Until 1964 when W. D. Paden published two corrective articles, it was commonly assumed that Arthur O'Shaughnessy was the illegitimate son of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and that he had become an expert herpetologist in the nearly twenty years he was employed in the Department of Natural History at the British Museum. The originator of the first notion was Edmund Gosse, who remained convinced of its truth; the second was upheld even by Richard Garnett, the keeper of printed books, who wrote the article on O'Shaughnessy for the Dictionary of National Biography and who must have known otherwise, since he came to the museum in the same year as O'Shaughnessy.

O'Shaughnessy did receive his first appointment to the museum in 1861, when he was seventeen, through Lord Lytton, who asked John Evelyn Denison, speaker of the House of Commons and one of the museum's trustees, to nominate the youth. Lytton's mistress, however...