As a sidelight on my new book on H.G. Wells in the Potteries, I’m currently reading Erasmus Darwin’s book-length poem The Botanic Garden: the Economy of Vegetation (1791) in its free Gutenberg version (clean in .ePub and Kindle .mobi, with the original footnotes, corrected long-s, and line numbers).

Here are some recommended introductory podcasts on local man Erasmus Darwin:

* “Erasmus Darwin: People, Language, & History Connections”, a nippy little fast-paced and friendly 15-minute introduction, from a popular podcaster.

* The 14 minute “The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden“ is also rather good. The best of a mostly rather dry series of such videos made by academics, apparently for the public.

The only broadcast documentary I can find is John Scotney’s “A Mind of Universal Sympathy”, though it’s not online. It was a long BBC Radio 3 partly-dramatised narrated documentary, broadcast in September 1973. Re-broadcast in 1974 and 1978, but probably now lost due to the BBC’s criminal policy of not preserving their archives in the 1980s and 90s. Such a pity that our regional archives never thought to record such key broadcasts on good reel-to-reel tape. An oral history interview with Desmond King-Hele, via the British Library, reveals more…

I also should mention the radio programme in 1973 called A Mind of Universal Sympathy. This was commissioned by John Scotney, one of the producers at the BBC, and it was really quite difficult to write, it was a dramatised documentary about Erasmus Darwin for Radio 3, it was forty five minutes [Radio Times suggests one hour] and it was a drama with Freddie Jones as Erasmus. It was very successful actually and financially one of my most successful things, because it was repeated several times on Radio 3 and they gave fees for those as well. I did another similar type of radio drama called The Lunatics covering the Lunar Society of Birmingham, again with Erasmus Darwin in a major role.”

Possibly these scripts might be rescued from archives somewhere, and re-made as a new semi-dramatised feature-documentary?

I had been recommended to read The Botanic Garden years ago, I forget by whom, but was reminded of it again by Wells’s “The Cone”. In this macabre revenge short-story Wells has a wife talk of her iron-master husband and his… “dreadful theory of yours that machinery is beautiful […] It’s his great theory, his one discovery in art.” Thus for my footnotes to “The Cone” I investigated the extent of the ‘heavy industry and machinery is beautiful’ sentiment at the time, in art and literature, to see if there was an obvious source Wells might have been gesturing toward and expecting his readers to recognise. There was no obvious source, but few choices at that time. Darwin’s “The Economy of Vegetation” certainly celebrated the rising new industries in no uncertain terms, and had both a Etruria (Stoke) and a Staffordshire connection (Darwin was a Lichfield man). It was a best-seller and went through multiple editions, and thus was likely to be easily available in used and reprint copies in the Potteries by 1888. There were also pirated Irish and American editions due to its immense popularity.

In it there is a striking use of a vengeful husband and his revenge, as a metaphor for the earth’s making of iron in the earth, with fits with the theme of “The Cone”…

Indignant Vulcan eyed the parting Pair,
And watch’d with jealous step the guilty pair

[… he traps and fixes them in a mesh of metal, in their love-bed]

Hence dusky Iron sleeps in dark abodes,
And ferny foliage nestles in the nodes;
Till with wide lungs panting bellows blow,
And waked by fire the glittering torrents flow

With the book-length poem’s visions of a future Empire in the air with airships (“The flying-chariot through the fields of air. Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above”) and in submarines under the sea (“Britain’s sons shall guide | Huge sea-balloons beneath the tossing tide; The diving castles, roof’d with spheric glass, […] Buoy’d with pure air shall endless tracks pursue”) and a great many other items of interest to a budding purveyor of the future, one has to wonder if Wells may have read The Botanic Garden in 1888 or thereabouts. Certainly the botanical aspects of the didactic poem would also have interested him, complete with Erasmus’s own fascinating scientific footnotes. In 1888 Wells appears to have been somewhat light on the botany half of biology, and in need of ‘cramming’ on the topic if he was to teach the subject, perhaps another reason to ‘give it a go’.

However… I can find not a whit of hard evidence that Wells ever mentioned Erasmus, despite Erasmus’s pioneering championing of the cause of “enlisting the imagination under the banner of science”, and his practical linkage of Romanticism and speculative optimistic science (and thirty years before the birth of Jules Verne, to boot). Given Wells’s immense and prolific output, and his effective founding of futurology, this absence in itself is perhaps indicative of a key influence being cloaked from public scrutiny. But the lack of hard evidence has to mean that a Wells connection can only be very tentatively suggested.

Still, The Economy of Vegetation is proving to be an interesting read, especially when viewed as in part an early work of science-fiction. Interestingly, Lovecraft had a copy in his library, and he no doubt adored the blend of the 1700s poetic style with speculative science. The long-s style of Pope and Erasmus Darwin was by then deeply unfashionable, but it was one Lovecraft doggedly championed in public until well into the 1920s.

There’s more to be had locally, and very much in the Darwin style, in The vales of Wever, a loco-descriptive poem (1797) by John Gisborne. It ‘Erasmus-ifies’ Wootton, near Alton Castle, complete with the same style of explicatory footnotes. Rather usefully, the poem throws several lights on the otherwise-unknown natural history of the Gawain landscape.