Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
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Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
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University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK
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Northwestern University Chicago, IL, USA
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Adam Colman
Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Adam Colman Department of English
University of Massachusetts Amherst Amherst, MA, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-030-01589-3 ISBN 978-3-030-01590-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01590-9
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Acknowledgments
This book would not exist without those who have read and generously responded to my work. I owe many thanks to Suzanne Daly; thanks also to Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge, David Katz, Daniel Levin Becker, Darren Lone Fight, Cornelia Pearsall, Heather Richardson, and David Toomey. Jonathan Crewe, William Keach, and Kate Thomas provided important guidance at early stages in my studies. At the 2017 Friends of Coleridge conference in Bristol, I was fortunate to learn from an array of scholars; Sharon Ruston and Tim Fulford, among so many others, have helped me find my way through Romanticism. More generally, a number of people have helped me figure out what I’ve been seeking to do in academia, and they include Lily Gurton-Wachter, Andrew Leland, Erin Moodie, Mazen Naous, and David Pritchard.
An earlier version of this book’s sixth chapter appeared in the journal Extrapolation, and I thank Liverpool University Press for the permission to include that material here.
To Gerald Colman and Ruth Colman, the entire Colman family, the Gu family, Kevin Johnson, Melissa Lok, and the Tam family, I owe much gratitude, and my utmost thanks go to Jessica Tam.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This is the story behind the good sort of addiction. To be clear: that good sort is not the medical condition of substance dependence, which is perilous and so often devastating. Instead, by “good sort of addiction,” I refer to a sense of addiction frequently used in pop-culture criticism. We find it in descriptions of videogames, in essays on music, and in reviews of television programs. Kirsten Acuna’s review of Breaking Bad, for example, uses the language of drug use in praise of a television show (in this case a show about a methamphetamine-dealer named Walt). “If you’re bingewatching,” Acuna writes, “‘Breaking Bad’ becomes as addictive as the blue meth Walt’s buyers can’t go without.”
Acuna is quite specific about the nature of Breaking Bad’s good sort of addictiveness. She argues that the show’s habit-forming property comes from its strategy of promising new information in each installment: “The final 12–15 minutes of nearly every episode,” she writes, “usually has a huge plot turn.” Acuna’s use of the word “addictive” here conveys a sober inclination toward acquisition of more and more knowledge, a sustained consideration of promised novelty and difference, and an orientation toward constantly intimated potential. Substance dependence, as described by the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Medical Disorders (DSM), also compels ongoing pursuit of more and more through “a pattern of repeated self-administration” (176), but it overrides will and narrows the range of possibilities pursued. It can drive one to consume
© The Author(s) 2019
A. Colman, Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in NineteenthCentur y Literature, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01590-9_1
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repeatedly a substance “despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the substance” (DSM-IV 181). The positive sense of addiction used by Acuna—that of an aesthetic experience merely like substance dependence due in large part to its similarly repetitive nature—combines the propulsion of desire with a widened range of exploration. Such an experience belongs to what I call the addiction aesthetic, an aesthetic category characterized by a particular modality, or orientation toward possibility. The addiction aesthetic’s modality, this book argues, is one of intensely repetitive investigation of the possible.
It is hard to imagine aesthetic experience of any kind that does not involve some combination of repetition and a sense of the possible, yet this book particularly examines the intensified, exploratory version of such experience in terms of addiction for two reasons. First, addiction-related terminology continues to appear in descriptions of this sort of aesthetic experience and, second, durable versions of such aesthetic experience emerged with regard to nineteenth-century ideas about habit-forming intoxicants. For a clearer idea of that emergence, consider the difference between Beethoven and Bach, as well as the difference in their receptions. Alex Ross, in a New Yorker piece on Beethoven, describes the nineteenthcentur y composer’s work as “addictive” in order to distinguish it from that of earlier composers such as Bach, whose music uses comparatively steadier repetitions and variations. Beethoven, Ross observes, brings more elaboration, greater scale, more obsessiveness—in short, more—to the musical tradition represented by Bach, and the result is addictive. Ross writes:
More than anything, it was the mesmerizing intricacy of Beethoven’s constructions—his way of building large structures from the obsessive development of curt motifs—that made the repertory culture of classical music possible. This is not to say that Beethoven’s predecessors, giants on the order of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, fail to reward repeated listening with their cerebral games of variation. In the case of Beethoven, though, the process becomes addictive [emphasis added], irresistible. No composer labors so hard to stave off boredom, to occupy the mind of one who might be hearing or playing a particular piece for the tenth or the hundredth time.
Here, a twenty-first-century writer uses the language of addiction to describe a Romantic composer—to describe the greater intensity of that nineteenth-century composer’s repetitive pursuit of something more than the music of his predecessors.1 Ross also quotes E.T.A. Hoffmann’s praise
of Beethoven as a composer whose music involves “infinite yearning” (Hoffmann 98), using language further suggestive of addictiveness, especially given that Hoffmann’s own nineteenth-century aesthetic ideals have been linked to his alcohol habit.2
Beethoven is said to have declared, “Music is like wine, inflaming men’s minds to new achievements, and I am the Bacchus serving it out to them, even unto intoxication” (Schindler 276). Such music resembled an intoxicant because it provided a pathway toward “new achievements”—toward novelty, toward possibility. Contemporaries including Hoffmann and later writers identified a corresponding, addictive, “infinite yearning” in this aesthetic experience. At a time when addiction discourse was on the rise in Europe (in conjunction with broader post-Enlightenment discussions of desirous habit) many saw aesthetic potential that matched addictive craving and intoxication; the quote from Alex Ross exemplifies the continued presence of that aesthetic sensibility.3 Thus “the addiction aesthetic” still proves useful as a label for this category of experience.
Again, the addiction aesthetic’s ongoing processions toward novelty, as we see in Acuna’s review, are exploratory rather than strictly, oppressively ravenous. Breaking Bad’s addictive allure sustains thoughtful curiosity about “huge plot turns,” an investigatory attitude toward alwaysdeveloping and always-promised change. Rather than producing drab compulsion, routine merges with its opposite for a figuratively addicted audience’s delighted contemplation. Breaking Bad’s addictive form—its episodically plot-driven tantalization—establishes the rhythms of routine engagement with the non-routine, structuring the aesthetic experience by which an audience might explore strangeness through intensified yet basically sober habit (the formal logic suggests something akin to that of Beethoven’s music as described by Ross). In this book, I do not rule out the possibility that such art deemed addictive may be experienced through the same neural processes as drug addiction, but nor do I devote much attention to the negative sense of addiction applied, for instance, to songs—“earworms”—that get stuck in one’s head, override will, and work in manners closer to the medically understood version of addiction associated with substance dependence. The scope of this book will mostly remain limited to the origins of the aesthetic category founded upon a positive sense of addictive repetition, a sense different from—though clearly related to—the compulsions of the medical condition.4
This book focuses primarily on Britain in the nineteenth century, when addiction became more firmly understood as a medical condition and so became available as an aesthetic concept. The Society for the Study of
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Addiction and the leading medical journal it produces, Addiction, both trace back to Britain in the nineteenth century. Specifically, they trace back to 1884, when the society was founded as the Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety, and when it first published its Proceedings. The terminology should not mislead anyone: from the start, the society was focused on drug habit as a disease rather than strictly a moral failing. “Only medical practitioners could have full membership… This medical focus was reflected in the society’s adherence to the disease concept of inebriety with its concomitant implication that inebriates should be treated in a hospital or asylum” (Blocker, Fahey, and Tyrell 564). And while 1884 is later than the publication of texts examined within the earlier chapters of this book, the sense of habitual intoxication as a disease of craving (and not a moral failing) emerged long before. That sense was demonstrably accessed and articulated influentially by earlier writers, from Coleridge to Dickens. Across the nineteenth century, the rise of professional medicine and medical journals continually supported an increase in medicalized discussion of addiction. “Habitual use, what we would now call addiction, caused less concern,” notes Virginia Berridge, than other risks of drug use early on in the century (Demons 26), but the problems of habitual use were at least registered. Contradicting a tradition that had viewed habitual intoxication as a moral flaw and following the eighteenth-century work of Benjamin Rush and Thomas Trotter, intemperance became increasingly described as disease in a variety of medical publications.5 Words like “alcoholism” and the noun “addict,” now among standard terms for describing substance dependence, emerged later in the nineteenth century, even if terms like “intemperance” or “inebriate” were commonly used to denote the same phenomena.6 In any case, Thomas Trotter had already described those who were “addicted to the habit” of alcohol consumption by the early nineteenth century (36). Addiction may not, again, have been the universally preferred term for drug and alcohol habit, and fears about opium habituation were not strong enough to regulate the substance in any real way in Britain prior to the 1868 Pharmacy Act, yet Romantic-era writers described what has since often been called addiction.
Addiction was becoming more widely medically recognized as intensely potent habits in general became part of so many different aspects of British life, often those linked to exploratory pursuit or consumption. As Meredith Conti notes, addiction became medically registered once there was “impetus to define, conceptualize and treat addiction” (113). By the start of the nineteenth century, that impetus had arrived as heightened consumerism,
colonialism, and global commerce depended upon substances known by those like Trotter and Rush to be habit-forming—substances such as rum, tobacco, and opium.7 Enlightenment thinkers including David Hume and Edmund Burke had also, in the eighteenth century, advocated custom and habits as mechanisms for society’s stability at a time when social habits were increasingly sustained by habit-forming activities in coffee-houses and taverns. This habitual social commerce involved pursuit of more than just consumption, such as knowledge of what was happening in one’s world, or knowledge through which one might profit. And as the nineteenth century developed, habit would become further linked to exploration. The scientific method—by which habitually repetitive experiment drives ceaselessly toward some knowledge yet to be had—attained greater cultural significance as the figure of the professional scientist gained prominence. Key people in nineteenth-century science, moreover, selfexperimented with intoxication and at times developed troubling toxic habits themselves, making their intensely repetitive investigations seem all the more evidently addictive, as I will discuss. Romantic and Victorian writers thus had an expanse of meaning to draw from when they considered drug and alcohol habit, and that sense of variety accompanied their representations of addictive consumption that had broadly exploratory ramifications.
Writers characterized adventures in readerly consumption, too, as addictive early in the eighteenth century and on through the nineteenth century. This started before the medicalization of drug and alcohol habit had reached broadest acceptance—well before medical writers Trotter and Rush began to describe alcohol habituation in the later eighteenth century. In 1710’s Tatler no. 155, Joseph Addison described “the Political Upholsterer Addicted to News.”8 In 1712, the Spectator of April 29 related consumption of novels to habitually consumable stimulants, urging readers to be “careful” about “how they meddle with romances, chocolate, novels and the like inflamers; which I look upon as very dangerous to be made use of” (Budgell 278).9 Readers’ pursuit of novelty and habitual enjoyment had been associated with one another before the nineteenth century, in other words, and that association would remain in place through the nineteenth century. The writers in the following chapters, accordingly, may have seen thrilling consumption habits as physically dangerous, but they would also have regarded such habits with some sense of a related, repetitive pursuit within literature.
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Nineteenth-century writers had a range of good reasons for deliberately patterning texts after addictive pursuit of possibility. As a sales strategy, peddling addictive enjoyment is demonstrably savvy, and repetitively consumed serial fictions were certainly designed and produced to meet regular consumer desires.10 But this book’s point is not that writers devised addictive literary techniques (in particular, the patterning of a work after addiction’s patterns) in order to hold an audience’s interest, maintain consumerist desire, or control those consumerist cravings. Others have effectively illuminated those uses of literature.11 This study instead examines how the aesthetic category of addiction entailed a strategy for producing certain literary inventions. To date we have seen no in-depth study of how the incorporation of addiction discourse into aesthetic experience could support formal invention through reliance on intensified, exploratory repetitions. We have, then, had no in-depth study of the addiction aesthetic’s most fascinating attributes.
To begin that study, it helps to consider further the historical intersections between repetitive experience, scientific exploration, and consumption. Repetitive scientific experimentation had—well before the Romantics—involved self-experiment via intake of substances. Santorio Santorio, a seventeenth-century Venetian self-experimenter who would weigh himself and study his intake of food, is said to have been the first case of a physician “verifying theoretical statements by testing and retesting” (Altman 22). In other words, the repetitively experimental—often self-experimental—quest into the material world’s possibilities long suggested habitual consumption. Repetitive exploration would naturally become figured as addictive once intemperate consumption habit became a broadly known medical condition.
The opium-consuming Samuel Taylor Coleridge would especially advance that sense of a connection between scientific pursuit, literary exploration, and addiction.12 We can attribute this partly to Coleridge’s engagement with the thought of Thomas Beddoes and others influenced by Dr. John Brown, who held that different kinds of stimuli—whether of mind or body—could have similar effects when experienced through a “habit” of being “over stimulated” (89). Brown described identical effects of “entertainment” and “drinking” on the body via their similar access to stimuli (131–132), and Coleridge himself replicated aspects of Brunonian thinking in his poetics, as discussed below. In 1801 he even listed John Brown alongside Paracelsus and Milton among his list of grandly empirical thinkers (Coleridge’s Notebooks 20). Coleridge also repeatedly experimented
with stimuli in a Brunonian manner via nitrous-oxide intoxication as part of chemical studies at Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institute; later he developed habits we would consider addictive, and he wrote texts widely thought to be influenced by toxic habit. Another example of such a figure would be the cocaine-using Sigmund Freud—Coleridge’s was just one of the earlier nineteenth-century cases in which readers would discover a relationship between desirous, repetitive experiment and addiction.13 As I discuss in Chap. 3, Freud also cited Brunonian-inspired studies in his major work. Across the nineteenth century, then, science was often linked to intensely repetitive yet personally motivated drives to confront something new in the material world, via methods that could thus seem especially addictive. Johannes Fabian has, for instance, written of the “uncontrolled, ecstatic behavior on the part of ‘scientific travellers’” into Africa in the latter half of the nineteenth century (274). He describes “drunken” European encounters with Africans, encounters that so often occurred under the influence of fever and intoxicants, even if those encounters were subsequently, contradictorily phrased largely in the sober language of positivism (274).
Professional science and a growing periodical culture would reinforce the nineteenth-century sense of science as repetitiously oriented toward alluring novelty, too. Repeatedly issued periodicals came to define science; as Thomas Broman writes, they “opened the door to the formation of more specialized groups of readers” (140–141). Through that in-process, readerly formation, scientific work was turning ever more routine and routinely consumed, even as it continually led into the unknown.14 Victorian scientists such as Thomas Huxley would confidently pursue scientific practice “as a useful profession” (White 31), yet Daniel Brown also observes in their science a sense of discovery matched by literary invention. Brown cites the interactions between Wordsworth and the astronomermathematician William Rowan Hamilton, and he considers the production of nonsense verse by Victorian scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell, who “turned to writing poetry as the private medium in which he further developed the epistemological grounds for his scientific practice” (6). Hamilton linked scientific work to the exploratory imagination by stressing science’s orientation toward the possible—an orientation toward the intensely affecting “may and the might.” “For imagined possibility affects us otherwise,” Hamilton observed, “than believed reality: the interest of the has been, the is, and the will be, differs from that of the may and the might; and both these interests are combined in physical science in its perfection”
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(Graves I.503).15 Notice the subjunctive mood, the mood for expressing the desired and the sought; such a modal orientation in science could easily suggest addictive desire, given the repetitive nature of routine, professionalized scientific experiment.
Robert Mitchell writes of a “hybridization of scientific and literary experimentalism” among the Romantics that arose with regard to the age’s vitalism (4). Mitchell adduces addiction-pioneer Thomas Trotter’s work as an example of such experimental vitalism—an example of a medical interest in the mysterious stuff of life that would attract literary, imaginative, and scientific experiment alike. Beyond Trotter, however, nineteenth-century science frequently proved both repetitively factchasing and imaginative as hypothesis-driven inductive work gained prominence.16 Romantics and Victorians both intensified an emphasis on hypothesis; this was the case with William Whewell, who is said to have devised the word “scientist” in a discussion with Samuel Taylor Coleridge,17 and John Stuart Mill, who “was opposed to Whewell’s idealism” but who also had written on the necessity of hypotheses (J. Smith 31).18 Mill’s outline of the scientific method in his System of Logic, for instance, would place imaginative hypothesis at the core of scientific work. He writes that often “what is an hypothesis at the beginning of the inquiry becomes a proved law of nature before its close” (292), and this hypothesis has “no other limits” beyond “those of the human imagination” (290).19 To derive natural law from whatever the scientist imagines would require recurrent experiment; Mill writes of a need to “assure ourselves, by a repetition of the observation or the experiment” (System of Logic 252). Imagination and speculation thus joined with material reiterations for the establishment of natural laws.20 Advanced in part by the work of Romantic scientists (among them Whewell, Humphry Davy, and other associates of Coleridge), such a speculative approach to the scientific method entailed an addiction-like, repetitive questing for more—more experience and more knowledge—sought by a vitally imaginative scientific mind.21
The following question might arise at this point: why shouldn’t we consider literature of repetitive possibility-pursuit, even when centered upon addicted characters, as “science-like,” rather than addiction-like? Either term could describe ideas and modes within the Coleridgean tradition that linked scientific study, literary experience, and intoxicating habit—but “addiction-like” covers more details of the aesthetic experiences under discussion here. These details include the frequent reliance on patterns explicitly reflecting repetitions of addiction; the desirous intensity
of the repetitions represented; the origins of this aesthetic category in the work of writers engaged with discourses of addiction; and critics’ ongoing tendency to describe such work as addictive. This justification for my distinction between the addiction-like and the scientific, however, is not meant to support a clean separation between the two. Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy describes the Dionysian aesthetic experience associated with intoxication as a way to access the previously unintelligible, and thus intoxicating art to Nietzsche suggests “a necessary correlative of and supplement to science” (80). The addiction aesthetic is, similarly, always in part the science-like, even if addictive aesthetic orientation pertains to a stronger element of craving. They are of overlapping modalities, or orientations toward the possible. (In case further terminological questions remain, I include an overview of key terms and definitions later in this introductory chapter.)
There may also be objections regarding the viability of addictive aesthetic strategy for creative exploration. Couldn’t aesthetic strategy modeled after addiction produce stagnating forms, or dull repetitions? Couldn’t the specter of addiction, a frightening problem, smother possibility even in the aesthetic strategy it inspires? What matters here, however, is the difference between “addiction as substance dependence or equally intense compulsion” and the other, figurative sense of addiction, the sense used by critics praising television programs, for instance. In this book, I will, at times, emphasize that this figurative version of addiction is merely addiction-like—formally it resembles the stronger compulsions of medically understood addiction, but it lacks such addiction’s perils. The addiction-like, once recognized and approached deliberately, allows for a greater range of possibility than medicalized addiction: that which is like an overwhelming desire can have overwhelming desire’s tendency to lead intensely toward more and more, without desire’s tendency to limit focus around an obsessively desired object.
The philosopher Gregory Currie’s work on “desire-like” imagination informs this book’s idea of addiction-like literary invention. As Currie puts it: “there is such a thing as imagining that is desire-like” (204). The existence of this kind of imagining, Currie writes, “helps explain the affective consequences of imagination” (211). He notes that “the effect of shifting” from desire to “desire-like imaginings is to free the subject from external constraint” (214). In other words, we can imaginatively access the possible for fiction-creation not solely through desire, which can overrun and constrain thought, but through something “desire-like,” wherein
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a freer consciousness brings us toward consideration of the always-yet-tobe-grasped.22 And because substance dependence, according to the DSM, revolves around “craving,” or “a strong subjective drive to use the substance” (176), something that is like substance dependence can present a correspondingly strong degree of creative potential for creative exploration of that which has not been attained, becoming a tool for opening up enhanced cognition of the possible. In the nineteenth century, the use of addiction-like properties for the creation of intensely exploratory, imaginative literature worked in precisely this way.23 In this book’s chapter on Percy Shelley, for example, I observe the connections Shelley established between the repetitive empirical work of Francis Bacon and aesthetic repetitions reflecting Shelley’s early studies of intoxicating habit. Shelley developed a poetics of linguistic patterns that could, with the potency but without the perils of addiction, structure Baconian exploration of possible realms beyond the limited scope of intemperate habit.24
Such creative, exploratory use of addictive orientation to possibility recalls how, at least as far back as Aristotle, philosophers and critics have discussed fiction itself as an engagement with possibility.25 More recently, Lubomír Doležel writes that fictionality works as a particular approach to the possibility making up a “universe of discourse” that is “not restricted to the actual world but spreads over uncountable possible, nonactualized worlds” (13).26 It makes sense, then, that addiction-like techniques have structured a profusion of fictional worlds, given the need to found such worlds upon a sense of the possible, the nonactualized, the unattained. Addiction heightens the sense of unmet possibility, and the endlessly investigative, hypothesis-pursuing, addiction-like approach to literary form allows writers and readers access to innumerable possible worlds without the obstacles of the physical condition itself.27
For an example of a twentieth-century fictional world formed by an exaggeratedly appetitive-hypothetical orientation toward possibility, look at the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. The story distills a requisite element of fiction-making—the exploration of “what if,” or of a possible world—and it demonstrates the hunger-like nature of that exploration through a series of statements that have an “if this, then that” logic. The book is patterned after its mouse’s intense hunger for more and more, and the story directs itself intensely toward hungered-for possibility from its title onward, beginning with that first “if.” If you give a mouse a cookie, we are told, the mouse is bound to start demanding milk, which creates a new condition to consider, and next we are told that, hypothetically, if you
INTRODUCTION
give the mouse milk, there will come a demand for a straw, and so on. Maybe you will never actually give the mouse a cookie, and maybe you would never actually follow that gift with milk, but this makes no difference. The story is off and running once it states conditions in which such possibilities exist, and then it continues to insist on pursuing possibility in, again, a hypothetical manner reflective of the mouse’s appetites. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie shows us fiction-making in its purest form: conditions are established, and a possible world founded upon those conditions is then explored and extended in a desire-like (or hunger-like, or thirstlike) way. It follows that addiction’s intensified, still hungrier orientation toward possibilities suggests an intensified profusion of addiction-like, narrative worlds of still more exaggerated possibility. After the nineteenth century’s association of addictive repetitions with imaginative, repetitive, scientific study, one could still more readily think of the addiction-like as exploratory pursuit, and Victorian fiction structured around wandering, adventuring, addicted characters—fiction like the Sherlock Holmes stories—portrayed realms of intensified possibility often accessed repeatedly through studies of mystery.28 Critics have ever since seen something addictive in the experiences of the reader of detective fiction. Edmund Wilson refers to such a reader of mysteries as a stimulus-seeking “addict,” who “reads not to find anything out but merely to get the mild stimulation of the succession of unexpected incidents and of the suspense itself of looking forward to learning a sensational secret” (264).
In that quote, Wilson carries on a long tradition of describing the addictive properties of repeatedly consumed detective fiction, and in this book, I look at the sources of that tradition. Of course, had addiction somehow never become a widely recognized medical problem, there would still have been awareness of affectively charged repetitions that lead toward new experience and understanding of possible worlds. Humphry Davy was pursuing such personally enthralled science before people thought his friend Coleridge was an addict, and nobody needs to know about addiction to conceive of possibility. But nineteenth-century literary strategy modeled after addiction—drawing from scientific associations with intemperate habits—can be shown to have attended an emphasis on especially intensely and habitually craved investigation in various kinds of literature, to have structured enormously popular stories of that repetitive exploration, and to have informed the critical responses to such texts. That is the central argument of this book: literary strategy modeled after addiction brought intensely repetitive investigation into mainstream British aesthetic experience, within an aesthetic category of addiction.
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I want to summarize here the basic components of my argument, both to clarify what I have covered and to prepare the reader for what is to come:
1. Desire-like engines for moving toward the possible without wholly succumbing to the limits of actual desire, as Currie suggests, provide imaginative, literary access to expanded aesthetic possibility.
2. Addiction intensifies desire, and therefore aesthetic strategy modeled after addiction supports repetitive, intensified literary engagement with possibility.
3. Addicted experimenters such as Coleridge exemplified more widely perceived connections between addictive pursuit of possibility—or an addiction modality—and repetitive, experimental, scientific investigation that always drives toward possible understanding.
As addiction was increasingly studied and publicly discussed, and as addictive thinking suggested tools for literary creation, writers often also maintained a scientific element of reiterated, desirous experiment in their narratives of addiction, thereby establishing a narrative modality of addiction that sustains episodic or recurring exploration.29
Each chapter of this book will examine a different use of literary strategy that falls within the aesthetic category of addiction. The formal innovations I analyze include the poetic reiterations that Percy Shelley describes as bridging sameness and difference; the digressive yet repetitive essays of Thomas De Quincey; the poems of Christina Rossetti and Alfred Tennyson in which subjective and external realities merge through mediated, appetitive exploration; Charles Dickens’s serial fiction structured around addicted pursuit; mystery fiction by Robert Louis Stevenson in which habitual investigation occurs indolently and vicariously and bibulously; and Marie Corelli’s expansion of generic possibility in Wormwood, a novel depicting lurid dimensions of addictive experience. The specific works selected for this study were chosen for several interrelating reasons. I focus on (1) early works that influentially articulated addictive aesthetic experience, such as those by Shelley and De Quincey, (2) works by writers, such as Tennyson, who explicitly refer to and reflect those who articulated that aesthetic experience, (3) works, such as those by Dickens, Rossetti, and Stevenson, that have represented some of the most salient features of this aesthetic category, and (4) works that involve some combination of the three aforementioned qualities. Quite a few— though not the majority—of this book’s objects of study belong to the genre
INTRODUCTION
of episodic crime fiction, which was decried for its resemblance to drug habit by Victorians including Henry Mansel, who, in an 1863 Quarterly Review essay, bemoaned the addictive, “ravenous appetite” (502) fed by sensation fiction like that of Dickens.30 Following my reading of Wormwood in the final chapter, however, I look also at recent fiction and reviews that undertake approaches toward addictive aesthetic experience in manners that have little to do with crime fiction. Still, the writers examined in this study bring to different forms—and to narratives of sometimes drastically different sorts of desire— similarly investigative senses of addiction. Analyzing the workings of the addiction aesthetic in a variety of forms gives us a better sense of just how crucial this specifically investigative aesthetic strategy has been for literary invention.
Our story begins here with a writer who did not so consciously access an aesthetic strategy of addiction, even as he made great contributions to the addiction aesthetic. I refer to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote at an early stage of addiction discourse but who represented to later writers—Thomas De Quincey most influentially—the literary possibilities that might be drawn from toxic habit. Coleridge wrote of repetitively experimental science and art linked as possibility-driven enterprises; he experimented with intoxicants; he defined the imagination as a matter of creative repetition; he was thought to attribute some of his own imaginative poetry to the drug to which he was habituated; and so he became, for future readers, identified with the figure of the poet who produces exploratory works of genius according to addictive thinking. Before moving on to discuss the larger implications of this book and the course of ensuing chapters, then, I would like now to consider Coleridge’s contributions to the addiction aesthetic.
Coleridge and the addiCted imagination
Samuel Taylor Coleridge enthusiastically cultivated various habits. He spent some of his early acquaintanceship with William Wordsworth, for example, habitually wandering in Somerset’s Quantock Hills, venturing into the woodlands around the village of Nether Stowey. This was in the 1790s, at the start of the intellectual partnership that would lead to their collaboration on the Lyrical Ballads 31 Wordsworth went on to idealize that productive time in The Prelude as a “summer, under whose indulgent skies, / Upon smooth Quantock’s airy ridge we roved / Unchecked, or loitered mid her sylvan coombs” (XIV.397–399).32 The two of them found insight in regular loitering, in a routine lack of routine.
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These wandering poets were participating in a tradition of Enlightenment thinkers who explored through pleasurable, customary digression. Often such digressive routines had occurred with still less vigorous activity, and Coleridge also enjoyed those more indolent habits. The talkative poet excelled conversationally at the coffee-house, the institution emblematizing the eighteenth-century ideal of habitual, sociable pursuit of knowledge.33 With its promise of regular discussion and caffeination, the coffee-house presented a suitable locale for the routine exchange of ideas and diverting gossip—a favorite channel for regular encounters with the irregular. Natural philosophers would gather in coffee-houses and routinely present surprising findings. In the minutes for the Coffee House Society’s meeting at the Chapter Coffee House on May 4, 1781, for example, we learn, “Mr Nairne exhibited to the Society an Electric Pistol, of a new Construction, for the explosion of Inflammable air” (Levere and L’E Turner 53). There was a general interest in merging intellectual advancement with the habits of coffee-house society. As Joseph Addison wrote in The Spectator (No. 10), “I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffeehouses” (I.311). The Spectator was itself written in Lloyd’s coffee-house (Russell and Tuite 6).
The work conducted in coffee-houses could be both thrilling and enlightening, and Trevor Levere has characterized this activity as hungrily motivated, writing that the “appetite of [the Coffee House Society] members for profitable science was immense” (Levere and L’E Turner 7). Coleridge would have found in the coffee-house habits for personal pleasure and learning similar to those he found out in the hills; at the coffeehouse he just par ticipated in rambling conversation, while in the hills he undertook actual ambulatory rambling. In the work of eighteenth-century writers Coleridge had read closely, a similar sense of habit arises again and again as a guiding principle for the acquisition of both pleasure and knowledge of something new. Edmund Burke, referring to the enjoyment of tobacco in his study of the sublime, notes that “habit alone has reconciled [the smoker’s] palate to these alien pleasures” (14). David Hume argues for the epistemological validity of a habitual experience in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; there Hume contends that existence is given meaningful form and made comprehensible by repetitive confirmation, through reiterated experience from which the mind can derive reasonable, reinforced connections of cause and effect. He writes that
INTRODUCTION
experience grants us knowledge of that which is regularly, “constantly” linked (19).34 Habitual experience, the argument goes, makes possible the repetitive perception needed to understand how different things conjoin and relate. Without habit, without constancy, the world would seem a bewildering array of novelty, and so the Enlightenment scientist sought a combination of surprise and routine. As Joseph Priestley, a pneumatic chemist the young Coleridge studied closely and praised, wrote in his Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air: “I wish my reader be not quite tired with the frequent repetition of the word surprize” (2.113). The repetition of surprise characterized a personally felt, aesthetically enjoyable sort of science, and similar repetitions in the form of habit lent themselves to stabilizing customs as well, customs that would link individual singularity with a vaster social network in contexts such as the coffee-house.35
There was a problem with the Enlightenment ideals of repetition for Coleridge, however, no matter how much pleasure or knowledge he took from his routines, no matter how much he enjoyed his habitual rambles. He would begin to establish a new sense of repetitive experience, one more destabilizing than reinforcing. Coleridge’s readers, too, would find an almost irresistible analogue to this theoretical development when they learned more about the poet’s life. Coleridge had a life-threatening habit, one that worked less predictably than those that Hume recounts, and it was a habit that even altered his wandering with Wordsworth. As he walked with his friend through Somersetshire, Coleridge periodically suffered from unbearable pain; the trouble was his regular consumption of opium, which led to anguish in between his uses of the drug, afflicting him with the torments of withdrawal. Wordsworth observed that “sometimes,” Coleridge would “throw himself down and writhe like a worm upon the ground” (Moorman I. 354–355).
And so, while some habits—wandering, conversation—helped Coleridge explore his world successfully, others of a more intoxicating variety on occasion reduced him to a disastrous state. Erstwhile friend Thomas De Quincey eventually described drug use as an essential part of this complex personality; Coleridge’s “sufferings,” he wrote, “came from opium” (Recollections 97–98). Coleridge himself described being altered by what is plainly addiction, referring to opium as a “free-agencyannihilating Poison” (Coleridge Letters III.490) and the drug habit as “a Slavery more dreadful than any man who has not felt its iron fetters eating into his very soul, can possibly imagine” (Coleridge Letters III.495).
A. COLMAN
To Coleridge’s friend and physician James Gillman, the poet was physiologically addicted. “Neither morally nor physically was he understood,” Gillman wrote, explaining that Coleridge’s opiate troubles were not due to sin. “He did all that in his state duty could exact” (Gillman I.173).36 Quite clearly, Romantics could and did think of habit-forming drug use much as we now do, and Coleridge’s case shows us that what we call addiction was known to afflict people well before the most widespread medicalization of addiction.37 Even my use of “addiction” as a synonym for Coleridge’s description of a “free-agency-annihilating” drug is not anachronistic. While the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry on “addiction” notes that the word was used throughout the centuries leading into Coleridge’s time to refer more broadly to “an immoderate or compulsive” manner “of being dedicated or devoted to a thing,” the OED’s examples of this usage from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries include quotes linking such addiction explicitly to taste and to appetites, and the OED also includes examples of “addiction” applied specifically to drug and alcohol habit before and during Coleridge’s lifetime (including one example from Walter Scott).
A particular school of medical thought had by Coleridge’s day tied together some of the many senses of (addictive and otherwise) habitual stimulation, and the young Coleridge was familiar with it through acquaintances such as Thomas Beddoes of the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol (see Budge 48–117). This is Brunonian medicine, which held that a wide array of health problems and experiences relate to a single issue. Gavin Budge summarizes it as follows: “Brunonian medicine, as set forth in the 1770s by its founder, the Edinburgh doctor John Brown, represented a radical nosological simplification in which all disease was understood as belonging to a continuum of under- or overstimulation of the vital principle” (56). Brunonian thinkers would understand stimulation of drugs, of literature, and of thought to work upon a similar principle, and thus they developed concerns with excessive stimulation that would inform addiction discourse and attitudes toward reading and thinking habits more broadly.38 Today John Brown is not a particularly revered historical figure. In the introduction to Roy Porter and W.F. Bynum’s Brunonianism in Britain and Europe, we are told that Brown “championed a programmatically simplifying system of the kind that would commonly be labeled ‘quackish’” (ix). Yet Budge notes that, among Coleridge’s scientific circle in the 1790s, “Erasmus Darwin and Thomas Beddoes were Brunonians, something shown by their tendency to rely on the ‘stimulants’ of alcohol
and opium as means of treatment, and by both men’s proto-teetotal hostility toward recreational uses of alcohol” (56). This school of thought— which recognized some perils of alcohol habit without recognizing the full dangers of treatment via opium stimulation—likely led to Coleridge’s own opium addiction even as it encouraged so much research into addiction (Budge 80).39
Brown had a strong influence on the Romantic era’s popular senses of habit-forming stimuli, even though his work exhibited an “underestimation of the addictive powers of opium” (Leask, “Murdering One’s Double” 86). Thomas Trotter, commonly credited for helping to inaugurate discourse of medicalized addiction in Britain, quoted Brown in his landmark Essay on Drunkenness first published in the late eighteenth century, describing the habit-forming properties of alcohol that work through “action of stimuli” or “excitability, as explained by Brown” (37). We find something Brunonian at work even in the Beethoven example I have included at the beginning of this introductory chapter, for instance, where I mention that Beethoven described music as similar to wine, and Beethoven’s appreciators noticed something habit-forming in his music. There is nothing surprising in finding a Brunonian sensibility among nineteenth-century Germans, either: as early as 1795, “a sudden interest in [Brown] arose and he was soon well known all over Germany” (Tsouyopoulos 63). Brown’s influence would spread, even if his reputation faltered; in the following pages, readers will notice a number of examples of nineteenth-century writers with Brunonian sensibilities—writers especially inclined to link repetitive stimulations of literature and thought with those of intoxicating substances. The thread runs through the work of Percy Shelley (who had studied Trotter’s Brunonian text on alcohol) through Dickens (who referred to similarly Brunonian work on alcohol) and beyond. Coleridge, writing of both “free-agency-annihilating habits” and habits of more intellectually useful stimulants, was just an early example of a writer influenced by Brunonian thought.
It is true, however, that such “free-agency-annihilating” habits as those Coleridge described had been linked to the experience of literature still earlier. The OED’s entry on “addiction” lists an example of an “Addiction to Books” from as early as 1675, and later, Addison, as I have mentioned, would describe an addiction to news. But Brunonian medicine would encourage thinking about interrelated, intensified habits of stimulation. Thus, by the time De Quincey wrote, there was a great deal of precedent for relating literary work such as Coleridge’s to intoxicating habit—which
A. COLMAN
De Quincey did, for instance, with regard to Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” (Burwick 43). Coleridge himself had promoted that sense of his poetry’s foundation in opium, describing how Kubla Khan resulted from “an anodyne,” which means that it was “universally accepted as opiuminspired” (Lefebure 27).
Coleridge and his circle would advance this sense of a connection between addiction and a particular kind of imaginative, exploratory pursuit—beyond his attribution of “Kubla Khan” to an anodyne. After the 1798 and 1800 publication of the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge described intense possibility-pursuit in science as well as in literature, and his scientific adventures at the Pneumatic Institute involved intoxication as well as poetic ideals. Because science suggested intense desire, because it related to “the passion of Hope,” Coleridge wrote in a letter to Humphry Davy, it shared attributes of poetry (Coleridge Letters I.557).40 And he would elsewhere describe such desirously imaginative pursuit as intensely repetitive, as a matter for routine and custom—generally, he aimed for “the inculcation of the habit of seeking and finding relations in mind and nature” (Levere 28).41 Coleridge’s friend Thomas Beddoes had also identified in John Brown’s life the overlap of addicted habitual desire, scientific habits, and imaginative experience. In Beddoes’s estimation—given in his 1795 introduction to Brown’s Elements of Medicine—Brown was “long addicted” to laudanum (xciii) and one who suffered from a “destructive habit” of “abuse of intoxicating liquors” (lxxxix). These addictions—note that Beddoes uses the word “addicted” to describe Brown’s habitual commitment to opium—in Beddoes’s view were bolstered by Brown’s intellectual habits of emotional sensitivity and energetic pursuit. “He was endowed with uncommon susceptibility to impressions,” Beddoes writes. “By whatever object they were touched, the springs of his nature bent deeply inwards; but they immediately rebounded with equal energy” (xciv). The energy that led Brown outward in his medical investigations is the same predisposition behind his other habits: “his high spirits hurried him into the most intemperate excesses” (xcv). By such intellectual/intoxicating habits, Beddoes observes, Brown’s “imagination was exalted into phrenzy” (lxxxvii).
Brown, Beddoes, and Coleridge were not, again, the first to notice intensely habitual orientation to the possible shared by scientific, literary, and literally addictive pursuits; in the OED’s entry on “addiction,” alongside references to addiction to reading and to books, we find a 1792 description of “a strong addiction to science.” Still, Coleridge did much
INTRODUCTION
to explore such addictive and addiction-adjacent habits, habits that linked pursuit of knowledge—or imaginative investigation of the possible—with craving. Partly this is because he devoted close attention to eighteenthcentur y philosophical work on habits and repetition more generally. For Coleridge, the associative patterns by which a mind habitually comes to know more and more of the world were of particular interest.42 He named his son, Hartley Coleridge, after David Hartley, the philosopher who had described associative, habitually established relationships between mind and world. The fifth chapter of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria is “On the law of association—Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley,” and there Coleridge credits Hartley as the Newton of the mind (comparing “the law of association” to gravity) (89; 92). Coleridge, however, argues that Hartley’s association—by which mind and world harmonize through chains of repeatedly confirmed, linked relationships—does not go far enough in examining the powerful role of the imagination (Biographia Literaria [hereafter BL] 106–117). He describes instead an imaginative individual as a creature of active repetitions: “The primary IMAGINATION,” Coleridge writes, “I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (BL 304). Repetitions, from Coleridge’s point of view, could guide the mind toward infinity, continually driving toward the conscious perception and creative, patterned articulation of something more, some grander possibility.
Coleridge also describes the repetitions of imaginative poetic experience in terms recalling the Brunonian discourse on habitual intoxication, with which he came into contact through friends such as Beddoes. Even after Coleridge’s later, broadened rejection of materialism,43 he still compared the rhythmic repetitions of meter to the effect of wine and intoxicating atmospheric (or pneumatic) experience such as that found at Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institute. He would describe how meter “tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited”; the effect is that of “a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation” (BL 66). He would also describe meter as “a stimulant of the attention” (BL 69).44 Notice the triangulation between poetry, repeated intoxicating stimulation, and curiosity: that is the triangulation at the center of this book, a Brunonian triangle that defined an addictive imagination.
COLMAN
This imagination differs from the consciousness understood by Hartley’s closer followers, who would have “consciousness considered as a result, as a tune, the common product of the breeze and the harp” (BL 117). To Coleridge, the Hartleyan method did have the benefit of harmony; it explained at least some formal link between mind and world—that of vibrations, from stimulus to memory to thought. But Coleridge held that the mind also creates forms out of its portion of infinity, out of the otherness from which and to which its ongoing repetitions spring. This creative force is, as Coleridge describes it, a literary capability driven by sustained, thoughtful movement toward more and more. By repeating into infinity, Coleridge’s imagination could actively forge links between familiarity and otherness. The poet’s situation as a known addict would make it easy for De Quincey and later readers to regard a relationship between toxic habit and habitually intellectual repetitions tending toward novelty.
Coleridge’s sense of access to the infinite found further expression in his writing about the role of the symbol, by which finite material experience joins with a feeling for the otherwise inexpressible and the infinite. The symbol, Coleridge writes in The Statesman’s Manual, “is characterized… [a]bove all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal” (Lay Sermons 30; qtd. in Barth 32). Critics have long viewed this Romantic theory of symbolism in light of Coleridge’s religious views. “True symbol for Coleridge,” writes J. Robert Barth, “might be said to be ‘sacramental.’ Some of the similarities between sacrament and symbol will be strikingly obvious” (39). As Ben Brice puts it, Coleridge’s symbol involves “a complex triadic analogy between the ‘subjective’ structure of the human mind, the ‘objective’ structure of the natural world, and the transcendent attributes of their divine creator” (96–97). This very triad complicated a neatly theological sense of the symbol when the world of matter and nature was understood in the manner of nineteenth-century science and medicine. Nicholas Halmi describes how the Romantic symbol emerged in part as a result of anxious efforts—responsive to scientific findings—“to decipher nature’s hieroglyphs” (24). Coleridge, in the context of his own circle’s scientific work, had understood study of the natural world to be thrillingly incomplete, always desirously driving toward more experience, in a way that his Brunonian circle related to material, addicted conditions such as his own. In Aids to Reflection, shortly before praising the pneumatic chemist Robert Boyle, Coleridge describes the human condition of being “a fallen creature, essentially diseased” (140; qtd. in Brice 41). A sense of a diseased, addictive engagement with the material world suggested possibilities, in
short, rather than perfect knowledge of the divine; the imagination and the symbol both became means for exploring those mysterious possibilities via literary invention.
Coleridge never claimed that he developed a theory of an addiction-like imagination or symbol, and he did not have access to the range of medical literature on addiction that later writers would have. He did state that he was enslaved by opium—he did come to see himself as what we would describe as addicted—but as Coleridge’s habit worsened (between 1801 and 1806) opiate habituation among many still “was not regarded as dangerous” (Vickers 92–93). Coleridge thought, rather, in ways that were during his lifetime just starting to be medically associated with perilous substance dependence. With Thomas Trotter’s John Brown-quoting study on the subject of intemperance, from 1788, British medical science had only begun to emphasize habitual intoxication as a problem worthy of broader attention.45 Trotter also wrote that opium habituation entails “nearly the same phenomena,” and its “habitual use nearly the same diseases” as alcohol habit (18), but it would take time for such medical consideration to become still more widely, institutionally accepted.46 Nonetheless, Coleridge makes an important introductory figure here, because in the eyes of his friend and follower De Quincey, he was a poetic genius shaped by sufferings caused by his habit-forming drug use. The forms and the patterns of addiction (not exclusively addiction itself) thus became available to De Quincey and others as tools for exploring a Coleridgean interconnection between repetition and access to possibility.47
A sense of addictively Coleridgean aesthetic experience is everywhere in De Quincey’s work. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater contains, for instance, a passage on endlessly replicating staircases that draws from both Coleridge’s influence and the addictive patterns associated with the poet. The endlessly replicating staircases in question appeared first in prints of the Carceri d’Invenzione by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), and De Quincey describes them in similarly repetitive terms to illustrate the opium-eater’s mindset.48 Yet De Quincey had not actually seen the image he describes, however perfect it was for portraying an addict’s experience of entrapment in repetitious endlessness. He instead uses Coleridge’s description of the Piranesi image, a description that Coleridge related to his own sick sensibility. Thus, while the essayist deployed an aesthetic strategy of addictive repetition-toward-novelty to structure his prose, he also consciously did so by copying Coleridgean repetitive experience in order to portray repetitiously sought possibility.
A. COLMAN
Addiction sent Coleridge into long periods of anguish, but he and others who reflected on the pattern of such habits of stimulation—as understood via Brunonian discourse and methods—also found an approach for creating intensely repetitive literary explorations of possibility. Even so, scholars have tended to examine how the emergence of medicalized addiction discourse policed desires.49 Clifford Siskin writes that “discourse of addiction … inscribed upon the culture an inherently disciplinary model” (190). Yet, from Thomas De Quincey to Christina Rossetti to Robert Louis Stevenson, the writers covered by this book all saw imaginative possibility flourish according to the patterns of addiction’s constraints, and they subsequently fashioned texts that repetitively charted newly imagined worlds using forms modeled after those constraints.50
modality, Formalism, and literary sCienCe
The following chapters will explore addiction literature’s modality, in particular its orientation to possibility, in light of its historical contexts. They examine how addiction discourse inspired formal, literary innovations for repeatedly accessing the possible, inventions such as the serial detective novel that suggested addiction-like aesthetic responses. I thus pursue two ways of thinking about literary form—as a response to material, historical circumstances and as a tool for the creation of particular experiences—that have often existed separately in criticism. Marjorie Levinson summarizes these two approaches as belonging to either “activist” formalist criticism, which considers how literary forms engage historical context, or “normative” formalist criticism, which describes particular “cognitive and affective” norms in aesthetic experience (“What is New Formalism?” 559). A reading of addiction literature and its origins, however, can pursue activist formalism while pointing toward the cognitive and affective effects of forms, examining formal invention in light of historical context—the rise of addiction discourse—while also taking into account the implications of those forms for an audience, or the addiction-like experience of repetitive possibility-pursuit on the part of the reader. The hinge between these two formalisms in the following study will, again, be the focus on the modality of literature of addiction. Such attention supports study of the actuality of literature’s material situation along with the corresponding possibilities for audience experiences.
On the matter of normative formalism: I do not seek to establish the specific degrees to which addictive aesthetic experience is like actual addiction. My focus remains on the aesthetic category more broadly, along with
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have a somewhat precarious existence because of insects and diseases though the fruit is not as subject to brown-rot as is that of the Yellow Egg with which this variety is usually compared. Golden Drop is seemingly fit for all purposes to which plums are put—for dessert, cooking, canning, preserving and prune-making. For the last named purpose it is unsurpassed for a light colored prune of large size, readily selling at a fancy price in delicatessen stores. The fruit when carefully picked and handled keeps for a month or more, shrivelling somewhat but retaining its flavor and pleasing fleshcharacters. A task for the plant-breeder is to breed a plum, of which one of the parents should be Golden Drop, which will give to this region a plum as good as the Golden Drop in regions where it is at its best. With all of its defects in the North and East, it is yet worth growing for the home and often for the late market.
Jervaise Coe, a market gardener, at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England, raised Golden Drop from a seed about 1809. Lindley (References, 5) says, “He [the originator] informed me it was from the stone of Green Gage, the blossom of which, he supposed, had been fertilized by the White Magnum Bonum, the two trees of which grew nearly in contact with each other in his garden.” From a study of the fruit-characters this supposition is very probable. C. M. Hovey in discussing the synonyms of this variety writes, “The French have disseminated it considerably under the name of Waterloo; trees received under that name have fruited in our collection this year, and proved to be the Golden Drop.” Robert Hogg, in his Fruit Manual, published in 1884, described Waterloo as a separate variety, found at Waterloo, Belgium, and introduced by Dr. Van Mons; the descriptions of the two are practically identical. The Silver Prune, well known on the Pacific Coast, at one time supposed to be a new variety, turned out upon investigation to be Golden Drop, though the growers there continue to call it by the new name they have given it. The variety under discussion came to America in 1823, when Knight, of England, sent a tree of it to John Lowell of Massachusetts. In 1852, the American Pomological Society valued it sufficiently to place it on the list of the fruits worthy of general cultivation.
Tree medium to large, vigorous, spreading or roundish, open-topped, hardy, productive; branches ash-gray, roughish, with few, large lenticels; branchlets short, stout, with internodes variable in length, greenish-red changing to dull brownish-red becoming drab on the older wood, glabrous early in the season but becoming pubescent at maturity, with numerous, small lenticels; leaf-buds large, long, pointed, free
Leaves folded upward, oval or obovate, one and three-eighths inches wide, two and three-quarters inches long, thickish; upper surface dark green, slightly rugose, pubescent, with the midrib but faintly grooved; lower surface silvery-green, pubescent; apex abruptly pointed or acute, base acute, margin serrate, eglandular or with small, dark glands; petiole one-half inch long, pubescent, tinged red, with from two to three globose, greenish-yellow glands usually at the base of the leaf
Season of bloom medium, short; flowers appearing after the leaves, one inch across, white, borne in clusters on lateral spurs, singly or in pairs; pedicels five-eighths inch long, lightly pubescent, greenish; calyx-tube green, narrowly campanulate, pubescent; calyx-lobes obtuse, sparingly pubescent on both surfaces, glandular-serrate, reflexed; petals oval, dentate, tapering to short, broad claws; anthers yellowish; filaments fivesixteenths inch long; pistil glabrous, equal to the stamens in length.
Fruit very late, season of average length; two inches by one and onehalf inches in size, oval, tapering at the base to a short neck, slightly compressed, halves equal; cavity very shallow and narrow, abrupt; suture shallow and wide; apex depressed; color golden-yellow, occasionally with a faint bronze blush, showing greenish streaks and splashes before full maturity, overspread with thin bloom; dots numerous, small, russet, conspicuous; stem three-quarters inch long, thinly pubescent, adhering well to the fruit; skin tough, rather adherent; flesh light golden-yellow, juicy, intermediate in firmness and tenderness, rather sweet, mild, pleasant flavor; good to very good; stone free, one and three-eighths inches by three-quarters inch in size, oval or ovate, slightly flattened, irregularly ridged and roughened, acute at the base and apex; ventral suture wide, often conspicuously winged; dorsal suture widely and deeply grooved
GOLIATH
Prunus domestica
1. Prince Treat Hort 26 1828 2. Lond Hort Soc Cat 147, 153 1831 3. Kenrick Am Orch 260 1832 4. Mag Hort 9:164 1843 5. Downing Fr
Trees Am. 300. 1845. 6. Floy-Lindley Guide Orch. Gard. 287, 383. 1846.
7. Thomas Am. Fruit Cult. 343. 1849. 8. McIntosh Bk. Gard. 2:531. 1855.
9. Hooper W Fr Book 245 1857 10. Cultivator 8:25 fig 1860 11. Am Pom Soc Cat 86 1862 12. Hogg Fruit Man 363 1866 13. Mas Pom Gen 2:15, fig 8 1873 14. Mathieu Nom Pom 432 1889 15. Waugh Plum Cult 105 fig 1901
Caledonian 1, 2, of some 5 & 8, 11, 12, 13, 14. Emperor 9. Goliath 1, 3. Goliath 9, 13. Nectarine 1, of some 2 & 8, 11 & 14 incor. Pfirschenpflaume 14. Prune-Pêche? 14. Saint Cloud 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, 13, 14. Steer’s Emperor 2. Steers’ Emperor 4, 5, 8, 12, 13, 14. Wahre Caledonian 13, 14. Wilmot’s Late Orleans 2, 5, 8, 12, 13, 14.
This old English plum has never been popular in America and is now scarcely known on this continent. It is a large, handsome, purple plum, as the illustration well shows, but seldom fit for dessert. “Seldom fit” because it is quite variable in quality in some seasons and under some conditions. It is an excellent culinary plum and its firm, thick, meaty flesh fits it well for shipping. On the grounds of this Station the trees behave very well in all respects and usually bear very full crops of plums that would tempt purchasers in any market. It has all of the characters usually ascribed to a money-maker variety of any fruit and why not more grown in commercial orchards cannot be said.
Nothing is known of the origin of this plum except that it is English. William Prince, in 1828, wrote: “This plum is of very large size, and has attracted much notice in England; but it is only recently introduced to this country, where it has not yet produced fruit that I am aware of.” The Nectarine plum was confused with the Goliath in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, but Robert Thompson,[215] the English horticulturist, separated them so satisfactorily that they have ever since remained distinct in plum literature. He found that this variety had pubescent shoots and fruit-stalks, while the same parts of the Nectarine were glabrous, and that the season of Goliath is considerably later. The American Pomological Society placed Goliath on its fruit list in 1862, but dropped it in 1871.
Tree large, vigorous, round-topped, dense, hardy, very productive; branches stocky, with fruit-spurs numerous, ash-gray, smooth except for
the large, raised lenticels; branchlets somewhat thick, short, with internodes of medium length, green changing to dull brownish-drab, heavily pubescent throughout the season, with few, inconspicuous, small lenticels; leaf-buds of average size and length, conical, free
Leaves somewhat flattened, obovate, two inches wide, three and fiveeighths inches long; upper surface dark green, nearly glabrous, with a grooved midrib; lower surface heavily pubescent; apex obtuse or acute, base acute, margin finely serrate, eglandular or with few, small dark glands; petiole one-half inch long, thick, heavily pubescent, with a faint red tinge, glandless or with from one to three large, globose, greenish-yellow glands usually at the base of the leaf.
Blooming season early to medium, short; flowers appearing after the leaves, one inch across, white; borne on lateral spurs, singly or in pairs; pedicels nine-sixteenths inch long, pubescent, greenish; calyx-tube green, campanulate, lightly pubescent; calyx-lobes, broad, obtuse, somewhat pubescent, glandular-serrate, erect; petals unusually large, roundish, finely crenate, not clawed; anthers yellowish; filaments five-sixteenths inch long; pistil glabrous, longer than the stamens, with a large style and stigma.
Fruit mid-season, ripening period short; one and five-eighths inches by one and one-half inches in size, roundish-oblong, somewhat oblique, truncate, compressed, halves unequal; cavity narrow, abrupt, usually russeted; suture a line; apex flattened or depressed; color dark purplishred, lighter colored on the shaded side, overspread with thick bloom; dots characteristic, numerous, large, russet, conspicuous, clustered about the apex; stem thick, three-quarters inch long, thickly pubescent, adhering well to the fruit; skin thin, sour, separating readily; flesh golden-yellow, rather dry, firm, sweet, of mild, pleasant flavor; fair to good; stone free, seven-eighths inch by three-quarters inch in size, roundish-oval, somewhat flattened, blunt at the base and apex, roughened and irregularly furrowed; ventral suture wide, winged, heavily furrowed; dorsal suture with a wide groove variable in depth
GONZALES
GOLIATH
Prunus triflora ×
1. Kerr Cat 1899-1900 2. Vt Sta Bul 67:13 1898
Ohio Sta Bul 162:252 1905 4. Penin Hort Soc Rpt 36 1905 5. Stark Bros Cat 1906
Gonzales 5. Red Gold 4. Red Gold 5.
Judging from the several published descriptions, Gonzales is a very promising plum, for the South at least. The writers have not seen the variety in the North, but there appear to be no reasons why it should not succeed in some northern soils and climates. It is a chance seedling found in Gonzales, Texas, about 1894, and was introduced by F. T. Ramsey, Austin, Texas, in 1897. About all that can be determined regarding its parentage is that it is the product of some Japanese variety pollinated by a native. In 1901, Waugh used this variety to typify a new species, Prunus hortulana robusta, composed of a number of hybrids between Prunus triflora and native species. The following description is compiled:
Tree vigorous, upright-spreading, open; leaves narrow, oval, tapering at both ends; upper surface glabrous; margin minutely glandular, finely crenulate; petiole short and slender, with two glands
Fruit mid-season; resembles Burbank in size and shape; skin toughish; color bright red, sometimes striped and splashed with dark red; flesh yellow, tinged red, firm, sweet; good; stone of medium size, oval, clinging.
GRAND DUKE
2.
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GRAND DUKE
Prunus domestica
1. Hogg Fruit Man 703 1884
Mathieu Nom Pom 432, 434 1889
W N Y Hort Soc Rpt 39:100 1894
Can Hort 18:117, Pl 1895
Cornell Sta Bul 131:186, fig 40 IV 1896
W N Y Hort Soc Rpt
42:83. 1897. 7. Am. Pom. Soc. Cat. 25. 1897. 8. Mich. Sta. Bul. 169:245. 1899. 9. Ohio Sta. Bul. 113:159, Pl. XVI. 1899. 10. Can. Exp. Farm Bul. 2nd Ser 3:52 1900 11. Waugh Plum Cult 106 fig 1901 12 Ohio Sta Bul 162:243 fig , 244, 254, 255 1905
Grossherzog’s Pflaume 2. Grand-Duc 2. Grand Duke 2.
Grand Duke, now probably the favorite late shipping plum in this region, is, as stated in the history given below, a comparatively new plum in America. Its great popularity, gained in less than a quarter of a century, is due to much advertising by nurserymen coupled with such intrinsic qualities as large size, the true prune shape which seems most pleasing in some markets, handsome plum-purple and more than all else a firm, meaty flesh which fits the variety excellently for shipping. The flavor, as seems most often to be the case with these large blue plums, is not pleasant and the plum is not more than a second rate dessert fruit though it is very good in whatever way cooked for the table. The trees grow poorly in the nursery and even in the orchard are seldom large and vigorous enough to be called first class, though usually hardy. Some years ago plum-growers were advised to top-work this and other weakgrowing plums on stronger stocks, but those who have tried such top-working usually condemn it because it is expensive and ineffective and because it so often gives a malformed tree. The trees come in bearing slowly but bear regularly and abundantly and hold the crop well, the plums being unusually free from rot and hanging in good condition a long time. Grand Duke deserves its popularity as a market plum and probably no better variety can be selected in New York for the last of the season.
Grand Duke is another of the many valuable plums produced by Thomas Rivers, of Sawbridgeworth, England. It was grown from an Autumn Compote stone and was sent out in 1876. When it was first introduced into America is not known, but in 1888 cions of it were distributed by Ellwanger and Barry[216] of Rochester, New York. In 1897, the American Pomological Society added this variety to its fruit catalog list and recommended it for this State and neighboring regions with similar climatic conditions.
Tree above medium in size, moderately vigorous, upright to slightly spreading, usually hardy, productive; branches ash-gray, with small, numerous lenticels; branchlets slender, short, with internodes of medium length, greenish-red changing to brownish-red, many twigs retaining a tinge of green, shining, glabrous, with numerous, small lenticels; leaf-buds large, long, pointed, strongly appressed; leaf-scars large
Leaves nearly flat, obovate, one and one-half inches wide, three inches long, thick; upper surface shining, slightly rugose, pubescent only along the grooved midrib; lower surface yellowish-green, lightly pubescent; apex taper-pointed, base acute, margin serrate, eglandular or with small, dark glands; petiole three-quarters inch long, nearly glabrous, slightly tinged red along one side, glandless or with from one to three globose yellowish glands on the stalk and base of the leaf
Blooming season intermediate, short; flowers appearing after the leaves, one inch across, white; borne in clusters on short lateral spurs and buds, singly or in pairs; pedicels one-half inch long, slender, glabrous, greenish; calyx-tube green, campanulate, glabrous; calyx-lobes lightly pubescent, glandular-ciliate, slightly reflexed; petals obovate, entire, shortclawed; anthers yellowish; filaments one-quarter inch long; pistil pubescent at the base, longer than the stamens.
Fruit late, season medium; unusually large when well grown, two and one-eighth inches by two inches in size, elongated-oval or slightly obovate, halves unequal; cavity shallow, narrow, abrupt; suture wide, variable in depth; apex flattened, somewhat depressed or occasionally with a short, blunt tip; color dark reddish-purple or purplish-black, overspread with thick bloom; dots numerous, small, brownish, inconspicuous; stem three-quarters inch long, adhering well to the fruit; skin variable in toughness, somewhat astringent, separating readily; flesh golden-yellow, juicy, firm, sweet, mild, not high in flavor; good; stone clinging, sometimes tinged red, one and one-eighth inches by seveneighths inch in size, irregularly oval, slightly flattened, roughish, acute at the base and apex; ventral suture broad, slightly winged; dorsal suture with a broad, shallow groove
Prunus domestica
1891 3.
1897 5.
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4.
GUEII
1. Downing Fr Trees Am 3rd App 181 1881
Can Hort 14:293, Pl
Mich Sta Bul 103:34, fig 6 1894
Cornell Sta Bul 131:187
Ont Fr Exp Sta Rpt 120 1898 6. Mich Sta Bul 169:242, 245
1899. 7. Ohio Sta. Bul. 113:159. 1899. 8. Am. Pom. Soc. Cat. 39. 1899. 9. Waugh Plum Cult. 107. 1901. 10. Va. Sta. Bul. 134:42, 43 fig. 14. 1902.
Big Blue 1. Blue Magnum Bonum 1, 9. Bradshaw 1 incor. Geuii 3. Gueii 1. Guii 1, 6. Gweii 1.
Gueii is one of the standard plums of its season in New York, ranking among the first half-dozen in number of trees growing in the State, with many growers holding that it is the best general purpose plum of all Domesticas. The popularity of Gueii is due to its being a money-maker, as few would care to grow it for home consumption. The quality of Gueii is poor, especially for dessert, and it cannot even be called a particularly good-looking plum, though the illustration scarcely does the plum justice, especially in size. But the variety bears early and abundantly; the trees are large, vigorous, healthy and hardy and the plums are hardly surpassed for shipping, especially at the time at which the crop comes upon the market, about mid-season, the best shipping plums maturing a little later. The fruit is quite subject to brown-rot, a matter of more moment in other regions than in New York, and yet in some seasons very important in this State. The stone, curiously enough, sometimes clings rather tightly and under other conditions is wholly free. It could be wished that so popular a market plum were better in quality, but since high quality is seldom correlated in plums with fitness to ship well, it would be unfair to condemn Gueii for a market fruit because it cannot be eaten with relish out of hand.
This plum, according to all accounts, originated with a Mr. Hagaman, Lansingburgh, New York, about 1830. It was brought to notice by John Goeway (Gueii) and was soon called by his name. For years it was not much grown and it was not until 1899 that it was placed on the fruit catalog list of the American Pomological Society.
Tree large, vigorous, spreading, open-topped, hardy, very productive; branches ash-gray, roughened by longitudinal cracks and by numerous, conspicuous, raised lenticels of various sizes; branchlets thick, of medium length, with short internodes, green changing to dark brownish-drab, dull, thickly pubescent throughout the season, with numerous, inconspicuous, small lenticels; leaf-buds short, conical, free.
Leaves obovate or oval, one and seven-eighths inches wide, four inches long, thick; upper surface dark green, with scattering fine hairs and with a grooved midrib; lower surface silvery-green, thickly pubescent; apex abruptly pointed or acute, base variable but usually acute, margin doubly crenate, with small black glands; petiole five-eighths inch long, thick, pubescent, tinged red
Blooming season short; flowers appearing after the leaves, one and one-eighth inches across, whitish; borne in clusters at the ends of spurs, singly or in pairs; pedicels thirteen-sixteenths inch long, pubescent, greenish; calyx-tube green, campanulate, pubescent towards the base; calyx-lobes broad, obtuse, pubescent on both surfaces, glandular-serrate, reflexed; petals roundish, entire, with very short, blunt claws; anthers yellow; filaments three-eighths inch long; pistil glabrous, equal to the stamens in length
Fruit intermediate in time and length of ripening season; medium to above in size, somewhat ovate, halves equal; cavity below medium in depth and width, abrupt, rarely sutured; apex bluntly pointed; color dark purplish-black, overspread with thick bloom; dots numerous, small, russet, inconspicuous, clustered about the apex; stem medium in thickness and length, pubescent, adhering well to the fruit; skin thin, tender, slightly astringent, separating readily; flesh greenish-yellow changing to light golden-yellow, dry, firm but tender, sweet, mild, somewhat astringent towards the center; fair in quality; stone variable in adhesion but usually clinging, large, ovate or oval, blunt at the base and apex, strongly roughened and pitted; ventral suture faintly winged; dorsal suture acute or lightly grooved
GUTHRIE LATE
Prunus domestica
1. McIntosh Bk Gard 2:532 1855 2. Downing Fr Trees Am 919 1869 3. Hogg Fruit Man 705 1884 4. Mathieu Nom Pom 434 1889 5. Rivers Cat 1898 6. Am Gard Mag 21:173 1900
Guthrie’s Minette 1. Guthrie’s Late Green 6. Guthrie Green 6. Guthrie’s Late Green 2, 3, 4. Minette 2, 3, 4. Verte Tardive de Guthrie 4.
Guthrie Late has never attained commercial importance in the United States, being found only in collections; but in England,
according to Hogg, it is a very fine dessert plum, rivalling the Reine Claude in quality and ripening a month later. On the grounds of this institution it has failed because the fruits are small, dull in color and do not keep well. Of the several varieties produced from seed of Reine Claude by Charles Guthrie, Taybank, Dundee, Scotland, about the middle of the last century, Guthrie Late is the best known.
Tree large, vigorous, round-topped, dense, productive; branches stocky; branchlets pubescent; leaf-buds large, short, with a peculiar brush-like apex; leaves folded upward, oval, one and seven-eighths inches wide, three and one-half inches long, thick, rugose; margin crenate, eglandular or with small, dark glands; petiole thick, glandless or with from one to four globose glands; blooming season short; flowers appearing after the leaves, one inch across, white tinged with yellow at the apex of the petals; borne on lateral buds and spurs, singly or in pairs.
Fruit mid-season, ripening period long; of medium size, roundishtruncate, dull greenish-yellow, often irregularly splashed and striped with green, overspread with thin bloom; skin thin, slightly astringent; flesh light golden-yellow, rather dry, fibrous, somewhat tender, sweet, pleasant in flavor; of good quality; stone free, seven-eighths inch by five-eighths inch in size, ovate or oval, medium turgid, with rough surfaces.
HALE
1. Burbank Cat 19 1893 2. Ibid 1894 3. Cornell Sta Bul 106:52 1896 4. Ga Hort Soc Rpt XI 1897 5. Am Pom Soc Cat 41 1899 6. Cornell Sta Bul 175:147, 148, fig 37 1899 7. Am Gard 21:36 1900 8.
HALE
Prunus triflora
Waugh Plum Cult. 136. 1901. 9. Mich. Sta. Bul. 187:77, 79. 1901. 10. W. N. Y. Hort. Soc. Rpt. 89. 1902. 11. Ohio. Sta. Bul. 162:254, 255. 1905. 12. Ga Sta Bul 68:10, 30 1905 13. Mass Sta An Rpt 17:160 1905
J 1. J 3. Prolific 2. Prolific 3, 8, 12.
It is doubtful if the average person who grows the Hale would recognize it as shown in The Plums of New York, as it is supposed to be a yellow plum; nevertheless the illustration is a good one so far as the fruits go at least. When mature on the trees the fruits are yellow with a faint blush, but in storage the color quickly changes into a pale red, becoming, when the plum is at its best in appearance and quality, a light currant-red. Hale, though large and handsome of fruit, is of questionable value, failing both in fruit and tree. The flavor of this plum is good in the judgment of most fruit connoisseurs, but others find it a little too sweet and somewhat mawkish near the skin and close about the pit. All agree, however, that the flesh clings too tightly to the stone for pleasant eating and that the texture is too tender for good shipping. But it is the tree that fails most markedly. Even on the grounds of this Station, where the peach is practically hardy, Hale is but semi-hardy, failing most often because with the best of care the wood does not ripen properly. The habit of growth is not particularly good, the trees are slow in coming in bearing, are not regularly productive and are readily infected by brown-rot and the fruits much infested by curculio. On the whole, it is to be regretted that Mr. Hale did not choose a better plum to bear a name so distinguished in horticulture.
Luther Burbank offered this plum, a cross between Kelsey and Satsuma, for sale under the name J, in 1893, and the following year as Prolific. J. H. Hale, South Glastonbury, Connecticut, purchased the variety in 1894, and introduced it as the Hale in 1896. In 1899, the American Pomological Society considered it worthy a place on its fruit catalog list.
Tree above medium in size, vigorous, vasiform, open-topped, semihardy, variable in productiveness; branches smooth except for the numerous, small, raised lenticels, somewhat thorny, dark ash-gray, the fruit spurs numerous; branchlets willowy, of medium thickness and length,
with short internodes, greenish-red changing to light brown, shining, glabrous; lenticels numerous, small; leaf-buds small, short, obtuse, plump, free
Leaves sparse, folded upward, oblanceolate or narrowly obovate, one and three-quarters inches wide, three and one-half inches long, thin; upper surface glabrous except for scattering hairs, with a grooved midrib; lower surface light green, glabrous except along the midrib and larger veins; apex acute or abruptly pointed, base acute, margin finely serrate or crenate, eglandular; petiole nine-sixteenths inch long, slender, tinged red, glandless or with from one to four globose or reniform, greenish-yellow glands on the stalk.
Blooming season early and of medium length; flowers appearing before the leaves, white; borne in thin clusters on lateral buds and spurs, singly or in pairs; pedicels long, glabrous, greenish; calyx-tube green, campanulate, glabrous; calyx-lobes obtuse, with numerous hair-like glands, nearly glabrous, erect; petals roundish-ovate, entire, not clawed; anthers yellowish; filaments short; pistil glabrous except at the base, much longer than the stamens.
Fruit early, season short; one and three-quarters inches in diameter, roundish, halves equal; cavity of medium depth and width, abrupt, regular; suture a line; apex roundish; color light or greenish-yellow, more or less blushed with red on one side, becoming red at maturity, mottled, with thin bloom; dots numerous, small, whitish, conspicuous only where the skin is blushed; stem slender, five-eighths inch long, glabrous, detaching easily from the fruit; skin thin, tough, adhering; flesh yellowish, very juicy, fibrous, tender, melting next the skin but firmer at the center, sweet except near the pit; good in quality; stone adhering, three-quarters inch by five-eighths inch in size, roundish-oval, flattened, blunt but with a small, sharp tip, rough; ventral suture narrow and rather conspicuously winged; dorsal suture grooved.
HAMMER
HAMMER
Prunus hortulana mineri × Prunus americana
1. Cornell Sta Bul 38:79 1892 2. Ia Hort Soc Rpt 275, 448 1893 3. Ibid 334 1894 4. Wis Sta Bul 63:24, 39 1897 5. Colo Sta Bul 50:36 1898 6. Ia Sta Bul 46:274 1900 7. Waugh Plum Cult 150 1901 8.
Ont. Fr. Gr. Assoc. 144. 1901. 9. Ga. Sta. Bul. 67:274. 1904. 10. S. Dak. Sta. Bul. 93:18. 1905. 11. Ohio Sta. Bul. 162:254, 255. 1905.
Hammer is one of the best native plums. On the Station grounds the trees of this variety make the best orchard plants of any of the native varieties, being large, vigorous, shapely and hardy, falling short only in being a little uncertain in bearing. The fruits are good in quality, handsome in appearance and keep and ship well, but crack badly in unfavorable weather and, according to some writers, are quite subject to brown-rot. Hammer extends the season of the Americana plums considerably, for though a hybrid, it may best be ranked with the Americanas, and is well worth planting in home orchards in New York, where the native plums are too seldom found; in particular, this variety can be recommended for the colder parts of this State where Domestica and Insititia plums are not hardy.
Hammer is one of H. A. Terry’s numerous productions and was grown from a seed of the Miner evidently fertilized by an Americana. The blood of the latter is shown by its hardiness and its broad, Americana-like foliage. The variety first fruited in 1888 and was sent out in 1892.
Tree very large, vigorous, round-topped, widely spreading, hardy at Geneva, an uncertain bearer; trunk and larger limbs shaggy; branches long, rough, brash, thorny, dark ash-gray, with many, large lenticels; branchlets thick, very long, with long internodes, green changing to dull reddish-brown, glabrous, with raised lenticels of medium number and size; leaf-buds small, short, obtuse, plump, free
Leaves folded upward, oval or slightly obovate, two and one-eighth inches wide, four inches long, thin; upper surface somewhat rugose; lower surface pale green, very lightly pubescent along the midrib; apex taperpointed, base obtuse, often unsymmetrical, margin coarsely and doubly serrate, eglandular; petiole three-quarters inch long, sparingly pubescent along one side, tinged red, glandless or with from one to four small, globose, greenish-brown glands on the stalk
Blooming season medium to late, long; flowers appearing after the leaves, fifteen-sixteenths inch across, white, with a disagreeable odor; borne in clusters on lateral buds and spurs, in twos or in threes; pedicels five-eighths inch in length, slender, glabrous, greenish; calyx-tube green,
campanulate, glabrous; calyx-lobes narrow, obtuse, thinly pubescent within, glandular-serrate and with marginal hairs, somewhat reflexed; petals ovate or oval, irregularly crenate, tapering below into claws of medium length and breadth; anthers yellowish; filaments seven-sixteenths inch in length; pistil glabrous, equal to or shorter than the stamens in length
Fruit mid-season, ripening period of average length; one and onequarter inches in diameter, roundish-oval, slightly compressed, halves equal; cavity very shallow, narrow, flaring; suture an indistinct line; apex roundish; color crimson overspread with thick bloom; dots numerous, very small, light russet, inconspicuous; stem slender, five-eighths inch long, glabrous, not adhering to the fruit; skin thick, tough, inclined to crack under unfavorable conditions, separating readily; flesh golden-yellow, juicy, fibrous, tender and melting, sweet, strongly aromatic; good; stone semifree, three-quarters inch by five-eighths inch in size, flattened, roundishoval, somewhat compressed at the base, abruptly pointed at the apex, rough; ventral suture rather narrow, faintly ridged; dorsal suture with a narrow, shallow groove
HAND
HAND
Prunus domestica
1. Horticulturist 2:436 1847 2. Ibid 6:21 fig , 187, 294 1851 3. Am Pom Soc Rpt 190, 214 1856 4. Downing Fr Trees Am 382 1857 5. Hogg Fruit Man 362 1866 6. Mas Pom Gen 2:19, fig 10 1873 7. Ont
