6 February 2015
19th century America: impressions from the archive of Joseph Hooker
Discover a selection of Joseph Hooker's views on 19th century America, taken from the great botanist's expedition letters.
Letters from Joseph Hooker to Asa Gray go online
The Joseph Hooker Correspondence Project, based in the Kew Gardens archive, has just completed the digitisation of the historic letters from Joseph Hooker to Asa Gray and they will soon be available online.
As Director of Kew Gardens (1865-1885) Joseph Hooker was the pre-eminent botanist in Victorian England. While Asa Gray, Professor of natural history at Harvard (1842-1873), was the botanical authority in nineteenth-century America. The correspondence between these two pillars of science contains fascinating insights into the progress of natural history studies in the 19th century. For example, Hooker and Gray's own research into global distribution of flora and their analysis of the interpretation and reception of Darwinism.
Plant hunting and people watching
The digitised correspondence also contains letters from Hooker to his wife Hyacinth, written during a tour of America made with Gray in 1877. These letters are full of Hooker's social observations of 19th century America, which wasn't always quite as he expected.
The aim of Gray and Hooker's tour was to observe and collect the vegetation of the Rocky Mountains and Western America. Hooker seems to have expected the west to be truly 'wild':
"Nothing in America has appeared to me so remarkable as the way the Anglo-Saxon has pushed his way into these mountains which were infected a few years ago with hostile savages and covered with Buffalo of neither of which except bones of the latter have we seen" [Joseph Hooker to his wife Hyacinth JHC207]
He seems surprised, even impressed to find that the frontier towns are so 'civilised' (despite lacking in gardens and vegetable produce). Of 1877 Georgetown, Colorado he says:
"Here at this little town at the extreme finger end of civilization the streets are watered better than at Kew; people sleep without locks to the doors, the fire engines are well manned & in capital & of food there is no end, though it's in too high to raise vegetables or any Garden produce! "
Equally he was pleasantly surprised by the politeness of Americans:
"The Yankee population that we meet every where are most civil & obliging, very rough in exterior but never so in manners. Here on the verge of civilisation, there is abundance of food & progress in all directions" [Joseph Hooker to his wife Hyacinth JHC211]
On Brigham Young and the Mormons
Joseph Hooker may have liked 'Yankees' in general but not all the Americans he met made an entirely favourable impression on him. In Salt Lake City, Utah he found the Mormon population to be industrious and progressive but he had more mixed feelings about famous Mormon leader Brigham Young, about whom Hooker wrote to his wife in his typically forthright fashion:
"Of course he is an arrant impostor, but nothing in speech look or manner differs from those of a quiet well bred English gentleman. I talked a good deal with him about the Climate history & productions of his country & found him communative[sic] & intelligent... & [he] "God blessed us"! when we left!" [Hooker to his wife Hyacinth JHC206]
Travelling in stateside style
Hooker has many comments to make in his letters to his wife Hyacinth about the various comforts and discomforts endured during his 8,000 mile round trip across America. Hooker was an avid traveller and prolific plant hunter throughout his life, visiting every continent in pursuit of plants (even Antarctica). But aged 70, Hooker seems to have found his botanical exploration of America exhaustingly hard work. Although from the look of their camp in the Rocky Mountains, even camping out was done in comfort.
In his youth Hooker was known to express a longing for a tent in the jungle or a ship's cabin over any other accommodation, but now of advanced years he was delighted rather more with the luxury of American rail travel and the novelty of stately paddle steamers.
"These steamers which at a pinch can accommodate 1000 passengers, & sail steam 20 miles an hour on smooth water are both for construction & comfort quite unlike anything we have at home."
And like all holiday makers the cuisine was a hot topic in his messages home and availability of good food usually heralds a more upbeat letter. He was particularly pleased with getting ice-cream served on the trains. Luxury indeed.
New York, Cincinatti, Boston and beyond
Hooker's American correspondence will be online soon, check back to find letters with his views on New York (he prefers Manchester and Glasgow), Cincinatti (a 'dirty place full of coal smoke', sorry Cincinnatians), and Boston (which he is kinder about, apparently Bostonians are all 'well educated' and 'handsome' and Hooker was rather fond of the 'nasal twang' to their accents).
- Ginny -
Joseph Hooker Correspondence Project Officer
