Chapter 1Lightning Child

Foreword

For twenty years I have written about women who worked indoors. Women with desks, with laboratories, with drafting tables and typewriters and correspondence they were careful to keep. Women of the twentieth century, most of them, whose findings were signed by the men beside them but who had at least been let into the building where the signing happened. That was my subject: two people at one bench, one of them credited and one of them not.

Mary Anning had no bench. She had a hammer, a basket, a coastline that was actively falling into the sea, and, for a few years, a dog. Her laboratory was the beach at Lyme Regis after a winter storm, when the cliff sheared away and gave up what it had been holding for two hundred million years, and the work was to reach it before the tide did and prise the animal out of the mud before the sea took it back. This was not science as I had trained myself to write about it. This was science done on hands and knees, in bad weather, under a cliff that had already buried her dog and had come within a few yards of burying her.

I did not go looking for her. I came to her the way nearly everyone now comes to her: backward, through the men. A footnote in a paper on the plesiosaur. A specimen in a museum with another person's name on the label. I expected to find a lucky collector, a local woman who had happened to live on top of the right rocks. I found a scientist who had been robbed in plain sight, and who knew it, and who described the robbery in words too exact to be mistaken for self-pity.

The record I worked from is the ordinary record of a poor woman's life: thin, secondhand, and filtered through the very people who took from her. The published papers that described her fossils and did not name her. The letters and account books that survive. The memoirs and travel notes of the gentlemen who called at her shop, went home to London, and wrote up what she had told them as though they had thought of it themselves. The press of her century and the scholarship of ours. A life documented, for the most part, by the transaction that erased it.

The women I usually write about were buried once, under their sex. Anning was buried twice. She was a woman, which kept her out of the Geological Society; and she was poor, which kept her a supplier rather than a scientist even to the men who admired her most. Remove either weight and she might have been recovered within a generation. She carried both. It has taken the better part of two centuries to give her back her name, and the giving is not finished.

I wrote this book because the hammer deserves what the pen has always been handed. Because a woman on a cold beach, reading a cliff the way other people read a page, is as much a scientist as any gentleman who ever sat in a warm room in London and described what she had sent him. And because the cliffs are still there, still falling, still releasing what they hold — and she is the one who taught the rest of us how to look.

— Ailsa Rennie, Edinburgh

Chapter 1 · Lightning Child

The storm came on an afternoon in August 1800, and when it was finished a woman was dead and the child she had been holding was not.

The details survived because the town remembered them. Lyme Regis was a small place, perhaps fifteen hundred people clinging to the Dorset coast where the land dropped into the English Channel, and in a small place a woman struck by lightning while holding a baby was the kind of event that got told and retold until it achieved the permanence of local scripture. The woman's name was variously given. Some accounts said she was a neighbor. Others said a nursemaid. What no one disputed was that she was standing beneath an elm tree, holding fifteen-month-old Mary Anning, when lightning hit the tree and killed three people under its branches. The baby survived. The baby was the only one who survived.

In the telling that grew up around the event, Mary had been a sickly infant before the strike, dull, listless, slow to respond, and a lively child after it. The lightning had cured her, or woken her, or charged her with some quality the town could not name but was certain it could see. This was folklore, not medicine. There was no mechanism by which an electrical discharge that killed three adults could have improved the constitution of the one infant among them. But Lyme Regis was a town that lived by its stories, and the story of the lightning child was a good one, and people held onto it the way they held onto the cliffs: because it was what they had.

The strike took place on August 19, 1800, during a fair held at Rack Field, an open green at the eastern edge of the town that was traditionally used for agricultural shows and festivals. The three women who died beneath the elm tree, all of them carrying or holding children, are known only in part. The woman holding Mary was a neighbour named Elizabeth Haskings; the names of the other two were not preserved in the surviving accounts. The strike was reported in the regional press in the days that followed. The four older girls in the group, walking ahead of the three women under the same tree, all survived. The four older girls had been sheltering as a separate group, slightly apart from the women with infants, and the path of the discharge passed through the women without reaching the children walking ahead. The newspaper notice did not mention the surviving baby by name. Mary Anning's first appearance in the printed record is as an unnamed survivor of a fatal accident.

Mary Anning was born on May 21, 1799, the fifth child of Richard Anning and Mary Moore Anning. The parents' marriage, he was a cabinetmaker from Devonshire, she was a local woman, had already been marked by the kind of loss that was ordinary in the English working class at the turn of the nineteenth century and devastating in every particular instance. They had buried three children before Mary was born. An earlier daughter, also named Mary, had died in 1798 at the age of four, possibly from burns sustained in a clothing fire. The naming practice, giving a new child the name of a dead one, was common enough that it requires no psychological interpretation beyond what it plainly stated: the name was available again.

The Annings would eventually have ten children. Only two survived to adulthood: Joseph, born in 1796, and Mary, born in 1799. Eight children dead. A survival rate of twenty percent. These numbers sound shocking in the twenty-first century. In the England of 1800, they were on the bad end of normal. Infant mortality rates among the working class ran between fifteen and thirty percent for children under five, depending on the region and the particular decade's epidemic patterns. The Annings' losses were extreme but not unimaginable. What was unimaginable, to the family living through it, was probably not the aggregate statistic but the accumulation of individual mornings when a child who was breathing was not.

Lyme Regis itself was a town defined by its relationship to the sea and the land's refusal to remain stable in the sea's presence. The town sat at the mouth of the River Lim, on the coast of what would much later be called the Jurassic Coast, a stretch of shoreline running from Orcombe Point in East Devon to Old Harry Rocks in Dorset, comprising 185 million years of geological history exposed in cross-section by the relentless work of erosion. The cliffs at Lyme Regis were composed primarily of Blue Lias limestone and shale, laid down during the early Jurassic period, roughly 200 to 195 million years ago. They were beautiful. They were also actively falling into the sea.

The Blue Lias, the name derived from the quarrymen's word "lyers," meaning layers, consisted of alternating beds of limestone and shale that eroded at different rates. The shale, being softer, weathered faster, undermining the limestone above it. The result was a coastline in a permanent state of collapse. After winter storms, whole sections of cliff face would shear away and tumble to the beach below, exposing fresh rock surfaces and, within them, the remains of creatures that had lived and died in the shallow tropical sea that had covered this part of England when the world was young and warm and unrecognizable.

The people of Lyme Regis had been finding these remains for centuries. They called them curiosities. Some called them crocodile bones or snake stones or devil's fingers. The ammonites, coiled spiral fossils of cephalopods, were called snake stones because they resembled coiled serpents, and local legend held that Saint Hilda had turned the snakes of Whitby to stone, which was as good an explanation as any when you did not have a better one. The belemnites, bullet-shaped fossils of squid-like creatures, were called devil's fingers or thunderbolts. No one, at the level of the working people who collected them, thought very carefully about what they actually were. They were objects that came out of rocks. They were pretty. They sold.

The trade in curiosities was well established by the time Mary Anning was born. Lyme Regis had been a modest seaside resort since the mid-eighteenth century, when the fashion for sea-bathing began pulling the middle and upper classes to coastal towns. The town was not Bath. It was not Brighton. It did not have the Assembly Rooms or the grand architecture or the machinery of fashionable society. What it had was the Cobb, a medieval stone harbor wall that curved into the sea like a protective arm, and the cliffs, and a quietness that appealed to visitors who wanted the restorative effects of sea air without the social obligations of a major resort. Jane Austen would set part of Persuasion in Lyme Regis, and the famous scene on the Cobb, Louisa Musgrove's fall, would be written from memory. Austen had visited in 1803 and 1804. She and Mary Anning may have been in the town at the same time. There is no record that they met.

The two women existed in the same geographical space but in entirely different social worlds. Austen was the daughter of a clergyman, educated, connected, literate in the full cultural sense — she read novels and plays and poetry and conducted a witty correspondence with her sister Cassandra that would one day be published and studied. She visited Lyme Regis as a tourist, staying in rented lodgings, walking on the Cobb, taking the sea air, observing the social dynamics of a provincial resort with the novelist's eye that transformed experience into material. The girl on the beach in heavy clothing, crouching over the rocks with a hammer, was not the kind of person Austen would have noticed or, if she noticed, included in her correspondence. Working-class people are nearly invisible in Austen's letters, present as servants and tradespeople but not as individuals with inner lives.

Anning was four or five years old when Austen visited. She was too young to be on the beach alone, but she would have been with her father on his collecting trips, a small child learning to look at rocks. In a different world, in a different century, the two women might have been colleagues, both possessed of extraordinary observation, both committed to the precise notation of what they found. In 1803, they were on opposite sides of a social barrier that neither of them had built and neither of them could cross. Austen went home to Hampshire and wrote about the fall on the Cobb. Anning stayed in Lyme Regis and learned to see in the cliff face what other people could not see. The two are among the most remarkable women of the early nineteenth century, and they were invisible to each other.

The visitors bought things. They bought bathing tickets and lodging and meals, and they bought curiosities. A prettily shaped ammonite, cleaned up and polished, made an attractive souvenir. A well-preserved belemnite could sit on a mantelpiece in London and serve as a conversation piece about one's holiday in Dorset. The market was informal but real. Local people, fishermen, laborers, anyone with time on the beach after a storm, collected fossils and sold them to visitors or to the shops that catered to them.

Richard Anning was one of these collectors. He was a cabinetmaker by trade, but cabinetmaking in a town of fifteen hundred people did not produce enough income to sustain a family, and the fossils supplemented what the furniture brought in. He had a table outside the family's house on Bridge Street, near the shore, where he displayed his finds for passing visitors. The house itself was modest, one account described it as a basement dwelling, partly underground, and the family's circumstances were what a later century would call working poor: employed, housed, fed, but without margin. Every shilling mattered. Every storm that exposed fresh cliff face was a potential payday, and every calm stretch of weather was a stretch without new material.

Richard took the children with him on his collecting trips. This was not unusual. Working-class children in 1800 were economic participants in the family from the time they could walk steadily enough to be useful. What was unusual, or at least what later seem unusual, was that Richard appears to have taught his children not just where to find fossils but how to see them. How to read a cliff face. How to distinguish a fossil-bearing layer from a barren one. How to extract a specimen without destroying it. How to clean it, prepare it, mount it for display. These were skills that required patience, manual dexterity, and a kind of visual intelligence that is difficult to describe but easy to recognize: the ability to look at a rock and see that it contained something that was not rock.

Mary learned. She learned early and she learned well. The evidence for this is what happened afterward, the career of discovery that would follow, but the foundations were laid in these years, on the beach at Lyme Regis, with a father who knew how to find things in stone and a daughter who turned out to be better at it than anyone who had ever lived.

The town itself was shaped by forces that had nothing to do with fossils and everything to do with the precariousness of working-class life in late Georgian England. The French Revolution had happened ten years before Mary's birth. The Napoleonic Wars were ongoing and would continue until 1815. The economic effects of wartime, disrupted trade, inflation, the diversion of resources to the military, pressed hardest on the people who had the least margin. Lyme Regis had once been a significant port; by 1800 its harbor had silted up and its shipping trade had declined, leaving the town dependent on its modest resort business and the mixed economies of its working inhabitants: fishing, farming, building, repairing, and, for some, the fossil trade.

The Anning family was Dissenting, that is, they were not members of the Church of England but belonged to one of the nonconformist congregations that the Established Church tolerated without embracing. The specific congregation was Congregationalist, later Independent. This mattered. In 1800, Dissenters could not hold public office, could not attend Oxford or Cambridge, could not serve in the military as commissioned officers, and operated under a web of legal and social disabilities that had been somewhat relaxed since the worst years of the seventeenth century but had not been removed. The practical effect on a family like the Annings was less about specific legal barriers, a cabinetmaker in Lyme Regis was not applying to Oxford, and more about social position. They were doubly outside: outside by class and outside by religion. They belonged to the town without belonging to its power structure, such as it was.

None of this would have been articulated in these terms by the Annings themselves. They were a working family. They made furniture. They collected fossils. They buried children. They went to chapel. They got through the week.

And they had Mary, who had survived the lightning.

The story of the lightning strike would be told for the rest of Mary Anning's life and well beyond it. It would be told as origin story, the moment the ordinary child became extraordinary, and it would be told as explanation, as though the electricity that killed the women around her had transferred some charge to her that accounted for what she later did. This was magical thinking, and it persisted because it filled a gap that rational thinking could not: how did a girl from a family with no education, no money, no connections, and no access to the institutions of science become the most important paleontologist of her century? The lightning story said: something happened to her. Something was given. She was struck and she was changed.

The truth was less romantic and more interesting. Nothing was given. Everything was learned. Mary Anning became what she became because she was very intelligent, because her father taught her to find fossils, because she lived on top of the richest fossil beds in England, because she had no choice but to keep digging, the family needed the money, and because she had a quality that the lightning story obscured rather than illuminated: patience. The ability to look at a cliff for hours. The willingness to come back after every storm and look again. The stubbornness to keep extracting when the rock was hard and the weather was cold and the tide was coming in. These were not gifts bestowed by electrical discharge. They were traits that she either possessed naturally or developed through years of practice, and the distinction between the two is less important than the result.

The result was Mary Anning. But in 1800 she was just a baby who had survived something that should have killed her, in a town that made a story out of it, in a family that was about to lose everything.

Richard Anning had a decade left to live. He would spend it making furniture and collecting fossils and taking his children to the beach. He would teach Mary everything he knew. Then he would die, and the real story would begin, because when Richard died the family would have nothing, and Mary would have to find things in the cliffs to survive, and what she found would change the world.

But that was later. In 1800, the child who had been struck by lightning was learning to walk in a house on Bridge Street in Lyme Regis, in a country at war, in a world that did not yet know it was old.

The town's relationship to fossils was equally layered. Lyme Regis had been producing fossils for centuries before anyone in the scientific world paid attention to them. The people of the town had their own names for the objects in the rocks, names that predated and survived the arrival of the gentleman collectors and their Latinate terminology. The ammonites they called snake stones. The belemnites they called devil's fingers or thunderbolts. The vertebrae of large marine reptiles, when they turned up on the beach, were sometimes called crocodile vertebrae or simply monster bones. The ichthyosaur teeth, curved and pointed, were sold as amulets against snake bite in some parts of England, a practice that reached back to the medieval belief in the curative properties of "toadstones" and other natural curiosities.

This folk taxonomy was not ignorance, exactly. It was a different kind of knowledge, organized by resemblance and practical use rather than by systematic classification. The snake stone resembled a coiled snake; the thunderbolt resembled a bolt of lightning; the crocodile vertebra resembled a crocodile's bones. The resemblances were real enough to generate the names, and the names were stable across generations because they were locally useful. Richard Anning would have known both the folk names and, to some extent, the emerging scientific names, because he dealt with both tourists who wanted curiosities and collectors who wanted specimens, and the language of each group was different.

Mary Anning learned both vocabularies. She grew up speaking the language of the cliffs as her father spoke it, in folk terms, and she gradually acquired the scientific vocabulary of her buyers, their Linnaean names and their anatomical terminology, through years of reading and conversation. By the time she was an adult, she was fluent in both, and she could translate between them with the ease of someone who had learned them in parallel. When a tourist asked for a snake stone, she knew what they wanted. When a geologist asked for an ammonite of a specific species from a specific horizon, she knew what they wanted. The ability to operate in both worlds, the folk world of the beach and the scientific world of the London societies, was part of what made her irreplaceable.

The question of what people in 1800 thought fossils were is not as simple as it might appear. The educated classes, the natural philosophers, the clergymen who studied natural history, the gentlemen of independent means who collected specimens, had been arguing about fossils for centuries. Were they the remains of living creatures? Were they sports of nature, mineral formations that happened to resemble organic forms? Were they evidence of the Biblical flood? Were they the remains of species that still existed somewhere, in unexplored parts of the world?

By 1800, the consensus among the educated was converging on the first option: fossils were the remains of once-living organisms. But the implications of that consensus had not been worked through. If fossils were the remains of living creatures, and if some of those creatures did not resemble anything alive today, then either those species still existed somewhere unknown or they had ceased to exist. The first option was attractive because it preserved the idea of a stable, divinely created world. The second option, extinction, was theologically dangerous because it implied that God's creation was imperfect, or at least impermanent. Why would a benevolent and omniscient Creator make a creature and then let it die out? What kind of plan was that?

These were not abstract questions. They were urgent, practical, politically charged problems at the intersection of science, religion, and social order. The Church of England was the Established Church. Its doctrines were intertwined with the legitimacy of the state. Challenging the Biblical account of creation, the six days, the flood, the roughly six-thousand-year age of the earth that could be calculated by adding up the generations in Genesis, was not merely an intellectual exercise. It was potentially seditious. It threatened the order of things.

The fossils in the cliffs at Lyme Regis did not care about the order of things. They had been lying in the Blue Lias for two hundred million years, waiting for the sea to set them free.

Mary Anning, at fifteen months old, did not know any of this. She knew the crash of waves and the smell of salt and the warmth of a body holding her under a tree in a storm. Then the lightning came, and the body went cold, and the baby lived.

It was the first of many times that Mary Anning would survive something that should have destroyed her. It would not be the last.