[colinwilyb]

When I write, it comes out like this. Pulling your attention to and fro across a scene to construct "brain pictures", letting your imagination fill in the gaps as the fragments become a whole.

The mention of Megalosaurus was jarring. My imagination placed this within a gloomy late-Victorian period and the mention of giant lizard caused mental association to very unrelated content for the rest of paragraph. I think a Wooly Mammoth waddling up the hill would make for a better picture.

On another note: What are horse blinkers?

[mrob]

Bleak House was first serialized in 1852. The famous Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were commissioned in 1852 and first shown to the public in 1854. The timing lines up with dinosaurs being something new and exciting to the readers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs

The collection includes an (inaccurate) model of a Megalosaurus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Cry...

Horse blinkers are things that restrict a horse's field of vision to directly in front of it so it's less likely to get startled or distracted. Readers would also have been familiar with them, because they were commonly used with horses pulling carriages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack)