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Jane Austen Society of Australia

What else was going on in Lyme?

The mention of Lyme to a Janeite will almost certainly result in an image of Louisa Musgrove jumping from the Cobb into (she hoped) the arms of Captain Wentworth. However, why don’t we find out what else was going on in Lyme?

When war erupted in Europe in 1792, there were security risks if the English gentry travelled on the Continent. As we know, many adopted the resorts of the south coast of England, and the spectacular scenery around Lyme Bay became a favourite of those who spent the season at Bath. Recall the excited anticipation of the young people in Persuasion who were all ‘wild to see Lyme’.

Jane Austen visited Lyme on at least two occasions. In a letter dated 14 September 1804 she wrote to Cassandra:

I have written to Buller & I have written to Mr Pyne, on the subject of the broken lid; it was valued by Anning here we were told at five shillings, & as that appeared to us to be beyond the value of all the furniture in the room together, we have referred ourselves to the owner.

The fate of the broken box is not our concern – it’s more interesting to ask ‘Who was Anning?’

Richard Anning was a cabinet maker but, although he was a skilled – and as Jane’s letter indicates – a highly paid artisan, he struggled to make a living. The blockade of European ports during the War caused severe food shortages – prices escalated and even industrious workers were turned into paupers reliant on charity to survive. As a proud artisan, Richard struggled on without seeking such assistance. However, like many inhabitants of Lyme, he and his wife, Molly, were not only hungry, but as there was also a fuel shortage, they faced damp, cold conditions. Existence was miserable to say the least. Notwithstanding such privations, Richard and his wife had ten children, although only two – Joseph and Mary – survived childhood.

A cabinet maker by trade, Richard was a fossil collector by avocation. His daughter Mary took a keen interest, learning from her father the techniques of fossil collection and helping him gather fossil ‘curios’ from the beach to sell to visitors. To supplement his meagre income, Mary and her father set up a ‘curiosity table’ outside their home, and she delighted in searching for unusual items with which to stock the table.

In an age before the disciplines of geology and palaeontology, and the theories of Darwin, no one could explain what these curios were. Petrified in the rocks were strange shapes, like fragments of giant, unknown creatures – there were enormous pointed teeth, thought to be derived from crocodiles, and pretty fossil shells and stones. Superstition abounded. For example, ammonites were known as ‘snake stones’. Some thought they had magical powers, as they ‘protected against serpents and were a cure for blindness, impotence and barrenness’; others believed they were originally people who for their crimes were turned into snakes and then cast into stone; but in a society which had absolute faith in the word of the Bible, the most convincing explanation was that they were remains of creatures that had perished during Noah’s Flood.

Despite her mother’s opposition, Mary and her father continued to risk their lives seeking fossils. It was very dangerous work. Rainwater endlessly percolating through layers of soft shales and clays caused frequent mudslides and rockfalls. There was the risk of being caught by the sea, as the fossils had to be removed before the tide turned and the waves washed them away. On more than one occasion the pair was trapped by rising waves between the sea and the cliffs and had to struggle up the slippery rockface to safety. However, one night in 1810, Richard lost his footing on the treacherous cliffs, fell heavily, and died a few days later.

Molly and the children were left destitute. Richard had left a debt of Ł120, a large sum at a time when average wages were about 10 shillings a week. Under the Poor Laws, the family were forced to accept charity and received outdoor relief – a considerable misfortune for an artisan family. The sale of fossil curios became even more essential for family survival; eventually Mary and her mother turned the front room of their home into a ‘curiosity shop’.

In 1811, Joseph made a remarkable discovery – on the beach, a strange shape caught his eye and as he cleared the sand and shale away the giant head of a fossilised creature appeared. It was four feet long, the jaws filled with sharp interlocking teeth, the eye sockets like huge saucers.

Fossil. The skull of the unknown creature found by Joseph Anning in 1811.

The skull of the unknown creature found by Joseph Anning in 1811.
His sister Mary located the rest of the skeleton about a year later.
This and above illustration of an ammonite from Cadbury, The Dinosaur Hunters,
as is the illustration below of Mary Anning.

He told his sister Mary where he had found the skull, but as that section of the beach was covered by a mudslide for many months afterwards, nearly a year elapsed before Mary – still scarcely more than 12 or 13 – came across a fragment of fossil buried nearly two feet deep, a short distance from where Joseph had found the head.

Picture the young Mary, on slippery rocks, possibly in strong wind, probably lashed by cold spray, working with her hammer around the rock, always with an eye on the rising tide. What was gradually revealed was an entire backbone, made up of sixty vertebrae – the shape of the entire skeleton could be clearly seen. As the fantastic creature emerged from its ancient tomb, they could see this had been a giant animal up to 17 feet long. Mary eventually sold the entire connected skeleton for Ł23, enough to feed the family for well over six months.

News of Mary’s discovery eventually spread to London, and it was later displayed in Bullock’s Museum. Scholars were baffled as there was no scientific context within which they could make sense of the find. Later the creature was acknowledged and named ichthyosaurus (meaning fish-lizard) by the Keeper of Natural History at the British Museum.

William Buckland, a Fellow of the prestigious Corpus Christie College at Oxford, was one of the first scholars to visit Lyme and consult with Mary. He was fascinated with ‘undergroundology’, (which he called the new subject of geology), and his lectures were both popular and controversial. A real quandary which surrounded the need to explain creatures such as ichthyosaurus. How did they fit in with the biblical description of creation? Where did the beasts come from? Why did God erase them from the face of the earth?

In the decades following Mary’s discovery of ichthyosaurus in 1812, scores of prominent ‘men of science’ visited Lyme to explore the cliffs with Mary, to seek her advice, purchase her fossil discoveries, or exploit her knowledge. The sight of Mary exploring the rocks and cliffs became a familiar one in Lyme, with visitors flocking to the beach to observe her at work.

Although she went on to make other major discoveries, including the first nearly complete plesiosaurus, the first British pterodactylus macronyx, the squaloraja fossil fish and the plesiosaurus macrocephalus, she received little acknowledgment in her lifetime. She was after all a single woman, of a lower social class, from a provincial area, and without formal education or a wealthy backer, at a time when upper-class London men – gentlemen scholars – received the credit for scientific discovery. One of Mary’s friends wrote: ‘these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a good deal by publishing works, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages’. Mary herself is recorded as saying: ‘the world has used me so unkindly’.

Her life was controversial and peppered with incidents – people disapproved of a young woman being involved in such work, and were scandalised when she began studying fossilised faeces; a leading French scientist, Cuvier, accused her of fraud and deception in her findings; others asserted that it was

a wonderful instance of divine favour, that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men...

To his credit, in the late 1830s Buckland was concerned at the continuing hardships which Mary faced, and through his intervention, the British Academy for the Advancement of Science granted an annuity of Ł25 to Mary. For the first time in her life, she had enough for a diet of potatoes and bread even if no new fossils were found. Mary died of breast cancer in 1847.

Despite a lack of recognition during her lifetime, it is interesting to note that in 1999, the bicentenary of her birth, she was described in The British Journal of the History of Science as ‘the greatest fossilist the world ever knew’. Incidentally, the ichthyosaurus skull found by Joseph, and many of Mary’s fossil discoveries, line the walls of Gallery 30 in the Natural History Museum in London.

So next time you’re in Lyme – either in person or accompanying the party from Uppercross – spare a thought for that other young woman – a contemporary of Louisa Musgrove – who also jumped across the rocks at Lyme, not into the arms of an eligible young man, but into the history of science.

Marlene Arditto

References:

Cadbury, Deborah, The Dinosaur Hunters. A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World, Fourth Estate, London, 2000
Tickell, Crispin, Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, Lyme Regis Philpot Museum, 1996
Women in Science, Mary Anning – Finder of Fossils, The San Diego Supercomputer Centre Website.

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05 July 2003