Earlier this year, I suggested that “Victorian laughter” would be a good theme for a conference. This was partly because the adjective “Victorian” is often synonymous with an austere lack of humor — “we are not amused,” etc. — despite the evidence that the people of nineteenth-century Britain enjoyed a laugh as much as anyone in history. Burlesques, nonsense literature — Gilbert & Sullivan, for heaven’s sake! whose shows still make us chuckle in 2017.
The other reason I liked this theme was that I thought it would be healthy to acknowledge that part of what draws many of us to studying the Victorians is that sometimes they could be so darn weird. To research them is to navigate a field full of rabbit holes, down which lies a world that can seem as alien as Wonderland. Take, for example, mummy seeds.
Recently, I’ve been working on a conference paper about Tennyson writing history plays after the manner of Shakespeare. Several were put on by Henry Irving, the most famous actor/producer of the period, with help from his assistant and business manager, Bram Stoker. Yes, that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Stoker visited Tennyson on several occasions to hash out details of contracts and revisions. Reading his memoir the other day, I came across this provocative sentence:
“In [his] garden Tennyson pointed out to us some blue flowering pea which had been reared from seed found in the hand of a mummy.” (vol. I, p. 215)
No explanation followed this rather gothic assertion. How… Where… What…? I couldn’t begin to fathom how such a thing as seeds from a mummy’s hand could have ended up in Tennyson’s garden, or how Stoker could have found it unnecessary to expand on that anecdote.
It turns out that Tennyson was but one of many, many people to believe that grains recovered from Egyptian tombs could grow new plants. (They can’t.) The section on Mummy Peas in this document offers some tantalizing suggestions for how Tennyson may have come to think he had a mummy pea plant in his garden. I’d still love to know how he acquired it, though. Did he buy a seed packet from an unscrupulous trader? Did someone present the plant to him as a gift? I’ll be keeping my eyes open any time I’m working with Tennyson documents, but we may never know.
This was a fascinating rabbit hole to fall down for an afternoon. If I’m honest, the curiosity that drove me to find out more partly stemmed (no pun intended) from a desire to know whether it was at all possible that seeds from a mummy’s hand could have sprouted millennia later. How cool would that have been? So in this case at least, I don’t have much right to laugh at the Victorians. I kind of want it to be true, too.