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DICKENS, DINOSAURS, AND DESIGN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2016

Gowan Dawson
Gowan Dawson*
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
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Extract

Charles Dickens's novels only occasionally feature images of prehistoric creatures. There is, of course, the famous “elephantine lizard. . .waddling. . .up Holborn Hill” in the opening scenes of Bleak House (1852–53), which, as is brilliantly captured in Tom Gauld's recent cartoon “Fragments of Dickens's Lost Novel ‘A Megalosaur's Progress’” (2011), has become a kind of icon of Dickens's entire fictional oeuvre (Figure 1). But beyond Bleak House’s iconic megalosaurus “forty feet long or so,” Dickens's panoramic representations of urban landscapes, which Adelene Buckland has shown to abound with quasi-geological ruins, are usually populated only by their more diminutive modern inhabitants (1; ch. 1). Even when the changing cityscape of “carcases. . .and fragments” of “giant forms” seems, as in Dombey and Son (1847–48), to suggest the presence of colossal fossilized skeletons thrown up by a “great earthquake,” they remain lifeless and merely augment the pervading atmosphere of urban upheaval (46; ch. 6). Animate extinct animals instead appear more commonly in novels by contemporaries such as William Makepeace Thackeray or, later in the century, Henry James. In their fiction, creatures such as the megatherium, a large edentate from the Pliocene epoch, not only afford apposite metaphors for gargantuan manifestations of industrial modernity, as in the former's Mrs. Perkins's Ball (1846) and the latter's The Bostonians (1885–86). More significantly, they also provide a model for the complex structures of serialized novels, whether commendatory, as in Thackeray's The Newcomes (1853–55), or otherwise, as in the famous epithet “large loose baggy monsters” that James coined in the preface to the New York edition of The Tragic Muse (1908) (1:x).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 761 - 778
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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