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14
Behind the Green Door
Love and Lust in Eighteenth- Century Botany
It was inevitable that plant sex, once out of the bag, would become a favorite tar-
get of wits, wags, and scalawags, and nowhere more than in Merrie England. The Puritan
Revolution had brought with it many social benefits, but humor was not one of them. The
British love of satire, temporarily suppressed during the dour reign of Cromwell, erupted
like a pent- up volcano after the Restoration of 1660, wilder and more iconoclastic than ever.
Aiding and abetting this return to jollity, Charles II, upon returning from his sojourn in
Paris, established a more permissive court atmosphere modeled on that of Louis XVI at
Versailles. Theaters were reopened, signaling a return to a more hedonistic public life, and
the most popular plays were sexually explicit comedies inspired by the farces of Moliere.
Actresses appeared on the stage for the first time, and female playwrights, such as Aphra
Behn, had their works performed to much acclaim.
Another factor fueling the popularity of satire in England was the heated rivalry in
Parliament between the newly formed Whig and Tory parties. Impassioned, inflammatory
rhetoric was frowned upon as dangerous to the social order. Instead, a rapier wit became the
weapon of choice for skewering one’s political opponents. Among the most notable literary
satirists of the period were John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. But there
was also a galaxy of mostly lesser talents, many of whom worked out of Grub Street in the
area known as Moorfields. Once a rare greenbelt area in the City of London, Moorfields
served as a refuge for impoverished survivors of the Great Fire of London in 1666, over the
strenuous objections of Charles II. By the eighteenth century, Moorfields had morphed into
a full- blown slum filled with crumbling tenements, where pimps and prostitutes plied their
trade amid a thriving industry of booksellers, publishers, and a mélange of scribblers rang-
ing from the cerebral, including the young Samuel Johnson, to the mercenary, such as the