The Dodo in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Exploration of the Gray Ghost Outside of the English Sentimental Eye

This article examines the specific type of monster that developed in eighteenth-century British culture arising from early attempts to reconstruct the extinct dodo. Specifically, discussions about the absent dodo took shape in early ornithological texts, where it was universally depicted as a monster, a lumbering, clumsy, gluttonous animal whose survival was unquestionably doomed by its ungainly morphology. This iteration of the dodo was constructed in the absence of productive empirical information about the “real” bird, largely from cultural prejudices and conjecture extracted from studying old, inaccurate paintings. This reconstructed monster-dodo shares little with the “real” dodo, about which we know only from fragmentary seventeenth-century accounts by witnesses who actually saw the living bird and recent studies drawn from its fossil record. This article explores why English culture took the relative “blank slate” left by this extinct bird and, contrary to emerging notions of sentimentality, re-fashioned the dodo as a monster.