Top Banana
It was during the troubled reign of Charles I that the very first bananas seen in Britain went on display.
1626-1644
King Charles I 1625-1649
It was during the troubled reign of Charles I that the very first bananas seen in Britain went on display.
1626-1644
King Charles I 1625-1649
The runaway success of Alicia Amherst’s History of Gardening in England (1895) surprised nobody more than its modest author. Plenty of horticultural manuals offered practical advice but Amherst and her contemporary Gertrude Jekyll helped put gardening into its wider social context. In this passage, she records the first appearance of a much-loved fruit but also gives us a glimpse of a courageous man.
THOMAS Johnson was born at Selby, in Yorkshire, but was himself an apothecary of London, and had a shop on Snow Hill.* It was in this shop on Snow Hill that the banana was first exhibited in England. Johnson received the bunch of fruit from Dr Argent,* who got it from Bermuda. Gerard* had only seen a pickled specimen sent from Aleppo. Johnson hung the bunch up in his shop until it ripened. He says: “Some have judged it the forbidden fruit;* other-some the grapes brought to Moses out of the Holy Land.”* He was the most eminent botanist of the time, and obtained some distinction as a soldier. He joined the army to fight for the Royalist cause, and died from wounds received at Basing in 1644.*
* Thomas Johnson (?1595/1600, to 1644) had set up as an apothecary in London by 1626. He received the degree of Bachelor of Physic by the University of Oxford in 1642, and MD (Medicinae Doctor, Doctor of Medicine) on May 9th, 1643. Thomas Shearman Ralph (1813-1892) published some of Johnson’s writings in ‘Mercurius botanicus’ (1849).
* Dr John Argent (?-1643) was an eminent doctor, who was elected President of the College of Physicians every year from 1625 to 1733 except 1628.
* John Gerard (?1545-1612) was a botanist and surgeon who maintained a large herbal garden in London. In 1597 he published an illustrated Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes that ran to 1,484 pages. Johnson revised and enlarged it in 1633.
* The forbidden fruit is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden; Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat it, but the serpent lured them into disobedience. See Genesis 2:15-17 and Genesis 3:1-7. Tradition since the Middle Ages has held that the fruit was an apple, probably drawing on the Apple of Discord in Greek myth, but the Bible does not actually say what it was.
* When Moses had brought the Israelites out of Egypt and across the desert to the land of Canaan, he sent spies into the land to see what it was like. They came back carrying grapes as evidence of its fertility. See Numbers 13:17-27.
* In 1842, the year before Johnson received his MD, the Civil War broke out, pitting King Charles I against his own Parliament in Westminster. Johnson sided with Charles and the Royalists. He took part in the defence of Basing House in Hampshire, a Royalist stronghold, in 1644 and on September 14th received a shoulder wound from which he died a fortnight later.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate her ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.