Thomas Hawkins and geological spectacle

Ralph O'Connor

O'CONNOR, R. 2003. Thomas Hawkins and geological spectacle. Proceedings of the Geol­ogists' Association, 114, 227- 241. The lurid geological writings of the Glastonbury collectorThomas Hawkins (1810-1889) are often dismissed as the outpo urings of a lunati c. Whenanalysed within their literary context, however, they reveal conscious strategies for awakeningthe public's visual imagination along similar lines to geological treatises by 'mainstream'authors like Gideon Mantell and Hugh Miller. By virtue of their unusual lack of restraint ,Hawkins' writings point up the theatrical tendencies and rhetoric of spectacular display whichunderpinned the popularization of geology in the 1830s and 1840s, and which still serves auseful purpose on our television screens today.

St John's College, Cambridge CB2 lTP, UK (e-mail: rj020@hermes.cam.ac.uk)

1. INTRODUCTION

The fossil collector and writer Thomas Hawkins(1810-1889) is best known today for his personaleccentricities. Man y colourful anecdotes have comedown to us - some relating his youthful exploits , othersdetailing the mental illness of his later years - whichare, by turns , hilarious and rather trag ic (Bulleid, 1943;McGowan, 2001; Taylor, in press). None of theseanecdotes will be related in the present paper. My aimis not to elicit the (justifiable enough) response 'Oddchap, Hawkins', but to set his remarkable geologicalwriting s in their cultural context and encourage a moreanalytic approach to this important figure.

The so-called 'Heroic Age' of British geology, whichbegan in the first decades of the nineteenth century,saw the publ ication of numerous popular treati ses.Most were written by amateurs - the gentlemanl y elitecentred upon the Geological Society of London, andprovincial collectors, some of whom used geology as ameans of social climbing (Knell , 2000, pp. 305-336). Inthese treatises, geological practitioners projected thenew science into various public realms as something tobe marvelled at, while at the same time making theirmark as men of letters and men of science (for menthey largely were). By the mid-1830s, the populargeological treatise had become a genre of sorts ­flexible, well-established and highly literary - winningthe science an enthusiastic following among the middleand upper classes. Celebrated examples includeCharles Lyell's The Principles of Geology (1830-1833),William Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise (1836),Gideon Mantell's The Wonders of Geology (1838) andHugh Miller's The Old Red Sandstone (1841), all of

This work was tirst presented orally at a jo int meeting of theGeological Society of London History of Geology Group andthe Geologists' Association, The Amateur in British Geology ,held at the Geological Society, Burlington House, London,14-15 March, 2002.

Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 114, 227- 241.

which went into multiple editions on both sides of theAtlantic and stayed in print for several decades.

Thomas Hawkins made two contributions to thisgenre. The son of a Somerset cattle dealer , he claimedto have formed the ambition, early in his life, to amassthe greatest collection of fossils in the world (Ha wkins,1834, p. v). He succeeded, thanks to an almost fanati­cal determination and his skill as a fossil restorer: hetouched up imperfect specimens with plaster , some­times adding whole limbs of his own creation (Ta ylor,1989, pp. 112-114; 2000; McGowan, 2001, pp . 117­148). Whether his preparations should be regarded asfraudulent or merely over-enthusiastic, the results arestill among the finest exhibits in the Natural HistoryMuseum tod ay. The very fact that they are still onpublic display there (unlike so many other magnificentfossils in the museum's collection) testifies to theirenduring popular appeal.

On the other hand, Hawkins' two illustrated trea­tises on Liassic marine reptiles, Memoirs of Ichthyo­sauri and Plesiosauri (1834) and The Book of theGreat Sea-Dragons (1840a) - henceforth referred toas Memoirs and Sea-Dragons - are usually broughtforward as chief evidence for his mental instability(Purcell & Gould, 1992, p. 107; McGowan, 2001,p. 125). His literary style was admittedly outlandish,but its excesses and his delusions of grandeur wereshared by the so-called 'hyper-Miltonic' school ofpoetry (Anon., 1832), whose vast 'visionary' epics andverse dramas on sacred and mythological history ­now utterl y forgotten by scholars - sold well duringthis period, despite mixed reviews in the press. Typicalexamples included Robert Pollok's The Course ofTime (1827), Edwin Atherstone's The Fall of Nineveh(1828-1 830), Robert Montgomery's Satan (1830),T. J. Ouseley's A Vision of Death's Destruction (1833),John Abraham Heraud's The Judgment of the Flood(1834) and John Edmund Reade's The Deluge (1839).

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228 THOMAS HAWKINS & GEOLOGICAL SPECTACLE

In the l840s Hawkins himself would join their numberand abandon geology (Hawkins, 1840b, 1844, 1850,1853).To the geologist of today, Hawkins' books seema bizarre hotchpotch: their contents mix scientificanalysis with scenic description, folklore, poetry,sacred history, fantasy and demonology. But none ofthese elements was entirely absent from the best-sellingworks of the more 'respectable' geologists mentionedabove, some of whom positively delighted in suchheterogeneity (e.g. Miller, 1835), and all of whomwrote poetry as well.

The middle-class city-dwelling public of this periodwas used to imbibing facts about the natural world inthe form of spectacular visual displays (panoramas,galleries of curiosities, etc.). Geological treatises cashedin on this demand: spectacle, 'animated language', waswhat the public wanted, and this is what they weregiven (Altick, 1978; Schaffer, 1996; Secord, 2000).Hawkins was as dedicated a purveyor of 'literaryspectacle' as any geological author of the day. As ageologist, he was unusual, mainly in his lack of literaryrestraint, and in this he resembles the 'hyper-Miltonic'poets: reviewers' complaints of Hawkins' excesses(e.g. Anon., l840b, p. 115) precisely echo strictures on,say, Heraud's The Judgment of the Flood (e.g. Anon.,l834c, p. 33). Indeed, lack of restraint is a fault levelledgenerally at all novelists, poets, dramatists, composersand artists belonging to the so-called 'school of catas­trophe' (Dahl, 1953), itself inseparable from the voguefor geology. But most geological writers tended to bestylistically more sober than Hawkins. His self­dramatization finds close parallels in Mantell's diaries,for instance (compare Hawkins, 1834, pp. 33-34, withCurwen, 1940, p. 97); but Hawkins actually publishedthese outpourings - in fact, several passages haveallegedly been copied directly from his own diaries(Hawkins, 1834, p. i; 1840a, p. 16).There also seems tohave existed a proof copy of Memoirs, containing someadditional autobiographical passages of a somewhatembarrassing nature relating to Hawkins and hisfather's chamber-maid: Hawkins suppressed thisversion, but not before The Athenaeum had got itshands upon it (Anon., l834a; Hawkins, 1835, p. viii).One suspects that Hawkins had trouble drawing theline between public and private in his writings. For thisreason, they reveal a great deal about the complex ofpoetical and theatrical postures underpinning thepopular projection of geology during this period. Theirvery exaggeration throws these postures into sharprelief, and alerts us to their presence within morerestrained, mainstream geological texts.

2. GEOLOGY AND THE READING PUBLIC

Memoirs was published in 1834, when Hawkins was23, by Mantell's publishers, Relfe & Fletcher. A secondedition came out in 1835 (its title page records 1834,but its new 'Appendix' is dated January 1835), inwhich Hawkins responded to unfavourable reviewswith characteristic energy (Hawkins, 1835, p. viii).

Sea-Dragons was brought out in 1840 by WilliamPickering, publisher of the Bridgewater Treatises andseveral epic poems (Warrington, 1987).

These were gigantic, expensive books: Memoirs,thanks to its huge margins, was over half a metre talland cost the enormous sum of £2 lOS ~ perhaps awhole week's wages for the average middle-classhouseholder, and almost twice as expensive as WilliamBuckland's Bridgewater Treatise of 1836 (Topham,1992, p. 400). Hawkins was playing to a wealthyaudience - genteel collectors and savants with a classi­cal education, broad literary tastes, time on their handsand a love of books as artefacts. 'Vanity publishing'this may have been, but these publications hadprecedents and a readership of their own. This samewealthy audience had recently been entertained byMantell's three treatises on Wealden fossils, TheFossils of the South Downs (1822), Illustrations ofthe Geology of Sussex (1826) and The Geology ofthe South-East of England (1833). These worksresembled Hawkins' in price, though they were farsmaller; they cemented Mantell's reputation andasserted his proprietary rights over the Iguanodon.Hawkins likewise wanted publicly to stamp his auth­ority upon the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs he hadpainstakingly collected.

The readership of these books (Mantell's andHawkins' alike) was split between specialists and non­specialists. Partly for this reason, their structure andstyle appear to us to be somewhat unstable, swervingbetween detailed scientific description and leisurely re­flections of a more general, often poetical nature(see Miller, 1841, pp. xix-xx), Equally, non-specialistreaders valued the detailed 'objective' descriptions forconveying the actuality of the fossil object: unadornedfact had a magic of its own (Merrill, 1989). But itwas for the benefit of the genteel non-specialists thatMantell (among others) began and ended his earlymonographs (and interlarded the later ones) with hintsof local history, learned epigrams, religious reflectionsand fragments of verse (Mantell, 1822, pp. 1-13,304­305; 1833, pp. xiii-xiv, 359~36l; W. Buckland, 1823,pp. 127-128). The following passage from Illustrationsof the Geology of Sussex demonstrates Mantell'sfavourite means of conveying the wonder of geology:

The gigantic Megalosaurus, and yet more giganticIguanodon, to whom the groves of palms andarborescent ferns would be mere beds of reeds,must have been of such a prodigious magnitude,that the existing animal creation presents us withno fit objects of comparison. Imagine an animal ofthe lizard tribe, three or four times as large as thelargest crocodile; having jaws, with teeth equal insize to the incisors of the rhinoceros; and crestedwith horns; such a creature must have been theIguanodon! Nor were the inhabitants of thewaters much less wonderful; witness the Plesio­saurus, which only required wings to be a flyingdragon ... (Mantell, 1826, pp. 83-84).

R . O 'CONNOR 229

Mantell crowns a mass of anatomical facts with amelodramatic gesture to the wider audience , painting aprehistoric scene in purple prose. In addressing ~he

reader and using visual cues ('witness the Plesio­saurus'), he is employing what Secord (2000, p. 439)has called 'a rhetoric of spectacular display'.

The hint of melodrama was not accidental: it was thewhole point. To drum up support for geology, toencourage more careful collecting , these writers had toplay on the science's potential for grand views ~nd

sublime narratives - to show how these dull-Iookmgfragments of bone and stone were, to quote Miller(1858, p. 7), 'voluble with ideas of a kind almost toolarge for the mind of man to grasp '. The theatredirector, Peter Brook (1968, p. 42), has said that goodtheatre is the art of 'making the invisible visible' andthis is precisely what geological writers were up to.Again and again, they ask their readers to picture theEarth as a great 'theatre of changes' , complete withmetaphorical 'curtains' at the end of each epoch, to'imagine' each 'scene' as a sublime panorama (Lyell,1830-1833 , I, pp. 73, 159; Mantell, 1838, I, p. 262, II,pp . 604-605 ; Miller, 1841, pp . 69-70,229-233,256; seeO'Connor, 2003). The reader was drawn to 'see' thoseworlds through the author's eyes, mediated throughthe hieroglyphic text of the strata, "w ritten, withinand without" with wonderful narratives of animal life'(Miller, 1841 , p. 60). Man y upright folk depl~red thepernicious moral effects of cheap romance fiction andvulgar melodrama upon society as a whole (Gallaway,1940; Altick , 1957, pp. 108-115), and geology - like theLondon panoramas (Altick, 1978, pp . 174, 182-183)­stood poised to offer a healthy yet exciting factualreplacement to all these lies. It was not enough to fillthe public with ' imperial gallons of facts ' like Dickens 'Mr Gradgrind; as Mr Sleary reminds him at the end ofHard Times, 'People mutht be amuthed' (Dickens,1854, pp. 9, 292). Geology was marketed as truthstranger than fiction: as Mantell put it in nearly all hisbooks and lectures, 'the realities of Geology far exceedthe fictions of romance' (Mantell, 1826, p. 78; 1833,p.280).

Of course, 'literary spectacle' is only one aspect ofwhat these treatises were trying to achieve, Hawkins'included - but it is an important and relativelyneglected aspect. Hawkins' books differ most obvi­ously from Mantell 's and Buckland's in the sheerextent of emotive, reflective passages, relative tostraightforward 'objective' anatomical description.Where Buckland devotes a few paragraphs, andMantell a few pages, to sublime rhetorical outburstsand poetical digressions, Hawkins gives over nearly athird of the text of Memoirs to such matters. Theremain ing two-thirds comprise scientific exposition,related in the standard dry enumerative style so be­loved of the Victorian reading public for its exaltedparti cularity and precision (Merrill, 1989, pp. 46-47) :

These two large bones form the vertex of thecranium, they are externally convex and concave

internally. Their sagittal suture is plain andsmooth, their anterior one serrated and thin ,and the posterior lengthened out and downward toa denticulated spinous apophysis (Hawkins, 1834,p. 16).

The frequency of italics was slightly old -fashioned , butthese passages raised few elite eyebrows. In Sea­Dragons Hawkins abandoned this precise, enumerativestyle altogether: the passages containing anatomicaldescription are far more speculative than their equiva­lents in Memoirs, and in any case take up only a thirdof the whole text. Some commentators have seen thisgradual reduction of 'objective' scientific description asinherently 'irrational' , a disengagement with 'reality'portending his mental instability (Purcell & Gould,1992, p. 107). It may, however, be more indicative ofthe relative importance he placed upon the non­specialist component of his readership, whose visualimaginations he wanted to awaken. We shall nowbriefly examine how he did so.

3. ENGAGING THE MIND'S EYE

Hawkins' great collection remains the focal point of histreatises, both of which refer the reader constantly tothe thirty or so lithographic plates of fossils at the backof each book. Hawkins loved to show distinguishedguests around his collection at Sharpham Park , nearGlastonbury (McGowan, 2001, p. 164) and much ofMemoirs, in particular, reads like an informal touraround his collection, with the plates standing in forexhibits (compare Best, 1837, p. 42; Mantell, 1851; seeSecord, 2000, pp. 444, 463). These plates are beauti­fully made: some were drawn by George Scharf, adistinguished painter of theatrical backdrops andpanoramas (Jackson, 1987; Hyde, 1988, p. 78), whoalso created visual aids for geologists' lectures andmuseums. For Hawkins (1834, p. v), these plates are'the best interpreters of the original matter', and it is tothe fossils themselves that he constantly directs thereader's attention in Memoirs. The plate reproducedhere (Fig. I; his plate 13) is introduced as follows:

Turn, reader, to the thirteenth plate; I am sure youwill understand how my heart fluttered when thatgem of price was placed before my flashing eyes(Hawkins, 1834, p. 31).

Ha ving referred the reader to the seventh plate(Fig. 2), Hawkin s proceeds to tell the story of how hesecured this fossil. The following extract is only a smallpart of what is, in effect, a kind of heroic romance:

"Have ye sid my animal sir," said the fossilistJonas Wishcombe of Charmouth as I called at hishouse in August to enquire if he had anythingworth buying; - "I should like vor yer honor sir tosee 'un." My heart leaped to my lips - "animal!animal! where!"

230 THOMAS HAWKINS & GEOLOGICAL SPECTACLE

Fig. 1. 'Unique Head of a Dragon from Street' (Hawkins, 1834, plate 13). Reproduced by permission of the Syndics ofCambridge University Library.

--Fig. 2. 'A perfect Dragon from Lyme Regis. 1833' (Hawkins, 1834, plate 7). Reproduced by permission of the Syndics ofCambridge University Library.

"Can't be sid to-day sir - the tide's in.""What - nonsense! I must instantly - come,

come along.""Can't see 'un now yer honor - the tide's rolling

atop 0' 'un fifty feet high.""In marl or stone?""Why in beautiful ma-arl - and -"Washed to death" - and I threw myself in

despair upon a chair.How often have I reflected upon the very­

Bedlam-impetuosity of my passions at thatmoment: - the chaffed sea rolling over an Ichthyo­saurus and remorselessly tearing it to a thousand

atoms - a superb skeleton of untold valuetriturated to sand by a million pebbles, suchwas the Promethean idea - torture of my rebelimagination (Hawkins, 1834, p. 25).

After this engaging West Country melodrama, thefossil itself is described in the traditional dry scientificstyle. But Hawkins keeps swerving back to his show­man persona, treating his exhibit as a priceless andunique work of art:

No words can express my sense of the beauty ofthose two paddles in the seventh plate: what amultitude of pentameters belong to those ossicular

R. O'CONNOR 231

Fig. 3. 'Dragon from Lyme Regis. Discovered in 1835' (Hawkins, l840a, plate 2). Reproduced by permission of the Syndics ofCambridge University Library.

Fig. 4. 'Dragon, in Stone, from Street' (Hawkins, 1840a, plate 20). Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of CambridgeUniversity Library.

strings every one of them worth a necklace oforiental pearls. Those paddles are exquisitelybeautiful ~ they are natures own mosaic [sic].(Hawkins, 1834, p. 28).

Sea-Dragons operates along similar lines, insistingon the crafted uniqueness of each precious relic. Butthere is a new note. Hawkins now repeatedly asks thereader to look with him through the fossils as ifthrough a window onto the alien world in which theylived. Here are two examples, accompanying the fossilsin Figures 3 and 4 respectively. The act of lookingbrings them startlingly to life:

'We are thus favoured with ... a much morestriking Contour of the head, in which stilllurkeththe ghost of a grim and greedy thing' (Hawkins,1840a, p. 10);

the head is instinct with life, the eye glowers in hissocket, as if in the last agony, the spine twists toand fro, as though the nervous filaments still

tortured its extremest parts, one foot digs into theground, and the lashing tail writhes under thegeneral throe, agitating for Death (Hawkins,1840a, p. 18; compare Miller, 1841, p. 237).

Taking up William Buckland's theory (1836, I,pp. 173-174) that ichthyosaurs' eyes were telescopic,Hawkins suggests that they were also covered withmovable skin like those of a chameleon, then reflects:

'By such inductions we revive the habits ofCreatures long vanished away, and recolor theardent Monster fleeting through the expanse ofSeas like lightning to his distant prey, with alust unquenchable in gore' (Hawkins, 1840a,pp. 10-11).

Hawkins urges us to imagine the colour of eachcreature's skin, so that we may picture the animal as itwas when alive, like the plesiosaur in Figure 5:

The long, lank, skinny hands, the deathy paddlesof Plesiosaurus, or spotted, or livid yellow and

232 THOMAS HAWKINS & GEOLOGICAL SPECTACLE

Fig. 5. 'Dragon from Street. 1834' (Hawkins, I840a, plate 27). Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of CambridgeUniversity Library.

pale, upon them fiend-like he fled: his hide, orblack or freckled, or russet, his eyes blood-shotfiery, or green, lizard-like; his teeth, his fangswhetted sharp, gloating upon and crunching thegristles of his dying prey: or fleeting through theExpanse of Ocean, or tempting the Profound, orcresting the Upper Waves, preying, or at watchfor prey, or lulling himself upon the wide, theuniversal deep: '" behold! the Great Sea-Dragon,the Emperor of Past Worlds, maleficent, terrible,direct, and sublime (Hawkins, l840a, p. 24).

Digestion provided another springboard into visionaryrealms. Buckland had exclaimed in his BridgewaterTreatise that

When we see the body of an Ichthyosaurus, stillcontaining the food it had eaten just before itsdeath, ... all these vast intervals seem annihilated,time altogether disappears, and we are almostbrought into as immediate contact with eventsof immeasurably distant periods, as with theaffairs of yesterday (W. Buckland, 1836, I,pp. 201-202).

Hawkins guides his readers to make a similar visualleap with the fossil illustrated in Figure 6:

the moment you look there into the abdomen,you believe you see the stomach collapsed, anda few meagre contents besieging the intestinalcanal; these are manifestly insufficient to hissustentation, that the Dragon at once appears,

inane, languidly sinking to the bottom of the Sea,and giving up the famished ghost (Hawkins,1840a, p. 19).

Hawkins repeatedly brings his fossils imaginativelyto life in their final agony, then pictures them turningslowly into fossils across the millennia to elicit thereader's wonder at the immensity of deep time. At thispoint it is worth illustrating the extent to whichHawkins' seemingly excessive and morbid rhetoricconformed to the norms of his chosen genre, bycomparing a characteristic passage from Hugh Miller'sextremely popular The Old Red Sandstone (1841) withHawkins' reflection on the plesiosaur in Figure 7 (hisplate 28):

The grand P1esiosaurus of Plate XXVIII lies in aponderous grave, built up with irregular lamellaeof Lias stone: the carcase seems to have passedthrough the several stages of corruption un­broken, but the unquiet waters finally sportedwith and scattered the osseous monster, whicherst ruled them, and reluctantly gave him burial.His was a hasty and begrudged obsequy, so thecapricious Seas first wrecking him, heaped up thePall of Cold Matter about his bones with noceremony nor care. How long and through whatvasty Cycles did the Seas career over him, silentand forgotten quite: what agonies of joy and rage,what mighty throes of being have been, and howoften felt throughout the Realm of Seas, since firstthe Dragon Lorded there, and also since the time

R. O'CONNOR 233

Fig. 6. 'Dragon, in Shale, from Street. 1836' (Hawkins, 1840a, plate 21), Reproduced by permission of the Syndics ofCambridge University Library,

'f

Fig. 7. 'Dragon from Street. 1837' (Hawkins, I840a, plate 28). Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of CambridgeUniversity Library.

of his final death-struggle therein. How manyRevolutions of the Universe have passed sincethis Monster dread; how many Races have ortramped, or fleeted with wing, or with fin, over hisdesolate bones (Hawkins, 1840a, pp. 24-25).

Chapters 12-14 of The Old Red Sandstone representMiller's bold attempt to construct a 'living' narrativeabout the creatures hitherto only described in theirfossil state. Here, he imagines the sudden demise of thecelebrated Pterichthys, illustrated in his plates I and 2(Fig. 8):

The Pterichthys shows its arms extended at theirstiffest angle, as if prepared for an enemy. Theattitudes of all the ichthyolites on this platformare attitudes of fear, anger, and pain ... Wholeichthyolites occur, in which not only all the partssurvive, but even the expression which the stiffand threatening attitude conveyed when the laststruggle was over. Destruction must have come inthe calm ...

The period of death passed, and over the innu­merable dead there settled a soft muddy sediment,that hid them from the light, bestowing upon

234 THOMAS HAWKINS & GEOLOGICAL SPECTACLE

Fig. 8. Pterichthys oblongus (Miller, 1841 [1857], plate 2).

them such burial as a November snowstorm be­stows on the sere and blighted vegetation of theprevious summer and autumn ... The processwent on. Age succeeded age, and one stratumcovered up another. Generations lived, died, andwere entombed in the ever-growing depositions.Succeeding generations pursued their instincts bymyriads, happy in existence, over the surfacewhich covered the broken and perishing remainsof their predecessors, and then died and wereentombed in their turn ... Whole races becameextinct, through what processes of destructionwho can tell? (Miller, 1841, pp. 237-44).

Such geological narratives allowed both authors con­siderable creative freedom, and Hawkins and Millerhad different literary tastes; but these extracts clearlyshare an underlying 'plot'.

Hawkins' fossils seem almost to speak to theiraudience about their lives, like the fossil shown inFigure 9:

his Animus survives in his attitude, discoursingmost eloquent things. The Profound, the SolitarySeas he haunted, the appetites he accomplished,the brassy Skies he saw, the Soulless World heruled, the unjoyous Times, the unchecked luststhis dragon knew, crowd their Memories in hisribbed boat, which, tracking the wide Oceans ofyears, lands them at last on our Modern Shores(Hawkins, 1840a, p. 17).

The main effect Hawkins aims at - suspending disbe­lief, bringing the past to life - is that of the popular

panorama and related shows (Altick, 1978, pp. 184­197). A dioramic adaptation of John Martin's apoca­lyptic canvas Belshazzar's Feast was advertised in 1839as follows: 'such is the extraordinary illusion withwhich it is painted, that the mind is led to contemplateit as a subject in reality' (Anon., 1839b). Martinhimself had recently drawn a bloodthirsty reconstruc­tion (reproduced in Rudwick, 1992, p. 79) of 'TheCountry of the Iguanodon' for Mantell's latest book,and in 1840he contributed an even livelier frontispieceto Sea-Dragons called 'The Sea-Dragons as they Lived'(Figure II). Memoirs also begins with a reconstructedantediluvian landscape (Figure 10). But these actual'scenes from deep time' (Rudwick, 1992)are only thereto whet the reader's appetite. They are snapshots. Thereal panorama takes shape within the mind of thereader gazing at the fossils themselves (as representedin the 'objective' anatomical descriptions and/or theplates), guided by what Mantell twice calls Hawkins''graphic' prose (Mantell, 1851, pp. 341 n. I, 347 n. 2).

In all these moments of visual immediacy, Hawkinsoften slips into a persona familiar from other treatises(and dramas and poems) of the period. This is the timetraveller or astronaut, taking the reader on a journeyto an 'alien planet' (Hawkins, 1840a, p. 9; compareByron, 1821, pp. 373-410, Mantell, 1838, I, pp. 373­376, Miller, 1841, p. 141) or a foreign country: 'wecross the Silent Seas of Time, and explore the SolitaryCountries of the Past' (Hawkins, 1840a, p. 20) Thesetime-travel strategies are closely paralleled, again, byMiller's work (compare Hawkins, 1840a, p. 26, withMiller, 1841, pp. 267-269; see O'Connor, 2003). Thegeologist's power to collapse time could have otherimplications. In The Geology of the South-East ofEngland, Mantell had described himself as a new'Frankenstein', creating enormous monsters from afew bones (Mantell, 1833, p. 315); likewise, Hawkinssaw himself - with no conscious irony - as the Pro­methean 'creator' of the fossils he prepared (Hawkins,1834, pp. 25, 27). Saurian resurrection was the meta­phorical aim of both men and vivid language was themeans. Hawkins (1834, p. 8) praised Mantell's 'ani­mated' language and declared in the Preface to Mem­oirs: 'I speak only the language of the heart. It willoffend a fastidious taste ... but it bears the impress oftruth' (Hawkins, 1834, p. vi). Some critics sneered and,in Sea-Dragons, he protested that the 'general favorite[sic] Authors in Natural History ... are those of themost enthusiastic disposition, which enliven theirwritings and fill them with charms' (Hawkins, 1840a,p. 9). Hawkins aligned himself with these 'enthusiasts',setting himself up with unintentional irony as a geo­logical successor to 'Ossian', the legendary Gaelicbard-hero whose alleged epic poems were 'restored'(or rather, invented) by James MacPherson in theeighteenth century and remained popular well into thenineteenth (Hawkins, 1834, p. 11); Hawkins launchedinto verse along similar lines (Hawkins, 1834, p. 13;1840a, p. 16). Almost all geologists quoted poetry in

R. O'CONNOR 235

Fig. 9, 'A Dragon from the lias Shale of Street. 1835' (Hawkins, 1840a, plate 17). Reproduced by permission of the Syndics ofCambridge University Library.

their popular works; however, where they quotedByron and Milton, Hawkins quoted himself.

4. GEOLOGIST AS PROPHET

That word 'enthusiasm' is central to Hawkins' visionof geology. In the early nineteenth century it did notconnote mere excitement, but a more intense, oftenreligious experience - a prophetic frenzy or divinepossession. In artistic circles it was highly fashionable .John Martin 's paintings were praised as 'the divineintoxication of a great soul lapped in majestic andunearthly dreams' (Bulwer-Lytton, 1830, p. 343). The'hyper-Miltonic' poets mentioned earlier went ostenta­tiously into this kind of divine rapture and Hawkins'geological treatises - particularly Sea-Dragons - sharetheir modus operandi. The concluding passage of Mem­oirs presents the geologist as a kind of metaphysicalopium addict:

Over these vestiges of Ichthyos and Plesion-sauri... we love to dwell. Such countless hosts ofassociations are connected with these gone-bythings - so much of the sublime and mystic, ofthe eternal and inspiring that we invoke fate tocontinue them ours for ever:- they are sensations- operations - that concentrate infinity and iden­tifies it [sic] , a something that the human under­standing can grasp bodily and be satisfiedtherewith, like the opium-eater, and his drug, forawhile (Hawkins, 1834, p. 51).

The geologist's uncanny, uniquely visual communionwith the pre-human past made him into a kind ofprophet who alone could interpret these visions andguide his audience to reflect on what Hawkins called'our own proper littleness' (Hawkins , 1834, p. iii;compare Byron, 1821 , p. 414). This prophet-personalurks behind many elite geological treatises of the

period (Lyell, 1830-33, I, p. 166; Mantell, 1838, II, pp.679-680), but Hawkins goes over the top, as ever,portraying himself as a new 'Daniel' whose heart'vibrated to an Angel hand' (Hawkins, 1834, p. 29;1840a, p. 17).

By 1840, these vibrations had apparently intensified:his geological 'enthusiasm' became more specificallyapocalyptic, closer in spirit to contemporary epic verse,fiction, fine art and so on (Dahl, 1953; Paley, 1986).Underpinning all this was Hawkins' change of opinionon his monsters' place in Creation. One thing disturbedhim in 1840: these beasts were clearly designed tomurder and mutilate , 'crunching the gristles of [their]dying prey', 'quadrupedal and deadly' (Hawkins ,1840a, pp. 24, 27) - yet they existed before the Fall ofMan .

In 1834Hawkins had followed Buckland 's use of theargument from design: these creatures were part ofGod 's 'stupendous but harmonious chain of effects'(Hawkins , 1834, p. 5), expertly designed by a benevo­lent Creator for their habitat, and hence not techni­cally 'monsters'. But, for dramatic effect, Bucklandand Hawkins capitalized on the monstrous appearanceof these creatures: they looked devilish enough toappeal to the general reader as 'Milton's crowdof locust angels' (Hawkins, 1834, p. 51; W. Buckland,1835). In 1840, however, Hawkins could not acceptBuckland's theory that carnivorous beasts were de­signed by a benevolent Deity as the 'police of nature'to keep the Earth from overpopulation (W. Buckland,1836, I, p. 133). To Hawkins, these pitiless killingmachines proved 'the action of some other Power inthe remotest ages of the Earth' : they now seemedliterally devilish, the robotic creations of rebel angels,not God (Hawkins, 1840a, p. 25). The differencebetween his two frontispieces - from a melan­choly evocation of a vanished world (Fig. 10) to aBrueghelesque vision of hell on Earth (Fig. 11) - doesnot , as some have claimed, illlustrate Hawkins' descent

Fig. 10. John Samuelson Templeton, 'Extinct Monsters of the Ancient Earth' (Hawkins, 1834, frontispiece). Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of CambridgeUniversity Library.

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238 THOMAS HAWKINS & GEOLOGICAL SPECTACLE

into insanity (Purcell & Gould, 1992, pp. 107-108). Itperfectly illustrates these creatures ' demotion fromGod's 'earliest essays' to a 'teeming Spawn fitted forthe lowest Abysm of Chaos ' (Hawkins, 1834, p. 5;1840a, p. 22). God had allowed Satan's 'dragons' to'Lord it' for a time, and then he had annihilated them(Hawkins, 1840a, p. 7). Their fossils he preserved as aspecial revelation to modern man, 'the only Key toTongues pregnant with Facts of the most astonishingkind concerning the gods' (Hawkins , 1840a, p. 21) - novague opium dream of associations these, but tangibleproofs that God would destroy Satan 's power in thelast days. And Hawkins was the prophet to whomthese visions were vouchsafed.

Once again Hawkins takes a common metaphor ­the strata as pages of Earth history (Miller, 1841, pp.42, 60) - and makes it literal. These fossils are a text,'the Great Book of Dead Times', whose 'later Editionsare incomplete' (Hawkins, 1840a, p. 23). They are likea lost book of the Bible - which explains the title andlayout of The Book of the Great Sea-Dragons, with itsdouble columns, red and black title-page and Hebrewlettering denoting the 'Gedolim Taninim', the 'greatsea dragons' of the Genesis creation account. Thescholar Granville Penn had said in defence of geologyin 1822 that this science leads our thoughts naturally'forward, in contemplation of another earth .. . notfigurative or allegorical, but real and actual ' (Penn,1822, pp. 451). This remarkable work of the apocalyp­tic imagination takes the conventional image of thevisionary geologist to its logical extreme:

The Carcases of the Sea-Dragons are strown overthe whole Earth; and thus shall dire thunderboltswhich shattered life out of them, fall upon andoverthrow the Kindred Legions of Sathanus.

Onward then, to the End of Time .. . (Hawkins,I840a, p. 27).

5. CONCLUSION: GEOLOGY ASENTERTAINMENT

But for all these exalted flights, Hawkins still offeredhis readers something not unlike a London freak-showor gallery of curiosities. His ichthyosaurs and plesio­saurs are stage demons frozen in melodramatic,pseudo-Gothic postures ~ players on the 'crimsonstage' of deep time, 'enacting perdition' in that part ofthe 'gorgeous antediluvian drama ' left out by Mosesand Milton, with the 'Panorama of Ages stretching outinto waste and desolation' as a backdrop (Hawkins,1835, p. viii; 1840a, pp. 18, 25, 27). They are also'exquisite' killing machines from which 'our NavalArchitects' might learn a lesson or two (Hawkins,I840a, p. 12). Hawkins was not the only geologicalauthor to make use of this theatrical mixture oftechnology, demonology, geology and landscape art;but his kind of 'spectacle' was perhaps closest in spiritto the popular science shows of the day. In 1839,alongside various ingenious machines, the Colosseum

exhibited 'a series of scenes' illustrating 'the GEOLOGI­CAL REVOLUTIONS OF THE EARTH', merging geologywith sacred history in the usual way - after which youcould watch the 'WORLD OF Smrrs ' giving up its'PHANTOMS, at a WITCHES' SABBATH in the HAUNTEDCAVERN' (Anon ., 1839a; Secord, 2000, p. 440). As inHawkins, geology meets phantasmagoria (Altick,1978, pp. 217-220).

Hawkins affected to scorn the 'vulgar' appetite for'spectacle' and 'common curiosity' (Hawkins, 1834,p. iii; I840a, p. 24) - an appetite that neverthelessconsumed the upper classes as much as the middle andlower - but in practice his work confirms the aestheticprinciple that 'the sublime' always depends partly ongut reactions of horror and astonishment, and alwaysruns the risk of seeming merely ridiculous . Memoirscertainly raised a chuckle or two from gentlemanlygeologists like Conybeare and the geologically trainedreviewer for the Magazine of Natural History . Butthe plates won universal admiration and the latterreviewer recommended that Memoirs be translatedinto French. And the non-specialist reviewer for theMetropolitan Magazine was captivated by Hawkins'prose style:

what a world does Mr. Hawkins describe, andhow beautifully does he describe it! How the mindturns inwards and dwells with wonder and deepthought upon that which was ... We wish Mr.Hawkins had written more ' " His language ispoetry ... (Anon ., I834b).

Hawkins had succeeded in painting a 'literary specta­cle': for this reviewer, his words brought a whole worldbefore the mind's eye. The Literary Gazette alsopraised the 'picturesque and animated ' descriptions inMemoirs. Sea-Dragons, too, was read as an 'astonish­[ing] display' (Anon ., I840a, p. 114). In 1851 largequotations from Memoirs were reproduced in GideonMantell's popular guide to the British Museum 's (nowNatural History) fossil collection, Petrifactions andTheir Teachings: just as Hawkins (1834, p. 8) hadpraised Mantell 's language as 'animated', so Mantell(1851, pp. 341 n. I, 347 n. 2) now lets Hawkins''graphic' language speak for itself in the context of anactual, physical display.

In 1857, the late William Buckland's son Frankbrought out a best-selling book entitled Curiosities ofNatural History , whose vivid style, miscellaneous con­tents and omnivorous approach to nature reflected yetagain the Victorians ' addiction to freak-shows andcuriosity galleries. At one point Buckland describes afight between two newts in a pond and remarks that ifthese newts were viewed under a microscope, 'theywould have realised the strange pictures we see in Mr.Hawkins' book on "The Sea Dragons'" (F . Buckland,1857,p. 25). There is, of course, only one such 'picture 'in Sea-Dragons - that by John Martin (Fig. II) - butBuckland uses the plural. It is an easy mistake to make.Sea-Dragons is stuffed full of vivid, unforgettable

R. O'CONNOR 239

scenes of fighting dragons and Martin's frontispieceonly illustrates one of them. The rest have lodgedthemselves in this reader's imagination.

Modern commentators classify Memoirs and Sea­Dragons with unwitting accuracy as 'curiosities ofscientific literature' (Bulleid, 1943, p. 65, emphasismine), giving that term a pejorative flavour it did notpossess in the mid-nineteenth century. Back then,curiosity brought geology fame and success, andHawkins - by virtue of his overheated imagination ­made a real contribution to the growing industry ofpopular geological spectacle, in his books as well as hiscollection. Nor are Hawkins' melodramatic excessesdead and buried. There follow, by way of conclusion,two extracts from the successful BBC television seriesWalking with Dinosaurs, first broadcast in 1999. Thesetranscriptions - the beginning and end of episode 4 ­give only a faint impression of the truly spectacularstory of how a large pterosaur (Ornithocheirus) met histragic end:

[Beginning] Doleful music. Low-down shot ofancient sea towards sunset. Camera pans steadilyaround to reveal long sand-bar stretching out intothe distance, with the corpse ofan enormous ptero­saur lying half in the water, half on the sand-bar.Tragic, yearning melody in full orchestra.

Kenneth Branagh (KB) (voiceover; solemnly): Inlife he was the most magnificent beast ever totake to the wing. He ruled the skies supreme,flying far and wide over the lands of the dino­saurs. This is the story of the last journey thisgiant ever made ...

[End] Same landscape scene as at the beginning,just before the pterosaur finally expires. Sametragic melody played loudly, then softly and with asolo violin as the dying pterosaur comes into viewand melancholy noises come out of its beak.

KB (solemnly): His life has run full circle. In histime he travelled the globe. But death finds himhere, in the very same place where he first mated,forty years ago.

View of the whole sand-bar covered in pterosaurcorpses, with sun shining on sea.

KB (solemnly): On the beach around himare others who lost out ... But Nature is seldomwasteful ...

A much smaller pterosaur pecks out the eye ofour now-dead pterosaur and squawks. Final shot ofthe pterosaur's massive eyeless body, half-in, half­out of the water, with the sand-bar extending fromlower-left to upper-right of screen, and the settingsun casting a lurid glare upon the water. Fade.Credits roll (Haines & James, 1999, episode 4).

Whether by accident or design, the final tableau repli­cates several crucial compositional elements of JohnMartin's frontispiece for Sea-Dragons (Fig. 11).

Such comparisons enable us to appreciate both thelasting influence of Hawkins' geological vision, and thespirit in which he wrote his treatises. Their aestheticqualities may, to an unsympathetic modern reader,seem to be aptly summed up by the author's ownwords: 'we encounter execrable and dreary things inthe abounding chaos' (Hawkins, 1840a, p. 27). Takenon their own terms, however, and read within thecontext of their times, Memoirs and Sea-Dragons (noless than Walking with Dinosaurs) present a bold andimpressive mixture of scientific expertise, imaginativespeculation and sentimental melodrama. It is a failsaferecipe for geological spectacle, aiming to draw atten­tion to the science and its discoveries. Onlookers' jawsmay drop for different reasons - wonder, amusement,scorn - but polarized responses greet any such specta­cle, with its necessary element of excess. As long as theshow is not ignored, it has achieved its first aim.Someone, somewhere, has been 'edutained'.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Clemence Christophe, PaulClasby, Julie Ann Lambert, Julian Luxford, MikeTaylor, Hugh Torrens and Harriet Truscott forbibliographical information. I am grateful to AnneO'Connor, Anne Secord, Jim Secord, SujitSivasundaram, Harriet Truscott and (in particular)Mike Taylor, Richard Howarth and Martin Rudwickfor their helpful comments on this paper and itsprevious versions.

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Manuscript received 28 July 2002; revised typescript accepted 23 November 2002