Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature

When the term 'dinosaur' was coined in 1842, it referred to fragmentary British fossils. In subsequent decades, American discoveries—including Brontosaurus and Triceratops—proved that these so-called 'terrible lizards' were in fact hardly lizards at all. By the 1910s 'dinosaur' was a household word. Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature approaches the hitherto unexplored fiction and popular journalism that made this scientific term a meaningful one to huge transatlantic readerships. Unlike previous scholars, who have focused on displays in American museums, Richard Fallon argues that literature was critical in turning these extinct creatures into cultural icons. Popular authors skilfully related dinosaurs to wider concerns about empire, progress, and faith; some of the most prominent, like Arthur Conan Doyle and Henry Neville Hutchinson, also disparaged elite scientists, undermining distinctions between scientific and imaginative writing. The rise of the dinosaurs thus accompanied fascinating transatlantic controversies about scientific authority.

“Houses are alive. No?”The image of a “revived” house in English literaturein the late XIX — early XX century

In this article we will talk about the unusual topos that occurs in Victorian and Edwardian literature — the “revived” estate. Indirectly going back to Gothic literature and the “horror literature” that inherited it (where the house can come to life literally, become harmful, frightening and even mortally dangerous for the inhabitant), however, it develops in a completely different way. The ghosts that inhabit the rooms of such a mansion are the guardians of a good and bright memory, “hidden joy”; embodied by the past, who lives in a shaky, invisible world. These ghosts have many hypostases: sometimes they turn out to be just a figment of the tenant’s imagination, and sometimes they are a real poltergeist, but not frightening, but protecting and preserving (W. Woolf, “A Haunted House”). Another manifestation of this topos can be called a house that comes to life, when the hero distinguishes between the beating of his heart (as happens in the novel by E.M. Forster “Howards End”) or hears a whisper of voices in the curtains shaken by the wind. The combination of these two motives (poltergeist and living house) is also found in the works of modernists (W. Woolf, “Orlando: A Biography”). Of particular interest is the image of a revived estate house in children’s literature; in this vein, we will consider the novel by Ph. Pierce, “Tom’s Midnight Garden”.

Introduction

This introductory chapter stresses the importance of a re-examination of Edwardian literature. It briefly considers what Edwardian literature in its various forms meant to the Edwardians themselves, to try to understand those ‘differences and disagreements’ that made the period's writing so lively and variegated in its contemporary moment. The chapter explores the cultural, political, and technological context against the backdrop of which Edwardian writings had thrived, and draws parallels between many of the authors who had come to exemplify Edwardian writing and Harry Gordon Selfridge, the entrepreneur proprietor of the era's major new London department store. Here, the chapter argues that the ‘great Edwardian literary emporium’ was designed to profoundly transform the existing horizons of those who entered through its doors. In addition, the chapter considers a sampling of critical surveys and monographs on the subject of Edwardian literature.