VICTORIAN NIGHTSHADES

VICTORIAN NIGHTSHADES:
HOW THE SOLANACEAE SHAPED THE MODERN WORLD

When I first picked up Elizabeth A. Campbell’s book on Victorian nightshades, I expected a rigorous but, frankly, clinical exploration of some of the modern world’s most famous vegetables: a beautiful botanical “still life,” so to speak. I was not prepared for Campbell’s compelling, dynamic, and often funny explorations of how Victorian moral- and meaning-making became inextricably tied with burgeoning botanical practices of (mis)identifying and (mis)naming these plants, making them extremely useful texts through which to analyze changing Victorian values and anxieties. 

Weaving dexterously through the 1800s, the text is structured broadly on the shift from Old World to New World, with the first half of the book focusing on the most notorious nightshades, belladonna and its frequently mistaken cousin, bittersweet, before shifting in relatively quick succession from potatoes and tobacco to the “eminently friendly” petunias, peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes. With so much initial, detailed focus on the more maligned members of the solanaceae (née Luridae) family, Campbell reveals a pre-established scientific interest in understanding plants that incorporated the superstitious and the moral to near-disastrous end. 

Despite the legitimate dangers posed by eating belladonna’s shining black berries, Campbell showcases how early Victorian botanists narrated its “perpetual appeal” as salacious and tempting—as “unforgivable sin.” Through continued dialogue between burgeoning botanists and then-contemporary authors, the literally-translated “beautiful woman” nightshade took on a life as a “harlot of a plant,” akin to “the sexy, marriage- and man-destroying, iconic Fatal Woman” and, later, witches. Exacerbated by its affiliated locales of “wild nature” and “gloomy lanes,” gallows, dunghills, and ruins in scientific and popular literature alike, this “outlaw” and irredeemable “plant pariah” came to represent the literal and figurative “margins of human habitations,” whose wildness and lack of cultivation revealed its seemingly innate immorality—and, conversely, how industriousness, cultivation, and “taming” species revealed not only “goodness” but national and moral strength: a trend that continues through Campbell’s analysis of potatoes and their “lazy,” “similarly soil-bound,” and thus Providentially-punished Irish farmers. Campbell cites Karl Marx’s scathing comparison here, in which he states that the French, like the Irish and their socially conflated potatoes, are a “similarly soil-bound” peasantry who share a “concomitant lack of a cohesive class ideology” and remain undifferentiated, unthinking, as “much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes,” showcasing the extraordinarily dehumanizing synecdochical affiliations maintained between certain nightshades and colonially subordinated Others. This continues with the tobacco industry’s cultivation of massive land masses by enslaved populations in the Americas to further enrich and ennoble the Crown, and the Crystal Palace’s modernization of gardening and housing exotic, non-native spaces representing “England’s triumph over the vegetable kingdom.”

While belladonna’s reputation as a wicked temptress haunting neglected spaces contributed to its becoming a staple in Gothic art and literature from the Victorian period onwards—its “impeccable Gothic credentials”—Campbell also highlights how this characterization leads to much more pervasive and pernicious ideology towards violence and eradication. Belladonna’s perceived danger, particularly towards “helplessly undiscerning” children or women, led to the consensus that it should not “be suffered to grow” but must be extirpated, sentenced to extinction. Combined with Campbell’s broader discussion on how these ongoing processes of identifying and characterizing plants throughout the Victorian period was absolutely subject to error—as with the constant misidentification of belladonna and bittersweet, or, later, with Charles Darwin’s confusion in discerning potato varieties, even according to his own methods of evolution and identification—the near-constant misidentification of bittersweet as belladonna meant that this “program of eradication” affected both species to such an extent that many later poisonings occurred as a direct result of there not being enough plants left to identify in the first place. Campbell’s text thus compellingly showcases how “prevailing opinion” and fears of imagined harm can beget and justify projects of violence, and how this becomes especially damning when rampant misinformation and misidentification abounds. It is not too far to connect these fearmongered, culturally constructed plant genocides with systems of human oppression, considering, for example, that the British deemed the mass starvation of Irish people during the potato famine “the dispensations of Providence,” refusing to provide aid because the blight was “God’s blessing on Ireland.” Awareness of the arbitrariness of plant names and their ascribed moral values thus invites us to reflect on other socially manufactured concerns, hopefully equipping us to better recognize oppressive social scripts.

Campbell’s focus on species’ (mis)identification and assumed moral values also reveals how easily the public can be financially manipulated and targeted, from belladonna’s initial status of “poison” and “pernicious temptress” to its later “pharmaceutical necessity”; tobacco’s shift from “illicit addiction” to “comfort”; petunia’s status as, first, “exclusive province of the rich,” then, as “fashionable bedder…in the gardens and florist shows of the working class”; and, finally,  the potato’s reputation as “poor man’s food,” or “bottom-feeding on the human and wage-scale,” before becoming “potato royalty” solely “responsible for the family’s consolatory associations” of Solanum. Campbell also points out various novelty cultivars going in and out of vogue to varying effect, as with the Eldorado potato, which sold for as much as £150 per tuber, despite being, in fact, another pre-existing and largely forgettable potato variety. These nightshades’ diverse and often opposing moral values reveal the malleability and tenuousness of categories in light of changing scientific advances, classist, aesthetic sensibilities, and social norms.

Campbell’s text also navigates the anthropocentrism and xenophobia implicit in Victorian classification systems, frequently referring to not only the literal familial and social relationships mirrored in botanical lingo (e.g., families, tribes, kinship, reputation, inheritance) but how establishing relationships between those plants provides space to moralize perceived problems within those familial lines. The potato’s “innocence,” “wholesomeness,” and “benevolent and providential influence,” for example, was seen as being at odds with belladonna, while the mandrake seemingly cast an “aura of evil” around the nightshade family as a whole. Botanists furthered these social links by classifying plants in direct relation to their “civil claims,” or the veracity of their nativity and “British-ness” through a multi-part scale ranging from “denizen” to “alien,” “colonist” to “incognita,” while some tobacco factories reiterated colonial and national identity, with advertisers proclaiming when goods were processed in “Model English Factor[ies]” by good “English Girls,” rather than from the “Continental Prisons” or “Slums of Cairo or Constantinople.” Though growing scientific processes gradually began to reveal the ambiguity and tenuousness of “native” versus “foreign,” through identifying and accounting for migration patterns and co-evolution, Campbell’s exploration of these dynamic naming processes reveals their nationalistic and arbitrary values.

Ultimately, Victorian Nightshades boasts an incredible synthesis of primary, archival, visual, and popular sources to reveal the ongoing, interactive processes of not just identifying but moralizing these plants, giving them deeply anthropomorphic identities that, despite being described as “harmless natural order[s]” are hardly harmless nor natural. Rather, shaped by changing moral and social attitudes, technological advancements, colonial projects, and classist, sexist, and racist attitudes, these nightshades became vehicles on which Victorian values were superinscribed, dictating not only broader social attitudes but action. Despite its botanical focus, Campbell’s work invites curiosity to explore and interrogate other seemingly innocuous but deeply human aspects of daily life (and makes me eager to critically rewatch Veggie Tales).