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Mary Anning (1799-1847) of Lyme; 'The Greatest Fossilist the World Ever Knew'

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Mary Anning (1799-1847) of Lyme; 'The Greatest Fossilist the World Ever Knew' BJHS, 1995, 28, 257-84 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS Mary Anning (1799-1847) of Lyme; 'the greatest fossilist the world ever knew' HUGH TORRENS* The historian has an obligation to the specific before he plunges into the general, and it is this responsibility that unifies the manuscript and the manufact.1 INTRODUCTION If one wanted to discover the significance of an individual of English extraction who had died during the Victorian era, the first two obvious sources to try would surely be the Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter DNB)2 and the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books to 1955 (hereafter BLC).3 If we use these to explore Mary Anning, we find she appears in the DNB, but only in the Supplement, published in 1901, of 'accidental omissions or people overlooked in the main Dictionary'. This was none the less a real achievement, in view of the 'very poor' representation of women in the original DNB.A She also appears in the BLC but, unsurprisingly, not as an author since she herself published nothing,5 but only as the subject of a slim volume of eighteen pages, The Heroine of Lyme Regis - The Story of Mary Anning, the Celebrated Geologist by one H. A. Forde published, according to the BLC in 1925, by a writer apparently active from 1879 to 1925.6 * Department of Geology, Keele University, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG. I thank the British Society for the History of Science for allowing me to spend some of my best days in its company. I am conscious of the problems any male, however honourably female in attitude, will have in writing on the history of a woman even one so clearly masculine, in some eyes, as Mary Anning the third. I have gathered enormous debts to Muriel Arber (Cambridge), Ben Bather (London), Liz-Anne Bawden (Lyme), Sheila Brecknell (Oxford), Geoffrey Cantor (Leeds), Kate Charlesworth (Edinburgh), Sheila Cole (Solana Beach, California), Lawrence Darton (Lewes), Marie Day (Toronto), Edward Ford (Cambridge), John Fowles (Lyme), Tom Goodhue (New York), Barbara Lambert (Concord), Wolfhart Langer (Bonn), Martin Levitt (Philadelphia), Stella Pierce (Bath), Mike Taylor (Edinburgh), John Thackray and Joy Whitby (London) for their kind help. Brian Fender's news provided final inspiration to ' take up my pen' here at Keele. Funds provided by the Royal Society of London and the Friends of Lyme Regis Museum have made the hunting possible. 1 W. E. Washburn, 'Manuscripts and manufacts', American Archivist (1964), 27, 245-50, on 247. 2 The Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols., London, 1885-1900. 3 The British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books, 263 vols., London, 1965-66, v, 774. 4 C. Matthew, 'The New Dictionary of National Biography', History Today (1993), 43, 10—13, on 12. 5 Her only publication was an extract of a letter to E. Charlesworth which he then published, in his Magazine of Natural History (1839), new series 3, 605. 6 H. A. Forde, The Heroine of Lyme Regis - The Story of Mary Anning, the Celebrated Geologist, London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co. Ltd, [1925]. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.139, on 30 Sep 2021 at 04:23:56, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087400033161 258 Hugh Torrens On the other hand Mary Anning does not appear in the (United States) National Union Catalog of pre-1956 Imprints,7 suggesting first, that the above book is rare and that secondly, she was of no interest to North American readers. Yet paradoxically the epithet, 'the greatest fossilist the world ever knew' in my title, comes from a North American manuscript source, and seems to be an annotation made there.8 MARY ANNING (1799-1847), WHAT DID SHE DO? A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY Her story starts with her father Richard Anning (c. 1766-1810) from a family of dissenters, originating, I feel sure, from Colyton in Devon.9 By 1793 Richard Anning had been attracted to the newly emerging, but still small, sea-bathing resort of Lyme Regis in nearby Dorset, where his skills as cabinet maker and carpenter could be put to good use. On 8 August 1793 he married at Blandford, Mary Moore of Blandford.10 This union immediately created a first Mary Anning (c. 1764—1842), whom I shall hereafter call Molly to avoid confusion. This couple had perhaps as many as ten children, some of whose births and baptisms are recorded in the Registers of the Congregational chapel at Lyme11 and those of the Parish Church there.12 Only two of these children reached maturity, such was infant mortality in a then unhealthy Dorset. The eldest was Joseph Anning (1796-1849) and the famous, third, Mary Anning was the other (hereafter Mary), who was born on 21 May 1799. To complicate matters she had been named after an elder sister, a second Mary (c. 1794—1798), who had just perished in a house fire at Lyme. News of this Christmas-time tragedy proved too sensitive for the local newspapers and was only reported a considerable distance away in Bath.13 So there were three Mary Annings, even of Lyme Regis, only the last of whom need really concern us, but the previously forgotten first one has certainly been conflated with the last in history. To add to the drama of being named after a burnt-to-death sister, Mary Anning was to achieve real local notoriety whilst still one year old. On 19 August 1800 a troop of horsemen was giving a display in the Rack Field just above her home in Lyme. In torrential rain a group of four found shelter under an elm tree: a grown woman Elizabeth Haskings, two children Fanny Fowler and Martha Drower and Mary aged 14 months.14 The tree was struck by lightning and Mary was the only survivor, being revived when placed in warm water. With these two juvenile crises, Mary Anning's curiosity was ensured and because of the lightning strike, it was even noticed, with twenty years' hindsight, that Mary 'from that time, from a dull child, became very intelligent'.15 7 The National Union Catalog pre-1956 Imprints, 754 vols., London, 1968-81. 8 This annotation is on an undated letter from Mary Anning to one of the Misses Philpot of Lyme, in the collections of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. 9 Details will hopefully appear in my forthcoming biography. 10 H. S. Torrens, 'Mary Anning's ancestry', Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries (1981), 34, 341. 11 Public Record Office, London, RG 4/462. 12 Preserved in the Dorset County Record Office, Dorchester. 13 Bath Chronicle, 27 December 1798, 3. 14 W.D.Lang, 'Mary Anning's escape from lightning', Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society (1959), 80, 91-3. 15 G. Roberts, The History of Lyme-Regis, Sherborne, 1823, 128. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.139, on 30 Sep 2021 at 04:23:56, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087400033161 Presidential Address 259 Richard was an occasional fossil collector, selling them as curios to the seaside visitors now coming to Lyme Regis. The extent of his involvement is made clear in a letter written in July 1810 by one of the earliest gentlemanly collectors to come to Lyme, James Johnson (1764—1844) of Bristol, to another pioneer in the field of palaeontology, William Cunnington (1754-1810). This noted: it is some years since I was a resident at Charmouth... 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...then as early as you can spare, you should walk to Charmouth and ask a confounded rogue of the name of Lock [William Lock (c. 1739-1814)] 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.18 But Richard died a few months later, in November, of the combined effects of having fallen over a cliff on his way to Charmouth and of consumption, aged only 44. This left his family unprovided for, the fossil treasures of Lyme Regis, about which he was clearly well informed, still undescribed, but his children well instructed in how to collect fossils. The remarkable 'first' fossil discovery, which was later to make Mary Anning's name, was made under these circumstances, at a date variously given between 1809 and 1811 and at any age between 10 and 12 years old. This was Mary's supposed finding of the 'first Ichthyosaurus'. The truth is complicated, but clearly it was not the first such 'crocodile' to have been found, even at Lyme Regis, as Johnson's letter makes quite plain. In addition, according to a well-informed source, Mary's brother Joseph had been the first to find the actual specimen in question, below Black Ven in 1811. It was Mary who located the remainder of the skeleton nearly twelve months later in 1812.17 This specimen was merely the first to come to the attention of the gentlemanly scientists in London, one of whom described the specimen and illustrated it with four plates including the skull in 181418 but who then failed, thereby starting a long tradition, to note any information about who had actually 'collected' it.
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