In-door Plants and How to Grow Them, for the Drawing-Room, Balcony, and Greenhouse...
London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1861. First edition of Elizabeth Anne Maling’s (1829 – 1866) first work on houseplants. It was a staple of the Victorian “cactus craze,” during which cacti and other succulents gained popularity as houseplants and began to appear in British art and poetry. With an attractive hand-colored lithograph frontispiece. It may have been the work of Noel Humphreys, who supplied frontispieces for several of Maling’s other books. Light edgewear. Pale yellow endpapers. Lacking front endpapers. Some toning to title-page. A very good copy of an uncommon book written for middle-class Victorian women at a time when the concept of the “houseplant” was still emerging in Britain. Publisher’s green cloth stamped in gilt with design of plants in a window. Octavo. viii, 150, 2 [publisher’s ads] pp. Item #17137
Elizabeth Anne Maling (1829 – 1866) was the author of almost a dozen books on home gardening, flower arranging, and birdkeeping, as well as novels. Her books include Song-birds, and How to Keep Them; the novel Cragstone Cottage; and Birds and Flowers, a gardening guide for children published by Emily Faithfull’s Victoria Press.
Wells, Lindsay. “The Victorian Cactus Craze? Succulents in Nineteenth-Century Poetry.” Baylor University Armstrong Browning Library webpage (February 27, 2019).
Price: $650.00