Charles Dickens famously invoked the “Megalosaurus …waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill” in the opening scenes of Bleak House, but otherwise his novels only rarely feature images of prehistoric creatures. Since the mid-1840s Dickens had enjoyed a close friendship with Richard Owen, the foremost paleontologist in Victorian Britain, and, despite the paucity of actual prehistoric megafauna in his novels, Dickens was alert to the relevance of his friends’ paleontological methods for his fiction. In particular, Owen was famous for his ability to reconstruct extinct creatures by revealing the perfect relation between all the apparently anomalous elements of their anatomy, and showing that this harmonious relation between each part allowed habits of life that, while often ungainly, were closely suited to the particular environment in which the gigantic creatures had lived. Dinosaurs, a term Owen coined in 1842, were therefore monstrous and ungainly creatures, but nonetheless examples of perfect design. For Victorian novelists like Dickens, eager to disclose the underlying design of their own ostensibly ill-proportioned serialized fiction, this must have seemed a particularly appealing skill.

Like Tennyson’s preference for “compact and vertebrate poems” over verse formed limply from “organizable lymph”, Dickens envisaged the serial parts of his novels as fragments that required “fusing together as an uninterrupted whole” like the similarly fused fossil vertebra discovered in dinosaur remains. Owen insisted that the bones of such creatures could be accurately pieced together because of the “existence of design in the construction of any part of an organized body”, while, for Dickens, in writing serial fiction there “must be a special design, to overcome that especially trying mode of publication”. While Dickens’s earlier, more picaresque fiction was frequently condemned precisely for its “absence of design”, the notion of design was one that became increasingly crucial to the painstaking planning of his later novels. This paper will consider Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1863), and especially how Mr. Venus, the melancholic taxidermist who articulates skeletal structures according to a larger “pattern” exemplified—in language inflected with natural theological overtones—by the “bones of a leg and foot, beautifully pure, and put together with exquisite neatness”, helps reveals the novel’s own complex structural design.