The first Victorian dinosaurs and revolution(s) in the colonies: Museum-as-theatre, imperial anxiety, and the spectacular mediation of scary new scientific revelations in Britain

In February 2024, dinosaur enthusiasts and popular media outlets across the globe celebrated the two-hundred-year anniversary of the formal naming of the “first” dinosaur, Megalosaurus. The creature was given its name (Megalosaurus bucklandii) in 1824 in reference to William Buckland, whose work recovery fossils of extinct creatures in the north of England had popularized knowledge of the “Ice Ages”; the creature was then used as the major reference two decades later when Owen first formally coined the term “Dinosauria”. In 1854, quite famously, models of Megalosaurus and Iguanodon were displayed in exhibition at the dazzling Crystal Palace in London, marking the first time ever that reconstructed dinosaurs had been displayed in public. The relationship between this particular location with a seminal event in the history of European science and popular consciousness provokes thought about the entanglement of spectacle, science, public perception, storytelling, colonial wealth, and imperial power.

Referring to the paleontological reconstructions, historian of science Alison Laurence (2019) suggests:

When the Crystal Palace at Syndeham opened in 1854, the extinct animal models […] offered Victorians access to a reconstructed past […] and drastically transformed how they understood and engaged with the Earth. […] The guidebook [for the exhibit], […] Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World, illustrates how Victorian naturalists placed nature in the service of the nation-even if those elements of nature, like the Iguanodon or the Megalosaurus, lived and died long before such human categories were established. The geological section of the Crystal Palace at Syndeham, which educated the public about the past while celebrating the scale and might of modernity, was a discursive site of exchange between past and present […].”

If the Crystal Palace offered a discursive site of exchange between past and present, then it could be argued that it also offered a discursive site of exchange between domestic and foreign, metropolitan and peripheral, civilization and the primitive, and familiar and exotic. Referring to these exhibitions, Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells describes how “[t]he Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace […], which displayed representative samples of colonial resources, was a microcosm of empire. Empire and science co-sponsored the surveying, mapping and inventorying of people, lands and products for the ends of imperial power. […] [N]ature, once a source […] of wonderment, was brought to the domestic market place”. Display of wealth and technological prowess, exhibited side-by-side with scientific knowledge and “factual” reconstructions, highlights how spectacle and the spectacular were key elements for nineteenth-century imperial administrators attempting to mediate new knowledge and current political events for an interested public audience.

Spatial and temporal anxieties of Empire: Science on stage and museum-as-theatre

The Crystal Palace inaugurated an era of spectacular display of scientific knowledge in Euro-American cities, from the 1853 New Year’s Eve party hosted inside a reconstruction of an Iguanodon at the Crystal Palace; to the “spectacle in Leicester Square” of James Wyld’s Great Globe in the 1850s; to electrical demonstrations; to the fashion for “popular lecturing” and science-as-entertainment; to the widespread hosting of massive World’s Fair-style technology expositions and grand exhibitions during the 1880s and 1890s. When the Crystal Palace reopened in 1854, its size was twice as big as the original 1851 venue, and its offerings included, aside from the colonial wealth and dinosaurs, new “ethnographic” exhibits which displayed recreations of foreign people in sets constructed to look like foreign lands, featuring an “Indian Islands” section with “Javanese people from the lower classes […] bears, and birds”; the “India” section contained “a group of Hindus, birds, a hog, and an elaborate tiger hunt”; and the “Africa” section was “the most extensive tableau.”

Display, exhibition, showmanship, and theatricality were tools and – sometimes, arguably –weapons, a series of both rhetorical and material techniques that were shared, borrowed, and refined among authors of both fiction and nonfiction in nineteenth-century Britain. Scholars have examined how the rise of science-fiction in the 1890s occurred in conversation with the political and cultural anxieties of the “Yellow Peril,” wherein political rhetoric in both the United States and Britain villainized a perceived racial and economic threat from East Asia, resulting in the Chinese Exclusion Act and the invoking xenophobia and Orientalist caricatures. Hyperbolic characterizations of real-world peoples and places were already present in British storytelling at century’s beginning, too.

From at least the 1790s onward, theatrical stage plays used elaborate set design, on-stage equestrian feats, and action-packed adventure to appeal to anxious popular audiences while telling stories explicitly about colonial conquest in India and revolutionary fervor in Haiti; in particular, two spectacular plays by J.H. Amherst, staged in the 1820s, which both describe the downfall of non-white rebels against European rule, provide a case study of how political anxiety about revolution in the colonies appealed to both British and French audiences. From the 1820s onward, geologists and paleontologists befriended popular authors like Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray as scientists engaged in showmanship and employed rhetoric and spectacular display to convey new revelations to the British public. And from at least the 1850s onward, anthropologists and other promoters curated ethnographical exhibitions at the Crystal Palace and elsewhere and facilitated the commercial display of “authentic” living peoples on museum and fair stages.

Partying socialites and “virtual entertainment” of colonial nostalgia

The allure of spectacular display in the employ of political messaging or glorifying colonial achievement may not be limited only to theatre proper. While plays at Covent Garden celebrated the East India Company’s 1799 conquering of Mysore, this renowned theatre was not the only venue of English socializing which promoted dramatic representations of British dominance in an Indian battle, even decades after the initial engagement. Ronjaunee Chatterjee describes the impact of affairs in India on the socialites of metropolitan Britain when describing Vauxhall Garden, as well, where:

… giant paintings were erected in the “Pillaried Saloon” of […] colonial wars: one painting of The Battle of Plassey (1757), which secured Bengal for the British East India Company. […] [N]ot just any such garden, but the largest and most spectacular of these […] sites of fashionable culture […] [where] Londoners who could afford the entrance fee were treated to an array of wonders and excesses”, was the subject of a “well-known chapter entitled “Vauxhall” in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-48)”.

Chatterjee highlights Thackeray’s original words, from the novel’s narrator (“Everybody had rack punch at Vauxhall, […] that bowl of rack punch was the cause of all this history […].”) before pointedly acknowledging that punch, “an alcoholic drink popular with colonial officers […] probably derives from the Sanskrit word “pancha” […]. Chatterjee, quoting Ashley Cohen’s study of the East Indies in British consciousness, notes that the dramatic battles depicted on the walls of Vauxhall, among “other sizable aesthetic works were ‘designed to be an immersive virtual reality experience’” for the attending partygoers.

In the 1790s, at the same time that Tipu Sultan’s name was appearing in many play production titles, the theatres of London were the sites of popular discourse about the Empire’s political intrigue. Theatre was a de facto venue for political deliberation, as Gillian Russell explored in The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793-1815 and as O’Quinn explored in Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770-1790. Surely, the Age of Revolutions provided ample social and political anxiety to process. Aside from developments in revolutionary Paris and the American colonies, the Haitian Revolution alarmed many European power brokers when a slave rebellion successfully resisted a major European power. In fact, in these decades, discourse about colonial rule in India and the abolition of slavery in Caribbean colonies could even be yoked together in the same context on the theatrical stage, as Jeanne Moskal explores regarding the relationship between India, slavery abolition, and the autonomy of women in writer Mariana Starke’s “The Sword of Peace”.

Whether through theatre at Covent Garden or watercolour portraiture at Vauxhall Gardens, both mediums of art acknowledge a similar subject of colonial power while conveying the stories of real events, peoples, and places, in a “virtual reality experience” that glosses reality in favor of narrative appeal and flattering interpretation. Other mediums of visual art and narrative storytelling in nineteenth-century Britain would come to obsess over these same subjects (new knowledge and the peripheries of Empire), characters (exaggerated portrayals of foreign people), and landscapes (“strange” new environments ripe for resource extraction).

The museum becomes a stage

Showmanship and public display became central to newly-founded or newly-professionalized institutions adjacent to or interested in paleontology and geology. This fusion of scientific “fact” with advertising, public promotion, and excitement can be found in new print media before reaching the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Crystal Palace and the subsequent display of the “first dinosaurs” in 1854. By the time of the Mutiny, culminating between 1857-1859, the British Crown superseded the East India Company and its parliamentary oversight to achieve direct imperial control of India. It is worth noting that in those very same years where Britain significantly expanded its power over and material interconnection with the Indian subcontinent, in the realm of knowledge production and popular consciousness, another thing occurred: the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a similarly major perspective-shifting event.

Coincidentally, Thackeray, a popular author with awareness of Indian colonies, British conquest, and the power of dramatic display - having been the author of our “Vauxhall” chapter in Vanity Fair - was himself actually tangentially engaged with the popularity of dinosaurs and the promotion of spectacular science.

Richard Fallon describes an illustrative nest of relationships, encapsulating this dynamic between fact, fiction, and publicity. Richard Owen, who had organized in 1854 the building of the dinosaur models at the Crystal Palace, was friends with Thackeray. As Fallon explains: “When attempting to rise to the top of British science, it helped to have the media on your side. Owen’s friendship with both Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray led to fond name- dropping by both novelists. Dickens’s Bleak House famously begins by imagining a Megalosaurus, one of Owen’s original dinosaurs. Both novelists even compared their own writing process to Owen’s palaeontological techniques.” In other words, Owen - the person who coined the term “dinosaur” and helped establish the Crystal Palace – was able to popularly promote his work through his friendship with both Dickens and Thackeray.

Interestingly, Dickens again shows up in the promotion of science as entangled with colonialism and spectacular entertainment, this time not with paleontology, but with ethnography. In May 1853, Dickens paid a visit to the “savages at Hyde Park Corner,” where an exhibition was displaying thirteen Zulu visitors, imported by entertainers to perform their “cultural rites” for London audiences. This display of foreign peoples evidently became a business and a market in its own right. Later, in the 1870s, the performer William Leonard Hunt—known more widely as “the Great Farini”—had followed up his stint with P.T. Barnum’s circus by exhibiting his troupe of “Friendly Zulus” in London.

Peoples on display

Historian of science Sadiah Qureshi describes how the display of exotic peoples was a popular entertainments in nineteenth-century London with hundreds of performers imported for the purpose. Among the most famous of individual figures to have been exhibited in London was Sarah Baartman, an Indigenous Khoekhoe women from South Africa, marketed in Britain with the name Hottentot Venus. As Qureshi explains:

Baartman was exhibited in Piccadilly […] just three years after the abolition of the British [domestic] slave trade in 1807 […]. Foreigners were imported in much larger numbers following London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 […] [a] celebration […] [which] started a whole genre of display throughout Europe, America, India, Africa, and Australia. The fairs were designed to be visual encyclopedias, to entertain and educate visitors […]. [T]he 1886 […] [India and Colonial Exhibition] featured dozens of “living natives.” These foreign peoples worked in cafes, in a model diamond mines, or in demonstrations of Indian crafts. The fairs were such an attraction that attendance figures ran into the tens of millions.

Qureshi initially identifies the creation of a consumer market for street spectacles early in the century with the popularity of “urban ethnography” in journalism. However, as Anne Clendinning notes in her review:

[I]f the urban streets [of London] were [already] human spectacles unto themselves, what then was so remarkable about the displays of foreign peoples […]? The rising popularity of human displays coincided with the expansion of advertising. Victorian showmen used the developing techniques of mass promotion-playbills, posters, photography, popular lectures, and the illustrated press-to convert passing curiosity into tangible profits […]. Qureshi notes that the conventions of Victorian travel writing directly influenced the text of exhibition programs, incorporating racialist stereotypes […]. With the increased popularity of large-scale exhibitions and imperial fairs, the displays of foreign peoples grew more spectacular and included mock villages and staged historical reenactments.

One might draw a parallel between the showmanship of circuses, geology, and later museum exhibits. One might also identify a consistency between both the Tipu Sultan plays at the outset of the century at Astley’s circa 1800 and the staged historical reenactments of the Late Victorian era. However, the theatrical stage plays regarding South Asian rebels might be more readily interpreted by an audience member as dramatized fiction. Comparatively, the later Victorian historical reenactments and mock “native villages” constructed at exhibitions and fairs – displaying “native” performers with “native” architecture, designed by British curators while purporting to display accurate and authentic reconstructions – might instead blur the boundaries between fact and fiction.

From the outset of the century, “going back to the 1802 exhibition of the first Mastodon exhibited in London’s Pall Mall, […] showmanship ruled geology and ensured its popularity and public appeal”; indeed, “[t]hroughout the Victorian period, […] geology was as much – if not more – sensational than the popular romances and sensation novels of time”. In 1822, following the discovery at Kirkdale Cave in the north of England of the fossils of a now-extinct species of Pleistocene hyena which mesmerized British readers by proving the previously little-known vast and intimidating scale of deep time, Lyell then cemented the significance of geology as a discipline with the 1830-1833 publication of Principles of Geology, and science “became a market in its own right […] with the explosion of cheaper forms of printed” literature, including “cheap miscellanies […], with geological romances, poetry quotations or folkloric tropes pervading”.

Elsewhere, Laura Rademaker has described this awareness of the scale of deep time as a “fundamental European ‘time revolution’ of the nineteenth century” when, in “the late 1850s and 1860s, Europeans are said to have experienced ‘the bottom falling out of history’, when geologists confirmed that humanity had existed for far, far longer than […] previously believed”. In other words, both British scientists and the British public were, for the first time, encountering deep time; they were engaging with new information, new knowledge, a “new world” within which they lived. To process this new knowledge, to digest its meaning, and to convey the implications and ramifications, institutions and individual scientists engaged in what Ralph O’Connor has called “the rhetoric of spectacular display,” taking on qualities of theatre.

It is in this context that the display of Megalosaurus and Iguanodon occurred.

Edgar Allan Poe and US military expeditions (?)

Public displays of scientific knowledge were not just discursive sites mediating for British audiences the temporalities of past and present. It was not just dinosaurs put on display which implied a hierarchical relationship between modernity and past; human beings were also put on display at ethnographical exhibitions, implying hierarchical dynamics between “modern” Victorian culture and the “primitive” Other.

Describing the role of fiction literature and public discourse in Antarctic exploration conducted by the US in the 1830s, historian of science Kathryn Yusoff animates a curious tale:

The origins of Wilkes’ US Exploring Expedition [in the late 1830s] stemmed from John Symmes’ petition for a US-led expedition to substantiate his Hollow Earth theory. […] To support a bid for funds for a southern expedition, the Secretary of the Navy employed Jeremiah N. Reynolds to collect information from the public as to what areas of the globe were most in need of exploration. Reynolds […] [was] a keen supporter of Symmes’ theory […]. Indeed, one of Reynolds lectures was attended by Henry Allan, the brother of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was in turn inspired to write his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. It was in the context of Wilkes’ departure for Antarctica in 1837/38 that Poe published his novel in […] a first example of Science Fiction (SF). In exploration, narrative was a form of aesthetic instrumentation […] that acted as a […] lens onto the unknown or peculiar. […] Narrative is clearly part of the scientific apparatus – the ability to tell a good yarn, to excite, stimulate (and embellish, where appropriate) was part of the expectation and construction of scientific accounts. […] That Antarctica is often the site of inversions in understanding is not just a convenient literary trope of a far-away place, but is also based on the […] problems that the landscape posed to normative structures […].”

In Yusoff’s telling, in the case of the US’s surveying of Antarctica, science is mediated by narrative; the narrative helps to instruct public perception and knowledge of a “mysterious” and “strange” land, but the public also helps shape that narrative. Reports from the Antarctic expedition were being revealed to the public at the same time that Poe’s Antarctic story were being serialized in Harper’s, reminiscent of a feedback loop.

Storytelling – spinning a “good yarn, to excite, stimulate” – acts as an instrument.

The “naturalization of antiquity” in the Age of Revolutions

The instrumentation of storytelling and the public digestion of narrative may also shaped how the nineteenth-century Anglosphere public imagined not just “strange” landscapes, but also “strange” peoples. Gondwana, a term originally derived from a forested region surveyed in India by the British Empire, has since famously been ascribed to “Gondwanaland,” the term for the now-gone supercontinent that existed on Earth about six hundred million years ago, breaking up gradually by the early Cenozoic. Describing how Victorian-era British scientists, encountering new knowledge about the depth of time while studying sediment in colonial India, conceived of non-European peoples as innately primitive, historian of science Pratik Chakrabarti has noted pointedly that this “imagined supercontinent has led to real landscapes,” as “its geological denominations have lent it racial and cultural significance and the term Gondwana is used to describe Afro-Asian cultures” since “primitivism was essential to nineteenth-century colonialism, in which the conquest of landscapes also entailed the conquest of their deep past”; ultimately, “the Gonds, their myths, forests, histories, their black soil, coal, all of which were at the same time being colonized, appeared pliable to alternative interpretations”.

In other words, the lives of people, the epistemological diversity of non-European cultures, the fates of landscapes, and fact itself appeared pliable to alternative interpretations.

British popular consciousness in the late nineteenth-century engaged with temporality and imagination, whether through anthropomorphized animal characters in illustrated children’s fairy tales of the Victorian era, Gothic horror fiction invoking the lingering trauma of past violences, the later “Egyptomania” fascination with the ancient Near East, or the nostalgia for touring pre-modern Greco-Roman ruins in the Mediterranean. Elsewhere, Chakrabarti has written at length on the utility of “re-writing” of geology in the context of anxious imperial encounters with non-white peoples during the nineteenth-century, which he has described as “the naturalization of antiquity”.

Chakrabarti is not alone in having identified the way that British (and French, and American) sciences in the first decades of the nineteenth century had a vested interest in promoting the narrative of a linear progression of history. Martin J.S. Rudwick has described this process as “the reconstruction of geohistory in the Age of Revolution,” wherein the political anxiety arising from “radicalism” and rebellions in Haiti and other colonies was deeply entangled with and influential on European academic and scientific cultures and their seeming prerogative to narrativize, to re-write history as a linear progression. Indeed, relevant to discussion of showmanship and theatricality in scientific exhibition, Ralph O’Connor directly connects paleontology, political anxiety, and newly-emergent scientific revelations with spectacle and dramatic narrativizing in his aptly-titled chapter “Hyena-Hunting and Byron-Bashing in the Old North: William Buckland, Geological Verse and the Radical Threat”; O’Connor notes that “[a]s classical education spread into the middle classes and the mixed culture of […] early Victorian drawing-rooms,” the practice of adding “humorous epigrams” and poems to scientific literature “spread with it, adapting […] and persisting in the face of print culture’s meteoric rise” and as “the social norms of science were undergoing rapid transformation”.

Yoking together the East Indies and West Indies: Taming the imperial peripheries

Recalling the J.H. Amherst’s spectacular plays from the 1820s (dramatizing both Indian resistance to British colonial rule and the perceived fallacies of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution in the Caribbean), it seems that the issues of rebellion in India and Haiti were yoked together in popular consciousness. It may also be worth noting that political anxiety about revolution in the colonies appealed to both British and French audiences and may have transcended inter-imperial rivalries. After all, plays about Tipu Sultan’s resistance to British power were popular in French theatres, while Amherst’s play about Haitian leader Christophe’s resistance to French power was popular in London. In a century which opened with Age of Revolutions and overt challenges to established colonial order in Port au-Prince, Paris, Boston, and beyond, perhaps it’s not surprising that anxiety about rebellion and foreign subversion came to be so definitive and ubiqituous. In the 1820s and 1830s, Amherst’s plays about rebellion in India and Haiti were being staged at a time when actual rebellion was happening in India; Thugee spectres were threatening British administrators, Britain had just formally abolished chattel slavery in the Caribbean, and British municipalities were establishing Poor Laws, Vagrancy Acts, and Workhouse Acts amidst working-class recalcitrance.

However, the Empire’s hierarchical position above colonial subjects could also be more insidious and less overtly violent. For example, in the 1850s, as the Mutiny was mounted against British rule in India, new anthropological exhibitions and travel literature presented the British public with information about people living at the imperial peripheries. It could be argued that this framing of colonized peoples worked (either deliberately or subconsciously) to re-cast or re-frame them as sufficiently docile enough to appear less threatening, having now been brought into being as objects of knowledge by professional scientific institutions; the perceptive eye of the imperial state could now examine the details of their lives enough to present them on exhibition stages.

Perhaps similarly, by the 1880s, travel literature included stories of elegant Englishwomen shaded by umbrellas enjoying sight-seeing tours on the backs of elephants in Burma. This literature depicted the increasingly strongly-governed countryside of Southeast Asia as increasingly pacified, docile enough to present a venue for leisurely touring. Meanwhile, by the 1880s, sportsmen’s magazines and memoirs recounted the author’s hunting exploits in India, wherein the common narrative of an English hero-hunter subduing a man-eating tiger cast Indians as passive victims of predatory large cats; yet the meek natives were protected by British hunters who duly subdued tigers and leopards. As historian Varun Sharma describes, “[t]here were dimensions of imagination and power that accompanied” the “idea of a man-eater,” which “was such that it helped advance the long held belief that the natives were a hapless lot. […] [T]he man-eater was an account in which the ephemeral idea of an ‘India’ glimmered constantly in the background. […] The side by side portrayal of the victims of the man-eater as ‘superstitious’, ‘rural’ and ‘ignorant’, only went to established before the (civilized) readers the proof of an (uncivilized) mass waiting to be salvaged, assimilated or disciplined”35. In these narratives, colonial subject were not necessarily scheming rebels, but were instead modest farmers or naïve ne’er-do-wells, and British power was not manifested as military might but was instead expressed by benevolence, as if the Empire was a guiding hand, protecting its subjects.

Conflating fact and fiction, conflating beasts and peoples, in stories about frontiers

New revelations about science and the vast scale of deep time presented a potentially disturbing challenge to established ways of thinking about temporality, linear progression of the past, and other-than-human species. The description of now-extinct Pleistocene megafauna from Kirkdale Cave in the 1820s, the exhibition of dinosaurs at Crystal Palace in 1854, the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, and the advent of electricity and fossil fuels presented potential destabilizing revelations, which were discussed and digested by the public through storytelling and the consumption of media. In Gothic horror, science-fiction, and other genre literature toward the final years of the century, sometimes the threat of the racial Other is even coupled with anxiety about the agency of other-than-human creatures, potentially yoking together both anxiety about colonialism and scientific revelations simultaneously. This might be gleaned from Zoe Chadwick’s analysis of “perilous plants, botanical monsters, and (reverse) imperialism” in fin-de-siecle horror fiction that invokes fear of other-than-human agency and racialized foreign peoples. Indeed, Yamamura’s analysis of Percival Lowell and genre fiction in the 1890s suggests that most of Britain’s imperial anxieties might all be yoked together in stories of extraterrestrial “aliens” and Yellow Peril fiction; in Yamamura’s assessment, Lowell’s (and other English-language authors’) fixation on temporality, oceanic navigation, extraterrestrial space, and East Asia which simultaneously evoked threatening racial Others; reverse imperialism; the threatening scale of deep time; and fear of the vastness of extraterrestrial outer space at once.

When encountering new knowledge about geology and paleontology in the nineteenth century, dinosaurs were reconstructed by British scientists and publishers alike to be put on public display in order to mediate the public’s understanding of past and present. Similarly, when encountering new knowledge about foreign cultures and exotic environments, human beings were also “reconstructed” to be put on public display to mediate the public’s understanding of dynamics between metropolitan and peripheral, domestic and foreign, pastoral and exotic, to soften and temper popular anxiety and to make sense of encounters with the unknown at the spatial and temporal edges of their Empire.