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‘By a Comparison of Incidents and Dialogue’: Richard Owen, Comparative Anatomy and Victorian Serial Fiction Gowan Dawson The ‘omnivorous’ and ‘unguarded reading’ undertaken by Charles Darwin between the 1830s and 1850s, as recorded in the extensive reading-lists in his Notebooks, was a crucial starting point for the central insights into the interchange between science and culture which have shaped scholarship in the field for the last three decades. Gillian Beer’s justly celebrated Darwin’s Plots (1983) begins by examining the ‘importance of his reading to the imaginative development of his ideas’, and, along with a further essay by Beer on Darwin’s reading practices in David Kohn’s The Darwinian Heritage (1985), contends

Darwin’s extensive reading of literature was a crucial starting point for Gillian Beer’s insights into the interchange between science and culture which have shaped scholarship in the field for the last three decades. However, while the impact of Darwin’s reading on the imaginative development of his theories has continued to be an extremely productive area of study, there has been hardly any consideration of the broader context of nineteenth-century scientists’ reading practices in relation to literature, giving the impression that Darwin’s thought was especially, perhaps uniquely, amenable to the impact of his immersion in fiction and poetry. This paper examines the extensive but relatively little-known literary reading of the comparative anatomist Richard Owen, suggesting that important aspects of other, and even explicitly non-Darwinian, areas of Victorian science were just as likely to be influenced by their practitioners’ enthusiasm for fiction and poetry. That Darwin and Owen frequently read the same literary works, and often in the same or similar locations (whether in metropolitan clubs or out in the field), also permits direct comparisons of their reading practices, which, intriguingly, suggest that, far from being uniquely amenable to it, Darwin’s scientific thought might in fact have been shaped much less by his literary reading than that of contemporaneous naturalists like Owen. In particular, the paper focuses on Owen’s reading of serial fiction, and considers the close parallels between his practices of reading serial novels and his use of comparative anatomy in his renowned reconstructions of the skeletons of prehistoric creatures.

impression that the level of his literary reading, and its manifest significance for his scientific thought, is another facet of his status as an exceptional and uniquely brilliant scientific and cultural figurehead.
It requires only a cursory glance over the 'Lives and Letters' of a few nineteenthcentury men of science to recognize that there was nothing anomalous about Darwin's aesthetic predilections (and, of course, I'm not implying that either Beer or Amigoni suggest that there is), but the absence of any detailed or sustained analysis of this broader context of scientists' reading practices in relation to literature can nevertheless imply that Darwin's thought was especially, perhaps uniquely, amenable to the impact of his immersion in fiction and poetry. After all, numerous critical works, in the wake of Darwin's Plots, have established a pronounced connection between Darwinian evolutionism and narrative fiction that is informed as much by Darwin's reading of novels as novelists' subsequent reading of his work. In this paper, which draws on work-inprogress from a larger project on functionalist palaeontology in Victorian culture, I want to explore the possibility that the important relation between Darwin's literary reading and the imaginative development of his ideas that was identified so skilfully by Beer was actually no more exceptional than his canonical and widely-shared tastes for Milton, Wordsworth and the latest novels of the day. By examining the extensive but comparatively little-known literary reading of Richard Owen, a prominent opponent of Darwin whom Nicolaas Rupke has recently described as 'Britain's leading biologist of the mid-nineteenth century', with the same kind of detail that has previously been the preserve of studies of Darwin, it will become clear that important aspects of other, and even explicitly non-Darwinian, areas of Victorian science were just as likely to be influenced by their practitioners' enthusiasm for fiction and poetry. 4 Rather than merely introducing another scientific reader with a marked fondness for literature to set alongside Darwin, or simply replicating the approach taken by Beer in the mid-1980s, my account of Owen's reading is also significantly informed by the greater emphasis placed upon material practices amongst recent historians of science, in which reading, no less than collecting in the field or experimenting in a laboratory, is perceived as a form of physical activity involving tangible objects that takes place in specific times and places, and within the broader context of everyday life. 5 Such a focus on practices rather than disembodied ideas or abstract theorizing has the potential to open up a new

Gowan Dawson, 'By a Comparison of Incidents and Dialogue': Richard Owen, Comparative
Anatomy and Victorian Serial Fiction 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 11 (2010) www. 19.bbk.ac.uk 3 range of connections between the literary reading of men of science and their professional activities. Indeed, that Darwin and Owen frequently read the same literary works, and often in the same or similar locations (whether in metropolitan clubs or out in the field), permits direct comparisons of their particular practices of reading, which, intriguingly, suggest that, far from being uniquely amenable to it, Darwin's scientific thought might in fact have been shaped much less by his literary reading than that of contemporaneous naturalists like Owen.
Owen's principal field of expertise was in comparative anatomy, the techniques of which enabled him to identify and reconstruct extinct creatures from fossilized bones and teeth. Most notably, in November 1839 Owen inferred the existence of a hitherto unknown giant prehistoric bird in New Zealand from the evidence of just a small fragment of femur bone, a prediction that was spectacularly confirmed four years later with the arrival of a consignment of bones from which Owen was able to reconstruct the entire skeleton of the wingless Moa, or Dinornis as he named it. Owen accomplished this extraordinary vindication of the power of inductive reasoning through the technique of functional correlation, a method of palaeontological reconstruction in which each element, or part, of an animal is presumed to correspond mutually with all the others, so that a carnivorous tooth must be accompanied by a particular kind of jawbone, and so on, that facilitates the consumption of flesh, and thus any part, even the mere fragment of a bone, necessarily indicates the configuration of the integrated whole. This principle had been developed in the 1810s by the renowned French anatomist Georges Cuvier, but it had become increasingly central to the English tradition of natural theology, and Owen's startling discovery of the Dinornis was welcomed as an indisputable affirmation that only providential design could have produced such a perfectly integrated mechanism. Owen's seemingly miraculous palaeontological feats also became popular and enduring causes célèbres in Victorian Britain.
Owen's growing scientific renown ensured that, from the early 1840s, he was feted by royalty and politicians as well as many of the period's leading literary writers. Indeed, unlike the more reclusive Darwin, who in later life claimed to have lost the capacity for aesthetic appreciation, Owen numbered Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Tennyson, Carlyle and R. D. Blackmore amongst his closest friends and acquaintances, and it is clear that he read their works with great enthusiasm and enjoyment. In particular, he was an The attachment to serial novels seems to have begun with Dickens's pioneering The Pickwick Papers, which, after a slow beginning, had become a publishing phenomenon by the end of 1836, and, from the start, Owen's fictional reading was closely intertwined with his professional scientific activities. He regularly referred to the geologist John Brown, a collector of important Pleistocene fossils, as 'Mr. Pickwick', informing his sister Eliza, in a letter of October 1842, that he was the 'closest approximation to Boz's famed type' and 'like the founder of the Pickwick Club, he solaceth himself with virtuosoizing in antiquities; but, as the immortal Cuvier hath it-"of a higher order" than those which amuse the F. A. S.'s'. 8 As this curious juxtaposition of the distinctive styles of the youthful originator of serialized fiction and the late founder of functionalist palaeontology might suggest, reconstructing Owen's literary reading practices will potentially shed important light on his own researches in comparative anatomy, a connection that Owen would, at times, acknowledge even himself.
At first sight, it appears that the serialized novels supplied by his wife offered Owen merely an engrossing escape from the pressures and demands of his scientific labours. The regularly published instalments of a novel, as Jennifer Hayward has argued, accorded with the increasing separation of public work and domestic leisure in the midnineteenth century, with the 'ritualization of its consumption ...help[ing] to mark off work time from leisure time'. 9 This certainly seems to be the case in the following entry from Caroline's diary made during the spring of 1844: May 3.-After a hard day's work, R. deep in 'Martin Chuzzlewit'. My father [i.e. William Clift] came in before going to the Royal Society, and talked to R. without mercy; but R., whose thoughts and attention were so entirely given up to Mrs. Gamp and Jonas, could only answer at random. As soon as my father was gone, we laughed over Mrs. Gamp till bedtime. 10 Owen's almost total absorption in what appears to be the fifteenth of the novel's nineteen monthly numbers denuded him of the ability to partake in a presumably professional and scientific conversation with his father-in-law and erstwhile mentor. Rather, following an exhausting day amidst the abundance of fossilized remains at the Royal College of Surgeons, the particular instalment of Dickens's sixth serial novel confined Owen, both physically and mentally, to the space of the domestic sphere and the company of his wife, who, it would seem, was able to take precisely the same pleasure as himself in the bathos of the bilious nurse Sairey Gamp's tea making. The rumbustious humour of Gamp's socalled 'scientific treatment' of Mr. Chuffey, in which the elderly clerk is subjected to vigorous shaking that renders him 'rather black in the face', displaced the more sober scientific subject of the secretion of carbon by animals which was to be discussed at that evening's meeting of the Royal Society. 11 As the Owens's living quarters at this time This theme of an absorption in fiction, following the completion of his professional activities, that was so rapt that it kept him aloof from his intellectual peers is also discernible in the entries in Caroline's diary relating to Owen's reading of serialized novels in other environments. On 22 January 1848 she recorded that after hearing a lecture of Whewell's, he went on to the [Athenaeum] Club, and took up Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair' to read. He became so deeply absorbed ...that he sat on, oblivious of the fact that everyone else had disappeared one by one...Then, having looked at his watch and found it considerably past 2 A.M., he rushed wildly out of the Club, and, like a scientific Cinderella, left his umbrella and great coat behind. 13 Rather than engaging in any form of conversation or sociability with his exclusively male thereby permitting a level of rapt concentration that, as had been the case for himself and would be again for Owen ten years later, rendered the reader unconscious of both his surroundings and even the physical ailments brought on by intensive scientific study. 14 It is unlikely, however, that Darwin's decision to take up one of Dickens's early picaresque tales at the gentleman's Club to which he had been elected less than two months earlier constituted merely a casual means of escaping from his exhausting intellectual labours.
Rather, it was whilst at the Athenaeum during the summer of 1838 that Darwin adopted a 'new plan' of 'only working about two hours at a spell' recommended by the geologist Charles Lyell, who advised him that 'as your eyes are strong, you can afford to read the light articles and newspaper gossip' and then 'after lying two hours fallow the mind is refreshed'. Reading even the most seemingly undemanding fiction could be an essential element of such a regime for the self-conscious regulation of intellectual energies, and Lyell's caution to Darwin that when at the Athenaeum and 'meeting with clever people, who would often talk to me' he 'used to forget that this ought to count for work ...and that I ought consequently to give up my second "two hours' spell"' might explain why ten years later Owen, another close friend of the geologist, stuck so assiduously to his reading  Dickens's almost contemporaneous Dombey and Son, with their experience of the respective serials shaping their responses to both. 16 In the month following Owen's evening of engrossment at the Athenaeum, Caroline's diary recorded: 'On February 29 [1848] No. 18 of "Dombey" appeared and he "stayed up very late reading it"', and it very much appears that he read the two novels concurrently. 17 21 Reviewers of Martin Chuzzlewit, in whose sixth number the Yankee journalist was first introduced, had already begun to warn that serialized novels, consumed regularly over an extended period of time, might actually distort their readers' perception of reality. Each 'new number of Dickens', the North British Review advised, is not a mere healthy recreation like ...a game of backgammon. It throws us into a state of unreal excitement, a trance, or dream ...But now our dreams are mingled with our daily business'. 22 Owen was partial to a 'hit of backgammon' when 'tired of my work', as he put it in a letter to a Richmond neighbour, but reviewers suggested that his much greater fondness for serialized fiction would not afford the same respite from his professional labours and, alarmingly, might instead become inextricably confused with them. 23 It therefore becomes problematic to separate Owen's marked enthusiasm for this particular format of fiction from the activities which he undertook during his long working hours at the Royal College of Surgeons, and maybe even from the kind of cognitive processes that he employed there. In the still innovative practice of 'reading one instalment, then pausing in that story', as Linda Hughes and Michael Lund have suggested, 'the Victorian audience turned to their own world with much the same set of critical faculties they had used to understand the literature'. 24  The method of such nefarious dramatists was not actually that different from the typical practices of less calculating readers of serial fiction, who, as Wolfgang Iser and Hayward have both noted, 'try to imagine how a story will unfold' and take 'active pleasure in guessing the outcome' (although many readers would clearly have taken umbrage at the suggestion that they were merely guessing). 27 What is still more remarkable is that exactly the same terms in which Nicholas portrays the disreputable methods of this piratical literary gentleman, and by implication the less culpable practices of many other readers of serial novels, were used by Owen to describe his own Cuvierian palaeontological practices, in which the 'interpretation of ...fossil remains requires a comparison of them with the corresponding parts of animals now living, or of previously determined extinct species'. 28 In Cuvier's analysis of extinct elephants, Owen proposed, these comparative procedures had meant that a 'rapid glance ...over other fossil bones, made him anticipate all that he afterwards proved' [italics mine]. 29 Serialization presented readers with small, disconnected parts from which they had to make inferences about the nature of a work that would often not be completed for several months or even years to come, and it was on the basis of these projections, which assumed an unerring relation between part and whole, that they made commercially crucial decisions whether to continue purchasing a particular serial. The audience for serial fiction also made careful comparisons between the available parts of a novel-as well as with a broader taxonomic repertoire of plots and characters drawn from their reading of other novels-in order to anticipate the resolution of its plot in a way that Carker as drawn throughout the book', Owen observed disgruntledly, 'makes it evident to me that he was not the man either to act or to be acted upon in such a way'. 34 Nor was Owen alone in such a view, with the English Review also complaining of the 'exaggerated ...portraiture' of Dombey and Son, contrasting it with Thackeray's 'thoroughly selfconsistent "Vanity Fair", in which 'nothing is forced, nothing artificial'. 35  holding the dinornis bone', and Owen's reading of serialized novels consistently overlapped with his professional activities as a comparative anatomist and, in light of all the conceptual and material parallels examined throughout this paper, it seems highly implausible that the two were not in some way connected. 36 The connection is made even clearer by Owen's account of the sequential temporality of palaeontological study and how in waiting for new fossil remains that might confirm initial predictions about the structure of prehistoric creatures 'one's interest is revived and roused year by year as bit by bit of the petrified portions of the skeleton come to hand'. 37  that, as his wife recorded on 29 July 1844, had 'just arrived' at the Royal College of Surgeons. After 'so much excitement', Caroline observed, 'it was perhaps a little trying to find that this enormous head proved to be nothing more than the skull of a seal. A bit of dinornis skull was thrown in'. 40 From the mid-1830s until at least the early 1860s, then, Owen was perpetually waiting, with apparently equal anticipation and excitement, for his gratitude for a more immediate and personal boon, which he had experienced -no doubt in common with other labourers in the field of science -from works which characterise and adorn the present period of literature. Often after the labours of the day, the nervous system, oppressed by the atmosphere of a dissecting room, and the eye wearied by poring through the microscope, he had rejoined the family circle, too exhausted, perhaps, for the enjoyment of social conversation. And where had he found the best restorative? Sometimes in listening to the genial humour and touches of exquisite pathos which are yielded by the pages of a DICKENS. 41 While these comments seem once more to instantiate a gap between the public and the private, the scientific and the literary, as well as recalling Darwin's notebook entry on how reading Sketches by Boz cured him of a headache, Owen had probably intended the encomium to be spoken in Dickens's presence -although the much coveted novelist absented himself with a 'most intolerable cold' -and his accompanying remarks that 'so much were the power and influence of the writer on science increased by the cultivation of literature' and 'literature has lent indispensible aid, has adorned and made fruitful the  46 In illustration of this, Owen's reference to the 'Naturalist's glimpse of "the law within the law"' in the preceding sentence drew upon a passage in Tennyson's early meditation on scepticism and suicide 'The Two Voices'.
Contemporary verse like that of Tennyson, as Owen seemed to acknowledge, actively assisted his scientific thought in a way that his reading of serialized novels never could.

Gowan Dawson, 'By a Comparison of Incidents and Dialogue': Richard Owen, Comparative
Anatomy and Victorian Serial Fiction 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 11 (2010) www. 19.bbk.ac.uk 14 Owen was perhaps more willing to acknowledge the significance of poetry for his scientific thinking because, unlike novels, it had long-established (and, for the man of science, highly desirable) associations with ideal beauty, universal truths and underlying law. Yet much nineteenth-century poetry, no less than works of fiction, was first published in serial parts, either on a periodic basis like Browning's The Ring and the Book or issued a volume at a time at irregular intervals such as Tennyson's Idylls of the Kings, and, just as with the novels of Dickens and Thackeray, these 'Victorian serial poems', as Hughes and Lund have argued, 'exhibited a continuing story over extended time with enforced interruptions, and they were read by an audience attuned to a vast production of serial literature'. 47 This habituated audience included Owen, who in April 1862, as his wife's diary documents, 'read part of one of the "Idylls"', presumably the instalment of Tennyson's protracted epic that had come out in 1859 and was generally viewed as a continuation of 'Morte d'Arthur' and 'The Epic' from 1842. 48 Idylls of the King was, according to Kathleen Tillotson, 'Tennyson's serial poem', and for its readers the 'parts ...would be seen gradually cohering into a whole'. 49 The spring of 1862 when Caroline noted Owen's own reading of Idylls was precisely the same time that he was also immersed in the monthly parts of The Adventures of Philip in the Cornhill Magazine, and the alternation of his rapt absorption in the latest serial by Thackeray with his no less engaged reading of one by Tennyson, whose importance to his scientific thought he had acknowledged explicitly to the Royal Literary Fund three years earlier, suggests strongly that the conceptual habits Owen developed whilst reading serialized fiction and verse had a tangible impact on his exactly contemporaneous deployment of analogous Cuvierian palaeontological techniques to reconstruct prehistoric creatures, as well as vice versa.
There is one further aspect of Owen's literary reading that again demonstrates its significant impact on his scientific activities, and which, interestingly, contrasts markedly with the material practices in relation to literature adopted by Darwin. Reciting passages of poetry had long been a feature of Owen's palaeontological fieldwork, and in April 1855 he recalled how 'my dear friend Fred. Dixon used to summon me to the exposed beds of Bracklesham, and we rambled in the pure bracing breeze, pitting against each other our stores of remembered lines from Milton & other choice spirits, revelling over our acquisitions' of fossils. 50 51 However, whereas Darwin conceded that 'I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or line of poetry' and had always had to carry his volume of Milton with him on inland expeditions from the Beagle even when this meant he could take no other books, Owen clearly retained 'stores of remembered lines from Milton', and the suffusion of his mind with memorized passages from Paradise Lost contributed to his thinking on methodological aspects of the reconstruction of prehistoric fauna. 52 Without the 'guide-post of Palaeontology', as Owen reflected, 'we find ourselves in a wilderness of conjecture, where to try to advance is to find ourselves "in wandering mazes lost"', implying that those who refused the clear light of Cuvierian correlation were in the same position as the philosophical devils of Milton's epic who, having rejected God, become entrapped in abstruse metaphysical considerations, although he also recognized that details of such necessary palaeontological techniques were generally 'addressed to readers "fit but few", in ...out-of-the-way scientific quartos'. 53 Poetry, as Owen told the Royal Literary Fund, enabled men of science fully to articulate, and therefore for the first time truly see, what previously had been grasped only incompletely, and, significantly, it was Owen rather than the avowedly more forgetful Darwin whose consciousness was most conspicuously affected by his reading of verse.