AUTHOR’S NOTE

In 1831, a frank and lively young woman named Anna Maria Pinney came to stay in Lyme Regis. She was seventeen, the daughter of prominent Bristol planters, and a keen observer and writer. Her journal is one of our richest sources of information about Mary Anning. “She glories in being afraid of no one and in saying everything she pleases,” wrote a fascinated Anna Maria soon after she met Mary.

In January 1832, Mary apparently confided in Anna Maria that she had been in love with a person of a higher social class and that, eight years before (i.e., in 1824), she had seen her hopes cruelly dashed. I say “apparently,” because Pinney, although astonished and even titillated by this confidence, was moved by its details to an uncharacteristic discretion.

Her wonderful history (which I cannot consider myself at liberty even to write) interested me, because I understood, I felt the power of the [e]motions by which she was actuated … during that time, the bodily anguish was small compared with what must have been suffered by a proud mind, who had hoped from childhood to see herself removed from her low station in life, and suddenly saw these hopes blasted by Satanic treachery.

Having suffered “as much as mortal can endure for years,” Mary Anning claimed to be thankful that the affair (if an affair it was) had ended: “Had it not been so,” Pinney quotes her as saying, “I would have lost what little religion I now have.”

She is not quarrelling with what she cannot obtain, the season of worldly happiness once would have returned again, and I believe would even do so now, but she is wise. Her wildness of manner and late horror of everything in the world is taken for madness by those who do not understand the agony of blasted hopes.

Well, what are we to make of this? Anning scholars, perhaps reluctant to see romantic speculation overshadow Anning’s long-delayed scientific reputation, have tended to dismiss these entries as the fantasy of an over-excitable teenager. Mary’s distress was caused by her brother Joseph’s marriage, they suggest. Or by the thwarted hope that Miss Philpot would elevate her socially – a more plausible theory, although it does not quite account for Anna Maria Pinney’s excitement. In fact, I find it impossible to read these journal entries as anything other than a veiled account of a romantic attachment; one that, after the initial crushing disappointment, continued to tempt Mary with the prospect of illicit love. And so I think we must put our minds to the question of who, among Mary’s acquaintances through those years, might have raised her hopes and caused her so much pain and confusion.

I think we can dismiss William Conybeare. He was adamantly blind to Mary’s work, and in a rare mention of Anning in a letter, he gets her name wrong. What about Thomas Birch? He was more than twice Mary’s age, but he was amazingly generous to the Annings, and a letter of the period mentions salacious rumours linking Colonel Birch and Mary. Then there is William Buckland, with whom Mary worked closely for decades. If Mary Anning had set her hopes on Buckland, his 1824 marriage to Mary Moreland might indeed have been felt as a “Satanic betrayal.” So I think that both Birch and Buckland must be considered candidates, although Buckland’s piety makes him less likely to have embarked on a “season of worldly happiness” with Mary.

As for Henry De la Beche, he seems a man inclined by temperament to chafe against social constraints. He was indeed expelled from Marlow for insubordination, and his drawings and journals are satiric and irreverent. And he was a true friend to Mary Anning for many decades. When Cuvier questioned Mary Anning’s integrity regarding the plesiosaur, De la Beche wrote from Jamaica in her defence. In 1830, his drawing Duria antiquior (a detail of which forms the cover of Curiosity) was printed and sold as a benefit for the Annings. At Mary’s death in 1847, it was Henry De la Beche who delivered a eulogy at the Geological Society, the only time Mary Anning’s name finds its way into the Society’s proceedings. De la Beche’s separation from his wife and his departure for Jamaica occurred the same year as the Buckland marriage, 1824.

Aside from the appeal of these facts, I was irresistibly drawn to Henry De la Beche as a fictional subject, and I wrote Curiosity not as a historical argument regarding his relationship with Mary Anning, but as an attempt to imagine what such a romance, so impossible and so full of possibility, would have meant to both of them. The progressive attitudes De la Beche expresses in his journals were terribly at odds with the reality of his life: he was a slave owner at a time when the conscience of England had awakened to the atrocity of slavery. All the individuals working with the fossils at Lyme Regis were confronted with the need to profoundly revise their view of the world and their place within it, but the challenges for Henry De la Beche were more personal and profound.

Curiosity is broadly (and usually factually) consistent with the historic record, although I have invented freely where no record exists. Almost all the characters, including such minor figures as Mrs. Stock and James Wheaton, are based on real individuals. As for chronology, time in Curiosity has had to conform occasionally to the higher purposes of the story, as it did for William Buckland’s God.

What happened to these people? Henry De la Beche’s 1824 journey to Jamaica did not make an emancipationist of him; instead, he used the occasion to write a book urging the humane treatment of slaves. When he returned to England, he resumed work as a geologist, and in 1842, he was knighted for his contribution to the science. Henry and Letitia divorced in 1826. Sir Henry De la Beche did not remarry and died in London in 1855.

The Megalosaurus announced by William Buckland at the famous meeting of February 1824 was the first primeval creature to be given the name dinosaur. William Buckland outlived both Mary and Henry. He died of dementia in 1856; an autopsy revealed a long-time tubercular inflammation of the brain.

The Khoisan woman known as Saartjie Baartman was exhibited in London from 1810 to 1814. Henry De la Beche’s visit to this exhibit is fiction, but his Paris journal reports a tour of the Cuvier salon where her body was displayed. Her remains circulated amongst Paris museums until 1974. After negotiations by the Griqua National Council and the South African government, they were returned to Africa in 2002. She was buried in her hometown in the Eastern Cape.

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.