The huge bones of a lost sperm whale which drifted into literary history are to go on display after languishing for more than a century in a half-forgotten grave.

The 18-metre (60ft) skeleton has been exhumed as part of the £600,000 restoration of Burton Constable mansion in East Yorkshire, near where the whale beached and died in 1825.

The bones were a public sensation at the time after being claimed by Sir Thomas Clifford-Constable.

So celebrated was the crowd-pulling exhibition that the American writer Herman Melville picked up on the episode and incorpo rated it in his novel, Moby-Dick.

He wrote: "Sir Clifford thinks of charging two pence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column, three pence to hear the echo in the hollow of the whale's cerebellum; and six pence for the unrivalled view from his forehead."

The vast peepshow was the first time a sperm whale had been properly dissected and examined. But the exhibition - part of Sir Thomas's Cabinet of Curiosities - started to get in the way of family life and was dismantled and buried in the mid 19th century.

David Connell, the director of the Burton Constable Foundation which is restoring the hall and its park, landscaped by Capability Brown, said that the whale would not be reassembled in full but shown in sections.

He said: "The cost of putting it together on an iron frame like Sir Thomas's is beyond us at the moment - but perhaps one day a benefactor will come forward."