Richard Fallon, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) 283 pp. £75 HB. ISBN: 9781108834001
This is a book that will, I suspect, resonate deeply with the interests of the BSLS. Dinosaurs must surely be the most popular science topic for children (and many adults too), and the very word ‘dinosaur’ is as familiar in our mouths as household words. Richard Fallon’s excellent book attempts to consider how this came about, by focusing on the use of palaeontology, especially dinosaurs, in late Victorian and Edwardian literature. In doing so, this book repeatedly turns upon the dialogue between science and literature, and the balance that is to be struck between recognising expertise and gatekeeping it; between popularising science and distorting it.
One of the key figures in Fallon’s history is the Reverend Henry Neville Hutchinson, who ‘attempted to bring the latest scientific research to mass audiences’ (62). Hutchinson, who is the central focus of the book’s first chapter ’Reclaiming Authority: Henry Neville Hutchinson, Popular Science, and the Construction of the Dinosaur’, strikes a balance somewhere between Barnum and Buckland, attempting to take complicated scientific ideas and make them understandable to the general reader, whilst never fully losing sight of the original details and rigour which underpinned them. Hutchinson wrote a number of works to this purpose, one of his most popular being Extinct Monsters and Creatures of Other Days (1892). Hutchinson was dismissive of scientific writing that was ‘dry, uninteresting, or even quite unintelligible’ to a mass audience, so in creating a work on this topic for a general reader he ‘wanted earth-science writing to make for gripping reading’ (39). As much as Fallon recognises and rewards the positive impact of these works, he also acknowledges how they have in turn impacted upon scientific ideas and their reception. For example, Hutchinson was a key figure in promoting the term ‘dinosaur’, using this ‘supposedly unnatural term more frequently than any early populariser’ (45), much to the annoyance of reviewers like Harry Govier Seeley who felt ‘the Dinosauria has no existence as a natural group of animals, but includes two distinct types of animal structure’ (45). Today palaeontologists who regularly have to correct well-intended enthusiasts mistakenly calling all prehistoric reptiles dinosaurs may well find some sympathy for Seeley. The term ‘dinosaurs’ has proved an extremely effective form of branding, but one that has also provided false confidence in our distinction between different groups.
Chapter Two, ‘Reinventing Wonderland: Jabberwocks, Grotesque Monsters, and Dinosaurian Maladaptation’, explores this tension of branding and public image by exploring the way in which dinosaurs became seen as a form of grotesque. As the chapter title indicates, Lewis Carroll’s influence is discussed; his own interest in palaeontology and the potential echoes in his work are discussed in the chapter, but the greater impact is the way in which subsequent readers then used ideas like the Jabberwock as a comparison or model for discussing dinosaurs. Framing these extinct animals within the wonder and nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s fiction simultaneously allowed for a broader appeal, while also condemning them as monsters of the imagination. The idea of the slow, lumbering, stupid dinosaur, Fallon argues, was a popular one in allowing ‘triumphant progress narratives’ (64) in which humans emerge as victorious while the dinosaurs were always doomed to fail: ‘While, for some Edwardians, dinosaurs still recalled the mystical dragons of myth and faerie, the increasingly dominant way of talking about dinosaurs detracted far more from their dignity’ (65). In contrast to Hutchinson’s attempts to popularise science while respecting it, this chapter introduces works such as ‘Prehistoric Peeps’, a series of cartoons by Edward Tennyson Reed published in Punch during the 1890s which depicted cavemen and dinosaurs in various comic scenarios. The most intriguing for me was Edward Cuming’s 1901 work Monsters in Wonderland which riffed off Carroll’s text and delight in nonsense while incorporating various dinosaurs in the narrative. As Fallon notes, ‘Cuming’s most original repackaging of Carroll’s technique was his askance approach to scientific method. Monsterland delights in drawing attention to the speculative nature of palaeontological reassembly … and telling the story of the reconstructions from the perspective of their objects’ (89). Thus we have Smilodon getting their ‘coats’ from the Natural History Museum, or Stegosaurus expressing his own doubts about what his backplates might actually be for. Chapter Two concludes that these delightful works result in dinosaurs being scary but silly.
In Chapter Three, ‘Rearticulating the Nation: Transatlantic Fiction and the Dinosaurs of Empire’ we see how the dinosaurs were being portrayed as decidedly scary and not silly in various romance stories of adventure and hunting. The chapter aims to counter the popular narrative of Americans popularising the dinosaurs alone, and contrary to the British view, by considering American and British works together. The American words considered are John Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) and Gustavus Pope’s Journey to Venus (1895), both of which combine palaeontology with frontier and colonialist fantasy. Dinosaurs become terrible beasts for the heroes to hunt, conquer and subdue as they battle them on other worlds (the idea being that life on other planets is evolving on the same scale as ours, just several millennia behind). Frank Saville’s Beyond the Great South Wall (1901) not only makes a monster of Brontosaurus, but gifts the animal with hypnotic powers too. Fallon concludes, fairly, that these adventure stories ‘used newly discovered American dinosaurs as symbolic means for promoting national identities that were, for the most part, aggressively masculine and enthusiastic about empire’ (134). For example, in Pope’s tale, the heroes ride a stegosaurus and, finding it uncomfortable, their companion pulls the dinosaur’s tail only for it to break off, after which they experiment on its second brain (which stegosaurs were believed to have at the time) to manipulate the animal. Dinosaurs thus become objects of amusement and experimentation; products to be owned and dominated. In contrast, the chapter also includes the welcome balm of Henry Augustus Hering’s ‘Silas P. Cornu’s Divining Rod’ (1899), which satirises both palaeontology and empire, lampooning the ‘awkward economics of the second dinosaur rush’ (124) and the recent installation of Carnegie’s diplodocus.
Chapter Four, ‘Rediscovering Lost Worlds: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Modern Romance of Palaeontology’ moves on to the most famous text under discussion, Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). In Conan Doyle we once again see an attempt to balance scientific rigour and popular appeal as seen in Hutchinson’s work. Just as Hutchinson wanted to make scientific ideas into gripping reading, so Conan Doyle believed that ‘empirical science, which included physical research and which he consumed chiefly from popular science books, ought to make the world more deeply wonderful’ (171). The idea itself of a lost world was not solely the realm of science fiction at this time, with several people speculating on what animals may lie undiscovered in Africa, and Conan Doyle himself sighting what he believed to be an ichthyosaur in the Aegean sea (153-4). What is particularly fascinating in this chapter is Fallon’s discussion of the original planned illustrations for the story by Patrick Lewis Forbes, which are deliberately minimalist and vague, showing parts of animals to recreate the sense of being on safari, in comparison to the replacement images that were published by Harry Rountree in which Conan Doyle felt animals were presented as if in an aquarium, easy to see and thus removing the wonder and magic of seeing them in the wild. As Fallon notes, ‘Conan Doyle wanted his readers to glance at suggestions of creatures in the “rose-tinted waters”, just as he had done in the Aegean, leaving room for the pleasurable workings of memory, imagination, and even doubt’ (167).
Fallon is to be congratulated for an engaging and well-researched book. His work shows how literature helped to shape the field of palaeontology and transformed what would otherwise be an obscure scientific term into a widely-recognised and beloved phenomenon: ‘During the decades on either side of 1900, the word “dinosaur”, signifying a heterogenous collective of prehistoric reptiles “swept wholesale from the board”, first became meaningful to mass anglophone audiences’ (174). Moreover, he counters the popular narrative that this popularisation of the field corresponds with a migration from British to American palaeontology, arguing that ‘Britain and the United States were intimately connected by literary networks in this period, and British authors were instrumental in crafting the meaning of American dinosaurs’ (176). Fallon’s book offers an enjoyable and rich topic to the reader, and his work will not be the final word on it: Fallon himself notes the many other creatives who could also have been discussed in more detail, ‘like journalist Jennie Irene Mix, geoscientific poet Henry Robert Knipe, naturalists Frederic Augustus Lucas and Richard Lydekker, artist Alice Bolingbroke Woodward, and palaeontologist William Elgin Swinton’ (178-9), and it is to be hoped that Fallon, or others, will take the opportunity to do so at some future point. As it stands, this is an excellent discussion of an enduringly popular topic and shows precisely how that topic became popular in the first place.
Pete Orford, University of Buckingham
