Curiosity (54 page)

Well, what are we to make of this? Anning scholars, perhaps reluctant to see romantic speculation overshadow Anning’s long-delayed scientific reputation, have tended to dismiss these entries as the fantasy of an over-excitable teenager. Mary’s distress was caused by her brother Joseph’s marriage, they suggest. Or by the thwarted hope that Miss Philpot would elevate her socially – a more plausible theory, although it does not quite account for Anna Maria Pinney’s excitement. In fact, I find it impossible to read these journal entries as anything other than a veiled account of a romantic attachment; one that, after the initial crushing disappointment, continued to tempt Mary with the prospect of illicit love. And so I think we must put our minds to the question of who, among Mary’s acquaintances through those years, might have raised her hopes and caused her so much pain and confusion.

I think we can dismiss William Conybeare. He was adamantly blind to Mary’s work, and in a rare mention of Anning in a letter, he gets her name wrong. What about Thomas Birch? He was more than twice Mary’s age, but he was amazingly generous to
the Annings, and a letter of the period mentions salacious rumours linking Colonel Birch and Mary. Then there is William Buckland, with whom Mary worked closely for decades. If Mary Anning had set her hopes on Buckland, his 1824 marriage to Mary Moreland might indeed have been felt as a “Satanic betrayal.” So I think that both Birch and Buckland must be considered candidates, although Buckland’s piety makes him less likely to have embarked on a “season of worldly happiness” with Mary.

As for Henry De la Beche, he seems a man inclined by temperament to chafe against social constraints. He was indeed expelled from Marlow for insubordination, and his drawings and journals are satiric and irreverent. And he was a true friend to Mary Anning for many decades. When Cuvier questioned Mary Anning’s integrity regarding the plesiosaur, De la Beche wrote from Jamaica in her defence. In 1830, his drawing
Duria antiquior
(a detail of which forms the cover of
Curiosity
) was printed and sold as a benefit for the Annings. At Mary’s death in 1847, it was Henry De la Beche who delivered a eulogy at the Geological Society, the only time Mary Anning’s name finds its way into the Society’s proceedings. De la Beche’s separation from his wife and his departure for Jamaica occurred the same year as the Buckland marriage, 1824.

Aside from the appeal of these facts, I was irresistibly drawn to Henry De la Beche as a fictional subject, and I wrote
Curiosity
not as a historical argument regarding his relationship with Mary Anning, but as an attempt to imagine what such a romance, so impossible and so full of possibility, would have meant to both of them. The progressive attitudes De la Beche expresses in his journals were terribly at odds with the reality of his life: he was a slave owner at a time when the conscience of England had awakened to the atrocity of slavery. All the individuals working with the fossils at Lyme Regis were confronted with the need to
profoundly revise their view of the world and their place within it, but the challenges for Henry De la Beche were more personal and profound.

Curiosity
is broadly (and usually factually) consistent with the historic record, although I have invented freely where no record exists. Almost all the characters, including such minor figures as Mrs. Stock and James Wheaton, are based on real individuals. As for chronology, time in
Curiosity
has had to conform occasionally to the higher purposes of the story, as it did for William Buckland’s God.

What happened to these people? Henry De la Beche’s 1824 journey to Jamaica did not make an emancipationist of him; instead, he used the occasion to write a book urging the humane treatment of slaves. When he returned to England, he resumed work as a geologist, and in 1842, he was knighted for his contribution to the science. Henry and Letitia divorced in 1826. Sir Henry De la Beche did not remarry and died in London in 1855.

The Megalosaurus announced by William Buckland at the famous meeting of February 1824 was the first primeval creature to be given the name
dinosaur
. William Buckland outlived both Mary and Henry. He died of dementia in 1856; an autopsy revealed a long-time tubercular inflammation of the brain.

The Khoisan woman known as Saartjie Baartman was exhibited in London from 1810 to 1814. Henry De la Beche’s visit to this exhibit is fiction, but his Paris journal reports a tour of the Cuvier salon where her body was displayed. Her remains circulated amongst Paris museums until 1974. After negotiations by the Griqua National Council and the South African government, they were returned to Africa in 2002. She was buried in her hometown in the Eastern Cape.

Mary Anning continued to collect, locating the first British pterodactyl in 1828. She never married and struggled intermittently to put bread on the table. She died of breast cancer at forty-seven and shares a gravestone with her brother Joseph in the churchyard in Lyme Regis. Many of her finds can be viewed in the Natural History Museum, London, credited to the gentlemen who acquired them from her. The efforts to establish Mary Anning’s scientific credentials did not begin until the 1930s, but Mary Anning was never really lost to local lore – the well-known tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore” is almost certainly about her.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All Biblical quotations in
Curiosity
are from the King James Version. The lines from William Cowper’s “The Castaway” are from
The New Oxford Book of English Verse
(Helen Gardiner, ed., Oxford University Press, 1972). Richard Anning’s hymn is based on Psalm 50 and is credited to E.J. Coale.

Thank you to the National Museum of Wales for permission to reproduce a detail of Henry De la Beche’s
Duria antiquior
as the cover image. De la Beche was an avid journalist, and his beautifully illustrated notebooks can be found at the National Museum of Wales. The journal entries ascribed to him in
Curiosity
are almost entirely invented. They allude to his actual journal only in the references to the Catholic Church and to Italy, and reproduce it only in one entry, which I take verbatim from his Paris journal: De la Beche’s cryptic account of his visit to the Cuvier salon.

Among the many print and Internet sources I consulted in writing
Curiosity
, I would especially like to acknowledge
The History and Antiquities of the Borough of Lyme Regis and Charmouth
by Mary Anning’s contemporary George Roberts (first published in 1834 and reissued in 1996 through the Lyme Regis
Museum); Christopher McGowan’s
The Dragon Seekers
(Perseus Publishing, 2001); on Saartjie Baartman, the writings of Yvette Abrahams;
The Prince of Pleasure
by J.B. Priestley, a delightful account of Regency England (to which I owe Uncle Clement’s story of the locks of hair);
The Dinosaur Hunters
by Deborah Cadbury (Fourth Estate, 2001);
The Meaning of Fossils
by Martin Rudwick (University of Chicago Press, 1972); and Hugh Torrens’s definitive summary of scholarship on Mary Anning: “Mary Anning (1799–1847) of Lyme: The Greatest Fossilist the World Ever Knew” (
British Journal for the History of Science
, 28). Shirley Brown’s show Vestiges (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2005) was a revelation regarding the aesthetics of bird skeletons.

It was a great pleasure to conduct research at the British Library and at the Natural History Museum, London, where many of the fossils and documents that figure in
Curiosity
are preserved. Anyone researching the life and accomplishments of Mary Anning owes a fundamental debt to the work of W.D. Lang, whose assiduous efforts rescued many papers from oblivion, and whose own studies of Anning’s contribution to British paleontology are available through the Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archeological Society. For information about Dorset in the early nineteenth century, I’m indebted to the writings of Jo Draper and to the novelist John Fowles, who was curator of the Lyme Regis Museum from 1979 to 1988, and whose passion for the area produced detailed articles and monographs.

A warm thank you to Tom Sharpe, Curator (Paleontology and Archives), National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, for his generous help and insightful observations about Henry De la Beche. Thanks to the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre for a fascinating Plesiosaurus dig in an escarpment in southern
Manitoba, and especially to my informative guide Evan Nordquist. Thanks to Dr. Gordon McOuat, Director, History of Science and Technology Program, University of King’s College, and to Dr. Jenny Cripps, Collections Curator at the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester. Thank you to everyone at the wonderful Lyme Regis Museum: Mary Godwin, Curator; Paddy Howe for fossiling excursions; and the museum’s team of volunteer researchers. Thank you as well to Bonnie Bodnar in Interlibrary Loan at the Winnipeg Public Library.

I’m grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Winnipeg Arts Council for grants that made the research and writing of this book possible. My appreciation also to the Banff Centre for the Arts, where a section of this novel was written at the 2007 Writers Studio, and to Riding Mountain National Park and the Manitoba Arts Council for a stay at the Deep Bay Artists’ Residency.

Thanks to readers who offered feedback on portions of the manuscript at an early stage: Susan Remple Letkemann, Michael Helm, Edna Alford, and Martha Magor. For a wonderfully insightful reading, I am indebted to Greg Hollingshead.

My deep appreciation to my editor, Lara Hinchberger, for her fine judgment, vision, and confidence. Many thanks to my agent, Anne McDermid, who has been unfailingly enthusiastic about this project since I shared the idea with her almost a decade ago. Thank you to Zoë Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge & White in London, for forthright advice.

I’m so grateful to my friends and family for their interest and encouragement and for companionship on trips to Lyme Regis. My appreciation and love to my daughter Caitlin. To Bill, thank you for the gift of a pyrite ammonite and for everything else.