Curiosity
Page 37
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.
Copyright © 2010 by Joan Thomas
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Thomas, Joan (Sandra Joan)
Curiosity / Joan Thomas
eISBN: 978-1-55199-353-9
1. Anning, Mary, 1799-1847 – Fiction. 2. De La Beche, Henry T. (Henry Thomas),
1796-1855 – Fiction. I. Title.
PS 86939.H575C87 2010 C.813′.6 C2009-904829-9
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