The Floral Gift: A Thing of Beauty, A Joy For Ever
Publications such as The Floral Gift were popular novelty pieces in mid-19th century England. Decorated with floreated borders and embellished with illuminated initials, this particular book features a collection of poetry connected under the common theme of flowers, with some even attributed to popular literary figures such as Wordsworth and Shakespeare. Gift-books such as The Floral Gift were designed to attract buyers and impress their recipients, being typically bound with brightly-coloured cloth and intricate gilt patterns. Published in 1863, the first edition of this text was bound with both green and red Morroco-style binding (Fig. 1). Other common titles often included names of gemstones, holidays, special occasions, and anniversaries. While the publication of such books eventually declined by the 1860s, these works nevertheless stand as testaments to the development of sophisticated industrial techniques such as chromolithograph printing–a unique method of making multi-coloured images by numerous applications of stone plates, each using a different ink colour.
Fig. 1: The green and red covers of the 1863 edition.
Since most of the books belonging to this genre were lavishly illustrated and visually appealing, gift-books were more often than not prized for their extrinsic beauty. Indeed, some of them were even explicitly advertised as works of “fine art”. Illuminated by Samuel Stanesby, the accompanying illustrations within the margins of The Floral Gift bear thematic correspondence to their written contents, such as how the set of poems based on “Violets” are appropriately framed with motifs of that particular flower (Fig. 2). Designed for display and admiration rather than for heavy reading, the contents of such books tended to be derivative in nature, as seen here in the reproduction of poetic phrases taken from different literary sources such as P. V. de Montgomery’s Hours of Sun and Shade (1891) (Page 1) and Shakespeare’s sonnets (Page 2). It comes as no surprise, then, that Victorian gift-books acquired a reputation for being of low cerebral quality.
Fig. 2: The page on “Violets”, with repeated motifs of violets in the margins (Page 2).
Fig. 3: Detail of the decorated initials.
Given that these titles were not regarded for the intellectual rigour of their content, these extant portions of The Floral Gift thus give credence to how certain books are able to survive purely based on their formal qualities. The contents of this copy, for instance, were removed from the original binding and sold as individual leaves or keepsakes–perhaps for greater profit. These highly decorative fragments would then have been framed and displayed as works of art in their own right, with collectors locating artistic value in the intricacy of the decorated initials and the quality of the printing (Fig. 3). While this practice of “breaking” or dismembering books often compromises the integrity and evidentiary value of the original texts, this idea that individual leaves contain aesthetic value in themselves nevertheless highlights an alternative way in which books survive into posterity. Although the trend of giving a book as a gift was originally focused on the lasting quality of the object, the process of systematic destruction exemplified by these remaining fragments of The Floral Gift ultimately points to other viable ways in which a book may last forever.
Prepared by Ina