes how extractive ecologies challenge standard, human-centered histories of the book.

Cecilia Glaisher’s Ferns

4Cecilia Glaisher’s (1828-1892) presence in the historical record is flickering. She was born in Greenwich (Kent) to a scientific family, her father Henry Belville being the assistant astronomical observer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich; and she married James Glaisher, the president of the Royal Meteorological Society, the Royal Microscopic Society, and the Royal Photographic Society. The most authoritative work on Glaisher’s life is Caroline Marten’s meticulously researched 2002 thesis, which traces Glaisher’s main projects: Leaves of the British Forest Trees Nature Printed (1857) and The British Ferns: Represented in a Series of Photographs from Nature by Mrs. Glaisher. Marten’s research also served as the basis for the Fitzwilliam Museum’s ongoing online exhibition of Glaisher’s works (2015).

5The British Ferns was conceived as a public collaboration between Glaisher and Edward Newman, a fern expert who penned an immensely popular book, The History of British Ferns (1840). A fern identification manual unrivalled in accuracy and beauty, The British Ferns Photographed from Nature would feature Glaisher’s fern prints created by experimenting with William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawing, camera-less photographic method that involved placing materials directly onto to light-sensitive paper and submitting them to sunlight. Alongside Glaisher’s prints, Newman would proffer a brief etymological history for each fern; in a handbill advertising the upcoming project, Newman boasts that each print will list “in chronological order the name applied to the Species in Sir. J. E. Smith’s ‘English Flora,’ Hooker and Arnott’s ‘British Flora,’ Mr. Babington’s ‘Manual of British Botany,’ and Mr. Newman’s ‘History of British Ferns’; so that it will be, in fact a companion and key to all our standard Botanical Works, as far as regards the Ferns” (qtd. in Pritchard 24).

6For as much fanfare as Glaisher and Newman’s project generated initially, it notably remains unfinished, never fully compiled into a singular, authoritative book object; the closet official compendium was a tranche of 10 plates that Newman submitted to the Linnaean Society in 1855. Glaisher produced 180 paper negatives and 160 salt printed positives between 1850-1858. Some prints bear the promised labels listing different nomenclature for the ferns; some remain inscrutably unlabeled. What remains, then, is a book object in a state of perpetual incompletion teetering on the verge of total cohesion but never fully set in stone. While this seems like an unlikely subject for an essay on Victorian book objects, the unfinished, dynamic qualities of Glaisher and Newman’s British Ferns Photographed from Nature more closely resonate with the surprisingly numerous, and sometimes lively, book objects that Victorian writers crafted as rhetorical stand-ins for the more-than-human world.

Geological Books of Nature

7Generally referring to the study of books as material objects, bibliography historically fulfilled a descriptive function of identifying and recording the material features of a text, but the term has since grown. A recent special issue of Criticism has debuted the term “critical bibliography,” situated at the broad intersection of bibliography and critical theory, to study the extended lives of material texts through diffuse critical lenses, including feminist, postcolonial, queer, critical race, Native American, and disability studies. Maruca and Ozment state the goal of critical bibliography as “(re)shap[ing] our histories of the book and bookish objects” (232). Their definition of “critical bibliography” generously leaves room for other critical interlocutors, as it is “specifically not delimited” (232). In this fashion, I would like to add my own entry to the list by interlacing bibliography with ecocritical perspectives.

8Both historically and contemporarily, geology and bibliography have been ready rhetorical interlocutors. While Glaisher’s album is not precisely geological insofar as it primarily documents plant life, I categorize her project as a figuratively geological one to unlock the different rhetorical, textual-material, and ecological layers that contributed to its making. Geology provides a particularly productive theoretical armature for an ecocritical approach to bibliography because, for Victorians, it possessed a non-anthropocentric historiographic consciousness. Geological study propelled debates about non-human forms of time, the longue durée adaptability and evolution of the Earth, and the evidentiary status of environmental materials. In doing so, it proposed a working method for writing an earthly history that recognized interconnections of the more-than-human and human.

9By accepting the premise that geological change could occur incrementally and gradually, humans also needed to acknowledge the limitations of their usually reliable scientific methods. In Geological Facts (1855), William Garland Barrett admits that the way the Earth indexes its own age exceeds human calculation processes: “the age of the earth, so far as its material fabric, i.e. its crust, is concerned, dates back to a period so remote, and so incalculable, that the epoch of the earth’s creation is wholly unascertained and unascertainable by our human arithmetic” (263). Out of such limitations, however, grew new methods of scientific inquiry that signaled to the possibility of an expanded history of the Earth, its materials, and its processes that predates the presence of humanity. Charles Lyell’s three-volume Principles of Geology (1830-1833) posited that to interpret the geological processes and materials of the present, one might look to those of the deep past. To familiarize readers with this strange mode of scientific inquiry, Lyell likened it to a familiar discipline, history: “By these researches into the state of the earth […] at former periods, we acquire a more perfect knowledge of its present condition […] When we study history, we obtain a more profound insight into human nature by instituting a comparison between present and former states of society” (1). Prehistorical reconstruction hinged on an expansive understanding of geology that built fossil assemblages comprised of ancient plants alongside “gigantic reptiles” and “chambered shells” (115). By linking history and geology, Lyell gestures to the self-inscriptive capacities of the Earth and its materials. More-than-human remains – like prehistoric lizards, shells, and ferns – could become textual forms possessing varying degrees of legibility, depending on their material condition and the would-be reader’s savvy.

10To grasp this vast world, Victorian geologists identified an everyday object as a rhetorical prop for exploring the mysteries of the Earth’s organic and inorganic materials: the book. Different book-related metonyms were employed to explicate the material structure of the Earth, so when read alongside one another, the history of the development of the Earth is also a global history of the development of books. Prehistoric plant expert, George Sumner Weaver recalls Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures by designating “petrified vegetable and animal remains” within the Earth’s strata as a “hieroglyphic history” with events inscribed on a “rocky tablet” (61). Other writers opted for a comparatively modern book object, the codex. With its stacked and centrally bound pages, or “leaves,” the physical format of the codex evokes the organizational principles of earthen strata, as Robert Bakewell maps out in his 1829 Introduction to Geology: “Stratified mountains or rocks are those which are composed of layers of stone, laid over each, and divided by parallel seams like the leaves of a closed book” (45). Charles Knight’s Natural History (1870) treats the metonym with increasing specificity by engineering an image of a typeset page that casts the “strata or bands of stony material” as the “leaves” of the book and the “organic remains which are actually embedded therein” as the “letters” (689). This repeated image of the reliable codex – a book format most readers were familiar with and physically interacting with – succeeded in familiarizing an otherwise-unrecognizable model of the Earth, while also tacitly reassuring them that they too could read the more-than-human world.

11Mid-19th-century developments in bookmaking also solidified rhetorical linkages between books and the Earth, exchanging the traditional book object for more experimental models. In The Great Stone Book of Nature (1863), David Thomas Ansted initially compares the Earth to a codex, “the leaves of the Stone Book” (24). Rather than populated with alphanumeric characters, Ansted’s is a primarily visual one comprised solely of “illustrations, ancient and modern” that narrate the ephemeral forces and flows of nature – “the river and sea, the heat and the forest, the heavy rain and the continual drought” as well as “the plants and animals” (28). Beyond the realm of rhetoric, the early 1840s was a watershed moment for the development of photographic books, exemplified by projects that each stressed the equal, if not primary importance, of images vis-à-vis text. William Henry Fox Talbot’s publicly disseminated treatise, The Pencil of Nature (1844-1846), debuted his camera-less photographic methods with accompanying photographic images in a six-part series. Concurrently, Anna Atkins began her decade-long private publishing of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, a book comprised completely of blueprint images of seaweed. As experimentations with book formats suggest, the boundlessness of the Earth invited more unbounded conceptions of what books could be.

12The language of geological materials, processes, and theories began to infuse 20th-century book historical accounts, echoing Victorian conceptions of geological inquiry. W. W. Greg’s 1914 “What is Bibliography?” designates the task of the book historian as “reconstruct[ing] the past out of the indications of the present” (39). His sentiment echoes Lyell’s contention that through geology’s “researches into the state of the earth and its inhabitants at form periods, we acquire a more perfect knowledge of its present condition” (1833, 1). Like geology, Greg’s brand of bibliography was a speculative enterprise with aims to piece together “the history of [a book’s] life, to make it reveal in its most intimate detail the story of its birth and adventures as the material vehicle of the living word” (qtd. in Tanselle 21). For Victorian geologists, inquiries into the past do not just settle on available material evidence, but rather pinpoint successive changes, which in turn gesture to future adaptations and changes to the world-to-come. Like this materialist conception of a continuously mutable universe, D.F. McKenzie views book history as a system similarly open to organic change, if scholars “allow for its natural evolution” (31).

13Beyond these finer nuances, other scholars have mined the Earth for more materially grounded metaphors. Michel De Certeau and Roger Chartier both grapple with the supposedly ephemeral nature of reading through geological loss. De Certeau frames reading in terms of dispersal and disappearance, as an act that “takes no measures against the erosion of time” (174), while Chartier acknowledges the possibility of its residual evidence by recalling the imperfect, and necessarily incomplete, geological record: “reading rarely leaves traces, is scattered into an infinity of singular acts” (47). Zeroing in on the materiality of a specific book object, Richard Sieburth describes some of the etchings present in Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s experimental, poetic-performance book object, Le Livre, as “fragmentary seismographs of a mind sketching out a project for the ideal Book” (132). Though brief, the metaphor itself incites tectonic shifts between geology and bibliography, earthen strata and page, as Mallarmé’s book registers the movements of the poet’s mind in terms that evoke the recombining motions of the Earth.

14If geology’s intellectual and material formations suffuse book historical scholarship, its disciplinary coordinate, media history, similarly leverages geology as a theoretical foundation for establishing non-human-centered and transhistorical perspectives. Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media (2015) fleshes out a material-conceptual apparatus that integrates the materiality of media, analog and digital, within the materiality of the Earth: “to track the importance of the nonorganic in constructing media before they became media: the literal deep times and deep places of media in mines and rare earth materials” (4). Parikka’s interpretation of geology does not just dwell in deep times – the crust and strata – but also occupies a forward-looking vantage point through its enmeshments in climate change, technological, and industrial narratives; taken together, geology helps to stage a “creative intervention to the cultural history of the contemporary” (4). This geological turn in media studies equips theorists and artists with theoretical bedrock for investigating how creative expression responds to the conditions of the Anthropocene, which generally marks the epoch in which human activity leaves its indelible imprint on the Earth. Literary studies scholar Noah Heringman frames the presence of the human as an “act of writing ourselves into the rock record,” which suggests that geological phenomena possess a “textual materiality” (58).

15Just as theories of books and media depend on geology as a metonym, ecocritical discussions of the more-than-human world ground the geological in figurations of books. Material ecocriticism pursues interchanges among discourse and materiality to move beyond a singular focus on cultural representation, instead preferring to dwell within the slippages between materiality and discourse to purport the potentials for more-than-human narrative making. To adumbrate materialist ecocriticism’s twin investments in materiality and representation, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann introduce the diptych, an “ancient writing tablet made of two hinged leaves” in which the “material object […] articulates a ‘discursive’ message” (2012, 448). Geological phenomena and forces accord particular visibility in materialist ecocritical accounts. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Stone (2015) calls for the unlikely liveliness of stone by citing the dialogical relationship between the lithic and bookish. The behaviors of stone, the way that it “aggregates, attracting to itself disparate matter,” are reflected through the different literary genres, forms, and physical formats it emerges through: “catalogue poems, encyclopedia entries, biographical digression, etymological impulses, lapidaries arranged alphabetically or color” (6). If Victorian naturalists tapped into the “book of nature” to discursively tame a world that felt increasingly chaotic and uncontrollable thanks to new and competing scientific theories, Cohen argues that human-directed modes of narrative making only “mask” the “disorder” and “wonder-filled romance” of stone, hinting at how its persistently untamable materiality may not be wrangled through human linguistic systems and book objects (6). Similarly concentrating on the surprising dynamism of the lithic, Stephanie LeMenager defines “sediment” as a “cultural-geological record and book open to rereading and therefore perpetual animation,” echoing Rachel Carson’s sentiment that “sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth” (169; 76). For LeMenager, sediment occasions a renewed glimpse at how geological precepts invite conversations amongst non-human storytelling materials, as the “storied time” of sediment combines the “lithic and aqueous” (169). In what follows, this essay will take on its own acts of speculative reconstruction, akin to Victorian geological study, to trace the development of Cecilia Glaisher’s British Ferns, demonstrating how her processes advance an ecocritical model of critical bibliography.

Collecting Ferns

16Not content with just enjoying ferns in their native growing environs, botanists began extracting living plants for their collections. Ferns might occupy their new homes in different ways, either in specialized garden spaces called ferneries or in carefully regulated terrariums known as Ward Cases. If the prospect of keeping the finnicky plant alive was too burdensome, fern fans could dry, press, and save them in books. While Victorian herbaria traditionally feature the specimens of plants themselves, Walter Porter Manton recommends photography as a “pretty and simple method for preserving a collection of leaves,” designating projects like Glaisher’s as herbaria in their own right (31). As a book object, the herbarium traversed institutional and domestic scientific realms, from Director of London’s Kew Gardens Dr. William Jackson Hooker’s unparalleled collection of global specimens to the casual fern hunter’s album made of local finds. Fern collectors universally agreed that the plant’s morphology, its external structure and physical form, made it eminently collectible. Since they were “so thin and delicate” they could easily be pressed and placed into “any ordinary book” (Williamson 21). As finished books, herbaria standardized plant life visually and materially through a recognizable and duplicable aesthetic that featured clean, flattened specimens poised against empty backgrounds. However, the collecting process was not so clean; in addition to venerating the ferns themselves, botanists fondly remembered navigating the craggy rocks and tangled woods where they pursued the plants. This section frames extraction through the acts of collecting that removed and rehomed ferns. Attention to the collecting cultures undergirding Glaisher’s project allows us to read the photographic surfaces of her prints down into their unseen undergrowth to explore how they preserve both the domesticated and “wild states” of the ferns.

17Fern collecting during the 19th century was a fashionable pastime appealing to nearly anyone. In coining the term “Pteridomania,” social-reformer and author Charles Kingsley elevated fern collecting to a certifiable fad that paired the pastime with the sharpest arbiters of good taste – teenaged girls. Kingsley cheekily warns British fathers of a new danger to their daughters, and their wallets: “Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing ‘Pteridomania’ and are collecting and buying ferns, with Ward’s cases wherein to keep them, (for which you have to pay) and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species (which seem to be different in each new Fern-book that they buy” (4). In introducing humans to the vegetal world, Fern Mania recontoured human engagements with books beyond reading tastes. An anonymous “Male Sufferer” submitted a poetic complaint about “The Female Fern Mania” to the Worcestershire Chronicle (1864), longing for the past days when women would “care for worsted work” and “read novels,” rather than “run[ning] to heavy books, where they / eternal ferns are pressing” (4). The heart of the scandal here lies not so much within the changes in reading materials, as it does in that fern collecting fundamentally changed how humans interacted with books as physical objects, as they became de facto repositories for drying fern specimens. A more level-headed commentator, gardener extraordinaire Shirley Hibberd, explains how pieces of books could be repurposed to build a domestic herbarium: the plants may be “mounted on the backs of letters, on fly-leaves torn from books, on printed papers, on anything that can be found anywhere” (14). And if the prospect of purchasing a new portfolio seemed too pricey, more frugal botanists could de-bind books and repurpose “the covers of an old book” (Knowlton 6).

Figure 2. Cecilia Glaisher. “Holly-Fern”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Photogenic drawing contact negative. 448 mm × 290 mm.

© Fitzwilliam Museum.

18Herbaria often garner comparisons to lifeless repositories of barely contextualized, dead plants. Some of Glaisher’s arrangement choices, like the stylized “lantern composition” of the “Holly-fern” (Figure 2), remove her ferns from their wild state to emphasize their aesthetic value. Ferns, however, muddled implicit connections between herbarium specimen and plant corpse, as Anne Pratt views the collected plant as “so living, the form so perfect, that we could fancy it had just been gathered in all its pride of beauty from shadowy woodland or rocky glen” (2-3). Pratt’s evergreen fern reminds us of the plant’s growing environs, allying it not with death but an extended life that possibly surpasses that of the human if the book is properly maintained. Comprised of once-living plants and everyday scraps of paper or book parts, the herbarium functions as both an identification manual and a “floral diary of journeys made and countries seen” (Manton 28). Not simply conduits for expressing the human memories of the collector, ferns also silently communicate remembrances of their own. John Williamson reminds his readers that “Every plant has a history of its own, recalling the scenes where it was collected, and all the attending circumstances. Every overhanging ledge, every wild mountain side, every deep ravine, has its representative” (23).

19For her project, Glaisher photographed ferns that had been chosen for herbaria from Newman’s own collection (Marten 2002). While the specifics of his own habits are unknown, general attention to the material practices of collecting begins to place fern herbarium making within geological models of the Earth. To properly prepare the ferns for their herbaria, the collector had to complete a series of drying and pressing steps in which wet, fleshy ferns were “laid between sheets of blotting-paper and placed under pressure,” or, if in a pinch, “old newspapers – not the Times” would do (Anonymous 41). These pressing matters were usually successful, but occasionally a fickler fern would test the collector. In that case, a substrate could be incorporated to ensure consistent drying: “dispos[e] the plants between the specimen sheets and pou[r] warm sand or dried earth over time. This will press every part flat. The pile should be left exposed to direct sunlight” (Bailey 87). This image of the three-dimensional, carefully layered stack of plants, paper, and earthen substrate approximate a deep time geological model of the Earth wherein fern specimens are carefully preserved through sedimentary rock. Awareness of this aspect of the plant collecting process reorients the temporal and spatial dimensions of Glaisher’s prints: though two-dimensional, they carry within them a deeper architecture that recalls both a deep time past and a more recent past in which Newman collected and readied his specimens.

20Many of Glaisher’s prints include the ferns’ root balls, a composition technique that carries over from traditional herbaria and that allowed for more reliable identification. The presence of the root ball also beckons us to move past the two-dimensional surfaces and to dig down into the print’s speculative subterranean layers to locate the stories of ferns in their native environs. As dainty as the ferns may appear in their photographed state, fern collecting was a messy pursuit that immersed humans within lush plant worlds, as enthusiasts enjoyed “climbing over […] huge prostrate trees, jumping from rock to rock across the rivulet, and wandering all about […] searching for [and] digging up” ferns, roots and all (Meredith 139). The selected ferns dramatize multiple stages of development, from curled-up crozier to fully unfurled frond. To explain how growing ferns document seasonal changes, Bayard Taylor employs a book of nature idiom that taps into the ferns’ developmental trajectories: “on every hillock the young ferns unrolled their aromatic scrolls written with wonderful fables of the southern spring” (290). The fern trios in Glaisher’s “Soft-Shield” print also showcase a startlingly opaque concentration of roots (Figure 3). Wispy rootlets commingle with the thick bulblet to approximate a massy, fleshy bundle of ecological materials that lends depth to the otherwise two-dimensional print. This type of ecological extraction does not simply flatten plant-life, but rather preserves the chaotic tangles that support its growth, highlighting the herbarium’s narrative function as a repository of vegetal memory. Cohen’s and Duckert’s 2017 Veer Ecologies place ecological knowledge production “within the thick of things” where “sedate collections of facts” give way to “vegetating chaos” (9). The differences in opacity and sharpness in Glaisher’s prints presage Cohen and Duckert’s commentary by memorializing the intransigence of vegetal depth, as Caroline Marten explains: “Glaisher had to overwork some of her photogenic drawing negatives because of definition problems caused by differences in depth between the fronds, stems, and roots” (2002). These imprecisions, however, tie the photographed plants to their British humus and transport the Soft-Shield ferns back to their native environs to memorialize the collecting practices that placed collectors in the thick of different ecological spaces and the knots of vegetal life that so entranced them.

Figure 3. Cecilia Glaisher. “Soft-Shield Fern”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Photogenic drawing contact negative. 450 mm × 291 mm.

© Fitzwilliam Museum.

Contact Printing Ferns

21In The Nature Printed British Ferns (1859), Thomas Moore airs his skepticism of photography’s ability to capture the minutiae of fern life: “But if minute accuracy is of more vital importance in one than another race of plants, it is most especially so among Ferns” of for which “the art of a Talbot or a Daguerre was insufficient” (viii). Supporters of camera-less photography dismissed such accusations that these methods were unrealistic representations of nature by insisting rebutting that they could better preserve the ephemeral idiosyncrasies of a plant’s in-situ relationship with other environmental phenomena. In a “Treatise on Photogenic Drawing” (1839), Dr. Golding Bird affirms that a plant’s individual “character is better preserved by the contrast of tint” generated by the sunlight’s interaction with chemically treated paper and fern specimen (244). This section identifies the different forms of extraction required of Glaisher’s printmaking to demonstrate how her images preserve different archival layers where watery, mineral, vegetal, and human presences encounter and inscribe with one another.

22Perfected by William Henry Fox Talbot, photogenic drawing is a camera-less photographic process that recognizes the inscriptive interventions of sun, water, and weather. To begin, the practitioner would sensitize superfine writing paper in a weak saltwater solution, letting it dry before applying a coat of nitrate of silver solution. The pressed plants would be arranged on the dried sensitized paper, overlaid with a heavy piece of glass, and exposed to the sun’s rays. After as little as a few minutes, the paper would then be floated in salted water again, resulting in reasonably stable prints with white photographed plants set against black backgrounds. 19th-century photography writers called these paper negatives, since they functioned like master prints from which positives could be made. Similarly to plastic film, the paper negative appeared with inverted color, the lightest appearing darkest and the darkest appearing lightest. Unlike the singularity of the daguerreotype, the paper negative allowed for multiple reprints, hailing a sea change in photographic practice: “This negative could be multiplied and the copies used to make other positives, and thus photographic printing was seen to be practicable” (Greeley et al. 876).

23From their earliest inceptions, photogenic drawing processes have been subject to environmental phenomena. In an 1832 letter to Louis Daguerre, photographic inventor Nicéphore Niépce bemoaned that “weather has been so unfavorable” that it stalled his attempts at photographic experimentation (Daguerre 53). Like Niépce, Talbot began to view the more-than-human world in distinctly photographic terms; in a February 20, 1839 letter to fellow photographer John Herschel, he complained that the London smut and smog made for the “most Antiphotogenic” weather. Not as fatalistic as his photographic forebears, N. Whitlock assures readers in “Photogenic Drawing Made Easy” (1851) that printmaking times might fluctuate according to different atmospheric conditions, but success is guaranteed: “in three minutes while the sun shines, or about ten minutes if the day happens to be cloudy, the drawings will be produced” (101). To represent through the photogenic drawing process, then, opens multiple potential archival contact points that recognize the representational agencies of other-than-human materials.

24An initial archival encounter takes place on a deeper, unseen compositional layer during the various dousing stages when the prints are either submerged, blotted, and brushed with different water-based solutions. If earthen strata or fern fronds were expressive books of nature, water, for Victorian writers, was less forthcoming; according to Shirley Hibberd, the contents of water are “hidden as the contents of a sealed book” (3). Photogenic drawing cracks open this closed book through prolonged moments of multi-mattered seeping. Contemporary eco-critic Steve Mentz theorizes seeping as “an ecological truth that all borders must be crossed, and all boundaries spanned” resulting in “mutual stainings and toxicities” (283). Seepages abound in photogenic drawing: just as water leaves its imprint on the images, the chemicals and paper leave theirs on the water, and the water on human hands; the water becomes an archive of mineral-laden, chemical contact prompting us to acknowledge the ecologically extractive nature of printmaking. To imprint, minerals must be mined and transmogrified into chemical compounds; water collected and distilled; linen, cotton, and hemp woven into the prized paper from J. Whatman’s Turkey Mill. Glaisher’s prints become miniature, regional archives of the resources and ephemeral environmental conditions of her native Greenwich, Kent.

25Another, even deeper layer of potential archival contact appears through a possibly overlooked material necessary for printmaking, minerals, and metals. Camera-less photography relied on chemical compounds, which forced the mining of resources like silver, iron, and salts. In Extraction Ecologies (2021), Elizabeth Miller traces the reciprocal relationship between “underground resource extraction” and literature: just as extraction shapes literary genre and form, literature engenders new ways of imagining extraction (2). Photography visually and materially depicts this Victorian cultural fascination with underground resource extraction. In taking a metal-based approach to the history of photography, Siobhan Angus argues that the “mine is a necessary precondition for photography” and attention to the finite metals required for photographic processes reveals the otherwise-hidden materiality of the medium (4). If geology discursively transformed the Earth into books, minerals and metals were the elemental features, or “the characters […] by which geology is written in the book of nature” (Penn 85). As Abraham Gottlob Werner advises, to understand geology’s “book of nature,” the student must first “know the characters in which that book is written […] the simple minerals” (80). This type of reading, however, was more complicated than initially presented, since, far from stolid, these earthly alphanumerics underwent different processes of crystallization and dissolution, especially when submitted to other environmental elements, like sunlight.

26While hailed as a breakthrough in photographic reproduction, the paper negative possessed its own challenges. In a lecture to the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Vernon Heath qualifies his praise of photography by noting “the unstable condition of the photograph itself” that arises through “gradual and spontaneous chemical change” (112). That is, the chemistry of sunlight, mentals, and chemical compounds that produces the negative in the first place also lends it its possible “want of permanence” (112). Sean Willcock’s ecocritical approach to the photographic negative identifies how the negative indexes not just the image, but also “the chemical reactions, environmental conditions, and material flows […] that went into its own formation” (139-40). Since paper negatives are only nominally stabilized, continued exposure to light may catalyze chemical reactions which register on the prints as polychromatic blobs and smears. For example, streaks and orbs punctuate Glaisher’s “Dickie’s Bladder Fern” (Figure 4) producing a ghostly brown fern frond floating behind the central white one. These subtle markings serve as visible reminders of an otherwise-invisible body of mineable, extractable resources needed to produce photo-chemical compounds. These surfaces, then, give way to unseen geological depths that push us to consider how these prints serve as archives of England’s vast terrestrial strata and the industrial mining cultures that dredged up their treasures.

Figure 4. Cecilia Glaisher. “Dickie’s Bladder Fern”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Photogenic drawing contact negative. Five frond composition. 436 mm × 279 mm.

© Fitzwilliam Museum.

Salt Printing Ferns

27Stratigraphy tells a history of the Earth’s natural and cultural layers that considers their origins, composition, and arrangements. Embedded organic remains were eminently extractable, dug up in the form of plant and animal fossils. Reading the Earth’s strata through its fossilized representatives bewitched geologists and provoked them to rhetorically resurrect lively prehistoric worlds. Inspired by a single fern fossil – one of those “letters” – prehistoric fern expert John George Newsham marvels at how stony books of nature clarify the processes of sedimentation and compression that created the Earth’s layers: as ancient fern forests “sank beneath the floods of sea water and settl[ed] into the sand,” they now “reveal their history […] to our curious eyes” (11). This final section contextualizes Glaisher’s process of transforming her paper negatives into positives, or “salt prints,” within contemporaneous writings on stratigraphy. Requiring and evoking subterranean extractions of ecological materials, Glaisher’s salt prints become multi-layered stratigraphic objects that preserve England’s deep pasts.

28The salt prints initially achieve archival depth through their composition process, which centered on making neatly compressed layers. Efforts to teach amateur scientists how the Earth’s layers compress and shift exceeded solely discursive invocations of the “book of nature,” as geological manuals promoted tactile learning experiences for folks at home by instructing them how to arrange actual books to erect proxies of the Earth’s strata: “if several books, all partially opened are arranged in a line but some with their backs on the table, and some with the edges, they will […] show the mode in which the strata are often found in the earthly crust” (Brown 75). Salt print making furnishes another possible instantiation of this hands-on stratigraphic pedagogy. Like photogenic drawings, salt printing required compiling textual-material layers: paper negatives were placed face-down atop salted paper, then covered in glass, and then submitted to the sun’s rays and any other situational environmental co-inscriber, like wind, cloud cover or drizzle. To guarantee material stability during the printing-out process, the creator might enlist extra layers of textual padding; to compress fully, fern photographer C.E. Waters inserted “a folded newspaper […] behind the paper and back of that a large book,” which would then be clamped down by “rubber bands” or human “hands” (351). The well-secured layers of paper, punctuated with an already-formed plant impression assemble into a textual-material proxy of the Earth’s strata dotted similarly with fossilized fern impressions.

29If the paper negatives risked impermanence, the act of reproducing them as salt prints succeeded in firmly fixing the images over longer periods of time. Victorian stratigraphers were similarly concerned with perceptions of the Earth’s stability in forming geological layers in deep time. David Wells’s First Principles of Geology (1861) includes a frontispiece of books bearing the names of geological eras. The first pile stacks neatly to visualize how compression forms flattened strata, a nod to orderly, neat processes of stratigraphic formation. The second illustrations, comprised of slanted, haphazard books spread across a bookshelf presents a more dynamic view with a caption explaining how “lower and older systems have been brought by disturbances to the surface and made accessible” (frontispiece). Ideally neat, uniform compression aided in producing salt prints. However, shifts in the textual strata may occur, which may reveal themselves in the surface of the final product much as intercalations appear in the Earth’s seams. Gillian Beer acknowledges this possible contingency in nature printing techniques by noting that they extracted from a plant “a standardized and ideal type, but one that was local, tentative, and subject to its home environment” (37). Because salt prints primarily work with paper negatives, I broach this question of contingency, not simply through the structure of the plant, but also through the layering process. A salt print of the “True Maidenhair” (Figure 5) includes a relatively smaller frond whose pinnules are so delicate they fade to near invisibility. This speaks, perhaps, of unexpected slippages or unevenness – unsteady hands, snapping rubber bands, weakened sunlight, nearly imperceptible gaps among textual layers.

Figure 5. Cecilia Glaisher. “Maidenhair Fern”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Photogenic drawing contact negative. Five frond composition. 436 mm × 279 mm.

© Fitzwilliam Museum.

30The color palettes of Glaisher’s salt-printed positives avoid direct referentiality to living plants, as chocolatey browns and blacks replace the expected verdure of ferns. Against stony backgrounds, the ferns share a passing resemblance to fossils, imbuing them with geological archival depth. As a twin science to stratigraphy, paleobotany studied fossilized plants located in layers of sedimentary rocks. Glaisher’s salt printed ‘Sea Spleenwort” (Figure 6) echoes a fossil with undulating black fronds ensconced interminably in stone’s repose. Because it is impassive and detached from the rocky substrates and the shimmering sea-spray of its flourishing maritime habitats, a full recounting of the ecological history of the fern seems elusive. But, beyond referential duties, fossilized plants also possessed more transportive, literary qualities. Currently, Jeffrey Cohen designates the fossil’s narrative capacities as multi-layered and transhistorical: as “an interpenetration of epochs,” the fossil “offers an invitation to worlds differently configured” (6). Fossil traces of Cohen’s contemporary theorizing appear in Victorian geological writings pondering the imaginative narrative qualities of the Earth’s materials, as J.W. Powell’s “A Great Survey” attests: “There are stories of paleobotany, dealing with the flora of long past times, which read like the romance of a dead world” (Liverpool Mercury 1886, 7).

Figure 6. Cecilia Glaisher. “Sea Spleenwort”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Salted paper print from a photogenic drawing contact negative. 444 mm × 281 mm.

© Fitzwilliam Museum.

31One dead world that particularly charmed fern enthusiasts was the Carboniferous period, a geological era within the Paleozoic era famous for vast swamps that would eventually metamorphose into coal beds. In their fossilized forms found in England’s innumerable coal beds, ferns were among the most abundant “letters” in the Carboniferous period’s book of nature, so much so that Wells deemed it the “master form” of the period’s flora (236). The salt print’s clear and contrasting color scheme resonates with enchanting descriptions of coal beds found in Victorian geological writings. As a contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises, an octet of works written by Victorian scientists hand selected by the Royal Society, geologist William Buckland compares the fossilized etchings of a coal seam to the finest of human-directed artistic productions: “The most elaborate imitations of living foliage upon the painted ceilings of Italian palaces bear no comparison with the beauteous profusion of extinct vegetable forms, with which the galleries of those instructive coal mines are overhung.” The ferns’ “festoons of graceful foliage” were not the only cause for celebration. So was, as Buckland notes, the “color contrast of the coal black color of these vegetables with the light groundwork of the rock to which they are attached” (qtd. in Edwards 103). Moving deeper than surface-level similarities, the self-inscribing capacities of fossils and salt prints were both enhanced by coal, an extractable environmental material vital to England’s deep and 19th-century presents. Coal acted as the template for plants to insert themselves, into the Earth’s archives; in “Observations on Fossils,” miner John Sim metaphorically guides readers deeper into coal mines, stopping to point out the fossilized foliage “planted in the different layers of [Nature’s] book” (111). To make a successful salt print positive from a paper negative, the photographer needed either very thin paper or a substance that would improve the translucence of the paper. Applying a layer of coal oil to paper during the salt print process would ensure this transparency, as C.E. Waters explains: since “thick paper” potentially weakens the light’s ability to penetrate through the layers of photographic materials, “the use of a little coal-oil make[s] the paper transparent” (352). The layers of sensitized paper, coal oil, and contact negative model a three-dimensional archival proxy of England’s deep past – a memorial to the Carboniferous period that produced the beloved fossilized ferns in coal – and a more recent 19th-century past of geological and industrial extraction founded on the simultaneous exhuming of fossils and coal.

Uncertain Futures

32By the later 19th century, fern fever broke. In an 1882 letter to the Selborne Society, W.G. Wheatcroft warns that reckless extraction would portend a fern-less future: “If fern-destruction continues at the same place as it is now proceeding, I venture to think […] that at the end of that period, the plant lover will seek in vain amidst the sheltered glades for his much-loved fern” (120). Two decades earlier, William Stanley Jevons raised alarms that the fern’s distant relative, coal, was soon doomed to exhaustion: “Geologists of eminence, acquainted with the contents of our strata […] were long ago painfully struck by the essentially limited nature of our main wealth” (viii).

33If, as John Berger argues, photographs are mementos of a “life being lived” and of “the absent” (20, 53), Glaisher’s prints record a moment both tinted by potential abundances and shadowed by eventual losses. Contemporary artists grappling with ecological loss have turned to photogenic drawings co-operative processes. Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur’s 2016 Chernobyl Herbarium commemorates the 30th anniversary of Chernobyl’s nuclear power station explosion; Tondeur’s photograms of plants growing within the exclusion zone dissipate into skeletal impressions glittering with white effluvia. Marder writes that they “send us back to a space and time outside the frame, wherein Linum usitatissimum germinated, grew, and blossomed” (14). In her Index series, D.M. Witman employs photogram technology to archive impending ecological loss in a “small patch of intertidal marsh of the St. George River,” which will bear the impact of “increasing temperatures and rising waters” of climate change (“Index”). Deep pasts, inevitable presents. Plants, salt, coal, water, paper, humans. Photogenic drawing processes invite ecological materials to write themselves into archives, preserving layers of the past in uncertain futures.

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Table des illustrations

Légende Figure 1. Cecilia Glaisher. “Holly-Fern”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Salted paper print from a photogenic drawing contact negative. Four specimens, lantern composition. 449mm × 304 mm.
Crédits © Fitzwilliam Museum.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/docannexe/image/9703/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 88k
Légende Figure 2. Cecilia Glaisher. “Holly-Fern”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Photogenic drawing contact negative. 448 mm × 290 mm.
Crédits © Fitzwilliam Museum.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/docannexe/image/9703/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 92k
Légende Figure 3. Cecilia Glaisher. “Soft-Shield Fern”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Photogenic drawing contact negative. 450 mm × 291 mm.
Crédits © Fitzwilliam Museum.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/docannexe/image/9703/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 101k
Légende Figure 4. Cecilia Glaisher. “Dickie’s Bladder Fern”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Photogenic drawing contact negative. Five frond composition. 436 mm × 279 mm.
Crédits © Fitzwilliam Museum.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/docannexe/image/9703/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 126k
Légende Figure 5. Cecilia Glaisher. “Maidenhair Fern”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Photogenic drawing contact negative. Five frond composition. 436 mm × 279 mm.
Crédits © Fitzwilliam Museum.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/docannexe/image/9703/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 122k
Légende Figure 6. Cecilia Glaisher. “Sea Spleenwort”. 1855. Fitzwilliam Museum. Salted paper print from a photogenic drawing contact negative. 444 mm × 281 mm.
Crédits © Fitzwilliam Museum.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/docannexe/image/9703/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 125k
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Ann Garascia, « Plants, Water, Salt, Coal: The Archival Strata of the Victorian Photographic Book »Interfaces [En ligne], 52 | 2024, mis en ligne le 30 novembre 2024, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/9703 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13p0o

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Auteur

Ann Garascia

California State University (San Bernardino)

Ann Garascia is a lecturer in the English Department at California State University San Bernardino. Her research interests include nineteenth-century British literature and culture, book history and archival studies, and environmental humanities (mainly plants). She is currently working on a monograph project, Strange Flora, that places book history and environmental humanities in conversation through shared interests in the materials of more-than-human storytelling to highlight how Victorian global plant collecting cultures provoke new imaginings of “the book of nature” in their past and present forms. Her publications appear in Victorian Literature and CultureNineteenth-Century Contexts, Journal of Ecohumanism, and other venues; for her work on Victorian botanist Anna Atkins, she received the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association’s 2020 Emerging Scholar award.

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