Dickens and the dinosaurs

Abstract

The opening paragraph of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852) includes a notable character never seen in any television or film adaptation of the story: “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.”