Shaping the Beast

Abstract

Scientists often claim that science is necessarily non-metaphorical and that scientific knowledge is poles apart from imagination. However, there is a long-standing debate on metaphors and analogies in science. This essay will raise the issue of the dual or unstable position of metaphorical language in scientific theory, focussing on the giant beasts that fascinated the Victorians and were spectacularised and sensationalised throughout the nineteenth century in shows, public lectures, popular science books and novels. Throughout the nineteenth century, works of popular science and scientific essays were full of structural metaphors and analogies that attempted to give shape to creatures that were extinct. Analogies were thus essential to scientific reasoning and Palaeontological discourse. Yet this type of metaphorical language was used in different ways: on the one hand, it served the authors’ and publishers’ commercial ambitions; on the other, it aimed to promote the scientific validity of an emerging discipline. This essay will analyse the visual rhetoric that appeared in scientific reports, popular science books and literary narratives in order to examine the interrelations between science and literature and explain why artists seized on scientific models to respond to fears, anxieties and societal issues.

Keywords:

• palaeontology
• extinction
• visual language
• nineteenth century
• science popularisation

Notes

1. Buckland was given the first chair of geology so as to document the geological evidence of the biblical flood and prove divine creation. When the Earl of Bridgewater funded the writing of eight volumes in the 1830s in the attempt to reconcile nineteenth-century science and revealed Christianity, Buckland contributed one volume to the Bridgewater treatises, Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (1836). However, Buckland’s reading of Genesis was somewhat untenable when his geological findings suggested the contemporaneity of man and antediluvian creatures.

2. John Martin was certainly the most important artist associated with representations of scenes from the prehuman past. His style – called Martinian (Rudwick, 1995: 21) –was impressive: death and violence were systematically dramatised and sensationalised, men were threatened and dwarfed by natural elements, as in The Deluge (1831). On John Martin, see Feaver (1975).

3. See Martin’s ‘The Sea-Dragons as They Lived’, the frontispiece of Thomas Hawkins’s Book of the Great Sea-Dragons (1840). Scientific inaccuracies went on in the 1850s and 1860s in popular works. Martin’s dinosaurs (such as ‘The Age of Reptiles’, frontispiece of the first edition of George Richardson’s Geology for Beginners [1842]), reappeared with their forked tongues in W.F.A. Zimmermann’s Die Wunder der Urwelt (1855), which was translated as The Wonders of the Primitive World, and pterodactyles were even drawn as bat-like creatures (Davidson, 2008: 73).

4. Dickens nonetheless saw the dehumanising potential of science and many of his writings denounced scientific ambition (Levine, 1991: 125).

5. I am not suggesting here that the Megalosaurus at the opening of the novel is a reference to the Crystal Palace Park (then under construction). It may rather hint at John Pringle Nichol’s Laplacean argument in View of the Architecture of the Heavens (1837) or Robert Hunt’s The Poetry of Science (1848), which Dickens had reviewed in the Examiner on 9 December 1848 and which criticised Robert Chambers’s anonymous Vestiges (which Dickens supported) (Frank, 2009: 75).