eJournals Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 47/1

Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik
0171-5410
2941-0762
Narr Verlag Tübingen
10.24053/AAA-2022-0007
2022
471 Kettemann

Richard Fallon, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

2022
Michael Fuchs
Rezensionen Richard Fallon, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Michael Fuchs The standard history of the emergence of dinosaurs - as both a word and a concept - begins with British scientist Richard Owen, who noticed shared traits in the anatomies of a group of extinct creatures and reported on these findings in a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1841. The anatomical characteristics provided “sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles,” for which Owen “propose[d] the name of Dinosauria” (1842: 103). For Owen, three species typified this group of reptiles: Megalosaurus (discovered and named by William Buckland in 1824), Iguanodon (named by Gideon Mantell in 1825), and Hylaeosaurus (named by Mantell in 1833), all of which were discovered in southern England. In 1854, sculptures of these three species were unveiled in Crystal Palace Park and drew massive crowds. The success of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs testified to a larger fascination with these prehistoric lifeforms in nineteenth-century England. As early as 1853, Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House referred to one of the ‘terrible lizards’ in its opening paragraph (“it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill” [[1853] 1996: 13]). Two years prior to Bleak House, the narrative “Our Phantom Ship on an Antediluvian Cruise” (“ostensibly a work of scientific nonfiction” [Fallon 2021: 13]) was published and imagined a world in which a group travels through deep time and encounters a variety of prehistoric animals, including a “sort of crocodile, thirty feet long, with a big body, mounted on high thick legs” that “is not likely to be friendly with our legs and bodies. Megalosaurus is his name” (Morley 1851: 494). By the time the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were publicly displayed and British writers could expect their readers to understand the references to Mesozoic- Era lifeforms, dinosaur fossils had also been discovered on the other side of the Atlantic. As the United States expanded toward the West, fossils were uncovered along the way, and the westward movement became entangled with a AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 47 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2022-0007 Rezensionen 154 journey into the past of the North American continent and the history of life. Expeditions looking for fossils were complicit in the settler-colonialist mentality of the westward expansion and exploited the knowledge of, and took land from, Indigenous populations. Both the scientific prestige associated with discovering and naming new species and the income that could (theoretically) be generated from fossils (and personal animosities) led to the ‘Bone Wars’ between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh during which Marsh described and named iconic genera such as Stegosaurus (1877), Allosaurus (1877), Apatosaurus (1877), and Triceratops (1889). Initially, the term ‘dinosaur’ was not even accepted in the scientific community, much less able to get a foothold in popular discourse; however, in particular visual arts and museums helped bring these prehistoric animals to the masses. By the 1910s, ‘dinosaurs’ was a household word and by the 1920s, dinosaurs had become mainstays in popular culture. While scholars have, in particular, explored the role of museums in popularizing dinosaurs at the turn of the century, Richard Fallon’s book Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon sets out to examine how “an array of writing on dinosaurs - fiction and non-fiction, scholarly and popular” (2) contributed to the transformation of dinosaurs from “British lizards to multiform American monsters” (7) between the 1880s and 1910s. Along the way, Fallon shows how, “from [Henry Neville] Hutchinson to New York millionaire John Jacob Astor IV and novelist Arthur Conan Doyle […],writing on dinosaurs was regularly characterised by populist and even downright heterodox attitudes towards science” (3). Hutchinson plays a prominent role in Fallon’s argument and is thus the focal point of the opening chapter. Hutchinson was an Anglican clergyman who thought that the language of scientific writing alienated the public and that science had become too secular in the second half of the nineteenth century. While scientists wrinkled their noses at Hutchinson’s attempts at dabbling in their fields of expertise, the popular appeal of his books allowed him to participate in science discourses and shape the image of dinosaurs. Fallon shows in this chapter that Hutchinson continued a literary tradition in the geosciences that was typified by Charles Lyell and William Buckland, whose “romanticism, poetry, and finely honed prose about deep time and prehistoric monsters” (32) helped establish the prestige of geology and paleontology, in no small part because their publications were widely read. This type of writing came out of style in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and was replaced by increasingly specialized writing. In an attempt to communicate science to the masses, Hutchinson frequently referred to works of literature. For example, in the preface to Extinct Monsters (1892), Hutchinson evokes William Shakespeare, while the book’s introduction opens: “Let us see if we can get some glimpses of the primæval inhabitants of the world, that lived and died while as yet there were no men and women having authority over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air.” Hutchinson speculates that “this antique world” might appear “as strange as the fairy-land of Grimm or Lewis Carroll.” However, this past world “was not inhabited by ‘slithy toves’ or ‘jabber-wocks,’ but by real Rezensionen 155 beasts, of whose shapes, sizes, and habits much is already known” ([1892] 1893: 1). Although Hutchinson wrote popular books on various earth sciences, his books on paleontology were particularly well-received. Importantly, he did not shy away from “enter[ing] debates on controverted issues, sometimes taking a combative tone against the theories of authorities, living and dead” (42): for example, he questioned the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. Besides his books being easy to read, what made Hutchinson key to introducing the masses to dinosaurs was the simple fact that he employed the term ‘dinosaurs’ rather than ‘saurians’ (which was still more frequently used in the early 1980s). As Fallon points out, “three chapters [in Extinct Monsters] included the word ‘Dinosaurs’ […] in their titles, as did two chapters in Creatures of Other Days [1894]” (45). Hutchinson’s enormous influence on the popularization of dinosaurs (and, in particular, discoveries made in the United States) was felt quickly: when the curator of comparative anatomy at the United States National Museum, Frederic Augustus Lucas, set out to write a popular book on prehistoric creatures, “he felt obliged to admit that it was ‘somewhat on the lines’ of Hutchinson’s exemplar” (49). The second chapter picks up on how Hutchinson’s introduction likens dinosaurs to Lewis Carroll’s fantastic bestiary and explores images associated with grotesqueness, monstrosity, clumsiness, and stupidity that were applied to dinosaurs at the turn of the century. This rather negative imagery suggested that dinosaurs went extinct because they could not adapt to their changing environments: “dinosaurs were […] perceived as the emblematic examples of selfdestructive monstrosity” (66). While considered the pinnacle of reptilian evolution in the mid-nineteenth century, dinosaurs’ role had to be reconsidered in view of the teleological understanding of evolution that would find its endpoint in (white) humans a few decades later. The chapter starts by discussing how American dinosaurs were connected to Carroll’s fantastic worlds in texts including an 1885 article that tried to describe Atlantosaurus to a general audience and a review of Marsh’s The Dinosaurs of North America (1896). Fallon observes that whereas writers such as Hutchinson evoked Carroll’s fantastic creatures to highlight the differences between these imaginary beasts and dinosaurs, journalists “were more likely to suggest that prehistoric animals and their polysyllabic names revealed the absurdity latent in palaeontological science” (72). Fallon traces the idea of dinosaurs’ inability to keep up with evolution, illustrated by their curious anatomy, through a set of texts that (more or less) explicitly reference Hutchinson’s Extinct Monsters and use the malformed prehistoric creatures for amusement or education: Eugene Field’s poem “Extinct Monsters” (1893), Edward W. D. Cuming’s children’s fiction Wonders in Monsterland (1901), and Emily Octavia Bray’s work of children’s literature Old Time and the Boy; or, Prehistoric Wonderland (1921). As Fallon demonstrates, by the time Bray’s book was published, “dinosaurs and other ‘Extinct Monsters’ were no longer shockingly new and strange” (96). The idea of human progress, both on an individual level in the didactic children’s fictions by Cuming and Bray and on a more general level as the Rezensionen 156 pinnacle of evolution, sets up the topic of Chapter 3: the symbolic use of dinosaurs in narratives of imperialism and the negotiation of national identities. Accordingly, John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) and Gustavus W. Pope’s Journey to Venus (1895) extended fantasies of Manifest Destiny “to outer space and to deep time itself, depicting an expansion that could continue infinitely” (103) and “established conventions for fiction about dinosaurs on other planets that have inspired authors to the present day” (134). Henry Augustus Hering’s short story “Silas P. Cornu’s Divining-Rod” (1899), on the other hand, mocked the idea of American expansionism and dinosaur fossils’ role in it. On the British side, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent (1900) and Frank Savile’s Beyond the Great South Wall (1899) stage encounters with sauropods in faraway lands that the book’s protagonists cannot kill, “growing stronger and more resourceful in the process” (134), and reflected the era’s anxiety about decadent masculinity. Savile’s novel, Fallon remarks, “helped to establish dinosaurs and other eldritch prehistoric horrors as appropriate adversaries in polar adventures,” while Hyne’s “prehistoric myth-making […] almost certainly” influenced Edgar Rice Burroughs’s sagas (134-35). When mentioning Burroughs’s paleofictions, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) is never far away. Thus, the book’s final chapter studies the original manuscript of the novel alongside its genesis (e.g. Conan Doyle’s experiments with faux-documentary images) to suggest that Conan Doyle thought that empirical science “ought to make the world more deeply wonderful” (171). However, the academic establishment at the turn of the century made this practically impossible (even if “the concept that certain species might have persisted in remote areas was becoming more scientifically credible” [153]), turning The Lost World into “a site for whimsical speculations on the possibilities of a scientific community unfettered by specialist protocols that limited not only what could be discovered but also what could be sought” (172). In a way, this notion of limitless possibilities echoes in the conclusion to Reimagining Dinosaurs, which elegantly summarizes the main findings and also connects them to more recent developments, as Fallon remarks that dinosaurs “appear capable of weathering whatever else human society can make of them” (184). To be sure, for readers versed in the cultural formation of dinosaurs, much of what they will find in Reimagining Dinosaurs will not necessarily sound new: from the change of the image of dinosaurs as the culmination of reptilian evolution to creatures that vanished from the face of the planet because they were too stupid, slow, malformed, etc. to survive to the entanglements between the colonial imagination and prehistoric narratives, these are all contexts that these readers will be aware of. However, Fallon’s discussions of select pieces of fiction and nonfiction produce a more nuanced understanding of dinosaurs’ (trans)cultural functions and their meanings in the Anglophone world of the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century. The author packages his explorations of literary examples in expertly conceived narratives about, among others, changing conceptions of dinosaurs and science’s struggle with (and for) its selfdefinition. In addition, Fallon constantly succeeds in presenting novel pieces of information that will be of interest to various types of readers, from the indepth discussion of paleontologists’ reactions to Hutchinson’s popularization Rezensionen 157 of their insights and the tidbit that Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreyev exchanged notes on Extinct Monsters to the details about the genesis of The Lost World and the remarks on Conan Doyle’s cryptozoological beliefs. In addition to being incredibly well-researched and well-written, Reimagining Dinosaurs includes a little over a dozen greyscale illustrations, most of which - unsurprisingly - focus on dinosaurs. While these illustrations are wellchosen, there are a few sections where I would have appreciated some visualizations, for example in the brief discussion of Tennyson Reed’s “proto-Flintstones [series] ‘Peeps’” (84) - but this is more of a remark than an actual point of criticism. Reimagining Dinosaurs should be of particular interest to scholars working in the fields of literature and science and the popularization of science, but the book also provides useful insights for scholars of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Anglophone literature and scholars working on transatlantic knowledge exchange and (popular) culture’s role in it. Conveniently, Fallon also edited the anthology Creatures of Another Age: Classic Visions of Prehistoric Monsters (2021), which may well be considered a compendium volume for anyone who would like to dig deeper into some texts from 1830 to World War I that imagine prehistoric life. I would recommend anyone who might be remotely intrigued by Reimagining Dinosaurs to pick up the book, since they will not be disappointed - in short, this is an excellent study about the transatlantic formation of dinosaurs at the fin de siècle. ‘Would recommend’ because there is a catch: the monograph (184 pages of main text, 62 pages of notes, a bibliography of 31 pages, and a sixpage index) sells for €98.90/ £75.00/ US-$99.99 (as a hardcover), which is clearly priced for institutions. The Kindle edition is about half the price of the hardcover, which seems borderline justifiable for an individual, while the eBook edition available in the Google Play Store is priced between the Kindle and hardcover. Accordingly, for the moment, if you cannot get your institution to acquire the book (or get the book via interlibrary loan), you may want to get the Kindle edition (if you can justify buying from Amazon), wait for the paperback edition, which Cambridge University Press usually publishes two years after the hardcover release, or bite the bullet and pay the hefty price for the hardcover edition. In view of shrinking library budgets and an increasing number of scholars in various types of precarious contracts, Cambridge UP would be well-advised to reconsider its pricing strategy. After all, even smaller university presses such as UP Mississippi have recently started to publish their books in both hardcover and paperback editions from day one. References Dickens, Charles ([1853] 1996). Bleak House. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Nicola Bradbury. London: Penguin. Fallon, Richard (2021). “Introduction.” In: Fallon, Richard (Ed.). Creatures of Another Age: Classic Visions of Prehistoric Monsters. Richmond, VA: Valancourt Books. 7-16. Rezensionen 158 Hutchinson, H. N. ([1892] 1893). Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life. Second Edition. London: Chapman & Hall. Morley, Henry (1851). “Our Phantom Ship on an Antediluvian Cruise.” Household Words 3. 492-496. Owen, Richard (1842). “Report on British Fossil Reptiles.” In: Report of the Eleventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: Held at Plymouth in July 1841. London: John Murray. 60-204. Michael Fuchs Institut für Anglistik & Amerikanistik Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg