Pauline Carpenter Dear's Owen papers: postscript

[Stephan Pickering <stefanpickering2002@yahoo.com>]

    In the interest of accuracy, it is to be noted
that Nicolaas Rupke, in his Richard Owen biography of
1994 (Yale University Press), does acknowledge Mrs
Dear's 1984 paper, in his footnotes and bibliography,
in contrasting her interpretations to those of Adrian
Desmond. His earlier, 1992 paper on Owen and the
Victorian museum movement, is a fine introduction to a
subject other scholars have pursued with diligence,
most notably in the excellent work of Carla Yanni. To
be sure, there was "cross-fertilization" in the U.S.
and Canada,  where Owen's enthusiasm for "natural
history" museums was readily accepted (the St. Hilaire
family in France, and Cuvier, to be sure, had
demonstrated their utilitarian and financial
functions). To be sure, it took Henry Osborn et al. to
use museums as iconographic celebrations of
quasi-colonialist currents, transforming them from
"natural history cabinets" to ideologies. The social
historian T.W. Luke has explored this (he calls it
"commodity aesthetics"), in particular in his 1997
paper Museum pieces: politics and knowledge at the
American Museum of Natural History. Australasian Jour.
American Studies 16(2):1-28. 
    All of this may be tangential to my life-long
passion for dinosaur phylogenetic systematics, but
Michael Crichton's John Hammond is an interesting
amalgamation of Osborn's interest in organizing his
museum halls from "lower" to "higher" taxa, and those
who want "interactive" "theme parks".
    Mrs Pauline Carpenter Dear and Hugh Torrens later
explorations of the data she discovered, at the very
least, provide one with insights into the ethos (and
mythos) of Victorian paleontology. It is a pity, of
course, that they had no equivalence of Marsh's
dinosaur quarries.

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