Instructions in Gardening for Ladies

London: John Murray, 1840. First edition. Good +. Publisher's green cloth. Octavo. xii, 406, 8 [publisher's catalogues] pp. Engraved title-page and textual illustrations throughout (some full-page). Rebacked with original spine laid down. Sunning to edges of boards. Foxing to endpapers and preliminaries, but otherwise quite clean throughout. A Good+ copy

Jane Loudon, nèe Webb (1807 - 1858) wrote over a dozen botanical books, some of which she also illustrated, and assisted her husband John Claudius Loudon (1783 - 1843) in the writing and editing of his own works on botany, including his Encyclopedia of Gardening (1834). Loudon was also a pioneering (truncated) author of science fiction: she published The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), which is set in the year 2126 and is the first English-language work to feature a reanimated mummy, when she was just twenty-two. The Mummy! was published less than a decade after Frankenstein and a year after The Last Man, and Loudon's work belies the inspiration she took from Mary Shelley's groundbreaking novels. Loudon arguably pushes the bounds of early science fiction further, however, in her invention of an all-new universe of technological and social advancement in which women in the queen's court wear trousers and hair ornaments of gas-powered flame, and "steam-powered automata surgeons and lawyers...speak briefs fed into tubes in their bodies" (Hopkins). It was through The Mummy! that Loudon met her husband, who favorably reviewed the work, eventually leading to her career in botanical writing that is documented here.

Instructions in Gardening for Ladies was Loudon's second book on horticultural subjects, preceded by the Young Lady's Book of Botany (1838), and her first written for adults.

Hopkins, Lisa. "Jane C. Loudon’s 'The Mummy!': Mary Shelley Meets George Orwell, and They Go in a Balloon to Egypt" (2003). Good +. (Inventory #: 7283)