Jurassic Mary E-Book

Patricia Pierce

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 327

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

Spinster Mary Anning, uneducated and poor, was of the wrong sex, wrong class and wrong religion, but fate decreed that she was exactly the right person in the right place and time to pioneer the emerging science of palaeontology, the study of fossils. Born in Lyme Regis in 1799, Mary learned to collect fossils with her cabinet-maker father. The unstable cliffs and stealthy sea made the task dangerous but after her father died the sale of fossils sustained her family. Mary's fame started as an infant when she survived a lightning strike that killed the three adults around her. Then, aged twelve, she caught the public's attention when she unearthed the skeleton of a 'fish lizard' or Ichthyosaurus. She later found the first Plesiosaurus giganteus, with its extraordinary long neck associated with the Loch Ness monster, and, dramatically, she unearthed the first, still rare, Dimorphodon macronyx, a frightening 'flying dragon' with hand claws and teeth. Yet her many discoveries were announced to the world by male geologists like the irrepressible William Buckland and Sir Henry De La Beche and they often received the credit. In Jurassic Mary Patricia Pierce redresses this imbalance, bringing to life the extraordinary, little-known story of this determined and pioneering woman.

Leseprobe

JURASSIC MARY

To two singular young women,

Amanda

and

Brittany

JURASSIC

MARY

MARY ANNING

and the

PRIMEVAL MONSTERS

Patricia Pierce

First published in 2006 by Sutton Publishing

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Patricia Pierce, 2006, 2013

The right of Patricia Pierce to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and

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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9569 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Map

1.

‘Verteberries’ and ‘Golden Serpents’

2.

Worlds within Worlds

3.

Denizens of Primeval Waters

4.

Reptiles and Relationships

5.

Her Spheres of Excellence

6.

The End and the Beginning of a Legend

Appendix: Mary Anning’s Fossils

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Anyone interested in, or writing about, the life of Mary Anning must give thanks and credit to the substantial research carried out by several individuals. One is William Dickson Lang (1878–1966), Keeper of the Department of Geology at the British Museum from 1928 to 1938. His wife came from Charmouth, and he retired there to pursue his studies of local natural history and geology. All the while he became more and more convinced of the value of Mary Anning’s pioneering work, and collected as much information as he could at that date. His approach was scientific with references. As president of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society from 1938 to 1940, he published many articles in the Society’s Proceedings, and these are an invaluable source for all writers and researchers on Mary Anning.

John Fowles (1926–2005), author, novelist, historian and Lyme resident, became Joint Honorary Curator of the Lyme Regis Philpot Museum in 1978, and Honorary Curator from 1979 to 1988. His work on Miss Anning and the history of Lyme importantly focused attention on these subjects.

Today, geologist and historian Hugh S. Torrens, formerly at Keele University, is a leading expert on Mary Anning. He has undertaken much valuable research, and is currently writing his own full biography of Mary Anning. Particularly useful is his ‘Presidential Address’ of 1995.

Thanks are also due to Jo Draper, Lyme Regis Philpot Museum; the staff of the Earth Sciences Library, and General Library, Natural History Museum; Dr Jenny Cripps, Curator, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester; and the staff of the British Library. Also to Jaqueline Mitchell, Hilary Walford and Jane Entrican, Sutton Publishing; Marion Dent; Kay Hawkins; Bridget Jones; and my agent, Sara Menguc.

Quotes from Finders, Keepers by Stephen Jay Gould, published by Hutchinson, are reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd.

Lyme Regis from the sea.

Introduction

It sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale – the story of a poor cabinet-maker’s young daughter who discovered an important and massive fossil at Lyme Regis, Dorset. Mary Anning (1799–1847) unearthed the first complete fossilised skeleton of a ‘fish lizard’ or Ichthyosaurus, when she was about 12 years old. However, Mary’s life was no fairy tale, but a struggle against near-impossible odds, although the mystery surrounding some of her life does imbue her story with a certain mythical quality.

In Lyme Regis Mary’s future path was set when she was still a girl, and she followed it throughout her life, finding a sequence of some of the earliest palaeontological specimens in the world. For Lyme is situated on an exceptionally fossiliferous coastline, where fossils – the remains or traces of animals and plants preserved by natural processes – were, and still are, to be found in abundance, and often of enormous size. But at that time few people knew what these strange bones and objects were or how they had come to be there.

In her twenties Mary discovered the first complete British Plesiosaurus giganteus (1823/4), which became the type specimen (that is, it set the definitions for its category for future reference in identifying further finds). She then found the first British example of the strange winged pterosaur, named Pteradactylus macronyx (1828) (renamed Dimorphodon macronyx), and then the new species Plesiosaurus macrocephalus (1828). That was followed by a strange new genus of fossil fish, Squaloraja (1829), another type specimen. There was much more. She was among the first to realise that the small fossils named coprolites found in abundance on the foreshore were actually the fossilised faeces of prehistoric ‘monsters’. The huge marine ‘lizards’ were contemporary with dinosaurs, although some of this story happened before dinosaurs were found, identified as such and so named.

Those professionals who study fossil animals and plants, the palaeontologists, have documented the finds, and it is for such scholars to analyse and explain the specimens in detail. While I am drawn to the diversity and beauty of the geological features of our planet, my interest in Mary Anning is as a woman: an exceptional woman, trapped in the stratified society of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Her achievements were remarkable by any standards, but especially so because she was born and bred in lowly circumstances from which there was little chance of escape. Mary was lower class, female, uneducated, unmarried and a dissenter – one who did not belong to the established Church of England. Lyme Regis was a remote place, its inhabitants socially hampered by the barrier of a strong Dorset accent. This impoverished spinster had to earn her own living, and it was to be in an unusual – and dangerous – way: by finding, excavating and then selling fossils both to casual seaside visitors and to important collectors and museums in Britain and Europe. Any one of her ‘handicaps’ could have been enough to scupper her chances; however, even though she was not properly recognised – as a socially well-placed man would have been – she did succeed to a large degree.

In spite of every disadvantage, Mary’s curiosity, intelligence and industry shone through to such an extent that her story is inexorably welded to the history of fossils found around Lyme Regis, mainly, although not exclusively, of the Jurassic Period, 200 to 145 million years ago.

Researching her discoveries was vital to my understanding of Mary; learning something of her subject and giving rein to my interest helped me to appreciate what fired her enthusiasm and determination. I hope the information gathered here to tell her story will similarly inspire the reader to look further, in acknowledgement of her great accomplishments.

A group of extraordinary and multi-talented men touched Mary Anning’s story, and some introduction to them is as essential to the understanding of her circumstances as are the very fossils they collected so obsessively. Pioneer geologist Henry De La Beche (1796–1855) founded the Geological Survey of Great Britain; irrepressible William Buckland (1784–1856), an unforgettable character and a founder of the Royal Geological Society, was the first Professor of Geology at Oxford, and became known as the ‘Father of Palaeontology’; William Conybeare (1787–1857) first described many of the Lyme fossils; Roderick Impey Murchison (1792–1871) defined and named the Silurian, Devonian and Permian Periods of geological time, and wrote 350 books, reports and papers; Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) was the first Professor of Geology at Cambridge, a position he held for fifty-five years, and he introduced the term Devonian (with Murchison).

There were others. Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) wrote the important Fossils of the South Downs or Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex in 1822, and discovered four of the five dinosaurs known in his time; Charles Lyell (1797–1875) became the leading geologist of the mid-nineteenth century, and published the hugely influential Principles of Geology; eccentric Thomas Hawkins (1810–89), a major collector of fossils, sold his truly unique collection to the British Museum; Richard Owen (1804–92) ‘invented’ dinosaurs by naming this group of large reptiles Dinosauria, and it was through his determined efforts that London’s Natural History Museum came into being.

Most of these men were either vicars or doctors. They made important discoveries, were members of the Geological Society of London, travelled widely in Britain and Europe, wrote books and have had books written about them. I have merely hinted at their accomplishments here and in the following text. These were the men, and their wives, in Mary’s circle of acquaintances, who sometimes became friends and who – to a degree – treated her as a colleague. They are part of her story.

Mary Anning was generous in sharing her hands-on knowledge gained from everyday experience on the foreshore with the eminent gentlemen scholars who came to visit her. Inevitably, they were not always so generous in giving her the credit she deserved, and she became somewhat bitter as they took freely of her work, discoveries and ideas and presented them as their own, seemingly without a second thought, while she continued to live a hard life all her days.

* * *

As a child, my box of treasures already contained a Native American Indian arrowhead I had picked up in a freshly ploughed field, a small chip of ‘1,000-year-old’ Pueblo pottery purchased at a museum with funds from my piggy-bank, and the minute nest of a humming-bird. To add to my collection of oddities, on the foreshore of Lake Ontario I found a stone with what looked like a shell in it. I now know it to be an impression of a common Pecten shell. I showed the fossil to my father, who was building a stone fireplace. The 6-year-old girl was thrilled when he promptly put it in pride of place above the keystone, where it has remained ever since.

What draws us to fossils? Perhaps it is the jewel-like quality of, say, an ammonite, or perhaps the intriguing orderliness and stark exposition of the skeletal organisation of animals, huge or tiny. Even a child senses that fossils, with the intricate beauty of nature’s symmetry, are gifts from another world. And who can resist a science that casts up evocative words like ‘coeval’, ‘antediluvian’, ‘primeval’ and ‘primordial’? Or a science that reveals the previously unknown, spectacularly enormous, terrifying and once-living creatures, some the stuff of nightmares?

Mary Anning can be listed among those extraordinary Englishwomen who have defied the constraints of their time and place – women like writer Freya Stark (1893–1993), a Victorian who travelled adventurously by camel in Arabia, or naturalist Marianne North (1830–90), who fearlessly explored the wilderness areas of every continent in the late nineteenth century, painting hundreds of native flora. Mary was unique, but she was also an example of the indomitable amateur who gets on and makes things happen, a type of person still occasionally encountered. In Mary Anning’s case, the ‘amateur’ soon became the consummate professional.

1

‘Verteberries’ and ‘Golden Serpents’

There is no picking up a pebble by the brook-side without finding all nature in connexion with it.

(G. Mantell1)

With the sea breaking behind her and the forbidding cliffs looming in front, the young girl knew she had found what she was looking for. Twelve-year-old Mary Anning, with large intelligent eyes, pale skin glowing in the fresh sea breeze and dark hair tangled, had spotted hints of long bones. A year earlier, in 1811,2 her brother Joseph had been the first to notice the head of a ‘crocodile’ in the exposed fallen rocks on the foreshore between Lyme Regis and Charmouth. It would eventually be identified as an Ichthyosaurus (literally ‘fish lizard’). The huge head had a long snout, and its large saucer-shaped eye socket seemed to stare out at them unnervingly.

Now, one year later, Mary had found the rest of the ‘fish lizard’ in the cliff high above where her brother had found the head. The Annings hired men to dig out the complete skeleton, 17 feet long, from the place it had rested in for 175, perhaps 200, million years. It was in ‘a very perfect state’.3

This was the first of these streamlined marine reptiles to receive the full blast of publicity in London. The Lord of the Manor at Lyme Regis, Henry Hoste Henley, bought it from the Annings, and he then passed it on to a museum in London’s Piccadilly. But it was not the first ichthyosaur to be discovered. The Welsh naturalist Llhyd had found a few fragments one hundred years earlier, which he described in his book Lithosphylacii Britannia (1699), and there had been others. But such a hugely important discovery by this young girl and her brother would prove to be the stuff of legend. This extraordinary find and others to follow would help to challenge, then overturn, many long-held ‘truths’ regarding the evolution of life on earth.

* * *

Mary Anning’s birth into a turbulent world was preceded by events of the most dramatic and far-reaching kind: the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution of 1776–1815, launched in Britain, the first industrialised country. The effects of such world-jarring events even percolated through to life on England’s south coast in remote Dorset, which was isolated by muddy, rutted roads, and further set apart by the local dialect.

The Anning family lived in comely Lyme Regis, a small seaside resort in west Dorset, noted for its fossils. Lyme and the River Lym lie cosily in a little combe, or ‘bottom’, between two steep hills with exceptionally fossiliferous cliffs stretching almost as far as the eye can see in either direction. In a dip to the east snuggles the equally fossil-rich village of Charmouth. Within the crumbling cliffs are strata of Blue Lias, sandwich-like layers of limestone and shale, imprisoning gigantic unknown beasts from other, earlier, worlds. The fossils (mostly skeletal remains, along with wood and trace impressions of prehistoric organisms preserved by natural processes), found almost everywhere around this area of the coast, were millions of years old, dating from periods of ‘deep time’ that are hard to grasp even today. Generally the fossils were unknown at the time of Mary’s discoveries, but some scholars were beginning to understand what they were.

Mary Anning lived out her life against a backdrop of long-recorded history. She was later described as ‘a being of imagination’.4 Did the young Mary gaze out to sea as the mist rolled in, and fancy she had been there at crucial points in Lyme’s history? Near the town, Homo sapiens had left his marks from the distant past, from the Iron Age hillfort on top of Pilsden Pen, at 909 feet the highest hill in Dorset, and the earthworks at Lambert Castle, to Lyme’s very own Cobb, much, much more recent but still hundreds of years old. The Cobb was the central feature of Lyme Regis, and the reason why the little port had survived, even thrived, for centuries.

When searching for fossils, as she walked along under menacing Black Ven cliff to Charmouth, did Mary imagine that she could see the thirty-five fearsome dragon-prowed Viking warships approaching, in ad 831, on one of their frequent raids on that place, ‘where they made cruel ravage and slaughter’?5 Standing on dominant Black Ven cliff, where the warning fire beacon had been lit on 31 July 1588, could she clearly ‘see’ the two Lyme ships heading out into Lyme Bay to join the English fleet commanded by Drake, and view its first skirmish with the Spanish Armada?

History flowed all around her. Did she ever imagine that she had been there in April 1644 during the Civil War, when Prince Maurice and 6,000 over-confident men attacked the ‘little vile fishing village’ intending to make it ‘breakfast work’? For the next eight weeks they unsuccessfully laid siege to the town from the land side. Flights of flaming arrows dipped in tar and hot cannon set ablaze the thatched houses at the west end of the town, as the intrepid women of fiercely Puritan Lyme dressed themselves as men to help confuse and repel the attackers.

When young Mary looked out to sea she might very well have seen French ships hovering – and she would not have been dreaming. For centuries there had been sightings of French vessels, raids and attacks along this coast. And the Francophobia was firmly grounded on reality. In addition to the menace of French privateers, the country was at war with France. When Mary was born in 1799, Britain had already been at war for six years and would continue to be so for the first sixteen years of her life. To a town on the south coast of England, the wars with the French were not remote. By December 1802 anti-French feeling was high, and between 1803 and 1805 an invasion scare reached panic proportions. The Napoleonic Wars resumed in 1805 and only came to an end with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

To the west of the Cobb, and taking in the border between Dorset and Devon, the wild, forested Undercliff, formed by countless landslides, stretches for 8 miles between Lyme and Axmouth. With every step Mary could not help but walk over ‘serpent-stones’ (ammonites), some several feet wide, so many that they formed a pavement, and fossils beyond number on Monmouth Beach. This was the place where James Scott, Duke of Monmouth (1649–85), a natural son of Charles II, chose to land in 1685, unfurl the royal standard and proclaim himself king. When his rebellion failed, the local people paid in blood, and ‘Hanging’ Judge Jeffreys ordered that twelve men be hanged, drawn and quartered at this spot on the foreshore.

Did Mary ever sense that her story would become an important part of the history of Lyme Regis, or even the most famous?

* * *

Mary’s parents, Richard Anning (c. 1766–1810) and his wife Mary (‘Molly’) (c. 1764–1842), married at Blandford parish church in August 1793. Richard probably came from Colyton,6 a market town on the River Coly in East Devon (inland from Beer Head), only 9 miles from Lyme Regis, at a time when the fortunes of the latter were known to be improving. Lyme was becoming a summer seaside resort, attracting well-to-do middle-class visitors.

Mary’s mother, Mary (‘Molly’) Moore, after whom she was named, came from Blandford Forum, a handsome Georgian town not far from Lyme. It was also the name given to an older sister, born in about 1794, who had perished in a Christmas-time house fire in 1798 recorded in the Bath Chronicle: ‘A child, four years of age, of Mr R. Anning, a cabinet-maker of Lyme, was left by the mother about five minutes . . . in a room where there were some shavings by the fire . . . The girl’s clothes caught fire and she was so dreadfully burnt as to cause her death.’ Of Molly and Richard’s four female infants, three died: Martha, the first Mary and Elizabeth. Of five male babies, four rapidly departed this life: the first Henry, the second Henry, Percival and Richard.

Joseph and his younger sister Mary were the only two children to survive to adulthood out of a family of at least nine children, perhaps ten. In those days it was not unusual for infants to die. The Annings’ immediate neighbours in unfashionable, unhealthy Cockmoile Square included John Bennett (1762–1852) and his wife Maria (c. 1763–1831), who lost three infants in four years, also at the end of the eighteenth century.7 Infant mortality was still high decades later in the first available census (1851): 123 babies died per 1,000 in West Dorset, but this was better than the national average of 150.

Happily, the year 1799 was a healthy one for the newly born in Cockmoile Square where the Annings lived, because not only did (the second) Mary survive, but so too did Ann, born the same year to the Bennetts next door. The Anning house had a double bow window in front, and comprised three floors and a cellar with windows. In the confined area of the Square, close neighbours would have been very close indeed. The Bennetts would remain in the Square for fifty years.

Oddly shaped Cockmoile Square, with its bizarre arrangement of dwellings, was built out almost over the River Lym, with the backs of the houses sensibly facing the sea, but still dangerously close to the foreshore. It was a place for artisans and their families. By trade a cordwainer or shoemaker, John Bennett was at heart a musician, and also an entrepreneur. In the 1820s he opened his own private baths, constructed between his sizeable leasehold property in the Square and the sea, despite the proximity of Jefferd’s Baths,8 open since 1804. That it was a viable proposition illustrates the increasing popularity of Lyme as a seaside resort for the discerning classes.

Richard Anning was a cabinet-maker or carpenter, but he also collected fossils to sell. Clearly a man of independent mind, and with limited time to hunt for fossils, he made use of Sundays and religious holidays including Good Friday and saints’ days for his rambles. He was a dissenter, a Congregationalist, as were the Bennetts. The dissenters, too, would have disapproved of his working on Sundays.

Occasionally Richard ferreted out fossils even on weekdays, which angered his wife, who ‘was wont to ridicule his pursuit of such things’,9 according to George Roberts, Lyme’s schoolmaster and first historian. Money was always short in the endless struggle to feed, clothe and keep the family warm when sharp and penetrating ocean breezes hit the little town tucked so picturesquely in its combe.

Remnants of stories that have come down to us indicate that Richard Anning had a strong, distinctive character. He was one of the ringleaders of a destructive mob during a bread riot in Lyme in March 1800.10 No one was prosecuted because no one would testify. It was a time, from 1799 to 1801, of bad harvests, when costs spiralled, the price of wheat went up and there were acute local food shortages, especially of the staple bread, since there was no European corn on the market, owing to the war.

DISSENTERS

In Lyme and in all Dorset there had long been a tradition of religious nonconformity. A succession of sovereigns ordered funds to be taken from the Customs at Lyme to maintain the Cobb, a grant withdrawn by Catholic Mary because the ‘inhabitants were then reputed as heretics for their religion’.* Protestant Elizabeth I, who referred to the Cobb as the ‘great and sumptuous structure, built with mighty stones and rocks’, reinstated the grant.†

In Charles I’s reign, the Cavaliers defended the divine right of kings and the State Church of England, while the Puritan Roundheads preferred to worship ‘by the word’, often with dynamic pastors. On Cromwell’s victory, the State Church was abolished, The Book of Common Prayer banned and thousands of clergy lost their living. After the Restoration, the situation was reversed and revenge sought. Nearly all the Lyme townsfolk were dissenters, belonging to sects such as the Baptists, Methodists, Quakers and Congregationalists. In nearby Uplyme there were also Anabaptists and Plymouth Brethren.

In Lyme Regis, the Congregationalists met at the Independents’ Chapel on Coombe Street. The ‘Church Book’, dating from 1653, is preserved in a museum in the original building.

Not conforming to the State religion presented an oppressive number of legal liabilities. Dissenters could marry legally only in the State church, which was also the only church from which a valid baptisimal certificate could be obtained. All burial grounds were, initially, owned by the State church; it was also the church to which dissenters were required to pay tithes unless very poor. They were not allowed to attend university and were excluded from many professions. Nor were they permitted to vote until the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835.

* George Roberts, Roberts’s History of Lyme Regis and Charmouth, London, Samuel Bagster and William Pickering, 1834, pp. 61–2.

† Ibid., p. 226.

The poverty was so widespread in Dorset that people made money any way they could. Even a family’s hair was an asset that could be harvested and sold to make wigs and hairpieces; a family’s crop of tresses might be farmed out at a price. The barber came along and cut off all the hair, then rubbed the numbskull with oil, and returned when the hair had achieved a marketable length once more.11 The Annings were fortunate in that fossils were close to hand to provide them with some extra income. From a table in front of his house/shop in the tiny Square, Richard displayed and sold anything interesting or unusual that he or his children had found.

No one knew what the strange, alluring fossils were, so names were invented to explain these ‘curiosities’, and legends grew around them. Among the variety of colloquially named wares on offer were:

‘verteberries’ or ‘crocodile teeth’, believed to come from ‘crocodiles’ (these were individual ichthyosaur vertebrae)

‘petrified serpents’, ‘snakestones’ or ‘serpent-stones’, thought to have once been serpents (ammonites, an extinct group of molluscs that looked something like the modern squid but with a hard coiled shell). These were the most common fossils and were also known as ‘Indies fingers’, ‘Cornu Ammonis’ or ‘cornumoniuses’ or ‘cornemonius’, ‘arbtusus’ and ‘birchii’, while ‘golden serpents’ were pyritised ammonites. ‘Paper Nautilus’ was Tragophylloceras loscombi, a smooth ammonite

‘ladies’ fingers’, ‘devil’s fingers’, ‘St Peter’s fingers’, ‘arrowheads’ or ‘thunderstones’, believed by some to be ‘thunderbolts’ from God (belemnites, an extinct group of molluscs related to ammonites and similar to the modern squid; they had a hard, internal, bullet-shaped skeleton)

‘Angel’s wings’ or ‘Cupid’s wings’ (masses of marcasite or crystalline iron sulphide)

‘Turbot’, ‘John Dory’, ‘John Dory’s bones’ (Dapedium politum, a flat, plate-like primitive fish)

‘Scuttle’ (a primitive cuttlefish)

‘Devil’s Toenails’ (sections through bivalve shells, related to the oyster Gryphaea, an extinct oyster-like bivalve mollusc. It had a thick shell, which in fossil form superficially resembles a chunky white toenail)

Fossil shells.12

* * *

In Mary’s day the main entrance to tiny Cockmoile Square was on the seaward side from Bridge Street, hard by Buddle Bridge over the Lym (sometimes called the Buddle), as the river – also the town sewer – nears the ocean at the back of the Square. It sits at the lowest part of hilly Lyme.

The Square itself was a small irregular space – roughly the open space in front of the museum today – with the old town in front and the tempestuous sea very close behind (the ancient sea wall can still be seen). ‘Cockmoile’ is an early West Country word for lock-up, and indeed the jail stood at the end of the Guildhall on the corner of the entrance to the Square from Bridge Street. In the Square stood the stocks, last used in 1837. According to Lyme’s schoolmaster George Roberts, ‘Cockmoile’ referred to a cock crowing and to labour. Another version has been suggested: ‘Cockenwhile’, which might be a corruption of ‘Coquinaille’, meaning a pack of thieves. Everyone seemed to have his or her own interpretation of the name.

To the west of Cockmoile Square was another larger square with the Assembly Rooms on the site of warehouses and the old Cobb Gate in a cramped position on the seafront, and opposite were the Custom House13 and the prestigious old Three Cups Hotel. Broad Street, the town’s steep main street, rises sharply up the hill, and from the top it ‘rushes [back] down to the sea’, in Jane Austen’s words, to meet the square. Opposite Cockmoile Square is narrow Coombe Street, the main street in medieval times, where the plain Independents’ Chapel is located,14 which the Annings attended. There were seven mills on the small River Lym, but Lyme was mainly a town of cottages on hillsides with sloping gardens back and front.

Before the turnpike road was constructed in 1758, thus opening up the village and linking it to Dorchester and Exeter, Lyme was a cul-de-sac. No wheeled vehicles could enter, because of the deep, narrow and muddy lanes and the steep, plunging hills. Goods landed at the port, woollen cloth made by the mills on the river, even fish carried in panniers, all were transported by packhorse teams that gathered by the red-brick George Inn. This medieval inn, where Monmouth himself had stayed so long ago, offered extensive stabling for ‘troops of pack-horses’.15 When the inn’s gates were shut for the night, it was said that the buildings and activity within resembled a small town. From the George, the packhorses headed up Coombe Street and out to the rest of the world.

Turning right (east) from Cockmoile Square, the road soon makes an abrupt left turn with the Butter Market on the outer corner. Up Church Street stands the Church of St Michael the Archangel, whose six bells can clearly be heard in the Anning house down in the Square. On the way into church the men of a former generation paused to untie the strings of their knee-breeches so they could kneel, and working-class women wearing the whittle – a blanket-shawl dyed crimson – made a ‘river of red’ flowing out of church or chapel at the end of a service.16

From the bend one can turn right into Long Entry towards the seafront. Long Entry leads to a route that ran across the forbidding cliff called Black Ven to Charmouth, an area Mary knew well.17 The path also led to Gun Cliff, close to the Anning home, where four guns had been sited but were seldom used.

Doubtless Mary Anning would still recognise Lyme Regis today because of the Cobb and ‘the remarkable situation of the town’,18 although there have been many changes.

* * *

The religious life of Lyme was organised around the church and two dissenting chapels. The three Sunday Schools were ‘happily calculated to instruct the ignorant, and improve the lower class of people’. From about 8 years of age Mary attended the Dissenters’ Sunday School, where in addition to religious studies she learned the three Rs.19 Her signed copy of the Theological Magazine and Review, Volume 1 for 1801, given to her by her brother, still exists. Interestingly it contains an essay stating that God created the universe in six days, and another essay encouraging dissenters to study geology. On the educational front there were three boarding-schools, two for young ladies and one for young gentlemen, the uncompromising emphasis being on ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’.

Fossiling had long been a tradition in the town. One of two collectors, according to Roberts, was William Lock (c. 1739–1814), nicknamed ‘Captain Cury’, ‘cury’ being a local name for ‘curiosities’. Fossils had first been exploited at nearby Charmouth, on the main road between Dorchester and Exeter. The bored passengers in the horse-drawn coaches provided a steady stream of new customers for Lock’s ammonites and other ‘curiosities’.

At Lyme a fossil collector named Mr South (who may have worked for the Duchess of Portland) taught Richard Anning.20 Another early fossil collector was Mr Cruikshanks (or Crookshanks), whom Richard knew and sometimes accompanied fossiling. His unusual method of investigation and excavation involved prodding the rocks with a long pole ‘like a garden hoe’ to scratch for hidden treasure. His fate is perhaps indicative of just how precarious a living was to be made from collecting and selling fossils. In 1802, when the coal-merchant business he had left behind in London’s Piccadilly stopped sending him an annuity, he found the income from finding and selling fossils was not enough to sustain him, so he killed himself by jumping off Gun Cliff into the sea, only a few yards from Cockmoile Square.

As a child Mary and her older brother Joseph (1795–1849) often accompanied their father on his walks to rootle out fossils, so learning the best places to find these unknown creatures from earlier mysterious worlds came to them as naturally as walking, their young minds absorbing information like sponges. Some may have accused Richard Anning of exposing his children to danger, as no one could deny that fossiling was hazardous work even for an adult.

Richard made his daughter a fossil extractor, a type of hammer21 with which she was able to release smaller finds from their prison of rock. Later she generously gave her father credit for her mastery of fossils. This was no doubt true of her initial basic knowledge, but her deep understanding of these primeval creatures, largely self-taught, was exceptional, becoming almost instinctive.

Richard Anning’s fossiling was noted in a letter written in July 1810 by an early fossil-collector to visit Lyme. The gentleman was James Johnson (1764–1844), writing to another collector, William Cunnington (1754–1810):

There is a person at Lyme who collects for sale by the name of Anning, a cabinet maker and I believe as men are, may be depended upon, I would advise you calling upon him at Lyme . . . as early as you can spare, you should walk to Charmouth [where James Johnson had once lived] and ask a confounded rogue of the name of Lock to call upon you . . . upon first sight give him a Grog or a Pint, this will buy him to your interest and all crocodiles he may meet with will most assuredly be offered you first.22

To reveal the jewel-like beauty of ammonites, it was Richard who reputedly first came up with the idea of slicing them in half to expose the crystalline calcite infilling the chambers.

Those inhabiting the fledgling world of geology formed an intimate group, and Mary was in the right place to get to know most of them. She became acquainted with several eminent pioneer geologists very early on. One future colleague was the boy Henry De La Beche (1796–1855), later to become the greatest geologist associated with the area. Another was Jean André De Luc, almost a Renaissance man so varied were his interests and abilities. They were close at hand from her earliest years, and, in the case of De La Beche, the Annings’ fossiling probably drew him into the field in which he would make such a great contribution.

Jean André De Luc (1727–1817) was a highly esteemed Swiss natural philosopher, politician and merchant who had been prominent in turbulent Genevan politics, supporting Rousseau’s Social Contract. As a result of the political upheaval and a trade embargo, his business failed.

De Luc arrived in England in 1773, secured a position at the Court of George III, and decided to pursue his love of geological investigation, one of many interests, to which he contributed much valuable research. Geology combined his love of the natural beauty in mountains with his interest in the history of the earth and how it related to man. He published a number of treatises and articles, especially on geology, and was highly regarded throughout his life in both Switzerland and England. In fact De Luc may have been the first to use the term ‘geology’ in the modern sense.

As part of his research into the character of rock strata, Jean André De Luc began exploring the geology of the Dorset coast in 1805, when De La Beche was a Lyme schoolboy of 11 and Mary was 6. De Luc left an account of a walk from Charmouth to Lyme in which he says: ‘It would be difficult to find a country which afforded more agreeable walks’ – a compliment indeed from a native of Switzerland. He continued: ‘As it was low water, there was a wide strand uncovered below the cliffs, which extend as far as Lyme, a distance of two miles; and along this strand I proceeded.’23 He noted the changes in strata, the carbonate content of the clays and the inclusions within them, the calcite-filled ammonites and the thin layers of fibrous calcite, known as ‘Beef’.

Richard Anning had built up a group of contacts, and was about to add another one. On arriving in Lyme that September De Luc had encountered an unnamed man of whom historian W.D. Lang stated ‘there can be no harm in supposing to have been Mary Anning’s father’.24 Lang’s description does fit with what is known of Richard Anning. He writes of

one of the inhabitants, who knows this coast very well, because he visits it from time to time, in search of fossils which he sells to the strangers who resort hither; Lyme being a place much frequented for seabathing. At his house I saw some find [sic] cornu Ammonis, [ammonites] sawn through the middle and various other marine fossils, proceeding from the above cliffs, and other places.

Together they went to view the ‘hill which was crumbling down’ by the church, and dangerous to both town and church. They discussed the very narrow space between the church and the disintegrating hill on the seafront, and the man assumed to be Richard Anning said that he could remember the area being much wider and containing gardens. In previous times it had been the promenade, but ‘all the ground lost here had detached itself by broad sections, which had successively slidden down the slope to the bottom’. He himself had been there during one of these slips on Church cliffs, and narrowly escaped being carried away with the earth to be crushed to death below.25

Unfortunately, Richard’s luck did not hold. Late one night in the winter of 1809/10, while walking to Charmouth, he fell off the boggy slopes of the ominous-sounding Black Ven cliff, ‘black’ because it looked dark and forbidding, ‘ven’ meaning ‘fen’ (boggy) in the Dorset dialect, ‘having diverged from the path in a field on a summit of the hill’.26 Perhaps he was unwell, tired or over-confident, because with his experience he should have known better. As one of Europe’s largest coastal landslides, the area today is still very unstable, and a dangerous maze if one leaves the paths.

Weakened by the fall, Richard Anning died of consumption in the autumn of 1810, aged only 44. On 15 October 1810 he was buried at St Michael’s. Consumption or contagious tuberculosis was associated with deprivation, and accounted for one-quarter of all deaths in Europe at the time. He left his heavily pregnant wife and two children almost destitute, with debts of £120 (almost £3,000 today). A baby, Richard, named after his father, would be born and christened late in 1810, and follow his father to the grave in 1811.

After the death of the head of the household, an already hard life became much more difficult for the family. Their main source of income now was charity. Richard’s widow, Molly, applied to the parish for support, and received relief from the Overseers of the Parish Poor – a trifling amount for food and clothing, about three shillings a week, which might have been paid in bread and other staple food. It was not much, but it was something, and they continued to receive these small amounts – which must have caused them great humiliation – until around 1816.27

At the time of her father’s death Mary was almost 11 and Joseph about 15. It seems Mary did not attend school after this, but her education would continue for a lifetime on the shale of Lyme – a practical, hands-on kind of learning and research – with her intelligent mind absorbing information that cannot be learned from books alone. It would prepare her to become ‘the most eminent female fossilist’.28