Literary Megatheriums and Loose Baggy Monsters: Paleontology and the Victorian Novel

Abstract

Many early reviewers depicted serialized fiction in the same terms used to portray ungainly prehistoric creatures such as the Megatherium. In the 1840s, however, Richard Owen revealed the seemingly incongruous, awkward skeletal structure of the Megatherium as a harmonious and perfectly integrated design. Owen's elaboration of the Megatherium afforded a model for novelistic design that vindicated the aesthetic credentials of serial fiction for Thackeray in The Newcomes. American commentators nevertheless continued to compare the mid-Victorian novel to ponderous antediluvian creatures, culminating in Henry James's attack on "large loose baggy monsters." James's famous epigram, invoking paleontological descriptions of the Pythonomorpha, only becomes fully comprehensible as part of a literary critical tradition drawing on paleontology that, although hitherto largely forgotten, was hugely important in contemporary responses to the Victorian novel.

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