Mary Anning (Radio Edit)

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Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today we are chiseling our way back to 19th century Dorset to learn all about pioneering paleontologist Mary Anning.

And to help us dig up this story, we have two very special guests.

In History Corner, he's a historian of the 19th century who has held positions at Balliol College, Oxford, and the British Library's Eccles Centre for American Studies.

You might have read his Orwell Prize-nominated book, The Interest, How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, or his brilliant new book, Impossible Monsters, all about the religious backlash, the discovery of dinosaurs.

It's my fave book of 2024.

You heard it here first.

It's Dr.

Michael Taylor.

Welcome, Michael.

I'm delighted to be here, and thank you for inviting me.

In Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, actor, author, podcaster, screenwriter.

She does it all.

You'll know her from all the TV, the panel shows, Live of the Apollo, comedians giving lectures, the great British Sewing Bee, Last Woman on Earth, Taskmaster, her sitcom, Out of Her Mind.

Maybe you've read her novel, Weirdo, but you'll definitely remember her from our first ever episode of You're Dead to Me about Queen Boudica, the iconic queen, and it's the equally iconic queen of comedy herself, Sarah Pascoe.

Welcome back, Sarah.

Thank you so much for having me.

I've been at home waiting waiting as you've had other people be repeat guests thinking when will my time in the sun come again?

We're delighted to have you back.

We knew from five years ago that you were a big history fan.

You'd been a tour guide.

Yes, the only little bits of history I know are from the tours.

I didn't even do history GCSE actually, which is why I want to learn more as an adult.

And what do you know about Mary Anning?

Well, when I got the email inviting me on the show, it said you don't need to know anything.

And I thought I can either lie, as in do research, revision and then pretend I just knew it and I've not done that I've been honest which means I know nothing apart from you just said she's a paleontologist yes I did yeah okay so what do you know

Paleontology is the study of dinosaurs.

We've all seen one of the 37 Jurassic Park movies or we know Ross from Friends.

And the name Mary Anning might be familiar to, maybe not to Sarah, but to some of you at home.

The Royal Society named her one of the most influential women in British science history.

You may have seen the Kate Winslet and Sir Sharonan movie Ammonite, which is very loosely based on her life.

But who was this fearless fossil finder?

And what was it like being a 19th century woman in STEM?

Let's find out.

Right,

Dr.

Michael, when and where was Mary born?

Okay, so Mary's born at the turn of the 18th century, May 1799, in Lyme Regis, which, if you know, it's a beautiful seaside town in Dorset in southwest England.

So Mary is born to her mother also called Mary and Richard her father and she is one of ten children.

In fact she's not even the only Mary because she had an elder sister also called Mary who very sadly died in a tragic accident whenever her dress caught fire from wood shavings in her father's workshop.

Indeed of the ten children it's only Mary and her brother Joseph who survive into adulthood.

So that's why we were doubling names up.

We won't know them in a couple of years.

We had a Mary and it was fine.

Let's have another Mary.

Yeah, I liked Mary.

I miss Mary.

We'll call her Mary too.

I mean it's ordinary for the 18th century, 19th century, it happens, but it's tragic.

So a tragically ordinary start to her life, born in 1799, but there was one very extraordinary event in Mary's young life.

Can you guess what happened to her at a horse show when she was just 14 months old as a baby?

We once went to like a petting zoo.

My sister turned around to have a photograph taken and she was eating some crisps and the goat behind her her started eating her ponytail.

And because it was the 80s, we just thought it was hysterically funny.

My sister now is still quite traumatised because when something horrible happens to you like that, I guess you want your mum or your sisters to be like, Oh, should we get that goat offer?

Rather than taking more photos.

So I'm going to guess it's something like that-like a horse sort of came, gave her a sniff, took some interest in her, perhaps.

Very sensible answer.

It's not what happened, Michael, is it?

No, she was struck by lightning.

So there was much excitement.

Yeah, yeah.

Mary, too!

Yeah, so there was much excitement in Lyme Regis.

The previous day, there had been a prodigious display of vaulting, as one historian records, and the next day, all the townsfolk of Lyme Regis had piled into the same field again to watch this performance by a travelling troop of horsemen.

But it was the late summer, and a storm was rolling in off the English Channel, and people began to run away.

So some people ran away completely.

Some people began to hide under cow sheds, and other people, including Mary's nurse, stood under the trees.

The nurse dies.

Mary is thought to have died at the same time.

She's rushed back into the town and has eventually revived after being dunked in a warm bath.

And apparently, beforehand, she had been rather a dull child.

But afterwards, the local legend grew that Mary became a bright and intelligent young woman.

I mean, Sarah, what superpower would you be willing to risk getting struck by lightning for?

Oh, 100% getting it on first try on a word or

Michael.

Perilous weather aside, what was young Mary's childhood like?

Is she educated?

Is she well off?

So, beside the forces of nature, Lime Regis is a pretty dangerous place growing up.

It could literally have become a battlefront because this is the place in the south coast where the Earl of Monmouth landed his rebellious troops, it's where William of Orange decides to land his Dutch troops during the Glorious Revolution, and Lime Regis is closer to the French naval base at Cherbourg than it is to London.

And this is the high point of the French Revolutionary Wars.

Besides that, it's a pretty economically precarious place to live.

Money is scarce everywhere, and Mary's father, Richard, is a cabinet maker.

Now, sometimes, depending on what clientele comes along, you can have enough money to pay for your rent, to pay for your food, but lots of times, it's a real struggle, even for a family where, sadly, there's only now two children rather than ten.

Mary attends a congregational Sunday school, so she begins to learn a little bit how to read and write, and that very little learning will go a long way in her later life.

Growing up and surviving to adulthood in Lyme Regis Regis and being healthy and being sure of your future, it's a very uncertain thing.

But the residents of Lyme Regis did have another way, finding fossils and selling them to tourists.

This is a little bit like crafting on Etsy, perhaps.

There are many reasons why people are coming from London and from other places to Lyme Regis.

One is that there's a real fashion for using salt water as a cure for everything.

So polite ladies will come down and in their elaborate bathing gear will walk out into the water and paddle.

Jane Austen does, doesn't she?

She does.

And Jane Austen is one of the visitors to Lyme Regis, and she, in fact, goes to Richard Anning as a cabinet maker to request that he fix a box.

But apparently, he charged far too much, and she took her business elsewhere.

You never really hear that about Austin, but she was a real haddler.

So, this is the way that Richard kept his family inbred whenever his cabinet making business was going badly.

But it wasn't really enough.

So, in 1810, whenever he's walking along one of the cliffs, he might have been in his cups, we don't necessarily know, but he was doing it at night and he fell down the cliff face.

He almost broke his back and it weakened him enough that he would eventually die of consumption, which was endemic at the time.

But he leaves debts, Richard, of about £120.

And that might not sound an awful lot now, but you can multiply that by about 100.

Yeah.

Mary's solution to all of this is to keep hunting for fossils.

Britain and Ireland in the early 1800s, it's a very religious society.

So is it awkward awkward when fossils are coming out of the ground that are perhaps looking very old and might be challenging the timeline of Adam and Eve?

So first, it's important to state, you're right.

It is a very religious society.

It might be tempting to think that the Enlightenment has come and gone.

The Enlightenment in England had been relatively conservative.

Moreover, remember, who are England fighting at the time?

Who are the British fighting at the time?

They're fighting the French, who are secular, who are democratic, who are atheistic, who are egalitarian.

So they represent the radical edge of the Enlightenment and Britain in turn defines itself as a conservative Christian nation.

Propagating some idea of science or a history of the world or a criticism of the Bible is a very dangerous thing.

So what people are doing instead is practicing what's called natural theology, which was an idea developed by the English clergyman William Paley, which is that if you are investigating the world, if you are practicing what eventually we call science, you're not doing anything blasphemous.

You're in fact understanding the works of the Lord.

So let's return to Mary clinging to the cliffs in Dorset at Lime Regis and let's get to her first big discovery the one that starts to make her name how old was she when she found it Sarah okay so she was struck by lightning she was 14 months old and then in that time you know she's lost siblings her dad has died so I want to imagine now she's a teenager so let's say she's 17.

It's a good guess.

She's 12.

Oh, God.

Poor Mary.

So she's learned to read and write and then it's just out on finding fossils.

Yeah, out on the cliff face.

Yeah.

And the first one that she finds, Michael, is the ichthyosaur.

Is that right?

Yeah, it becomes known as the ichthyosaurus.

So colloquially it might have been termed a sea dragon at the time.

The ichthyosaurus actually means fish lizard.

Her brother Joseph found the skull first, but he had to go back into upholstery so the family could eat.

So he tasked Mary with finding the rest of the skeleton.

And it took her a while.

It took her almost a year to do it.

But eventually they piece everything together.

And what happens is that whenever this new fossilized skeleton is presented to to science, nobody really knows what to make of it because nothing like it has ever been seen before.

So what was your greatest achievement at 12?

At 12.

Oh, God.

So if I admit this, I mean, so at 12, I was out of school for six months.

So I was at home by myself, eating bourbon biscuits and making hot chocolate, watching neighbours twice, because it used to be on twice a day.

I remember those days.

Yes.

What happened to the skeleton of this sort of ichthyosaurus then?

So the skeleton's lifted up out of the ground, it's put together, and it's bought by henry host henley who's the local lord of the manor but he doesn't keep it instead he gives it over to museum at piccadilly in london and that's where all of the clever men of the capital go to look at it is this um monetizable for her yeah it is it's i think 20 pounds yeah 23 pounds 23 pounds um so you know that's that's a lot of money

yeah yeah yeah so she found it in 1811.

It's not the only marine animal that Mary found.

So a decade later in her mid-20s, she's now a young woman, she discovers a complete plesiosaurus, Michael.

What's a plesiosaurus when it's at home?

So a plesiosaurus or a plesiosaurus, the name means near lizard.

So there had been other bits and pieces of ancient reptiles found about the southwest of England.

The week before Christmas in 1823, Mary does make this discovery.

So she finds this enormous creature.

Again, nothing quite like it has been seen before.

and it's later memorably described as a serpent threaded through the body of a turtle.

It It becomes in time the inspiration for the Loch Ness monster.

So this is 1823, she finds this one.

So she's found one every 12 years

so far.

So it's 1823, she's found one every 12 years.

It's a good inning.

Yeah.

It'd be hard to get the dopamine.

If you've found a really, really massive sea dragon at 12, every time you've...

Oh, it's just another little handheld one.

Yeah, you've peaked, haven't you?

Just another ammonite, yeah.

Yeah, I'll sell it for a quid.

The name I want to bring in is that he's a Frenchman, Baron Georges Cuvier.

How does he get involved?

So Cuvier is effectively the Napoleon of natural sciences in the early 19th century.

So he runs all of these scientific institutions in Paris, which are incredibly well funded.

And before the learned men of Britain really want to make a big announcement, they really want Cuvier's approval.

So eventually they get his approval about the plesiosaurus, which he had maybe slightly doubted beforehand.

And the Annings sell it.

They sell it for £100, which is an enormous amount of money in the 1820s.

Then in 1828, she finds another fun species, a pterosaur, a flying reptile.

Wow.

And there's also another person we should mention is William Buckland, who's a fun character in his own right.

Churchman and scientist, often at war with his own sense of what he believes, I guess.

But he has a lovely quote, doesn't he?

He does.

So Buckland, who is a Church of England minister and an Oxford fellow, whenever he is describing Mary Anning's pterosaur, which is named the Dimorphodon Macronyx, he says, it somewhat resembled our modern bats and vampires, but had its beak elongated like the bill of a woodcock and armed with teeth like the snout of a crocodile.

In short, it was a monster resembling nothing that has ever been seen or heard of upon Earth, excepting the dragons of romance and heraldry.

And did anyone not believe in them?

Not so much as disbelieving that there are these fossils, but what is their importance?

What do they signify?

That's the really important question.

So Mary Annie, by this point, has been drawing the attention of William Buckland, who's the sort of the the big daddy in England or Britain.

You've got Cuvier in France.

She's got the two giants in the field to take notice.

She's now renowned as a paleontologist, a rock star paleontologist.

But there was one thing she never discovered in her whole career, in 35 years of digging.

Do you know what that was, Sarah?

True love?

No.

The one thing she doesn't find is a dinosaur.

Ah, we're quibbling.

We are quibbling, but in some ways we're not quibbling.

So how are we defining dinosaur then?

Yeah.

So a dinosaur is a land-dwelling reptile.

Okay.

And in particular, a land-dwelling reptile where the hips and the legs are constructed underneath the trunk of the body.

So that's a dinosaur.

So Mary Annie never found a technical dinosaur.

Because these are sea-dwelling or flying.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm going to say,

to me, she's a dinosaur discoverer.

Okay, okay.

So in terms of

the way that she was making her living, I mean, could it just be that she was so passionate about her career and her job and because she made money, she didn't need to marry.

That would have been incredibly rare, but she would have had the choice, I guess.

From everything that we know of her, she was quite a solitary person.

I mean, certainly hunting for fossils is something that something that you can do alone.

And she's very, very close to her mother.

Yeah.

And she does make friends amongst some of the geologists who come down to Lymeidas or the seasonal tourists who come down as well.

And there are reminiscences of Mary Anning in their memoirs.

but so far as we know there was never any kind of serious romantic relationship.

So when we say Mary Anning is digging up stuff out of cliffs Sarah we shouldn't undersell her talents intellectually.

What do you imagine she was thinking when she's digging these things up?

Well

to have put as much time into it as she did at such a young age it can't just have been monetary.

There would have been a reason that propels you to go out and find something that can be sold.

But for her to have spent a year digging something out, she must have had a huge curiosity.

This is someone that barely learned to be able to write and read, who is making massive discoveries that are changing the world, changing how very educated religious men, men with titles, are talking about the world.

If she was a horrible person with a massive ego, I would forgive that.

Because, I mean, to have so little and to make such a huge change in the world is incredibly rare, isn't it?

Yeah, it's amazing.

She certainly knows how intelligent she is.

Yeah, and she gets the papers sent down from the London scientific societies and she really relishes reading what all of these grand men have written and

about all of her.

Well, at least about the discoveries that she has made and pointing out where they've gone wrong.

And whenever people come down to Lyme Regis, all the geologists do this.

They don't come to pay homage, however.

They basically exploit her.

Gideon Mantel, who discovers the iguanodon, says he's really unimpressed by this sour, prim, vinegar-looking woman sitting in her shop selling fossils.

Others are much more generous.

So the widow of the senior judge at the Old Bailey comes down to Lime Regis and she credits Anning with knowing immediately whenever she looks at a bun exactly what kind of creature, what species it comes from.

And Anning realizes this too.

She eventually becomes quite bitter that she's being used by all of these men, that they are making great names for themselves off her discoveries.

And I think fairly so.

Well, from everything you've just said, she's not getting the due respect as an intelligent person.

It's like she's the delivery driver or something rather than, you know, or she's the

muscle.

She's the muscle getting them out.

That's right.

She's the excavator.

She's the JCB.

So she's an autodidact in some way.

She's teaching herself.

She's learning on the job.

And she's obviously incredibly knowledgeable.

So not just a practical digger, not just brave, but also increasingly an anatomist of tremendous skill.

But she's also unmarried.

She's a lower-class woman because Mary Anning's not allowed to join the Geological Society, right?

She is not the Royal Society won't have her.

Nope.

So none of them allow women to join.

Has that changed?

It has changed.

Thank you.

Oh my God, God, you look to me in a way, Michael.

Oh, no.

Still, they deny that any women are scientists.

So

she's proved herself over and over.

Why can't she join these societies, these scientific institutions?

She's proved herself a scientist.

Well, in the mindset of the the time, it's just not the done thing.

Because she's a woman.

Yeah.

And the class.

And a lower class woman.

Okay.

So I think a really telling example of this, and I was maybe going to save it for the nuance, Wendo, is that in the early 1830s, whenever the British Association for the Advancement of Science is set up as an institution which will bring within science men of lower income, so middle-class men can join this and can listen to all the great men speak.

Even eminent women, such as Mary Somerville, the physicist and mathematician after whom an Oxford College is now named, is only allowed to attend the dinners and the conversational soires.

For somebody like Mary Anning, no invitation at all is extended.

But Mary Anning was recognised.

There's someone called Louis Agassiz, is that right?

Yes, so during her lifetime, Louis Agassiz did name two species of fish after her.

And then after Mary's death, there was a species of Ichthyosaur, which was named after her.

Right, okay.

So two species of fish for a lifetime of work.

And we don't know how she felt about it, or do we?

Oh, we do.

She was increasingly bitter about how she had been treated unkindly by the world

and would walk along the beach in Lyme Regis, giving off to anybody who would accompany her about all the young idiots who were coming down and enjoying themselves, not necessarily at her expense, but without giving her the credit that she deserved.

But she was bringing the people in, right?

So

there's a sort of paradox, right, in that her fame is quite well established.

People are coming to visit Mary Annie.

Yeah.

And yet at the same time,

they're not paying the proper dues.

Yeah.

So how do you think Mary was cashing in on her ability at least to draw in punters, people coming down to see the stuff?

Well, I would hope that she would be maybe teaching, demonstrating, showing people how she worked.

Was it that kind of thing?

Yeah, touring

her work.

Yeah, find out what I saw and where I found it.

That little hole there's where Zaddie hit the ground.

I mean, is she doing tours?

Is she doing day trips?

She's She's not doing that, but she's set up her own fossil shop.

So eventually she's selling enough that she earns enough money to buy a place where she and her mother can live.

And they live above their fossil depot.

I just love how this woman takes control of her own life, even down to this, because you say in terms of being bitter, I think rightly so.

She was failed, actually, by the people who should have been her peers.

And perhaps we lost out on a brilliant brain that we could have utilised more.

But she just, she did very practical things things constantly, didn't she?

Yeah.

But her reputation's international.

She has one very fancy guest from quite far away.

Do you want to guess who?

Michelle Obama.

Yeah, it was.

It was amazing.

Shakira.

She's going to be a great, a great powerful woman.

The Joan of Arc.

I love all these guests.

No, the king of Saxony.

In 1844.

So a king shows up in Mary Anning's fossil depot.

Right.

That's a proper coup, isn't it?

It is.

So she is internationally renowned.

The directors of museums in New York come to buy fossils from Mary Anning.

Swiss naturalists pay repeated visits to Lyme Regis to come and see her.

And in the 1840s, when he's touring Britain incognito because he can't be bothered with all the official events, the King of Saxony and his doctor come down to Lime Regis.

They are impressed with what they see in the Anning Fossil Depot.

They buy a perfect ichthyosaur, and whenever they ask for her name, she writes it in the doctor's pocketbook and says, I am well known across all of Europe.

Good for her.

And what what would the Pasco Depot sell if you were going to run your own shop?

So, at the moment, what I've got is loads of pepper pig sets that my toddler is.

Pasco's Pepper Pigs is quite good.

Yeah, second-hand pepper pigs.

They sort of disprove evolution.

One of them does run an ice cream fan, which I guess is advanced for a pig, but pigs can't do that anymore.

So we should have stuck with God's vision.

Nice.

So, I mean, Michael, the King of Saxony's shown up and he's bought some lovely, he's bought an ichthyosaurus, so she's got some cash.

Does that mean we can say, at last, Mary Ann, comfortable security, you know, retirement plan, pension scheme, she's going to live a life of, you know, not necessarily international glamour, but she's fine?

I'm afraid not.

All the way through her life, it remains a struggle because, you know, there are stories which arise from these big finds and these big sales, but they might only happen once every few years or maybe even once a decade.

So we have repeatedly people offering their charity to her.

So we have, towards the end of her life, some of the London institutions subscribing and giving her a pension.

There is never really any stage during her life, even after being able to buy and live in the Anning Fossil Depot, that they are completely comfortable and secure.

And the British Association for the Advancement of Science raised some cash as well for her.

So this is 1838, so not the end of her life, but sort of in middle age.

Already there are handouts coming from people with deep pockets going, well, we should probably not let let her starve.

Yeah,

there is an eventual recognition that Anning has given so much to science that science really should give something back.

But as she reaches her 40s, life doesn't necessarily get any easier.

Her mother dies eventually, and after that, Mary herself then develops cancer.

And in the last few years of her life, she's using opium and alcohol to numb the pain.

Yeah, it's a really sad end to her life.

She died of breast cancer in 1847, so she was about 47 years years old maybe 48.

joseph her brother died two years later three years after her death there is a nice tribute to her so there's a stained glass window commemorating her in a church in lyme regis and henry de la beach who's a pioneering geologist who'd come down to lyme regis quite a lot does give a eulogy to her in his presidential address to the geological society so she is remembered

but i think more recognition during and maybe even more reward during her lifetime would be more fitting.

A comfortable lifetime, as well as knowing you're going to have a legacy.

I guess no one really is aware of their own importance during their lifetime and I don't know what comfort that would be.

The nuance window!

It's time now for the nuance window.

This is the part of the show where Sarah and I settle down on the sand with our rock hammers and we allow Dr.

Michael to tell us something we need to know about Mary Anning.

You have two minutes.

So without much further ado, take it away, Michael.

So as much as we have discussed how Mary Anning made all of these really extraordinary discoveries, but still failed to receive the due reward and recognition because of her sex during her lifetime, it's really important to recognise that she was not alone in this.

We've already mentioned very briefly about how the British Association for the Advancement of Science decided not to invite women, even eminent physicists like Mary Somerville, to the main events at their meeting at Oxford.

But many of the other key men in this period in geology and paleontology relied heavily upon the work of their wives.

So William Buckland had met his wife Mary in a stagecoach and they bonded over the work of Georges Cuvier.

But Mary Buckland would go on to write many of William Buckland's treatises.

He would dictate it, she would write it down.

She also played a key role in many of his experiments.

Whenever Buckland was trying to work out which reptile could have created certain footprints, it was Mary Buckland who had the idea to roll a slab of dough and to place their family tortoise on it.

And by doing so she allowed her husband to recognize those footprints as belonging to a tortoise.

Gideon Mantell was the Sussex surgeon and geologist and paleontologist who discovered the iguanodon and later the Hyliosaurus.

There has been some debate about whether or not it was actually his wife who first discovered the fossils which gave rise to the discovery of the iguanodon.

And Charlotte Murgeson, Mary Anning's friend, who was of a much higher class, was married to Roderick Murgeson, who was a key figure in the early development of geology.

And in the late 1820s, whenever Charles Lyell, the famous geologist who would go on to upturn everybody's idea about the age of the Earth and geological processes, was marching through the south of France and down into Italy with Roderick Murgeson, it was Charlotte Murgeson who was accompanying them and planning their route and making sure that everything went to plan.

So, in this early period of the 19th century, Mary Anning was not alone.

Thank you, Michael.

Sarah?

I think

the difficulty with the way that history has historically been told is that there are brilliant men and it's very difficult to be brilliant by yourself and the thankless or the

wife title taking away from what sounds like they are teams.

They are teams of people working together and because of the way society treated women or women's place, it's much easier for it to go under the man's name.

There was absolutely no point saying and his wife.

Also, do you know she was actually there?

I mean, who wanted to listen to that?

So, at least, hopefully, we're getting a little bit better at realising that people don't do things in a vacuum.

Well, there we go.

That's the life of Mary Anning.

I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner.

We have the tremendous Dr.

Michael Taylor.

Thank you, Michael.

Thank you, Greg, for having me.

That's a pleasure.

And in Comedy Corner, we have the sensational Sarah Pascoe.

Thank you, Sarah.

Thank you.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we dig up more hidden historical treasures.

But for now, I'm off to go and stand in a lightning storm to supercharge my intellect.

Bye!

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People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, Don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunselmann, for History's Heroes.

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