I can go a little way to answering this question: The public was generally interested and excited by dinosaurs (and people were interested in exciting people about them). I suppose the most famous expression of publicly visible 19th century dinosaurs were the models made for the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1854, when the "celebrity scientific illustrator" Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins decided to put Richard Owen's dinosaurs in the corner of Crystal Palace Park.

Source: Joe Cain, who gives an engaging 40-minute talk on the Crystal Palace and its dinosaurs here.