Richard Owen (Victorian Naturalist)

Richard Owen (b. 1804–d. 1892), best known for his skills in comparative anatomy, was one of 19th-century Britain’s most celebrated naturalists. Owen coined the term “dinosaur” to describe a series of British fossil reptiles, but, in his own lifetime, he was better known for work on other strange specimens (both extant and extinct) brought into his hands from across the British Empire and the world. These included the moa bird, the pearly nautilus, the giant ground sloth Mylodon, and the gorilla. Most of Owen’s anatomical research was carried out from the vantage point of well-stocked London museums, namely the Hunterian Museum and the natural history department of the British Museum—the latter of which, thanks chiefly to Owen’s efforts, was relocated to South Kensington’s purpose-built Natural History Museum in 1881. Although born into a lower middle-class family in Lancaster, Owen’s scientific rise enabled him to move in elevated circles. He and his wife Caroline (née Clift) thus enjoyed the patronage of the royal family and prime minister Robert Peel and the friendship of literary figures like Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle. During the mid-19th century, his gift for publicity made his name the byword for an almost preternatural knowledge of fossil bones. Owen’s theistic anatomy combined the functionalism of French paleontological pioneer Georges Cuvier with concepts from German transcendentalism, the latter of which inspired his notion of a divinely ordained archetype underlying all vertebrate skeletons. During the late 1850s, however, this framework came under attack from iconoclastic naturalists like T. H. Huxley, whose subsequent association with Charles Darwin and evolutionary theory overshadowed Owen’s complicated ideas of life’s progressive development. At his death, Owen’s reputation had wilted. For decades, the Darwinian winners and their acolytes wrote the history, their work made easier by Owen’s reputation for abrasiveness. In the second half of the 20th century, scholars started to take him more seriously. While the proto-evolutionary nature of his early writings has intrigued the “Darwin Industry,” other fascinating parts of his career have also become better understood, including his anglicization of German and French anatomical ideas, his mastery of serial publishing and influence on Victorian literary culture, and his formative role in Australian colonial natural history. Despite this flowering of Owen scholarship, his life and works have not received the quantity of attention granted to other similarly eminent Victorians.