"Monkey climbing a tree," Uncaptioned Headnote Vignette by John McLenan for Bulwer-Lytton's "A Strange Story" in "Harper's Weekly Magazine" (26 October 1861)

Headnote Vignette [Monkey climbing a tree]

John McLenan

1861

Wood engraving

10.5 cm. by 5.5 cm.

Bulwer-Lytton's A Strange Story

Harper's Weekly 5 (26 October 1861): 686.

Scanned image and commentary by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Passage Illustrated: The Natural History Museum — "Homage to Science before Pleasure!"

The building was brilliantly lighted, and the effect was striking, perhaps because singular and grotesque. There, amidst stands of flowers and evergreens, lit up with coloured lamps, were grouped the dead representatives of races all inferior — some deadly — to man. The fancy of the ladies had been permitted to decorate and arrange these types of the animal world. The tiger glared with glass eyes from amidst artificial reeds and herbage, as from his native jungle; the grisly white bear peered from a mimic iceberg. There, in front, stood the sage elephant, facing a hideous hippopotamus; whilst an anaconda twined its long spire round the stem of some tropical tree in zinc. In glass cases, brought into full light by festooned lamps, were dread specimens of the reptile race, — scorpion and vampire, and cobra capella, with insects of gorgeous hues, not a few of them with venomed stings.

But the chief boast of the collection was in the varieties of the Genus Simia — baboons and apes, chimpanzees, with their human visage, mockeries of man, from the dwarf monkeys perched on boughs lopped from the mayor’s shrubberies, to the formidable ourang-outang, leaning on his huge club. [Chapter XXXI, p. 686]

Commentary: A Stuffed Orangutan or Ourang-outang Strikes a Darwinian Theme

To introduce the night of the mayor's ball, McLenan takes advantage of the exotic nature of the house's natural history collection to represent a Malaysian great ape climbing a tree, striking a Darwinian theme that would have indeed been highly topical among intellectual circles after the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Margrave identifies himself with these fierce creatures, bragging about how many he has seen in the natural state, and imitating their sounds and movements.

Bibliography

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G. D. A Strange Story. Illustrated by John McLenan. Harper's Weekly V, 10 August — 21 December 1861.

Created 21 November 2007

Last modified 26 June 2026