Mary had begun fossil hunting at the age of five. She’d followed her father so tenaciously among the cliffs that he’d made a pick and hammer especially for her, something to fit her little hands. Back in his workroom, he taught her to chip away the rock, and then to clean and polish the fossil that emerged. Sometimes the work was so delicate it had to be done with a sewing needle. Her father teased her that she was, like any other girl, learning her needlework.
After his death, she roamed the beaches in her odd get-up – filthy clogs, multiple tattered skirts, one on top of the next for warmth, and then a patched cloak flung over the whole. She wore a man’s top hat, stuffed with paper and shellacked for protection from falling rocks. Quite thin, but seen from a distance, kitted out for fossil hunting, she resembled a small round hut with a hat for a chimney.
She was not always alone on the beach. In 1812, someone new came to Lyme, a boy with prospects, sixteen years old to Mary’s thirteen, and, like Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park, heir to a sugar plantation in Jamaica. Austen would have seen the possibilities. The only sure way out of poverty for Mary was to marry up.
She might have been more marriageable if she hadn’t made a habit of picking up creatures that washed ashore and dissecting them on the Anning kitchen table. She was not a pretty girl and she had no pretty ways.
The boy’s name was Henry De la Beche. Recently booted from military school for insubordination, he’d come to join his mother and her third husband at their home on Broad Street. There is no record of how he and Mary met, but we can imagine it as Austen might have written it – the older boy, in disgrace, but with the confidence of wealth, education, and good looks. Then Mary, who should have been quiet and deferential in his company, but was not.
At thirteen, she was already the expert on the Blue Lias. People talked later of how sharp her eye was, how she would set her chisel into the cliff at some spot no different from any other spot and after a few blows, reveal the small skeleton of an ancient fish. If it was fossils Henry wanted, he did best to listen to her, keep in her good graces.
He did want fossils. He was as keen on fossils as a boy could be, given that he didn’t need to find them in order to eat. Soon after meeting Mary, he had decided on a career in geology. They were often seen scouring the cliffs after a storm, their heads bent together over some find, their hands touching accidentally as they worked a specimen free. Mary’s fingers would be rough and scraped, her nose red from the wind and salt. Mr. Elliot, Anne’s father, would have been the first to note that she was seldom out in such weather as would improve her looks.
Sometimes an older woman, Miss Elizabeth Philpot, a noted collector who also lived in Lyme, joined them. But often it was just the two of them, alone in the wind and the water, scrambling about the cliffs.
He did not marry her. At twenty-one, he came into his fortune and used it to travel to sites of geological interest, to meet prominent scholars in the field. He was able, as she was not, to join the prestigious Geological Society of London. He was writing papers by then; one entitled “Memoir on the genus Ichthyosaurus,” consisted mostly of descriptions of Mary’s finds.
Mary had continued to uncover skeletons. These, varying greatly in size and with subtle differences, particularly in regard to their teeth, suggested four distinct sub-species of ichthyosaurus. She learned of his marriage to the beautiful Letitia Whyte only after it had occurred. They continued as good friends, the carpenter’s daughter and the plantation owner’s son, although he was much less often in Lyme now.
By then she had other partners. Her terrier, Tray. Elizabeth Philpot on many occasions. And, when she was only sixteen, an Oxford professor named William Buckland. He had written to her first, asking for the privilege of accompanying her on her hunts. Buckland was a noted eccentric, a jokester, whose rooms at Oxford were filled with birds and mice, guinea pigs, snakes, and frogs. As a young man, he’d vowed to eat his way through the animal kingdom and was infamous for serving mice on toast to unsuspecting guests. The bluebottle fly, he said, was the worst tasting animal he’d found.
Other geologists – the Anglican clergyman, William Conybeare, and Jean Andre De Luc – came often to Lyme Regis during these same years and these men sought Mary out, young and poor as she was. She listened to them and they to her. She grew accustomed to the company of her betters. The residents of Lyme noticed.
These guests sometimes brought her papers from the various scientific societies. Mary copied these out, including the drawings, which she did very deftly. She read well and had a good hand. She deeply regretted not being able to go to the museums in London to see what could be seen.
She noticed that the men who’d bought the fossils from her were being credited with finding them. In addition to thinking well of herself, she began to feel hard done by. For all the flattering attention, her family’s finances had not improved.
At thirteen, a neighbor had given her a book on geology, the first book she’d ever owned, and over the subsequent years she had read it to tatters, carried on with her dissections, and learned to make her careful drawings, her beautiful, detailed descriptions of the fossils she found. She was becoming impressively learned. She was every inch a scientist.
She was a complete romantic. Fond of poetry, her fourth commonplace book (the first through third are lost) began with Lord Byron’s “January 22nd, Missolonghi” copied onto the page.
Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it has ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love.
Though perhaps she chose this poem not for the rejected melancholy of its opening verses, but for its later impulse toward glorious self-sacrifice. Anna Maria Pinney, a wealthy sixteen-year-old who met Mary when Mary was in her thirties and was clearly dazzled, wrote in her diary: “Had she lived in an age of chivalry she might have been a heroine with fearless courage, ardour, and peerless truth and honour.”
Awake (not Greece – she is awake!)
Awake, my Spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake
And then strike home!
One morning, Mary was out early, the remnants of the storm still gusting about her, stinging her cheeks with salt. The year was 1815. The Napoleonic Wars would soon see their final battle. Anne Elliot was off somewhere, enjoying her happy ending.
Something large had washed up on the Lyme beach. Smugglers’ brandy often came ashore. Mary usually hid any contraband she found until it could be quietly retrieved. Lyme looked after Lyme and not the excise men. But this was not a box. She approached it cautiously. Perhaps she was finally to see one of her crocodiles in the flesh. Perhaps it was only a seal.
What she found was the body of woman, lying with her face to the sky, her long hair tangled with seaweed, her eyes open and milky. Her sodden clothes were beautifully and expensively made.
Mary knelt and cleaned the sand from her face, untangled the seaweed from her hair, pulled her skirts so that her legs were covered. The woman was still beautiful and Mary immediately associated her with Ophelia or some other storied creature. There was something so intimate in her ministrations as to make her feel that she had known this woman. The finding and the loss of her seemed like the exact same thing since they had happened at the exact same moment.
She saw the body taken into the church and then went there daily, to pray over her and to bring fresh flowers. As long as the woman went unidentified there was no one she belonged to more than Mary. Mary invented many pasts for her, many ways she might have ended on the beach. Tragic love stories, desperate gestures.
Eventually she was identified as a Lady Jackson, lost in the wreck of The Alexander with her husband and children. The Alexander, inbound from Bombay, had gone down in a gale on Easter Monday in a part of Chesil Beach known as Deadman’s Cove. There were only five survivors, none of whom spoke English, and no account of the ship’s final hours, so close to home after a journey
of 155 days, has survived. Friends came from London to take charge and Mary felt the loss not just of the body, but of the stories she had told herself about the body. No Lady Jackson had been listed on the ship’s manifest. There remained just that bit of mystery.
Fifteen years later, Mary recounted this to Anna Maria Pinney. Mary had been just sixteen when she found Lady Jackson. Pinney was just sixteen when Mary told her about it. The romance may well have doubled in the double adolescent telling of it. Anne Elliot would have recommended less poetry in the diet and more prose to the both of them.
When she was nineteen, Mary met Lieutenant Colonel Thomas James Birch, a retired officer of fifty-two, comfortably well off and a great collector of fossils. He began visiting Lyme, calling on Mary and her mother and usually making several purchases.
On one such occasion, he found both Mary and her mother in tears. He made them sit, brought cups of tea. He feared something dreadful had happened to Joseph, but the problems turned out to be financial. After years of support, there was to be no more money from the parish. Mary had not found a valuable fossil for many months. “We are selling the furniture,” Mary’s mother told him. There was little enough of it, but all made by her dead husband. “And once that’s gone, we’ve no rent, we’ve no roof over our heads.”
Birch’s sympathies were aroused, but also his anger. As valuable as Mary’s contributions to science had been, it wasn’t right that the Annings should be facing eviction. He would not have it.
He put the whole of his own collection up for auction, 102 items in all, an extraordinary grouping that he had gathered over years and continents. Many of these were things that Mary had found. The sale created enormous excitement. It lasted three days and drew bidders from Germany, France, Austria, and, of course, England. Cuvier himself bought several pieces. When it was over, Birch had earned more than £400, all of which he gave to the Anning family. For the first time in their lives, the Annings were financially secure.
The auction had also drawn a great deal of attention to Mary. Most of it was scientific. That such a young girl was capable of the arduous, dangerous work of fossil collecting! That she had found so many exemplary specimens!
Some of it was romantic. What had possessed Birch to make such an astonishing gesture? Rumors arose about the young girl and the old man; it was whispered that she attended to him on his visits to Lyme. Fortunately, according to Pinney’s diaries, Mary “glories in being afraid of no one.” She went out and bought herself a bonnet, though as a Dissenter it cannot have been a gaudy one.
Three years later, Mary made her greatest find. She was out on a particularly treacherous section of cliff known as the Black Ven when she saw something, some bit of shine, still mostly covered with shale. It was December, the day after a great storm, and she was working in a blustery wind with an intermittent icy spray of rain. She spent all morning chipping away the slate, her fingers numb and stiff with cold. When she was done, she had a skull unlike any she had ever seen.
She left her dog Tray to guard the spot and called on men from the village to help her before the tide returned. They worked into the evening until the whole skeleton had been revealed, nine feet long and six feet wide, but with a strangely elongated neck and a strangely tiny head. The creature had paddles instead of feet and would have resembled a turtle if not for the neck.
Conybeare had speculated on the possibility of this creature from fragments he’d found and now here was the whole of it. He responded with jubilation, writing to Henry De la Beche who was off in Jamaica attending his plantation. “The Annings have discovered an entire Plesiosaurus,” Conybeare wrote. Mary had made meticulous drawings of the skeleton and one of these went to Henry, her childhood friend.
Another found its way to Georges Cuvier. Cuvier said that the neck was far too long – thirty-five vertebrate – when no creature that walked on four legs had more than seven. Birds might have as many as twenty-five, reptiles no more than eight and this was clearly a reptile. Mary, he suggested, had taken the head of a snake and put it on the body of an ichthyosaur. He felt he could even identify the place in the neck where she had made the joining.
Skeletons in the Blue Lias were often found scattered; there was always the danger of mistakenly welding two creatures together. But Cuvier was not alleging a mistake. He was accusing Mary of deliberate fraud.
A special meeting of the Geological Society of London was called, which, as a woman, Mary could not have attended even if she’d had the money to go to London. She paced the beach at dawn, prayed in the church at noon, picked at her dinner as she waited to hear. Sleep was impossible. She was still so young. The wrong finding would destroy her reputation and end her career.
The skeleton had been shipped by sea to London, but didn’t arrive in time and Mary’s drawings had to suffice. The meeting went late, hot with debate, a duel of science against science. Around this same time, Mary wrote a letter, which contained the following: “The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of all mankind.”
By the end of the meeting, Cuvier had completely recanted. On closer inspection, he accepted Mary’s specimen as the genuine article.
The village of Lyme Regis did not fare as well; the year ended in an epic storm. The first floor of the Anning’s house flooded and all their fossils had to be moved to the upstairs where Tray whimpered and the family huddled as the wind howled outside. Dozens of ships along the coast went down, scores of people drowned. Trees were pulled from the ground and hurled down the hills. The great Cobb itself cracked and let the ocean through.
Mary had at least two close friendships with younger women. Both were diarists; both are remembered only because they left a record of Mary. Both appear to have been thoroughly infatuated, at least initially. Frances Augustus Bell was the first of these. Sickly herself, she was greatly impressed with Mary’s strength and courage. On one occasion, out on the cliffs with a dangerous tide already at their ankles, she says that Mary simply seized her and carried her up the cliffs to safety. She describes Mary as a person impossible to dislike.
But Anna Maria Pinney, who knew Mary later and wrote more of her, said that she “gossiped and abused almost everyone in Lyme” and that the company of her own class had become distasteful to her. Her likes and her dislikes, Pinney said, were equally violent and unshakeable.
Visitors to Lyme vary greatly in their descriptions of her over the years:
“A clever funny Creature.”
“A prim, pedantic, vinegar-looking, thin female, shrewd and rather satirical in her conversation.”
“A strong, energetic spinster of about 28 years” (she would have been thirty-eight at this time) “tanned and masculine in expression …”
“She would serve us with the sweetest temper, bearing with all our little fancies and never finding us too troublesome as we turned over her trays of curiosities.”
“It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour – that this poor, ignorant girl … understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.”
By the time she was twenty-seven, Mary had saved enough money to buy a shop with a glass display window in the front. She named it Anning’s Fossil Depot and she and her mother lived in the rooms above. In 1844, King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony visited her there and for £15 purchased an entire ichthyosaurus skeleton. His physician who accompanied him wrote the following:
We had alighted from the carriage and were proceeding on foot, when we fell in with a shop in which the most remarkable petrifications and fossil remains – the head of an Ichthyosaurus, beautiful ammonites, etc. – were exhibited in the window. We entered and found the small shop and adjoining chamber completely filled with fossil productions of the coast …
He asked Mary Anning for her name and address, which she wrote in his notebook. “I am well-known throughout the whole of Europe,” she told him since he seemed not to know this already.
In 1833, an entry in Anna Maria Pinney
’s diary alludes to a deep sorrow, given in strictest confidence and too delicate to set down in its details. Whatever it was, Pinney kept the secret, noting only that, eight years earlier, Mary had hoped to see herself raised from her low situation and had seen those hopes cruelly dashed.
The world dislikes a story in which a woman is merely accomplished, brave, and consequential. Eight years before, Letitia De la Beche had sought a legal separation from Henry alleging ill treatment, which may have simply been his long years without her in Jamaica. A year later, she’d taken up residence with her lover, Major General Wyndham. We’ve no reason beyond the faint hint of Pinney’s diary to believe that Mary wanted Henry. If she did, like Anne Elliot, she’d had this second chance. But Henry took off for the continent to escape the scandal and Mary found a pterosaur, the first in England, instead.
In 1830, Henry had come to Mary with an offering. He’d painted a watercolor for her entitled Duria Antiquior, A More Ancient Dorset. This crowded Jurassic landscape, largely underwater, included every creature Mary had found, and most of them trying to eat each other. It was an astonishing act of imagination, beautifully rendered.
But it was not the painting that was Henry’s chief gift. Mary had lost her money in a bad investment; the market for fossils had slowed, and once again her finances were precarious. Lithographic prints had been made from Henry’s painting and were being briskly sold. All the proceeds were to be Mary’s. Henry hoped her fossil sales would be boosted as well by the advertising.
Meanwhile her old friend William Buckland persuaded the British Association for the Advancement of Science to grant her an annuity of £25 a year. No other woman had ever been half so acknowledged. When secured, it was enough to keep her and her mother, too, even if she never made another great find.
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women Page 10