Up From the Abyss of Time
On the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs as Public Art
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
As a child of the nineties, born a year after the publication of Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park and two years before Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film adaptation, I had — and have — a true and enduring love of dinosaurs. I wanted to be a paleontologist long before I ever wanted to be a writer.
A voracious desire for more information about dinosaurs led my me and my brother to ransack both of our local libraries for every dinosaur book we could find. In addition to the illustrations and descriptions that so sparked our imaginations, many of these books also contained short histories of paleontology itself. (Even now, names like Gideon Mantell and Edward Drinker Cope conjure up vivid prehistoric images in my mind.)
One historical moment inevitably evoked in these child-oriented histories was the construction of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, which first went on public display in 1854. The two contemporary illustrations of the dinosaurs reproduced in those books — one of finishing work on the dinosaurs in the workshop, the other of the famous 1853 New Year’s dinner for scientists inside the half-finished Iguanodon — have lingered in my mind ever since.
When it came time to find an appropriate illustration for a story inspired by my younger self’s paleontological dreams, there was only one option. And, when the alignment of our schedules (and the blessed absence of a global pandemic) allowed my brother and I to travel together in England last month, Crystal Palace Park and its dinosaurs were of course on the itinerary.
For many, the salient fact about the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs is their obsolescence. The Wikipedia article on them, for instance, begins with the following sentence: “The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are a series of sculptures of dinosaurs and other extinct animals, inaccurate by modern standards, in the London borough of Bromley's Crystal Palace Park.” Nowadays, to quote the next paragraph,
the models are notable for representing the scientific inaccuracies of early paleontology, the result of improperly reconstructed fossils and the nascent nature of the science in the 19th century, with the Iguanodon and Megalosaurus models being particularly singled out.
Wikipedia also points that the name itself is inaccurate, as only three of the fifteen species in the sculptural group are now classified as dinosaurs; the menagerie also includes prehistoric mammals and such iconic non-dinosaur prehistoric reptiles as ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and pterodactyls.
As life-sized reconstructions of what dinosaurs — and their contemporaries — actually looked liked, the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are outdated and thus inadequate as popular science, as teaching tools. But what these sculptures as public art? As a sculptural group in a landscape? This post will answer that question by taking Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s most famous creations seriously as works of art, beginning with a consideration of what they might have meant in their original historical context.
In 1851, a gigantic purpose-built iron and glass structure, appropriately named the Crystal Palace, housed London’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, the ur-example of the world’s fair. After the colossally successful Great Exhibition finally closed in October that year after attracting more than 6 million visitors, the Crystal Palace itself was relocated from Hyde Park to an open space at Sydenham Hill that has been known ever since as Crystal Palace Park. While the Crystal Palace burned down in 1936, the name has remained, as has the park’s second most famous landmark. (My British readers doubtlessly know the area for its football team, Crystal Palace FC, which disappointingly lacks either a dinosaur logo or a dinosaur mascot.)
The Crystal Palace Company, which funded the palace’s relocation, created the park as a commercial enterprise, as something of an early theme park with a five-shilling admission fee. (Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, perhaps the prototypical theme park, only predates Crystal Palace Park by eleven years.) In addition to the palace, the park would feature ornamental fountains, concerts, flower gardens, art exhibitions and displays of Egyptian and Greco-Roman antiquities. The Crystal Palace train station, which is still in operation, was and is a two- or three-minute walk away from the park’s entrance, making it accessible to millions of Londoners. To attract these crowds, the Crystal Palace Company decided to invest in a second major permanent attraction, one inspired by some of the era’s most incredible scientific discoveries.
When Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and his team began work on the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs in 1852, the word dinosaur itself was only a decade old. The pioneering paleontologist Sir Richard Owen, who consulted on the sculpture’s design and attended the New Year’s Eve dinner inside the Iguanodon, coined the term to describe three genera of prehistoric reptiles — Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus — whose fossils had been discovered by the Reverend William Buckland and the husband-and-wife team of Gideon and Mary Mantell. When Queen Victoria opened the new Crystal Palace Park, complete with dinosaurs, in 1854, she did so just thirty years after the first scientific description of a dinosaur fossil in a scholarly journal.
These sculptures, in other words, come from the very beginning of paleontology, from a world completely lacking the museum displays, fossil replicas, illustrated books and sculptures that familiarized later generations with dinosaurs.
In an 1854 paper with the Victorianly grandiloquent title of “On Visual Education as Applied to Geology, Illustrated by Diagrams and Models of the Geological Restorations at the Crystal Palace,” Hawkins notes that the truly fragmentary nature of his day’s fossil record simply prevented museumgoers from being able to visualize dinosaurs. The handful of fossils then on display in those early days of paleontology — in Hawkins’s words, “literally only dry bones or oddly-shaped stones to the majority who see them” — were simply not enough to spark the public imagination or to communicate the importance of these new scientific discoveries.
But what about an imaginative reconstruction, a life-sized artistic representation of what these prehistoric animals might have looked like? Backed by “the great enterprise and resources of the Crystal Palace Company,” Hawkins and his colleagues
attempted for the first time to illustrate and realise—the revivifying of the ancient world—to call up from the abyss of time and from the depths of the earth, those vast forms and gigantic beasts which the Almighty Creator designed with fitness to inhabit and precede us in possession of this part of the earth called Great Britain.
This historical background points to two interrelated reasons why we might take the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs seriously as works of art even though they are long obsolete as popular science. First, they are probably the very first reconstructions of dinosaurs, certainly the first to have a major cultural impact: the not-so-distant ancestors of contemporary dinosaur sculptures at zoos and natural history museums.
Therefore, these sculptures, inadequate though they may be as reconstructions of prehistoric life, do offer a window on a much later epoch. If they cannot transport the scientifically informed 21st century visitor back through the abyss of time to the Jurassic or Cretaceous, they can take him or her to the infancy of paleontology and of the theme park, and to the birth of the undying publication fascination with dinosaurs.
Noting the public fascination with them is important because the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs — originally conceived of, as we’ve seen, as a teaching tool — also represent the beginning of dinosaurs as entertainment.
In hindsight, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins becomes the very first in a long line of artists, writers and filmmakers who have tackled the artistic challenge of revivifying the prehistoric world, of bringing dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles back to life: Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Winsor McCay, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Willis O’Brien, Walt Disney et al, Ray Harryhausen, Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsubaraya, Don Bluth, Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg and even Terence Malick.
For at least some of the Victorian Londoners who flocked to the Crystal Palace Park, Waterhouse Hawkins’s dinosaurs offered the same visual spectacle — and the same cunningly constructed simulation of life — that the dinosaurs of King Kong, Fantasia and Jurassic Park offered to 20th century moviegoers.
In Routledge’s Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park at Sydenham (1854), for instance, Edward MacDermott stresses the sheer sculptures’ sheer innovation. Until Hawkins, MacDermott writes,
scientific men who devoted a long life to the accumulation and study of fossil remains, who had put together the skeletons of these gigantic monsters, and seen them in imagination roaming over the pathless forests of our island, had never yet beheld the entire animal reproduced before them.
“The vast bodies which the visitor sees before him,” Samuel Phillips writes in a rival guidebook, “have been constructed with a truthful certainty that admits of no dispute.”
The December 3, 1853 issue of Household Words magazine begins with an article titled “Fairyland in ‘Fifty-Four,” written by its editor Charles Dickens. Dickens begins by lamenting the disenchantment of the modern, rational, scientific, adult world.
Are the Good People, the Brownies, the Leprechauns, the Banshees, the Witchwolves, White Ladies, Witches, Pixies, Wilis, Giants, Ogres, Fairy godmothers, Good Women in the Wood, Genii, Ghouls, Afrites, Peris, Elves, to give up the ghost; and am I to be deprived of all the delicious imaginings of my childhood and have nothing in their stead?
At Crystal Palace Park — then under construction — Dickens rediscovers the magic of his childhood. Beginning with the Crystal Palace itself, which he describes as a fairy palace and “a grand spectacle of artistic contrivance, which has left the mark of modern magician’s wand,” Dickens’ tour includes fountains and various exhibitions of classical sculptures before climaxing at “a long low shed,” Waterhouse Hawkins’s studio. This shed, in Dickens’ words, contains
The world before the flood. Yes. Ages, perhaps, before Noah’s ark was built, or launched, or thought of. In this shed the Triton known as Waterhouse Hawkins has conspired with the King of Animals, Professor Owen, to bring back those antediluvian days where there were giants in the land. Pre Adamite, perhaps; pre-Noahite, certainly. Modelled according to some subtle theory, admirably carried out into practice; the marvels of what we may call scientific art — plasticity applied to comparative anatomy — are the great monsters and reptiles of the fossil world.
The ichthyosaurus, the plesiosaurus, the megatherium, the mastodon, igua-arneton; gigantic creatures of lizard, toadlike, froglike, beastlike form grin at you, crawl at you, wind their hideous tails round you.
(Dickens or his copy editor has presumably butchered the spelling of the unfamiliar word ‘iguanodon.’) This encounter with Waterhouse Hawkins’ half-finished dinosaurs possibly inspired the Megalosaurus’s fanciful appearance in Bleak House, a passage that I of course chose as this post’s epigraph.
Dickens was not the only contemporary observer to emphasize the creatures’ lifelike quality. “The result,” writes an appreciative London Atlas reporter, “is that the ‘very form and pressure’ of the great reptiles is before us,” so much so that a real dinosaur, if miraculously brought to life, would greet Hawkins’s sculptures as a friend. The dinosaurs soon became internationally famous; a November 1855 article in distant Tasmania’s Hobart Town Advertiser, for instance, praises their simulation of life, which “enable(s) us to reproduce in our minds pictures of animals differing so widely from those which we are accustomed to behold.”
By October 1854, just five months after the park opened, the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were popular enough to inspire a parody in the satirical magazine Punch. The observation that “everybody has a passing acquaintance with the Plesiosaurus, the Megatherium, and so forth, that the visitor sweeping round the corner on his way to the Crystal Palace beholds in grim repose,” begins an article about the Tory dinosaur Doubleubeesioraus, a fossil from “the good old time of corn laws, top boots, and leather breetches” known for its “indominable strength of cheek, and invincible power of jaw.”
To sum up, these contemporary accounts of the then-new Crystal Palace Dinosaurs express many of the same themes that one might expect to find in, say, a glowing 1993 review of Jurassic Park: recognition for the combination of scientific knowledge, artistic skill and sheer hard work that went into the simulated dinosaurs, appreciation for their seemingly lifelike qualities and, as in the case of Charles Dickens, a sense of their particular appeal to the imaginations of children or children at heart.
In 1854, then, Hawkins’s dinosaurs offered a fantastical visual spectacle as well as an illustration of that era’s cutting-edge science. But what about a visitor to Crystal Palace Park in 2024?
I cannot imagine the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs having quite the same impact in the white cube of a museum gallery. If I imaginatively place them in that context, they seem rather shabby: worn by decades and decades of British rain and lacking the fine detail that repays close viewing.
Their overall impact, in other words, is greatly enhanced by their setting on the peninsulas and islands of Crystal Palace’s artificial lake.
The visitor to Crystal Palace Park sees them first from a distance, through the branches of trees. This intriguing glimpse gives him or her a destination a destination to walk to and the experience of discovering other creatures en route to that destination. They act, in other words, like a magnet, drawing visitors to their corner of the park.
If this approach to landscape design seems familiar to some of my readers, it might be because Disneyland — which opened just over a century later — and its successors use the same technique. At the park entrance, for instance, the guest looks down Main Street and sees Sleeping Beauty Castle in the distance, which pulls him or her into the park; the glimpse of Fantasyland through the castle gate provides the impetus for further exploration.
Perhaps more to the point, those first glimpses of Hawkins’s dinosaurs brought back memories of similar first glimpses of Disneyland animatronics, also through trees, from Jungle Cruise boats or passenger cars on the Disneyland railroad. As with Disney’s animatronics, the foliage surrounding these creatures and their distance from the viewer (accomplished at Crystal Palace Park by putting many of them on an island in an artificial lake) prevents their flaws from becoming too apparent.
In contrast, the park visitor can walk right up to Hawkins’s statues of the extinct elk species Megaloceros giganteus; my impression was not of prehistoric grandeur but of dilapidation, of having too clear a look at water damage, bird droppings and collapsing antlers.
The interaction with the broader context of the Crystal Palace Park, then, enhances the visitor experiences of both. The dinosaurs, as the park’s most iconic (surviving) landmarks, transform what might otherwise be a normal walk in the park into something much more dramatic: a glimpse of distant creatures through the trees, followed by a brief journey to them and a sense of discovery once the viewer gets a good look at them. The dinosaurs’ presence also gives the park around them something of a primeval flavor completely absent at Hyde or St. James’s parks. (The Crystal Palace Park gardeners have added to this by planting authentic living fossils, ginkgo trees, which do date back to the Jurassic Period.)
The trees, bushes, rocks and lakes surrounding the dinosaurs, on the other hand, enhances the illusion of them as living creatures in their natural environment. Most obviously, painted cement skin that might look obviously artificial up close and under bright artificial light takes on a much more lifelike quality from a distance, under a cloudy London sky. Visitors see them not as sculptures in a museum gallery, isolated from their original context for our contemplation, but almost like animals in a zoo or nature preserve.
The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs’ relationship to the wider park landscape also gives them something of a mythical resonance, at least for this visitor. As I walked around Crystal Palace Park’s artificial lake, appreciating the clay and cement plesiosaurs and mosasaurs that had seemingly just crawled out of it, my mind went to another British lake at the other end of the island.
To quote probably the only top 40 pop hit about Britain’s most famous cryptid, The Police’s “Synchronicity II,”
Many miles away
Something crawls to the surface
Of a dark Scottish loch.
Hawkins’s aquatic reptiles struck me as something like London’s equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster, evoking centuries of sailor’s tales about sea serpents and other inhabitants of the deep. Consider the contemporary media and public interest in beached whales; the image of a leviathan on the shore still retains an archetypal resonance.
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s dinosaurs, imaginative reconstructions based on fragmentary evidence, understandably incorporate a high ration of fantasy to fact. Taking the word dinosaur — ‘terrible lizard’ in Greek — rather literally, they built their dinosaurs as bulky giant lizards with only a passing resemblance to the agile, possibly warm-blooded, possibly feathered dinosaurs of contemporary paleontology. With the benefit of an exponentially more complete fossil record, 21st century museums and other institutions offer much more accurate recreations of what dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals might have actually looked like.
But the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, as I hope I’ve demonstrated in this piece, have not simply become obsolete. If they’ve lost their ability to evoke true prehistory, then they can still effectively evoke history: a fascinating moment in the history of science, entertainment and the intersection of the two. And to at least some viewers they evoke myth as well as science and even, as with Dickens, the childlike hope that they might come to life and start walking through London.
Author’s Note: Thanks for sticking with me after a post-less April; as you might imagine, I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of it traveling.
While writing this essay I thought about including something — perhaps at the conclusion — about the unique place dinosaurs have in our collective imagination. That soon grew into a post of its own, which I’m currently writing and plan to finish later this month.
Immediately wants to see if this park can be part of a trip to London next year. Thank you for this essay. I enjoyed reading it, and it makes me want to take a trip, if only to see this.
> the other of the famous 1853 New Year’s dinner for scientists inside the half-finished Iguanodon
Funny. I don't know where it was, some book I think, but there was a cartoon of that dinner which I saw as a child. I would not have remembered that cartoon, less so known what it was depicting, had I not now read this. I recognized it by the description.