Alfred Russel Wallace, writing in the popular Macmillan's Magazine (1869), complains about the number of “imperfect, badly prepared, and badly arranged” taxidermy, those “immature, ragged, mangy-looking specimens one often sees in museums, stuck up in stiff and unnatural attitudes, and resembling only mummies or scarecrows” (247). Such taxidermy, Wallace continues, is “positively repellent, and we feel that we never want to look upon it again” (247). If too much of museum taxidermy resembles Gothic monsters that ought to be abjected, the amateur specimens fare no better. As Christina M. Colvin notes, the “strange, uncanny, or awkward forms of many examples of amateur [taxidermy] mounts call attention to their own poor construction and therefore question any simple claim that taxidermy unambiguously demonstrates the mastery of the human over the animal” (66). Evidently, in this “golden age of taxidermy” (Ross 1030), not all that glitters is indeed gold. These darker contours were, thus, more in keeping with taxidermy's tendencies, with things as they monstrously are.

Like a car crash, it is hard to look away from the wreckage of some taxidermy, such as the two-headed kitten created by the nineteenth-century self-taught taxidermist, Walter Potter. Potter, the darling of much scholarship on taxidermy, is best known for his cute anthropomorphic taxidermy done in a whimsical vein—kittens getting married, birds conducting a funeral, squirrels playing cards, frogs frolicking on the playground—often staging scenes from beloved nursery rhymes and stories. Animals he killed to create. But this Janus-faced kitten, this lesser-known piece, more frightful than friendly, helps tell the story of the darker side of taxidermy. This chapter shows how taxidermy's furry feet pad their way through the Gothic nineteenth century.

Scholarship on nineteenth-century taxidermy tends to consider it in comparison to the work of traditional collection (re)formation, preservation, and display practices (cf. Morris, Wonders, Yanni) and to highlight its ability to disrupt taxonomy and the organization of collections (cf. Ritvo, Spary). Still, more work remains to be done on taxidermy's intersection with other dominant literary and cultural discourses of the day, such as the Gothic. As Sarah Bezan and Susan McHugh note, “Stretched, stitched, and stuffed, taxidermy hides themselves hide, conceal, and secret away their stories” (134, 132).