A dim world, where monsters dwell: The spatial time of The Sydenham Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park

Abstract

The Sydenham Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park articulated a spatial model of deep time that both supported and subverted social and racial hierarchies. Intended to point visitors toward Creationist conclusions about history predicated on man's central role in God's scheme, the park thematized a divinely ordained progress of civilization of which Victorians were the final heirs. Yet despite such attempts at rigid hermeneutical control, the park nevertheless presented profoundly disturbing evidence of degeneration and extinction, thereby denying the verity of human progression and suggesting that the primitive and the civilized - the ancient and the modern - were intimately related.