It's a Small World

Regency London must have been a frustrating place for green-fingered members of the bourgeoisie. Few middle-class urbanites enjoyed the luxury of a garden, and airborne soot and dust made cultivating plants indoors a fruitless pursuit. In 1829, however, Dr Nathanial Ward came to the aid of the domestic horticulturalist. By purchasing the physician's patented 'Wardian case' the parlour-room gardener could, as Ward's son Stephen wrote in 1854, 'introduce Nature into the crowded city in all the attractiveness and purity [...] in which she exhibits herself in the country'. Ward's glass vitrines provided a sealed environment in which plants could live for years - the first example of what we would now call a biosphere. By the 1850s these display cases were a feature in the reception room of any self-respecting middle-class home. To urban Victorians they must have seemed like windows on to a forgotten countryside, a wild, eternal wonderland glimpsed through a sheet of glass. The popularity of Ward's invention coincided with (and is largely attributable to) that most bizarre of Victorian enthusiasms: pteridomania, or the faddish collecting of ferns. Intricate and elegant, yet sombre and masculine, ferns were considered the aristocracy of the plant kingdom, a world away from the crude ostentation of flowers. Tapping into the same vein of Romanticism that had resulted in the domestic display of miniature grottoes a decade or so earlier, ferns came to symbolize the cold beauty of the English countryside - a vital part of the Gothic sensibility. As time passed, Wardian cases became ever more elaborate, eschewing Ward's original utilitarian tube shape in favour of all manner of absurd designs. Even Ward wasn't immune to this increased ornamentalism: towards the end of his life he designed a case in the shape of Tintern Abbey. Of course, Ward's original motivation had been scientific rather than aesthetic. A quiet man, dissatisfied with practising medicine in the rather seedy environs of Whitechapel, he spent most of his time involved in amateur entomology, botany and natural history. Ward's invention rested on his discovery that, if they're rooted in damp soil, stood in sunlight and covered by a sealed glass case, plants grow quite happily without any further human intervention. As the good doctor duly noted, the atmosphere inside such a contraption would be maintained by the balance of vegetable photosynthesis and respiration, while moisture levels would endure through a constant cycle of evaporation and condensation. Ward's first experiments were - perhaps presciently - with ferns, which were just starting to arouse interest in the late 1820s. Over two decades later Ward's original ferns, in their original cases, were still thriving. Apart from their obvious interest to botanists, Wardian cases enabled entrepreneurs to transport plants across the globe with ease. International arboreta could build up collections of exotics, and nostalgic expatriates in the colonies could enjoy a corner of their homes that would be forever England. But for most Victorians Wardian cases were about one thing only: the exhibition of a miniature rustic scene. Whereas 18th-century cabinets of curiosities had been a strictly upper-class hobby, the repeal of the extortionate glass duties in 1845 meant that any middle-class family could afford a Wardian case. Along with the Parisian arcades that Walter Benjamin famously studied, Ward's vitrines were part of a revolution that transformed the West's optical unconscious: the democratization of the gaze. The pure scopophilic pleasure of looking - whether through a shop-front window or through a Wardian case - was eagerly claimed by an aspirant middle class. As Wardian cases became more common, so they became less fashionable. But the lure of glass and the desire for observation remained, and later Victorian fads - such as the aquarium - were simply variations on the Wardian model. Glass-fronted boxes, with their promise of control and containment, their coy look-but-don't-touch exhibitionism and their transparent offer of spectacle and entertainment, infiltrated deep into the popular psyche and were here to stay. Anyone for television?