MÉLANIE COURNIL
Maîtresse de conférences en histoire britannique
Senior Lecturer in British History
Sorbonne Université
WILLIAM JACKSON HOOKER AND THE GLASGOW BOTANIC GARDENS (1820-1841)
For the past three years, I have been developing a research project on the imperial network of William Jackson Hooker, an English botanist from Norwich. Well-known among historians of science, Hooker became Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1841 when he was 55. A whole body of literature has been devoted to his late career in London and to his renown scientific acquaintances (Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, George Bentham…), underlining the influential part he played in establishing botany as a discipline in its own right and promoting it as an economic and imperial tool. Yet not much has been written about his tenure as Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Glasgow and Director of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens (1820-1841).
For many historians of botany, it seems that the Glasgow years of William J. Hooker deserved little more than a footnote. Yet, the work that Hooker undertook during his time in the Scottish city – more than two decades – proved consequential both for his scientific career and for the prominence of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. While in Glasgow, Hooker became an extremely popular professor, and his colourful and scientifically challenging university lectures drew an increasing crowd of eager students and helped popularise botany. He greatly benefited from his academic position as he expanded his scientific and diplomatic networks in Europe, North America and British colonised territories. He was also very keen to promote the Gardens, which flourished under his tutelage, boasting of a remarkable plant collection, which attracted many visitors in the 1820s and 1830s.
My research project is two-fold:
- writing a history of the first Glasgow Botanic Gardens (1817-1841) while investigating the gardens' many imperial connections
- examining Hooker's blossoming career as professor of botany and putting together a digital database project that maps his professional correspondence (27,000 letters) with other botanists, scientists and politicians.
