"These gardens may be called the gardens of the respectable working classes"
About this Quote
“Respectable working classes” is Victorian code with a smile: it flatters laborers while quietly sorting them. Robert Fortune, a plant-hunting scientist writing in an era obsessed with cataloguing both nature and people, is doing more than describing a public space. He’s naming a social function. Gardens here aren’t just pleasant grounds; they’re an instrument for producing a certain kind of worker-citizen: orderly, sober, improvement-minded, fit for the moral economy of industrial Britain.
The intent is promotional and disciplinary at once. By calling them “gardens,” Fortune invokes cultivation, a word that conveniently applies to plants and to behavior. The “may be called” phrasing performs scientific modesty while slipping in a confident classification, as if social hierarchy were as observable as botany. And “respectable” is the hinge: not “poor,” not “laboring,” not “crowded,” but a curated subset of workers who conform to middle-class norms. The compliment doubles as an exclusion sign. If you’re not “respectable,” the garden is not for you, or at least not about you.
Context matters: mid-19th-century Britain saw the rise of municipal parks, model housing, and improvement societies, all pitched as public goods and as antidotes to urban disorder. Fortune’s line sits comfortably in that reformist mindset. It frames access to beauty as a reward for compliance, and it turns leisure into a lesson: nature, properly arranged, makes people easier to manage.
The intent is promotional and disciplinary at once. By calling them “gardens,” Fortune invokes cultivation, a word that conveniently applies to plants and to behavior. The “may be called” phrasing performs scientific modesty while slipping in a confident classification, as if social hierarchy were as observable as botany. And “respectable” is the hinge: not “poor,” not “laboring,” not “crowded,” but a curated subset of workers who conform to middle-class norms. The compliment doubles as an exclusion sign. If you’re not “respectable,” the garden is not for you, or at least not about you.
Context matters: mid-19th-century Britain saw the rise of municipal parks, model housing, and improvement societies, all pitched as public goods and as antidotes to urban disorder. Fortune’s line sits comfortably in that reformist mindset. It frames access to beauty as a reward for compliance, and it turns leisure into a lesson: nature, properly arranged, makes people easier to manage.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Robert
Add to List
