I adore that Jane Austen was more into the people-watching aspect!
I wrote an entire chapter in one of my serial fics that takes place in the Liverpool Museum. The FMC is a geologist inspired by Mary Anning, and the MMC is a sphinx librarian and scholar. Here's an excerpt of the chapter:
Adelaide sighed. This was just like her brother to run off without her. She couldn’t blame him, though. Not only was he only a child, just 11 years old, but this exhibition was fascinating! Bullock’s natural history collection included thousands of items they’d never be able to see elsewhere, including items from the famous Captain Cook’s voyages to the South Seas, as well as a wealth of geological pieces of particular interest to her.
The two women set off through the crowd to find the boy—and then Adelaide stopped short and grabbed her friend’s arm. There was her brother up ahead—speaking to a very familiar sphinx. Griffon Andrews.
They were not far off, but angled to both be facing a huge skull of some creature, so they had not seen Adelaide or Frederica. “There he is!” Frederica said when she spotted Dev, but Adelaide pulled her back behind a pedestal with a few stuffed seabirds atop it.
“What is it?” Frederica asked.
“Shh! That’s him, with Dev. The sphinx.”
Frederica peered out from behind the pedestal. “Oh…that is the sphinx? Your sphinx?”
The word “your” agitated Adelaide, but she nodded. “Yes. Mr. Andrews.”
Frederica’s face lit up. “Let’s go speak with him.”
“No!” Adelaide hissed. “Just…just give me a few moments to get my bearings.”
It had been a few months since she had broken things off with Griffon, and in that time she had not seen him once. For a week afterwards, every time someone rang at the door of her house, her heart leapt up, thinking it was him come to see her, even though she knew that was a foolish hope, made even more foolish when she became disappointed every time it turned out not to be him.
It had made her angry with herself, but since then, that anger had cooled into regret. She was willing to admit that she missed him—not only the sexual pleasure they shared, but Griffon himself.
As she stood there trying to compose herself, she could not help but overhear what Griffon and her brother were saying to each other.
“I read a paper on this very specimen, as luck would have it. The author believes it to be a type of crocodile. What is your assessment?” Griffon asked the boy.
Griffon nodded at the 4-foot long animal skull. “Do you think it looks like a crocodile?”
Dev considered it. “Rather like, though its eyes must have been enormous, based on those eye sockets! Do crocodiles really have such large eyes?”
“Excellent observation; no, they do not. That is a marked difference to be sure.”
“What if it wasn’t an animal at all, but a monster of some sort, like a sea dragon?” Dev asked with excitement.
Adelaide couldn’t see Griffon’s face well, but it sounded as though he was smiling as he replied. “It sounds as though you are fond of monsters.”
You can read the whole chapter here, or check out the fic's master list to start from the beginning.
