For many years, I have been a fan of Charles Dickens’ novels. In case you didn’t know, he was quite the writer. His books are funny, atmospheric, and rich in detail, both personal and geographic. He also came up with some splendid names, including Mr. Pumblechook, Inspector Bucket, Sargeant Buzfuz, Uriah Heep, and Harold Skimpole. Skimpole, a scheming mooch, comes from one of my favorite books, Bleak House (published serially from 1852-1853), which details the epic case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
Bleak House also contains two splendid references to geology. (If you don’t want to read it, there’s a wonderful 15-part BBC series.) The first is in the book’s amazing opening paragraph.
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Megalosaurus—the word and name for an extinct animal—had entered the lexicon on February 20, 1824, at a Geological Society of London meeting. William Buckland (also famous for his passionate study of coprolites, or fossil poop) described fossil teeth and bones from a carnivorous reptile at least forty feet long and weighing as much as an elephant. In honor of its larger-than-life size, at least larger than any known, living land animal, Buckland named it Megalosaurus, the Great Lizard. His description was the first ever of the group of extinct animals that would be named and classified as dinosaur. That historic event though wouldn’t take place until 1842, when Richard Owen coined the new word.
Few probably truly understood the size or significance of Megalosaurus until the year after the first publication of Bleak House. On June 10, 1854, at the grand reopening of the Crystal Palace, the public got to see the world’s first life-sized models of dinosaurs. Despite the existence of the term in scientific circles, very few people used the word dinosaur; the most common descriptor for the models, which included Megalosaurus,along with Igaunodon, and Hylaeosaurus, was antediluvian beasts or monsters. Made of brick, tiles, cement, and iron, the fantastical creatures had been created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894).
I’ve long been fascinated by Mr. Hawkins, a sort of Zelig for his times. He drew illustrations for Charles Darwin; hosted an infamous New Year’s Eve dinner in a dino, which included Richard Owen; attended the infamous meeting of the first presentation of Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theory of natural selection; worked on the first life-sized dinosaurs in the USA (only to have them destroyed by nefarious means); and still had time to be a bigamist. About a decade ago, I wanted to write a book titled The Man Who Invented Dinosaurs, but no one was interested so I abandoned the project.
One can still see Hawkins’ antediluvian beasts at the Crystal Palace in London, as the photograph below shows. Fortunately, most of them have been restored to their former beauty. Anatomically incorrect—primarily because Buckland, Owen, and others in the first generation of paleontologists lacked enough specimens—the Crystal Palace Megalosaurus were scientifically up-to-date and must have been exciting to see for those who had read Bleak House. Even for those who hadn’t, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs were stunning, and the beginning of the world’s long-term love affair with all things dinosaurian.
As exciting as is Mr. Dicken’s mention of Megalosaurus, I am a bit more partial to his second reference in Bleak House. It comes about a third of the way into the book when Mr. and Mrs. Bayham Badger visit Esther Summerson, one of the key characters in the novel. Mrs. Bayham Badger had previously been married to the now dead Captain Swosser and Professor Dingo, neither of whom, along with Mrs. Badger, possessed a first name.
"People objected to Professor Dingo when we were staying in the north of Devon after our marriage," said Mrs. Badger, "that he disfigured some of the houses and other buildings by chipping off fragments of those edifices with his little geological hammer. But the professor replied that he knew of no building save the Temple of Science. The principle is the same, I think?"
I am not recommending that everyone go out and follow in Professor Dingo’s footsteps but it is noble thought and I was glad to learn that my passion for building stone has had a long and illustrious history. I admit that I have joked about whacking off a building chunk or two when leading building stone walks but want to make it clear that I have never done so...yet. I have been known though to peel up layers of weakened sandstone and even splash vinegar on a building or two to test whether it was made of limestone or sandstone.
I am certainly not the first to point out Dicken’s fascination with geology. Geologic musings, his and others, regularly showed up his newspaper Household Words, as well as in other publications where he wrote. Here’s one of my favorite observations of his, which is technically about science but clearly an homage to geology: “…in those rocks she [science] has found, and read aloud, the great stone book which is the history of the earth, even when darkness sat upon the face of the deep. Along their craggy sides, she has traced the footprints of birds and beasts, whose shapes were never seen by man. From within them she has brought the bones, and pieced together the skeletons, of monsters that would have crushed the noted dragons of the fables at a blow.” (The Examineer, December 9, 1848, p. 787-788) As Adelene Buckland wrote of this passage in Victorian Literature and Culture in 2007 (v. 35. p. 679-694), “This ideal science is geology.” I can add nothing further to this fine observation.
And, a quick note to let you that I will be taking a two-week vacation from my newsletter. I will return on October 16.
October 14 - Secret’s of Seattle’s Botany - 6pm (Zoom) - Birds Connect Seattle - If you asked early citizens of Seattle which natural feature best symbolized the region, few would have hesitated in responding “Douglas firs.” These trees were everywhere, but they were not the only plants in the area. In this talk, David describes the presettlement botanical landscape of Seattle by examining modern clues, such as neighborhood names, big stumps, and big trees, that provide hints for telling this story and for showing the complexity and beauty of Seattle 150 years ago.
