Wednesday 27th November at 5pm (Week 9)
Arts Building Room 104
Dr Victoria Mills (Birkbeck), ‘“Orchid Jo”: Empire, Satire, and Political Self-Fashioning’
Abstract:
The Birmingham entrepreneur-cum-politician, Joseph Chamberlain, amassed one of the nineteenth century’s best-known collections of orchids, which was displayed in a series of large greenhouses at his Moor Green residence, Highbury. Chamberlain’s orchid mania went beyond a passion for collection and cultivation as the orchid became a symbol of his political persona, worn religiously as a buttonhole and frequently discussed in the periodical press. This talk examines satirical depictions of Chamberlain’s orchid collecting in both London and Birmingham periodicals (Punch, Moonshine, The Dart, The Owl), all of which reveled in the scope for floral-based satire afforded by the orchidaceous Chamberlain’s relationship with the primrose-touting Tories.
I argue that an examination of satirical depictions of Chamberlain’s orchid collecting (including cartoons depicting him in his Highbury greenhouse) reveals how late-Victorian imperialism, domestic politics and constructions of masculinity intersect. For Chamberlain, masculine and political self-fashioning were linked; for his numerous satirists in the London and local Birmingham press, his orchid collecting became a nexus around which a number of ideas could constellate about the relationship between science and aesthetics, the vegetal and the human, coloniser and colonised, opposing political allegiances, and manliness and unmanliness.
You can read more about Dr Mills’s work here: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/8005084/victoria-mills
Those of you unable to attend in person can sign up to join us online. Details here.
