by Olivia Laing
In the undulating landscape around Lewes Mantell carried out his earliest explorations, turning up the belemnites and bivalves that betrayed the chalk’s origins on the bed of an ancient ocean. In 1816 he married, and after that he shifted his investigations north, focusing particularly on a patch of the Weald about ten miles shy of Lewes. The ground here was sandstone, and the fossils it contained were very different from the marine remains he’d become accustomed to unearthing. When his preliminary excavations at Whiteman’s Green quarry revealed large bones of a kind he’d never seen before, Mantell tipped off a quarryman and was soon receiving packages of random body parts: disarticulated forms that arrived sometimes individually and sometimes as a mass embedded in rock. He worked on them by night after his doctor’s rounds were finished, teasing the bones free with a chisel in the drawing room at Castle Place, the beautiful townhouse he’d bought beneath the castle.
The sheer size of the bones was baffling. Mantell thought at first they might belong to an ichthyosaur, but he was disabused of this notion when he began to notice that some of the rocks from Whiteman’s Green contained traces of tropical vegetation: feathery fronds that resembled palms and tree ferns; prints of leaves that looked strangely like euphorbias, which grew in Asia and were not native to these islands. If the strata he was investigating had, as he suspected, once lain beneath a now eroded layer of chalk, then it seemed he had stumbled upon the remains of a tropical world, submerged at some unguessable period by a sea that had itself long since receded. This made the size of the bones all the more intriguing. By the early nineteenth century fossils of giant mammals were regularly being found in Europe, among them mammoths, mastodons and some sort of ancestor of the elephant. But these were always found in Tertiary rock, whereas Mantell was almost certain his bones came from a deeper and correspondingly far older layer. Ancient crocodiles had also been unearthed on the coast of France, and this had begun to seem the likeliest source for the bones when Mary Ann Mantell, Gideon’s wife, stumbled across something strange.
Mantell left several written versions of this story, none of which quite tally in detail or date. What seems clear is that at some point in 1820 or 1821, his wife came across a giant tooth – perhaps more than one – on the road near Whiteman’s Green, where it lay amid some stones recently hauled from the quarry. This tooth, which Mantell sometimes claimed he’d found himself, was the key to the bone puzzle, though it would take some four or five years to properly decode. More were soon found, and close inspection immediately ruled out the possibility that they’d derived from any sort of crocodile. They clearly belonged to a herbivore, being designed for grinding and much eroded by use. Even in their worn state they were huge: up to 1.4 inches long and, in Mantell’s own words, ‘so remarkable that the most superficial observer would have been struck with their appearance as something novel and interesting’. If they weren’t from a mammal or a fish, what else could they be? The thought perplexed him, and at last, very tentatively, he began to draw the only remaining conclusion: some giant, hitherto unguessed-at member of the lizard tribe.
When I think of Mantell’s work, I am reminded of a type of story common to both Greek myths and the folk tales of northern Europe, in which the hero must attempt to sort a mass of dirt and poppy seeds or separate mixed grains into their constituent parts. These labours are usually accomplished with magical help, and they occur, to give a pair of examples, in the tale of Eros and Psyche and in some of the overlapping yarns that are spun around the Russian witch Baba Yaga. I mention these myths because I think they are helpful in imagining the impossibility of the task Mantell set himself when he began to piece together from a rubble of broken and disparate bones an animal whose very existence was only just short of unimaginable.
Convincing the scientific establishment of the significance of his find was never going to be easy. Mantell was a country doctor; despite his evident brilliance he was not immediately welcomed into academic circles, and though he built up many sustaining friendships with geologists, he was also so peculiarly unlucky he sometimes felt himself quite sincerely to be cursed. In 1822 he published a book about his finds in the Weald that to his gratification was ordered four times over by the king, George IV. But despite its success, the book was not enough to get his suspicions about the giant lizard accepted. For this he needed the validation of the Geological Society, but its members rejected Mantell’s thesis, suggesting politely that he must have been mistaken about the age of the rock in which the bones were found.
The next summer a friend took the tooth across the Channel to show it to the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier, but he too was dismissive, announcing that it must have derived from some sort of rhinoceros. On the verge of total despair, Mantell resolved to focus his efforts on proving the rock quarried at Whiteman’s Green was indeed from a Secondary strata, and thus considerably older than the Tertiary rock in which mammalian remains were customarily discovered.
Two things changed his fortunes. Among the mess of bones that had been hauled from Whiteman’s Green were other teeth, equally large but with a tearing surface that was instantly declarative of a carnivore. Mantell wasn’t the only person to have discovered such relics. The geologist William Buckland had in his possession the partial skeleton of a massive animal found near Oxford, which, as luck would have it, was unmistakably of reptilian origin. The story of the Oxford lizard is as complex in its way as that of the iguanodon, but it is sufficient for our purposes to say that in 1824 Buckland announced his discovery of megalosaurus, the first land dinosaur – though that word had still not been invented – to be officially identified. Mantell was present at this meeting of the Geological Society and, screwing up his courage, stood to announce the carnivorous teeth he’d also discovered in the Weald. Buckland agreed to visit him in Lewes, and there conceded that the teeth did belong to megalosaurus, which he thought – wrongly, as it turned out – might turn out to ‘have equalled in height our largest elephant and in length fallen little short of the largest whale’.
The world was rapidly shifting towards an acceptance of Mantell’s theory, and a few weeks after the meeting in which the megalosaurus was unveiled, Cuvier finally agreed that the giant herbivorous teeth were indeed reptilian in origin. Mantell was intensely gratified, and soon after came almost by chance upon the conclusive evidence he’d so long sought. Early that autumn he spent a day at the Royal College of Surgeons, searching through the Hunterian Museum’s vast reserve of anatomical specimens to see if he could find a reptilian tooth that bore even a vague resemblance to his find. The work was dispiriting, and he was about to give it up when the assistant curator, Samuel Stutchbury, came ambling over for a chat. Stutchbury, it transpired, was familiar with tropical reptiles from having worked sporadically at cataloguing the specimens that slave ships sometimes deposited in Bristol, and he immediately saw a startling similarity between Mantell’s tooth and that of the iguana, despite the unholy disparity in size. An iguana is about three feet long; scaling up, Mantell calculated rapidly, might make his own creature a mighty sixty feet.
In 1825, Mantell’s paper on the giant lizard – now named Iguanodon mantelli, from the Greek for ‘iguana tooth’ – was read out to the Royal Society. By the end of the year, he was formally invited to become a Fellow. It was probably the happiest moment of his life, and heralded a period of unprecedented professional acclaim. Mantell began to lecture widely on the dinosaurs and their realm, bringing the lost world to life with such passion that his audiences were by all accounts spellbound.
He was still avidly collecting fossils, and in 1834 a find confirmed his earliest instincts about the iguanodon. The Maid-stone slab, as it became known, was a huge lump of rock unearthed from a quarry in Kent. Embedded in it were a great variety of guddled bones, some broken and some incomplete, which Mantell instantly recognised as belonging to one or more iguanodons. This find was complete enough to allow him for the first time to make a proper guess at the creature’s form, assemblin
g what looked in his initial drawing of it something like a large reptilian dog, around thirty feet long, with a coiling tail and a spike parked on its snout. In time it became apparent to him that the fore-limbs were shorter and more delicate than the hind, and could be used for plucking foliage, though in this as in much else he was contradicted by his bitter rival, the creationist Richard Owen, curator of the British Museum, who coined the word dinosaur and attempted to take credit for the discovery of the iguanodon.
This fortunate period in Mantell’s career wasn’t destined to last for long. The medical practice he established in Brighton in 1833 almost bankrupted him, and while the town council saved him temporarily by buying up the premises for use as a museum, he made such a botch of this as a financial venture that his wife Mary Ann, who had illustrated his books with her own drawings, left him, taking their four children with her. A little later Mantell’s beloved daughter died, and between these two nightmarish events he became so seriously short of funds that the vast collection of fossils he’d assembled since childhood had to be sold in its entirety to the British Museum. The crowning insult came in 1841, when, living alone in Clapham, Mantell was injured in a carriage accident that permanently damaged his spine. He survived for just over a decade, still working almost daily despite the increasing pain, and died at the last in the winter of 1852, accidentally overdosing on the opium he’d begun to take liberally in the wake of his injury.
Throughout his life Gideon Mantell was afflicted by a sense of waste, for he felt himself shut out of the intellectual society he craved on account of his poverty and the heavy demands that doctoring made on his time. His diary is a melancholy litany of slights and humiliations suffered at the hands of the more educated and better born, and barely a year goes by without bursts of bitter self-recrimination at the squandering of his talents. The iguanodon acts as a counter to these thoughts, for though Mantell would go on to discover other dinosaurs and write and publish other books, it is this first find that stands as his monument. The discovery of the giant lizard shows him at his finest, summoning back from a litter of bones a world that had become buried in time, with not much more at his disposal than a chisel and a dogged refusal to be proved wrong.
There’s a strange coda to Mantell’s story. A persistent rumour circulates that after his death a section of his spine was stolen by Richard Owen, though how this was supposed to have been facilitated I’ve never seen explained. In fact, Mantell himself left a sum of money in his will to fund a post-mortem, adding that ‘if any parts are worth preserving for examples of morbid changes, let them be sent to the Hunterian Collection’, the same place where he had found the evidence that proved his giant tooth was reptilian in origin. The spine – which turned out to demonstrate an unusual and presumably intensely painful lateral curvature – was pickled and exhibited for almost a century in the Hunterian Museum alongside all sorts of oddities, from Roman teeth and skulls to the skeleton of the Irish giant Charles Byrne. In 1941, during the early days of the Blitz, the museum was bombed and something like 40,000 anatomical specimens were smashed to smithereens. A further rumour, repeated in almost all his biographies, is that Mantell’s spine was among their number, but this is not the case. The spine survived the war intact, and was inadvertently disposed of by the museum’s staff in 1970 during a clearout of the shelves, by which time much of Mantell’s grand collection of fossils had been sold, lost or dispersed, an act of unmaking that this time really was contrived by the malevolent Richard Owen.
I could see Whiteman’s Green from where I stood. It was one of the patches of wood that lay just to the south of the ridge. The Downs were blue behind it, and beyond them, invisible, were the low lands, the marshes that ran at sea level from Lewes to the coast. It was a wrench to imagine it as it must once have been: a tropical forest divided by a mighty and nameless river; a steamy world of tree ferns and cycads in which the English oak and ash were utterly unknown. I imagined the iguanodon passing between those flowerless forms, calling its rough music, the branches snapping beneath its feet. It was a sight that would never again be glimpsed on this earth, for it is one of the quirks of evolution that a design, once discarded, will not be repeated.
I don’t know if Virginia Woolf knew of Gideon Mantell, but her last novel, completed the winter before she died, is full of visions of the primitive world he unearthed from beneath the Weald. Between the Acts is set in a country house on a summer’s day right at the precipice of the Second World War. The narrative slips between characters, picking up stray thoughts and soliloquies as a radio picks up static. One of the women, Lucy, is reading a book called Outline of History, which merges two real works: G.M. Trevelyan’s History of England and The Outline of History by H. G. Wells. Throughout the day images of the rich, sequestered English countryside are set in contrast to the prehistoric wilderness of the dinosaurs this book describes.
There is – initially at least – a larky comedy to these juxtapositions. One of the first comes early in the morning, when Lucy is lying in bed:
She . . . had spent the hours between three and five thinking of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied, seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters; the iguanodon, the mammoth, and the mastodon, from whom presumably, she thought, jerking the window open, we descend.
Entranced by her vision, which compresses time most oddly, she fails for a moment to distinguish the maid who’s entered the room bearing a tray of tea in blue china ‘from the leather-covered grunting monster who was about, as the door opened, to demolish a whole tree in the green steaming undergrowth of the primeval forest’.
Between the Acts is a novel obsessed with the past, and how to make sense of it when confronted with the rupturing effect of war. Much of the narrative is concerned with describing a village play, in which England’s bygone days are presented as a sort of mocking, tongue-in-cheek pastiche, a mash-up of Elizabethan poetry, Restoration comedy and Victorian triumphalism, complete with forgotten lines and interpolations by cows and rain. What is being sent up here is the official, imperial approach to history, which sees the past as a continuous pageant of coronations and battles; an approach regarded with intense suspicion by Woolf and her circle.
Despite this uneasiness, the past also proves intensely consolatory. In fact, it is startling how much the novel resembles an archaeological dig: a dig that has worked down through the cultural psyche of England, turning up the layered finds of centuries of thought. It’s constructed largely from snatches of overheard or overlapping conversations, which themselves often contain fragmentary references – quotes, misquotes and allusions – to the great works of prior eras: scraps of Keats and Lear; orts of Racine, Swinburne and Lord Tennyson. These fragmentary relics testify to human endurance and continuity against the odds, and so too in a wider sense do Lucy’s visions of the primeval past.
The novel was written on the brink of a great shift in the world, the incalculable change that followed on the heels of the Second World War. It was a change Woolf anticipated but didn’t live to see. The approaching conflict appears only in glimpses, but the intensity of its threat is very strong. Sometimes the tone rises almost to despair, but Between the Acts is also playful and not immune to hope. It ends at night, in the timeless darkness of Lucy’s visions. Violence, it is clear, will follow, but so too will love, for these are the cardinal points of experience in a world that existed long before man descended to the stage and spoke.
I left the ridge then and began to walk roughly east, descending slowly into one of the valleys through which the river flowed. Beneath me was a field of sheep and as I passed between the skinny ewes and fat, unshorn lambs, a hundred or more rooks rose out of a single oak, winging across the field and heading south-west with the wind. The noise rooks make en masse is staggering. What were they doing? Holding a meeting? Plotting a coup? A fe
w swung back, the jacks of the pack, and I could hear more coughing in the trees, but they were nothing on the cacophonous crowd I’d flighted. The sheep looked up, nostrils flared. Mayor!, they bellowed. And again, more plaintively, Maayor! They followed me to the gate and watched as I went, yellow eyes slitted against the unwavering light.
It was hot now, the beginning of a heatwave that would grip the coast for a fortnight, before the summer subsided into rain. I passed up a dusty track into a farm, where I wandered bewildered between sheds that bore warnings of asbestos, unable to find the path. In an outdoor school a slouching girl was failing to get a pony over a set of trotting poles. Like an idiot I wasn’t wearing any socks, and my right foot had begun to burn. Keep hunting, read a sign in the window of Sideneye Cottage, the words quartered white and red by the St George’s flag.
The track gave way to a lane full of wild roses, sugar pink and sugar white. They were making hay in the valley, the blue bales embossed against a suddenly fallen sky. The hedgerow here was stuffed to bursting, a botanist’s sweetshop, full of St John’s Wort and campion, beetroot-pink hedge woundwort, agrimony, meadowsweet and the silver-leaved tormentil that can both stem the flow of blood and dye leather red. I wanted to sink down among them and let my eyes slide shut for a while, but cars kept swooping by and the lane seemed – to my sore heel at least – to run on for ever and a week.