Outliving all prophecies of structural disaster, the Victorian Valhalla, Thackeray’s ‘blazing arch of lucid glass’, one of the greatest memorials to Victorian engineering, architectural achievement and popular amusement, had sunk to her knees, all but taking the memory of her creator, Joseph Paxton, with her. Paxton was a gardener first and last but, as a pioneer among Victorian self-made men, he was part of a generation who thought of their own time as one of transition from past to future and who embraced the innovations of the day. His character sprang from the spirit of the age – determined by imagination, unremitting energy, motivation, and enthusiasm – a coupling of enterprise and ambition. Like many of his contemporaries, he appeared to be able to turn his hand to almost any task: an untrained engineer and architect, half-amateur and half-professional, he not only built the most perfect greenhouses in history but became the greatest horticulturist of his day. He was a revolutionary – the Crystal Palace was one of the most astonishing design and engineering feats of the nineteenth century. With his dogged single-mindedness, Paxton typified the bold new men with abundant creative energy who grew out of and formed the age of unparalleled industrial expansion, a quintessentially persevering pragmatist.
Yet, in 1936 a jarring, prophetic note was struck by George Bernard Shaw. Asked by the Daily Sketch what he thought should replace the Palace, he replied, ‘I have no wish to see the Crystal Palace rebuilt. Queen Victoria is dead at last.’ Without its raison d’être, the garden’s magnificent terraces and blaze of flowers languished and fell to ruin. The site has still to be redeveloped. The broken stone steps, one lonely damaged statue and several sad sphinxes witness only the creep of the brambles. A television transmitter towers starkly on the ridge. The sculptured bust of Joseph Paxton, erected in 1869 four years after his death, turns its back to the forlorn, now empty hill, looking away from the vanished glory of his intoxicating pleasure dome.
Milton Bryant is a small and pretty rural village some 50 miles from London, raised slightly above the Bedfordshire plain, modestly protected from change now, as it most certainly was in the early 1800s, by its position on the edge of the Duke of Bedford’s Woburn Estate. At that time the village formed part of the collected farms of the Woburn Estate, containing a manor house as well as a public house, a collection of cottages and gravel pits, a village pond and a Saxon church. Half a mile away is the site of a now vanished mansion, Battlesden Park, and a further 2 miles away is the market town of Woburn and its abbey.
On 17 May 1810, aged 50, Joseph Paxton’s father William, a farm labourer, was buried there three months before Paxton’s seventh birthday. The boy’s family were now poorer than ever. Later in life, when he was wealthy and enjoying a fine dinner, he is said to have remarked, ‘you never know how much nourishment there is in a turnip until you have had to live on it’.
There are few documents relating to the early years of Paxton’s life. It has been suggested that his father was a tenant farmer, rather than a labourer – the disparity in incomes of the two positions was not slight – but his name does not appear in any of the rent books for the Woburn Estates, nor is there any mention of him in the land tax records for the area. William may have farmed his brother’s land or he may have laboured at Battlesden Park, where two of his sons subsequently became bailiffs. Whether he farmed or laboured, he worked on land in a county famed for market gardening, where smallholders cropped wheat, barley and some oats.
Joseph Paxton had been born on 3 August 1803, the seventh son and last of the nine children of William and Anne, who had moved to the village by the time their fourth child was baptised. His parents had been married for about 22 years, and both were in their early forties. By 1803, their eldest child – also William – was twenty and soon to be married and it is likely that five or six of the other children still lived at home. They were John (16 when Paxton was born), Henry (14), James (11), Thomas (9), Mary Ann (7) and Sarah (about 3) – all packed into a small labourer’s cottage.
It was an auspicious year for a future gardener to be born. In 1803 the Liverpool Botanical Gardens opened and the Horticultural Society was conceived; Joseph Banks sent William Kerr to collect plants in China and Humphry Repton was about to publish his Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. In the wider context of their lives, England stood on the threshold of great political and social upheaval. On the one hand, the French Revolution of 1789 had heralded democracy; on the other, Georgian aristocracy were still pursuing their lives of privilege. The demand for universal suffrage would grow in fervour right up to and beyond the First Reform Act of 1832, but now the transition from a feudal and agricultural order to a democratic and industrial society was just beginning.
From the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century, towns had been growing as labourers moved from the land to work in ‘manufactories’ with their new power looms, the spinning jenny and, by the latter part of the century, steam power. Demand for new textiles and manufactured products was stimulated by the wars that had raged for years with France and by 1815 many of these factories had become great mills. Later, the demand for iron products for roads, bridges and railways would accelerate the migration as people packed into industrial towns like Manchester, Bradford, Liverpool, Birmingham and Sheffield, swelling them by an average of 50 per cent. The population of England doubled between 1801 and 1850.
By the time Paxton’s father died, the distress of agricultural and factory workers alike was growing. The Luddite riots of 1811–12, where the workers’ anger was directed not so much at the machines as at the bosses who refused to negotiate with them over pay and conditions, erupted and the perpetrators were, for the most part, deported to Australia. As veterans returned from the French war in 1815, post-war depression and its consequent poverty set in. Crucially, cheap wheat imports were banned by the new Corn Law – a measure which maintained the high price of bread and the increasingly dismal lot of the labourer. By 1816, the price of bread had risen sixteenfold over fifty years.
In the countryside these radical changes were less obvious, though its economic structure was changing, too. The French wars had raised the cost of food and in 1803 many potato crops failed. So there were more people and less food, a distress compounded by the enclosure system, which had begun at the end of the previous century, and which meant that labourers were no longer able to use common land to grow vegetables, forage for firewood or graze animals. Wages were not increased to compensate for the loss of these auxiliary resources – so that, earning only seven or eight shillings a week, most labouring families were subsisting on a diet of tea, potatoes, some cheese and bread. Yet the pace, if not the quality, of life in the country was still broadly as it had been for centuries. Nothing travelled faster than a galloping horse and rural life followed the traditional agricultural calendar of Valentine’s Day, May Day, Summer Harvest, the village feast, hiring-fairs at Michaelmas, Guy Fawkes, late-November seeding and Christmas. Only rarely did events of national importance punctuate their rhythm: in 1814, when Napoleon was sent to Elba, there was mass celebration in Woburn, where houses were decorated with oak boughs and flowers and there was street feasting.
There are several differing reports of Paxton’s schooling. Given the death of his father and the consequent poverty of his family, it is fairly extraordinary that he made it to school at all. Education did not become a requirement by law until as late as 1880; farmers generally opposed the few free schools available, preferring their children to work in the fields for a few pennies, and conservative opinion considered popular education dangerous and undesirable. Some churches introduced Sunday Schools since this was often a child’s only free day, but weekday teaching for the working classes was rare.
There was no school in Milton Bryant until 1853, but there was a free school for boys at Woburn, started by the 1st Duke of Bedford. In 1808 it was rebuilt, reorganised and run on a voluntary subscription.