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"The Busiest Man in England": The Life of Joseph Paxton, Gardener, Architect, and Victorian Visionary
Natural History, Sept, 2006 by Laurence A. Marschall
"The Busiest Man in England": A Life of Joseph Paxton, Garden Architect, and Victorian Visionary by Kate Colquhoun David R. Godine, Publisher, 2006; $30.00
Among the great engineering marvels of the 1800s, surely the Crystal Palace ranked supreme. Erected to house London's Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851, it was the largest building built to date, a third of a mile long, 450 feet wide, and enclosing an area of almost twenty-one acres. Like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower, the other iconic structures of the age, the Crystal Palace celebrated new technology. Its skeleton was made of cast iron, not timber, and its outer walls and roof were sheathed in plate glass, more than 200,000 panes held in place by 205 miles of sash bars. During the six months of the exhibition 6 million people passed through its galleries, and, when it was later reconstructed on a permanent site in south London, the huge building continued to attract and delight weekend crowds until it was gutted by fire in 1936.
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It was no coincidence that the Crystal Palace resembled a giant greenhouse. Its architect was Joseph Paxton, chief gardener and landscape designer for the Duke of Devonshire. In the preceding twenty-five years, Paxton had transformed Chatsworth, the Duke's estate, into the most advanced and most spectacular botanical park in Europe. At Chatsworth, a variety of innovative structures housed plants from all over the globe. In one great greenhouse, heated by solar power and subterranean boilers, the temperature was regulated so that one end was temperate and the other end subtropical. From a surrounding gallery, visitors could gaze down at a jungle of exotic trees--coconut palms and date palms, banana and cinnamon. Birds flitted above carpets of ferns, and fish swam in artificial lagoons. In an age obsessed with natural history, Paxton's gardens were a collector's dream, and his fame, even before the Crystal Palace, was nearly universal.
Paxton promoted his innovative ideas through a series of periodicals which he founded and edited--Horticultural Register, begun in 1831, and Magazine of Botany, begun in 1834--along with several popular gardening books. He succeeded not simply through the cleverness of his ideas, according to writer Kate Colquhoun, but also through the power of his personality. Paxton's industry, clarity of expression, and fundamental sense of decency made him an ideal manager. Everyone who met him admired him, and the many friendships he made during his lifetime were deep and enduring.
Yet that same industriousness and friendliness made Paxton the archetypal workaholic of the Victorian Age. He was the "busiest man in England," according to Charles Dickens, who worked for him briefly as editor of the Daily News, a liberal newspaper Paxton founded in 1846. As Paxton's fame grew, the demands on his time grew enormously, and it seemed he could never say no to an appealing idea. He accepted commissions to design municipal parks and private estates, developed railway lines, planned municipal waste sewage systems, and even served in Parliament, all the while carrying on the duties of gardener, editor, and family man. When he died at age sixty-one in 1865, prompting an effusion of public adulation, the editor of Punch simply wrote in his diary, "More fatal overwork."
Kate Colquhoun's masterful biography of Paxton more than does justice to this remarkable overachiever. She traces his rise from humble farm-laborer's son to pillar of society by providing a perceptive portrait of the culture that celebrated his talent. Like many self-made men, Paxton was also a product of his time, caught up by the unrestrained curiosity and entrepreneurialism of the Victorian Age. If his name, like that of the great Crystal Palace, is no longer a household word, this book will serve as a handsome memorial, and should stand the test of time.
LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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