Back when "Pansy" was a Compliment

[This post is prefaced by a “Nerd Alert.” It's all about flowers, birds, and 19th century book-buying habits. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.]

Greetings and geraniums,
My dear Periwinkles and Zinnias!

Translation: Hey Friends. Fancy meeting you here!

No fooling. That’s me greeting you in flower language. For a fleeting period of history, flower language was real.

Not long ago in my 19th century American poetry class we discussed the immense importance of flowers to Victorian culture. Since it’s just too great to keep to myself, I want to try to reproduce from memory and a smattering of class notes some of that discussion.

We all know that roses mean love, and yellow roses mean something else (I can’t remember what) and that Lilies are for Easter. But, for the Victorians, flowers constituted a veritable language of feeling. Emily Dickinson was known for her extensive herbarium, a collection of pressed flowers, and she frequently mailed poems wrapped in flowers to friends and loved ones. The Victorians linked flowers to specific emotions, and some of the top book sellers of the day were flower anthologies that merged floral poetry and botany. The Lady’s Book of Flowers was typical of the genre, with a format featuring a hand-painted scientific illustration of a flower accompanied by its scientific classification and a poem about the flower. Indicative of their mass appeal, the anthologies featured writers from across the literary spectrum; poems by the mega-poetess of sentiment, Lydia Sigourney, appeared beside "serious" flower verse by such venerables as Edgar Allan Poe.

Besides a floral anthology, a necessary volume in any Victorian library was a floral dictionary, which listed hundreds of flowers, each with a corresponding sentiment.

Some of the definitions are familiar to contemporary ears:
Daisy = innocence
Rose = beauty/love

Some are less obvious:
Honeysuckle = inconstancy
Genetion = death

And some are just weird:
Kingcup= I wish I were rich

Learning the meanings of flowers expanded one’s sentimental range of expression, since the mere mention of a flower could serve as shorthand for a particular feeling. Flower language came in especially handy for writing racy love letters. For instance:

Dear Beloved,
Wormwood can do nothing against the real arcadia of our love! Think, dearest, of the mugwart of our next interview!”
(From The Flowers Personified)

So popular were flowers as stand-ins for human passions that some daring authoresses even went so far as to pen “floral liberation narratives.” These dramatic stories are just about what you'd expect. In one exciting account, a pair of flower sisters determine to leave their dull domestic life and find careers-- related to their floral natures, of course:

“I shall be an author!” said the rose.
“I a trinket vendor,” sighed the daisy.
(From The Flowers Personified)

The Victorian interest in flowers was part of a larger romantic fascination with nature. Books about birds and birding were also popular around mid-century. In fact, the same year Thoreau published his wildly-unpopular-at-the-time volume of ecological meditations, Walden, pop novelist Florence Merriam came out with a novel in the “bird western” genre called Birding on a Bronco. It, by contrast, was a big hit.

Poor Thoreau.

Birdies, flowers, and feelings. That was what grumpy guys like him had to contend with.