Mr. Venus's Museum

In his last completed serial novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Dickens alluded directly to the prestigious paleontologist who was by now a longstanding friend. In the first number of the novel, the narrator remarks of Mrs. Podsnap, “fine woman for Professor Owen, quantity of bone, neck and nostrils like a rocking-horse,” while in the seventh installment she is again designated a “‘splendid woman’. . .by elderly osteologists pursuing their studies in dinner society” (1: 8; bk. 1, ch. 2; 1: 193; bk. 2, ch. 4). The latter was most likely a knowing reference to Owen's customary depiction in the popular press, including Dickens's own Household Words, as a “gentleman [with] a remarkable predilection for old bones,” and it is certainly the case that Our Mutual Friend is suffused with many other indirect allusions to Owen and his renowned paleontological reconstructions (Morley 383).Footnote ¹³ The malevolent amputee Silas Wegg is described as resembling “some extinct bird,” and, as with Owen's celebrated dinornis, the giant flightless bird whose past existence was inferred from just a small fragment of its femur bone, Wegg's whole identity is represented synecdochically by the portion of his leg bone purchased from a hospital porter by Mr. Venus (“Where am I?” and “what did you give for me?,” asks Wegg with existential import) (1: 160; bk. 1, ch. 17; 1: 62; bk. 1, ch. 7). Venus himself is an “Articulator of human bones” who inhabits a gloomy shop crowded with “Bones, warious. Skulls, warious” (Figure 2) that closely resembles the account of Owen's own Hunterian Museum (Figure 3), with its “hundreds of skeletons” and “bony parliament of the natural creation” as well as a Wegg-like “gigantic extinct bird,” published in Household Words in 1850 (1: 62–63; bk. 1, ch. 7; Hunt 278). Tellingly, at the novel's conclusion the narrator even refers to the shop as “Mr. Venus's museum” (2: 276; bk. 4, ch. 14).Footnote ¹⁴

Figure 2.

Marcus Stone, “Mr. Venus Surrounded by the Trophies of his Art.” Wood engraving by George and Edward Dalziel, from Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864–65), 1: facing 61. © Mary Evans Picture Library.

Figure 3.

Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, The Hunterian Museum. Watercolor, c. 1842. Royal College of Surgeons, London. Courtesy of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.

Amidst this osseous miscellany, Venus boasts to Wegg “I'm not only first in the trade, but I'm the trade.” Although he then proclaims “I've gone on improving myself in my knowledge of Anatomy till both by sight and by name I'm perfect” when Owen instead endorsed John Hunter's more modest opinion that “Comparative Anatomy. . .is too great a task for any individual to make it in any way perfect,” several critics have identified Venus with the predominant anatomist and paleontologist in nineteenth-century Britain (1: 63; bk. 1, ch. 7; Hunter, Essays 2: 1). Victor Sage has even designated him an “affectionate parody of Owen” (“Negative Homogeneity” 220).Footnote ¹⁵ The number plans for Our Mutual Friend show that the character of Venus was in fact only brought into the novel after Dickens had overwritten the second monthly number and needed to postpone a lengthy wedding scene until the subsequent installment, and it is likely that a droll satire of the “boney light” in which his scientific friend examined the natural world would have afforded an expedient solution to one of the perennial contingencies of serial publication (1: 63; bk. 1, ch. 7).Footnote ¹⁶

But if Venus represents, at least in part, Owen's renowned capacity, when confronted with a chaotic assortment of fragmentary bones, to “pick ‘em out, and. . .sort ‘em all,” thereby creating order and harmony from disorder and confusion, other critics of Our Mutual Friend have been equally insistent that this anatomical prowess also places Venus in the same position as the actual novelist (1: 63; bk. 1, ch. 7). In his “joining of fragments into skeletons,” according to Albert D. Hunter, Venus becomes a “parody of a godlike creator, he fulfils within the novel the function of the artist, of the novelist himself” (“Dismemberment” 152). Jonathan Smith similarly observes that Venus's “ability to articulate is a creative power.. . . The association of articulation and art suggests Dickens's role as the ‘articulator’ of this narrative. . .as the author who puts its fragmented monthly pieces together” (47). Amalgamating these two critical perspectives on the melancholy articulator it becomes evident that, as well as representing an affectionate caricature of Owen, Venus also afforded a means of relating his celebrated paleontological procedures to Dickens's own practices as a novelist.

Dickens certainly saw suggestive parallels between Owen's particular mode of analyzing petrified fragments and traces and his own attempts to examine and expose the iniquitous social order that came to dominate later novels such as Our Mutual Friend. In a somber travelogue for All the Year Round four years after the completion of that novel, Dickens reflected angrily on the poverty existing in London's squalid streets:

The sheer force of intellect exhibited by Owen in his astounding inferences regarding the primeval past could, in the far future, similarly recall the gilded hypocrisy and barbarism of the Victorian metropolis in the very same way that Dickens, in his later novels, was himself already exposing it for contemporary readers.

The nineteenth-century capitalist polity is depicted in Our Mutual Friend as a primordial “Dismal Swamp” populated by “amphibious human-creatures” and more voracious “Alligators,” which, like the avian Wegg, will soon become extinct under the ruthless rules of political economy and be preserved, if at all, only by the processes of petrifaction (1: 160; bk. 1, ch. 17; 1: 56; bk. 1, ch. 6). As well as the Dinosauria, Owen, in his 1842 “Report,” had also designated the Crocodilia, comprising prehistoric alligators and gavials, as another of the suborders of fossil reptiles, and in his Monograph on the Fossil Reptilia of the Wealden Formation (1854) he showed that the “vertebræ of the young Iguanodon” had analogous features to those that could be observed in the “naturally articulated vertebral column of a young Alligator” (3). Notably, one of the most conspicuous items in Venus's crowded shop is the articulated skeleton of a “young alligator in the corner,” whose great antiquity, perhaps dating as far back as its dinosaurian brethren in the Mesozoic, is suggested by its “yard or two of smile,” which seems to reflect wryly on the similarities of Victorian London to the “depths of the slime, ages ago” (2: 123, 2: 125; bk. 3, ch. 14).Footnote ¹⁷ In evoking the emblematic “slime and ooze” of the nefarious society depicted in Our Mutual Friend (1: 1; bk. 1, ch. 1), Dickens, as he had when portraying the no less symbolic “crust upon crust of mud” traversed by the waddling megalosaurus in Bleak House (1; ch. 1), took inspiration from the reconstructive abilities that Owen shared with Venus.

There is, however, a still more tangible parallel between the particular skills of Owen and Venus and Dickens's own compositional practices. Our Mutual Friend’s serial parts, as Jonathan Smith suggests, had a clear affinity with the osseous fragments articulated with such proficiency by both Owen and Venus, and it is noticeable that, returning to the format of monthly numbers he had pioneered with The Pickwick Papers for the first time in almost a decade, Dickens was especially attentive to the exigencies of this particular form of serialization. This, significantly, seems to have increased following the forced interposition of Venus into the second installment and his subsequent emergence as the novel's symbolic guarantor of order and even meaning. Dickens suggested parallels, at least implicitly, between the synecdochic practices of “readers, pursuing a story in portions from month to month through nineteen months” who attempt to “perceive the relations of its finer threads to the whole pattern” and the “boney” activities of Venus, who, as with “‘that French gentleman’. . .represented. . .by his ribs only,” can construct skeletal wholes from fragmentary parts (2: 307–08; postscript; 1: 63, 1: 61; bk. 1, ch. 7). The discontinuity enforced by Our Mutual Friend’s method of publication, as Juliet McMaster has observed, “makes one think of the novel itself as ‘loose in a bag,’ a fit set of fragments for Mr. Venus's attention” (195). Akin to Owen, Venus exhibits great skill in “piecing little things together,” and it is the “likelihood of small indications leading him on to the discovery of great concealments” that enables him, like a particularly perspicacious serial reader, to comprehend the hidden truths of the various false identities developed over the novel's twenty installments (1: 230–31; bk. 2, ch. 7).

In his review of Robert Hunt's The Poetry of Science for the Examiner in 1848 Dickens had eulogized the “Science. . .[that] has found, and read aloud, the great stone book which is the history of the earth” and “has brought the bones, and pieced together the skeletons, of monsters that would have crushed the noted dragons of the fables at a blow” (787). Nearly two decades later, in his last completed serial novel, Dickens once more suggested a correlation, or at least a clear parallel, between the anatomical and paleontological “piecing. . .together” employed by Owen and Venus and the accurate comprehension of an immense book, distinct from fallacious fables, composed of fragmentary parts (1: 230; bk. 2, ch. 7). Even those readers who were “neither practical chemists nor palæontologists,” Dickens had contended in the Examiner, were still “capable of making. . .geological speculations,” and in Our Mutual Friend such “intelligent men” were offered the opportunity to themselves similarly piece together and speculate on the novel's incrementally developing plot (787).

Owen was not only alluded to in Our Mutual Friend, his methods of paleontological reconstruction were integral to the proper appreciation of the overall structure of a novel whose awkward and anomalous format, appearing simultaneously in monthly installments as well as (after the tenth number) an initial volume, meant that, as Robert L. Patten has noted, “it was one of the more cumbersome. . .novels to sell at railway stalls,” with its by now old-fashioned numbers “too big for the commuter customers” (309).Footnote ¹⁸ While Our Mutual Friend, published in the mid-1860s when the popularity of serialized fiction was on the wane, might have seemed particularly unwieldy and ill-proportioned, Dickens had long been anxious, as he put it in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit, to “resist the temptation of the current Monthly Number, and to keep a steadier eye upon the general purpose and design” of his serial novels (viii; preface). Even in The Pickwick Papers he had envisaged that the “twenty numbers. . .should form one tolerably harmonious whole, each leading to the other,” although he also warned readers that “no artfully interwoven. . .plot can with reason be expected” (1: viii; preface). Hostile early reviewers continued to bemoan his inability to “combine the scattered portions of a tale into one consistent and harmonious whole” ([Lister] 96). It was, however, only with Dombey and Son, which he began writing in June 1846, that Dickens curtailed his previous tendency to impromptu composition and instead drafted detailed number plans – or “mems” as he called them – for the whole novel before a single installment had been started.Footnote ¹⁹

Fusing Together

Dombey and Son was meticulously planned in four equal sections, which, according to modern critics, were constructed “architecturally” (Bradbury 157).Footnote ²⁰ The close parallels between architecture and paleontology were frequently noted in the nineteenth century, with, for instance, the Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal reporting, in 1863, that the “organic structure. . .of all good building is so evident from a fragment, that from one stone a piece of architecture can often be put together, in the same way as animal forms may be with certainty built up from a single bone” (“The Royal Institute” 119).Footnote ²¹ As well as architecture, Dickens, when considering the structural configuration of his later serial fiction, seems also to have drawn upon the procedures and terminology he might have recalled from conversations with Owen, who himself regularly employed architectural analogies such as “osseous masonry” (Memoir 74).

When “publishing. . .in. . .parts,” Dickens told the literary hostess and aspiring novelist Jane Brookfield in February 1866, “notice how patiently and expressly the thing has to be planned for presentation in these fragments, and yet for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted whole” [italics mine] (House 11: 160). The term “fragment” was particularly multivalent at this time, signifying both serial numbers and mutilated fossil remains, with Owen, for example, insisting that just a “few fragments” had often “served. . .as the basis of the restoration” of prehistoric creatures (Geology 16, 38–39).Footnote ²² But Dickens's suggestion that the fragments of a serialized story could subsequently be fused together into an integrated whole also corresponds with Owen's account, in his Monograph on the Fossil Reptilia of the London Clay (1850), of the structure of the “skeleton of a Tiger-boa” in which “anchylosis of the 148th to the 149th vertebra has taken place; and the 166th and 167th vertebræ have been more completely. . .fused together, so as to appear like a single vertebra” [italics mine] (61).Footnote ²³ It was precisely such “anchylosed joints” that had earlier facilitated William Buckland's initial identification, in 1824, of the size and means of locomotion of the megalosaurus (“Notice” 395), with the “sacral vertebrae,” as Hugh Torrens has written, “fused together, forming a continuous solid piece of bone” (261) that could only have belonged to an unprecedentedly colossal creature such as the “elephantine lizard” that bestrides the opening pages of Bleak House (1; ch. 1). In fact, it was this “large sacrum composed of five anchylosed vertebræ of unusual construction” that Owen, in 1842, assigned as the defining characteristic shared by all members of the Dinosaurian suborder (“Report: II” 102–03).

Alfred Tennyson, whose friendship with Owen was almost as close as that of Dickens, had adopted similar language in expressing his preference for “compact and vertebrate poems” over verse formed limply from “organizable lymph” (Tennyson 2: 506). Tennyson was taking aim at Spasmodic poetry such as Sydney Dobell's Balder (1854) that, indulging in protracted and amorphous monologues, lacked the restraint imposed by a clear, integrated structure. Of course, Tennyson's use of this anatomical language was merely figurative, as indeed was Dickens's own deployment of the terminology he had likely learnt from Owen, but it nevertheless afforded both the poet and the novelist a precise and dexterous – if ultimately only analogical – means of describing their respective compositional practices.Footnote ²⁴ Composed of fragmentary parts that were then fused together into an uninterrupted whole corresponding to vertebrae, the structure of Dickens's serial novels resembled that of the prehistoric megafauna that occasionally appeared within their covers, with Our Mutual Friend itself featuring what the novel's narrator describes as a “very hideous church with four towers at the four corners, generally resembling some petrified monster, frightful and gigantic, on its back with its legs in the air” (1: 167; bk. 2, ch. 1). Being, paradoxically, both unwieldy and yet perfectly adapted (at least to their original Mesozoic environments), such petrified monsters offered Dickens equally apposite analogies for the discordant architecture of London and, at the same time, the harmonious structure of his own serialized fiction.

Yet even when configured along such strict anatomical lines, Dickens's later, more carefully planned novels still remained liable to the “monstrous joining together of. . .anomalous members,” as Sharpe's London Magazine complained of the juxtaposition of sensational and naturalistic registers in Great Expectations (1860–61) (“Great Expectations” 218). This, notably, resembled the fear of inadvertently producing an imaginary composite animal that had long haunted paleontologists piecing together osseous fragments that, when in situ, were often mixed up with the remains of other animals.Footnote ²⁵ The original meaning of the term “monster” was a creature amalgamating discordant parts, with connotations of great size only subsequently being added to its primary meaning, and religious opponents of paleontology's intellectual claims regarding extinction and the vast age of the earth cautioned “let us not be too sure that in putting together the bones of extinct animals and in defining their habits and nature, we are not out of collected fossil remains creating to ourselves a monster” (Best 28–29).Footnote ²⁶ Dickens himself was certainly alert to the perturbing possibility of such paleontological mishaps, reflecting in The Chimes (Reference Simms1844), the Christmas Book he wrote the year after becoming friends with Owen, that in Trotty Veck's disturbed dreams “monsters uncouth and wild, arise in premature, imperfect resurrection; the several parts and shapes of different things are joined and mixed by chance” (93; ch. 3).Footnote ²⁷ As with Sharpe's London Magazine, critics of Dickens's later fiction similarly perceived even his most meticulously planned novels as potentially monstrous amalgams, joining together random and incongruous parts.

What was necessary, in both paleontological reconstructions and the composition of serial fiction, was a flawless design that would preclude the possibility of such egregious conjunctions and instead ensure the harmony and proportion of the perfectly integrated structure. Those “who deny the existence of design in the construction of any part of an organized body,” as Owen avowed, “are not, nor have been, those who have contributed to the real advancement of physiology or palæontology” (Palæontology 301). Similarly, Dickens, only three months after the completion of Our Mutual Friend, insisted to Brookfield regarding serial parts that there “must be a special design, to overcome that specially trying mode of publication” (House 11: 160). Dickens's earlier, more picaresque fiction was frequently condemned precisely for its “absence of design,” as even his friend John Forster complained of Nicholas Nickleby in the Examiner (677). And even when Dickens did try to contrive an intricate murder mystery, critics had been no less censorious. Edgar Allan Poe, in a review of Barnaby Rudge (1840–41) for Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, urged that the only way of counteracting the “present absurd fashion of periodical novel-writing” was for the “traces of the design” to be evident “upon every page,” and he complained bitterly that the most egregious “error[s] on the part of Mr. Dickens” had stymied Barnaby Rudge’s putative “design of mystery.” In fact, having claimed to have “fathomed” the plot of Barnaby Rudge by the novel's “seventh page” only to find that his predictions were erroneous, Poe blamed Dickens's improper design and haughtily insisted that “if we did not rightly prophesy, yet, at least, our prophecy should have been right” (126–27). Faced with such stinging censure, the notion of design, in all its manifold senses, was one that became increasingly crucial to the painstaking planning of Dickens's later novels.Footnote ²⁸

He had, after all, pledged to “keep a steadier eye upon the general purpose and design” in Martin Chuzzlewit (viii; preface), and, by the time of Little Dorrit a decade later, could observe archly that what initially appeared a “bad design” might eventually be revealed as a “good and an expressly religious design” by the time of its “climax” (vi; preface). Dickens's conception of religious design, of course, related more to issues such as the providential punishment of Little Dorrit’s corrupt financier Mr. Merdle than to Owen's demonstration of anatomical adaptations so perfect they necessarily indicated the guiding hand of a designer.Footnote ²⁹ Modern critics examining Dickens's potential engagement with Charles Darwin's purposeless evolutionism have nevertheless identified connections between these two strains of divine design. George Levine has contended that Dickens's teleological plotting, although under constant strain from the chaotic multitudinousness of his inventive imagination, finally resulted in a “story much like that told by natural theologians, which makes ‘chance’ part of a larger moral design” (138). Howard W. Fulweiler likewise argues: “It is true of Our Mutual Friend, as it is of all Dickens's novels, that design and teleology are at the core of its fictional intent and thus diametrically opposed to the special vision of Darwin” (73). If, as Gary Colledge suggests, “Dickens embraced the popular natural theology. . .which affirmed both a Scriptural view of God as Creator and the discoveries and evidences of science” (51), and, as Levine proposes, he retained the “confidence of natural theology” in constructing the providential novelistic designs of his later fiction (134), then his method of composition becomes still more analogous to the paleontological procedures of his friend Owen that were so central to the natural theological tradition upheld by Buckland and other influential men of science in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Aesthetic and divine design, the creations of both the serial novelist and the omnipresent author of the natural world, manifest the same skill and artifice, even if the ultimate implication, to avoid raising the artist to a hubristic God-like status, must be that the design of a work of art is directed by divine providence no less than that of an organic structure.Footnote ³⁰

Putting This and That Together

It was in Our Mutual Friend that Dickens, as his ensuing letter to Brookfield suggests, was most concerned with issues of design, not only providential and structural, but also pragmatic and calculating. Within the novel's arena of remorseless amoral competition, numerous characters develop designs in order to take advantage of others, whether the nefarious matchmaking of the “artful and designing woman” Sophronia Lammle, or the only marginally less culpable “thoughts and designs” to “marry money” of the “mercenary plotter” Bella Wilfer (1: 319; bk. 2, ch. 16; 1: 244; bk. 2, ch. 8). To be designing or to have designs in Our Mutual Friend is, almost without exception, a negative attribute. While both Sophronia and Bella at least acknowledge their own designs, the still more manipulative Wegg conceals his plotting, as when he “lightly taps his hands together, to express an undesigning frame of mind,” and instead induces his victims to believe that it is they who are the conniving ones (1: 60; bk. 1, ch. 7). Indeed, the “undesigning Boffin had become so far immeshed by the wily Wegg that his mind misgave him he was a very designing man indeed” (1: 141; bk. 1, ch. 15). Such is the skepticism towards design in the novel that when Eugene Wrayburn is asked by his friend Mortimer Lightwood about his intentions regarding Lizzie Hexam “Do you design to pursue her?,” he replies with uncharacteristic decisiveness: “My dear fellow, I don't design anything. I have no design whatever. I am incapable of designs” (1: 223–24; bk. 2, ch. 6).Footnote ³¹

Yet despite its apparent distaste for those who pursue designs, Our Mutual Friend is certainly not a novel that is itself without design. In the postscript included in the final double number Dickens elaborated on how keeping the mystery surrounding the identity of John Rokesmith “for a long time unsuspected, yet always working itself out” was the “most interesting and the most difficult part of my design.” This design, as he acknowledged, was one whose “difficulty was much enhanced by the mode of publication,” which precluded all but the most proficient readers of the serial parts from discerning the novel's overall structure “until they have it before them complete.” There nevertheless was a “whole pattern” which, in contrast to the iniquitous and ultimately incoherent designs pursued by characters such as Wegg, had been “always before the eyes of the story-weaver at his loom” throughout the “nineteen months” of the novel's serialization (2: 307–08; postscript).

Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend’s postscript, compared the serial novelist working out the portions of an overall pattern to an artisanal weaver at his pre-industrial loom. Within the novel, however, it is Venus, operating from a no less unadorned and plebeian “working bench,” who similarly 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,” with which Wegg's anomalous limb is “compared” but cannot be made to correspond. Even Wegg's prosthetic “timber fiction” lacks any functional correlation to his environment at the Harmon dust mounds, and he concedes the “want of adaptation in a wooden leg to ladders and such like airy perches” (1: 60–62; bk. 1, ch. 7; 1: 231; bk. 2, ch. 7). Although Venus refrains from discoursing explicitly on design, he is adamant that he “keep to nature,” even in his most “miscellaneous working in,” and Wegg's discordant leg, as Venus professes, could only be joined together with other random parts “as a Monstrosity, if you'll excuse me” (1: 60, 1: 62; bk. 1, ch. 7).

This, of course, was precisely how Sharpe's London Magazine had represented Dickens's previous novel Great Expectations and anxieties that even the assiduously planned numbers of Our Mutual Friend might constitute such a composite monster were, at times, expressed in the novel itself. The police inspector who, investigating the apparent murder of John Harmon in the novel's initial monthly part, is in the very same position as serial readers endeavoring to fathom Dickens's mysterious design, is described as “lurking about in boats, putting this and that together. But, according to the success with which you put this and that together, you get a woman and a fish apart, or a Mermaid in combination. And Mr. Inspector could turn out nothing better than a Mermaid, which no Judge and Jury would believe in” (1: 24; bk. 1, ch. 3). In The Newcomes a decade before, Thackeray had used an almost identical phrase to Dickens's “put this and that together” when suggesting that “As Professor Owen. . .takes a fragment of a bone, and builds an enormous forgotten monster out of it, wallowing in primaeval quagmires, tearing down leaves and branches of plants that flourished thousands of years ago, and perhaps may be coal by this time – so the novelist puts this and that together” (2: 81; ch. 47). The serial novelist, for Thackeray, was akin to a paleontologist who produces an unerringly accurate reconstruction of a perfectly designed prehistoric monster from just fragmentary fossil parts. Like Dickens, Thackeray was also a close friend of Owen, and the paleontologist even seems to have sided with the latter in the occasional contretemps between the rival novelists, once remarking that “Dickens has grown so arrogant” (quoted in Adrian 134).Footnote ³² Thackeray, as the above passage from The Newcomes makes clear, was certainly much more explicit than his haughty rival in drawing an analogy between the novelist who “puts this and that together,” while all the time realizing a premeditated design, and Owen's propensity for intuiting the flawless structure of putatively monstrous megafauna. Dickens's own briefer but no less direct allusions to Owen in Our Mutual Friend, as well as the distinctive anatomical terminology evident in that novel and elsewhere in his fiction, journalism, and private correspondence, nevertheless suggest that he too recognized the resemblance between Owen's celebrated paleontological practices and the novelist's “putting this and that together.”Footnote ³³

But the same procedure, when in the hands of an indifferent detective (or a negligent author of serial novels) rather than an adept paleontologist, could just as likely result in an incongruous and ersatz conjunction of parts like the mermaid. Other mythical monsters made up from anomalous components such as “Unicorns or Griffins. . .— fables altogether,” Dickens had cautioned novice writers in Household Words in 1853, would be the only literary output of authors who disavowed the strenuous demands of writing serialized fiction, including the “patient separation from the heap of all the fragments that will unite to serve it” (“H. W.” 145). From analogous fragments, as Dickens had noted in his review of Hunt's Poetry of Science, “palæontologists” had “pieced together” perfectly proportioned “monsters that would have crushed the noted dragons of the fables at a blow” (787). A serial novel such as Our Mutual Friend would resemble such a flawlessly integrated monster, rather than an absurdly incongruous monstrosity of unscientific fable, only when its underlying design was recognized by readers following the incrementally developing plot in the same perspicaciously “boney light” as Mr. Venus (1: 63; bk. 1, ch. 7).