Gardens in the Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel

Our theme for the autumn and winter terms is ‘An Open Book: Gardens in Literature and Letters’.

The historical novel of the nineteenth century, as it developed from the work of Sir Walter Scott, took as its basic theme the strangeness of the past: how much did the people of past ages resemble the novel’s readers, or did there lie between them, as James Anthony Froude put it, ‘a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge’? The historical novelist was expected (in those days before the discipline of social history had developed) to do extensive research into the lives of earlier generations, and sometimes this research extended to the garden. Scott alone provided accounts of gardens from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries, from Byzantium to Capability Brown. Among the other authors whose works will be investigated are Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Prosper Mérimée, Théophile Gautier, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert. This paper will examine accounts of gardens from nineteenth-century novels according to the periods described: classical, medieval, Renaissance and baroque, and finally the rise of the landscape garden. In each case it will ask the questions: what were the author’s sources, and how did these descriptions relate to, or even influence, the styles of gardening that were taking place in the author’s world?

Dr Brent Elliott was formerly the Librarian, then the Historian, of the Royal Horticultural Society. He is the author of Victorian Gardens (1986), The Country House Garden (1995), The Royal Horticultural Society 1804-2004 (2004) and other books. He has recently co-edited, with Sarah Dewis, an anthology of nineteenth-century garden writing (Nineteenth-Century Gardens and Gardening - Abingdon, Routledge, 2024), and has collaborated with Roger Bowdler on a forthcoming history of British cemeteries. He was, for 21 years, a member of English Heritage’s Historic Parks and Gardens Committee, and has been a member of the Victorian Society’s Buildings Committee for 45 years.