Philobiblon

Is it possible to write about the fall of the West Roman Empire without making it a lesson about your own day? Since at least Gibbon, that’s been the reason for covering the final centuries of Rome’s pre-eminence, and Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of the West is no exception.

What does make Goldsworthy’s work different is that he attempts to tell the story of the empire in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, then draw the conclusions, rather than allow the explanation to infuse through the whole text, as was the case in one book I’ve recently reviewed, where the overconsumption of energy was the theory of choice.

Goldsworth has thus produced a rather old-fashioned narrative history – emperor follows emperor, usurper knocks out usurper, and the swirl around. That has its strengths – if you want to get the latest historical thinking on, say, the “end of Roman” Britain, Goldsworthy is drawing on the latest archaeology and thinking.

He’s clearer than many in setting out the structure of late 4th-century Roman Britain, “a diocese under a vicarius based in London and responsible to the praetorian prefect. The diocese was subdivided into either four or five provinces…The Comes Britanniae commanded a force of comitatenses consisting of three infantry and six cavalry units…The Dux Britanniarum commanded units of limitanei, mostly stationed in the north and including the garrisons of some named forts on Hadrian’s Wall. Finally, there was the ‘Count of the Sexon Shore’ controlling limitanei based around the east and south coasts.”

On the vexed subject of the “Saxon invasion” (did it happen? did it involve significant numbers? were the existing populations pushed aside?) he’s sensibly agnostic, noting that the academic fashion has swung, probably too far, towards denial. He challenges recent interpretations of “mixed” Saxon and Briitish cemeteries, noting “considerable caution needs to be used before assuming that a particular object automatically denotes someone of a particular race. Brooches were both functional and valuable. ..In the end brooches and belt buckles were there to hold up clothes more than to express identity.”

This section is relatively analytical – and addresses one of those questions that history can’t help worrying at – but the careful narrative approach in other sections can get rather monotonous and repetitive.

To take just a couple of pages: In March 238 the proconsul of Africa was proclaimed emperor, in resistance to the newish Maximus , who was too preoccupied in the west to deal with an attack by Ardashir a couple of years before. The Senate in Rome rejoiced, and accepted the usurper, but within weeks the governor of the neighbouring province had defeated his son and co-emperor in battle, and Gordian hanged himself. But the Senate couldn’t go backwards, so selected two of their number, Balbinus and Pupienus, as co-emperors, and they were immediately forced to co-opt a third, Gordian’s young grandson, aged just 13. Maximus got bogged down in fighting, then his troops killed him, but they didn’t fancy the two senators either, and soon killed them too, leaving the teenager as titular head of the empire, to be married to the daughter of his Praetorian Prefect Caius Timesitheus, effective ruler. He died at age 19, either at the hands of the Persians, or his own troops after a defeat by the eastern enemy.

It might make a good board game, but it is hard to get interested in this fast-moving, if shortlived, cast of characters, about which we learn little. So while as a reference this is a handy book, it wouldn’t be the best thing to take on a long train trip when seeking an engaging read.

So what of its grand theory? Well as you might expect from a narrative historian chiefly concerned with political history, it concerns political structures. Goldsworthy argued that the marginalisation of the senatorial class in the third century meant that the possible range of emperors, or usurpers, was greatly widened, and emperors had to fear practically anyone who got some sort of influence over some troops.
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Most cultures around the world have a Noah’s ark-style story – of a great inundation that consumes the whole planet. One rare exception is the eastern parts of the British Isles. Which is odd, because the archaeologists have recently established that just off the east coast of England there was a great lost land, an area greater than the existing UK, you might even call it a culture, which disappeared completely beneath the waves only around 6,000 years before today. One explanation for this loss might be that the repeated invasions of the east coast in the historical period disrupted regional myth cycles, in contrast to the continuity of Celtic cultures of the west coast.

But one effect of this historical disruption is clear: it makes Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland particularly fascinating and gripping – slightly odd really, when you consider that this has the dry-sounding subtitle of “Research Report No 160 Council of British Archaeology”.

You’d have, however, to be a very dry sort indeed, not to be captured by the tale of the gradual unfolding of knowledge of an entire lost world in Europe – a world that the geological surveys of oil companies and pipe-laying firms has enabled the experts to map, and the archaeologists to reconstruct. Some of the seismic data is a bit on the technical side; some of the images (and the council deserves credit for producing such a finely and voluminously illustrated as well as accessible monograph) are only for the expert to really judge, but they do bring alive this story of a lost – and possibly one day recoverable – culture.

The name Doggerland comes from the Dogger Bank, a relatively shallow area in the North Sea from which fishermen have for decades been dredging artefacts – including some finely carved tools and weapons.

Europe’s Lost World takes the unusual step for something labelled a “research report” of following the gradual unfolding of knowledge of Doggerland, starting with the work early in the 20th century of Clement Reid, who in a little book called Submerged Forests identified the potential archaeological value of buried lands: “In them the successive stages are separated and isolated instead of being mingled.”

The report then goes on to look at what is known from the land of the sites of the period – the Mesolithic, the intermediate culture that it says has traditionally been neglected between the deep mysteries of the Paleolithic and the excitement of great change into farming of the Neolithic. The authors here make a now fashionable claim that at least some of the peoples of the time were considerably less nomadic, and built grander structures, than has traditionally been thought.

They look in detail at the site of Thatcham in Berkshire, centred around a hut about 6m in diameter. (It is impossible now due to erosion to know whether this was solitary or part of the group.) “All the evidence suggested that the house had been maintained and rebuilt on several occasions by a family group, perhaps six or eight people, and that it served several generations of hunters… burnt bone fragments included wild pig, fox and, possibly, a domestic dog. Marine shellfish, particularly dog whelks, were also present on the site.”
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David Horspool’s new popular history has an interesting thesis: that the English are a rebellious lot, always champing at the bit to overthrow their rulers. It’s always good to challenge popular conceptions – by European tradition the French have the role of bloody rebels, while the English are the phlegmatic, unchanging, unchallenging lot, working slowly if not always steadily towards an agreed constitution so complex it can’t even be written down.

And in The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking, From the Normans to the Nineties, Horspool covers, as the title suggests, a lot of ground, and finds some solid support for his thesis, particularly up to the “Glorious Revolution” (or Dutch invasion, whichever you prefer). He also identifies a perhaps particularly English formulation for rebellion: “this isn’t against the king, it is to save the king from the evil councilors surrounding him”.

The idea of the English as rebellious is not itself new; as Horspool points out Thomas Paine in Common Sense calculated that since the Norman conquest there had been “(including the Revolution) no less than eight civil wars and nineteen rebellions”. Not a new idea then, but one that keeps coming up.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, however, the text suffers from some disappointing flaws. One is that it trails rather dutifully but uninspiringly through all those medieval aristocratic squabbles, not just Simon de Montfort and Perkin Walbeck, but rather lesser known figures such as Roger Bigold and Sir John Oldcastle. For such exciting, dramatic, blood events, the writing is surprisingly flat, and the half chapter or so per rebellion formula fails to inspire.

Horspool is also very unclear about what he means by “rebellion”. A lot of the time he is talking about attempts to overthrow the regime, but sometimes he’s simply talking about standing out against the king’s will, from Thomas a Beckett to in modern times, where the thesis gets really stretched, he trails through the suffragettes and the Greenham Common protests. Certainly the participants in both these movements were rebels in the most general sense, but to group them with some medieval aristocrat setting out his stall for the crown really fails to work.

This perhaps is a book that covers around 500 years more than it should. About half-way through it, Horspool himself identifies a major change in the way the English look at revolt, with the arrival of Protestantism, and specifically the doctrine of obedience to the Crown as a religious duty. Horspool writes (in one of his livier passages):

“The theory took time to catch on. When Matthew Parker, who became Elizabeth’s Archbishop of Canterbury, went to preach, as an up-and-coming evangelical churchman, to Kett’s rebels at Mousehold Heath in 1549, it was his theme of submission for the common god which almost caused a riot. Though the rebels immediately demonstrated their evangelical credentials by being so distracted by the singing of a new English version of the Te Deum that they allowed Parker to get away, at this time the association of Protestantism and obedience was not yet commonly accepted. ..Increasingly, however, it would become a keynote of English Protestant thinking, and one widely disseminated by preaching and in treaties, pamphlets and biblical exegesis.”

If Horspool had stopped here, the book would have been a lot more coherent. Certainly after this he finds interesting events – and quite a few disproving the always rather weak claim that “the English don’t build barricades”. But had he covered the medieval period – thematically perhaps rather than chronologically, and used those conclusions to perhaps reflect on more recent events, this might have been a much better, more coherent book. What is on the page here is rather a useful handy reference to rebellions, rather than a book you really want to sit down with to read through.

When you start reading Martine Segalen’s Love and Power in the Peasant Family: Rural France in the Nineteenth Century, you might think she’s taking on straw men. Surely no one believes any more that peasant families were unemotional, wholly practical alliances of economic value only, or that children were not loved or treated as human to quite an age, or that the views of the 19th-century folklorists about the “backwardness” of traditional cultures would be given any weight.

Then you look at the publication date (1980 in French), and the foreword by Peter Laslett which explains how Segalen set up the “magnificent” exhibition on Mari et femme dans la France rurale traditionelle in 1973, and you realize that you are reading a modern classic, a revolutionary text, one that well-deserved being translated into English.

As you get into the text you realize that it deserved to be translated not just because of the revolution in theory if helped to create, but also because it has a cracking good story to tell. One of Segalen’s main sources is traditional proverbs, sayings, rituals, and practices and what a rich storehouse they are, and often a surprising one too.

On courtship, she notes how the practices in most places – thought by the 19th-century observers to be crude, rough, even violent – were in fact a practical way for both sides of the potential relationship to test out each other. The romantic explanation (yes, the peasants did do romance) was that the force of the interaction reflected the strength of emotion, but as Segalen says, this was a practical test. “The sense of what is beautiful is guided by the essential prerequisites of a society based on manual labour applied with both strength and skill.” She quotes Henri Massoul “Beauty consists in being well-fleshed, glowing, plump and large. A ben groussiere (buxom) woman, a ben rougeaud (ruddy) man, this is the criterion of beauty.”

And she says that while in a society where words were rare and often little used, courtship often relied on gestures, and when words were used, “the metaphors were often borrowed from the world of peasant objects”. You might not want to try this Vendean effort out on your own beloved, but it certainly worked at the time: “I think you’re so lovely, my great big darling: and then you’re so fresh, that I can’t do better than compare you to a field of young cabbages before the caterpillars have been through.”
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Welcome to the monthly carnival – a browse across the highways and byways of the past 2,500 years, or so, as recorded in the blogosphere.

Women’s history is rather my thing, so I’m going to start with them: the heroines, the success stories, and the (possible) murderesses.

On Indiecommons, you can meet four of the foremothers of photography – I doubt that you have ever seen such beautiful pictures of algae. No, really!

And on Zenobia, you can meet another ancient woman, the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, the subject, I learn of a new Hollywood movie, Agora. If you are planning to go to see it, you might want to save reading this until after that. No I haven’t seen the movie, just too many disappointing “historical” movie in general.

Another story of achievement, if of a rather different kind, is that of Eliza Jumel Burr, the daughter of a prostitute and a kept woman herself, who went on to become the richest woman in America.

And on Executed Today, the fascinating story of in England. Not at all a clearcut case…

On Strange Maps is the hexagonal map of London – designed to stop hackney cab drivers getting away with daylight robbery.

And the unmissable Diamond Geezer’s been visiting a fan museum in a Georgian house in Greenwich. As you’d expect, it’s rather small.

Opening out from my own interests, and starting in the ancient world, Memorabilia Antonius is reluctantly convinced that Nero’s rotating dining room has been found. And Aardvarchaeology has been seeing some fascinating, high-tech research on burial urns.

Going medieval, the historical fiction writer Elizabeth Chadwick on Living the History sets out what she knows about the life of John Marshall, a formidable medieval warrior. And Sound and Furry looks at sticks in my crow, really, it is crow, not craw, using it as a fascinating exploration of the relations between the birds and the aristocracy – “fetch me my hunting crow”.

I’ll use my host’s privilege here to point to one of my own posts – some very new archaeology revealing the history of the Chateau de la Perriere in Burgundy, its most famous owner being Nicholas Rolin.

And a little later in the dark ages indeed for humanity, there’s an account on Early Modern Whale of the martyrdom of the young Catholic priest Edmund Geninges in 1592. Not one for the squeamish.

Then there’s a small collection of 20th-century history: a letter from Verdun in October 26, 1918, and a more cheery post on Mary Beard’s A Don’s Life about the history of holidays.

And Daniel Finkelstein on his Times blog has some critical comments on The Boat That Rocked, a film about pirate radio stations. It’s whitewashing the role of the Labour government, he suggests.

Chapati Mystery is going back a little further, but also right up to date, wiith a post on the challenge of Securing Afghanistan – in 1842.

Then we ought to have a little bit of theory: Mary Kate Hurley has been reflect on methodolgy and medieval literature. And on Mercurius Politicius there’s the vexed question of reading pamphlets in electronic form. Is it really the same?

And finally, this is being just a little bit circular, but why not? The Ancient and Medival Carnivalesque, the special Halloween edition. Spooky!

You can find out more about the History Carnival on its home page.

The title is Austerity Britain: 1945-1951. The cover image is of a grey and dreary Newcastle on Tyne from 1950, and it weighs in at a wrist-wearying 692 pages. You wouldn’t pick David Kynaston’s combined social and political history as a non-fiction bestseller, which it was.

But you don’t have to get far into its pages to find its combination of anecdotal accounts (drawing heavily on the Mass Observation Survey) and descriptions of a society trying to rebuild itself from the ground up, compelling. In fact I found it so compelling I devoted two days of a recent holiday to little else, skipping easily through its pages.

The interest is multiplied by the fact that many of the debates that fill its pages — about the form of the foundational NHS, about the nature of a more equitable schooling system, about housing shortages and the problems of building new communities, about Britain’s economic place in the world — are being revisited today – or perhaps were never adequately solved.

Some of the stories about the NHS should be force-fed to everyone who’s now trying to dismember the fabulous free-at-the-point service provision. Kynaston reports the words of Dr Alistair Clark, an “ordinary GP: “For the first six months I had as many as 20 or 30 ladies come to me who had the most unbelievable gynaecological conditions… at least 10 who had complete prolapse of their womd, and they had to hold it up with a towel as if they had a large nappy on.”

The biggest early pressures were on “drugs, spectacles and false teeth” – the first and last of these reflecting modern-day debates about drug costs and dental provision today.

The housing debate started from a very different place from today’s – in a Sunday Pictorial account of “100 Families” in July 1946, only 14 owned or were buying their own homes, but one big debate was about mixing the classes. Bevan placed much hope in this: You have colonies of low-income people, living in houses provided by the local authorities, and you have the higher income groups living in their own colonies. …It is a monstrous infliction on the essential psychological and biological one-ness of the community.”

Kynaston reports that in 1946 a patchy start to housing construction, handicapped in part by a desire to build quality rather than quantity, and marked by a significant squatter’s movement, but by September 1948 750,000 new homes had been provided. But several million more were needed, without even counting the renewed impetus in the slum clearance movement.
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If you look at the subtitle of Edward Vallance’s A Radical History of Britain, it’s clear where he’s coming from. He’s, in his own term, a radical, and sympathises greatly with those before him who he regards as falling into the same camp. The good news is, this has not destroyed his critical faculties. He’s wary of painting the present too closely on the past, of regarding former radicals as “just like us”, and keen to point out that many fond legends of the left, and the right, such as the exact place of the Magna Carta in “British freedom” (largely constructed in the 14th century, when Parliament passed six acts that reinterpretted chapter 29 far beyond its original intent and since, making, for example “lawful judgement of peer” mean trial by jury).

Vallance clearly explains his aims in the introduction for the book: “First, it aims to evaluate radicalism in its specific historical contexts, uncovering in many places the formerly secret history of both its successes and its failures. Second, it evaluates the enduring power of the idea of a ‘radical tradition’, by examining how each age has reinvented it to suits its own ends.”

Some of the names and events here will be familiar, at least in outline, to anyone with a smattering of school history: the peasants; revolt, the Levellers, Thomas Paine, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the suffragettes. Yet most will have little more than a sketch of these events – and often an inaccurate one.

So Vallance concludes that the Peasants’ Revolt had a different impact that suggested by the “bitter invective of the boy-king Richartd, often invoked to show the futility of popular insurrection”. In fact, wages rose after the revolt, many serfs were released from villeinage, rations improved,with labourers’ rations at harvest often including up to a pound of meat a day, and life expectancy rose to about 35 (higher than industrial workers in the mid-19th century). And for the first time, Vallance said, there was an awareness in the elite that the Commons had a place in public life, as the anonymous poem ‘God Save the King and the King’s Crown’ said: “The leste lygge-man with body and rent/He is a parcel of the Crown.”

But the core of this book, as any book about English radicals, is around the Revolution. and the core of that is the Levellers, subject of much historical revisionism, antirevisionism, anti-anti-revisionism, etc… This is Vallance’s conclusion: “…the key Leveller writers, Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn and John Wildman, were at the centre of the political turmoil of the civil war and the revolution. Far from being marginal figure, individuals like Wildman were, in fact, well connected to radical MPs within the Commons such as Henry Marten and Thomas Rainborowe. By cautioning against seeing their politics as reflecting a simple dichotomy between radicals and conservatives, recent work has also directed our attention to those moments when the army grandees themselves seriously considered radical solutions, suc as the Levellers’ various Agreements of he People, for settling the nation.” I
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It is to the early 19th-century reformer Major John Cartwright that we owe the innovation of having individual sheets of paper for mass petitions, which could be spread around the country – previously they’d always been on one long sheet (with obvious logistical difficulties). His tour of the country in 1813 gathered 130,000 signatures in support of a taxypayer franchise.

Although he didn’t have a lot of effective success – most of his petitions were dismissed by parliament as inadequately framed. “Petitioning continues to this day to be regulated by an act of 1661 agauinst ‘tumultuous’ petitioning, and by 18th-century notions of ‘decent and respectable language.

(From Edward Vallance, A Radical History of England, p. 297)

Richard Overton, English Civil War writer, in The Arraignment of Mr Persecution (1645), wrote that it was often the “most weak and passionate of men, the most unable to defend truth or their own opinions” who were “the most violent for persecution”. (From Edward Vallance, A Radical History of England, p. 155)

Have just been meeting “Les Physiocrats”, who believed in a “government of nature” – i.e. laissez faire, leaving everything to the market and being very hostile to any state intervention. Their leader was Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), who wrote the article on grains in The Encyclopedia.

In the reigns of both Louis XV and XVI there were regular food crisis, and the traditional method of trying to control these was by preventing the movement of grain across international frontiers, and also between provinces. In 1763/4 Louis XV authorised the transport of wheat between provinces, but fear of riots and dissent meant nothing happened until 1768.

In Burgundy, the rural parts of the province produced far more food than it needed, but it was swallowed up by the Lyon market, and in the spring of 1770 food riots and unrest started in Dijon.

In 1774, at the start of Louis XVI reign, a new controller of finances, Turgot, imbued with the ideas of the Physiocrats, had proclaimed on September 13 completely free internal trade in cereals. This gave free reign to speculators, hoarders and traders. Prices rose brutally – in spring in Dijon the price of wheat doubled, maize followed.

Thus started what was known at the time as The War of the Flours. On April 12 there was little grain in the market and prices were extremely high. No one doubted famine would follow. A grain merchant, Fauvernay, was roughed up in the market.

On the 18th a crowd of mostly women gathered, and grew through the morning. One of them donned “un bel habit rouge, une canne [walking stick] a pomme d’or a la main” in the manner of Nicolas Carre, the miller of l’Ouche, who was much detested. With the support of the provincial administration, he had adopted a technique promoted by the Physiocrats to produce white flour, which could only be afforded by the rich. The crowd chased him fown the street, but he found a house of refuge with another miller, so the crowd’s anger was redirected towards a parliamentary councillor, Jean-

Charles Filsjean de Sainte-Colombe, who was thought to speculate with Carre. He hid in the cellar as the crowd surged through his house, and – so the story goes – was dug out of his hiding place, a pile of manure. He was to survive however, until the Revolution, when he met a nasty end.

Soldiers were called in from Auxonne to restore order, and the parliament at Dijon pronounced severe penalties for the rioters. Some of the “sediteuses” were taken before the parliament on July 29,1775.

In 1776 Turgot was dismissed by the king but the principle of “liberty of grains” was not abandoned. More hunger and more unrest in Burgundy, and in 1784 the Quartermaster of Burgundy, Amelot de Chaillou, tried to set up a municipal flour shop, to ensure sufficient grain, but the notables object and the project was abandoned.

By 1789 there was trouble over grain across Burgundy – at Charolles, Tournus, Saulieu, Auxois, Autun, Beune, Sens, Dijon, Auxerre — carts were stopped, stores raided.
From “Jours sans pain, jours de colere” by Jean Bart in Pays de Bourgogne, No 222, June 2009, pp. 3-10.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, published in 1915, created a new sub-genre, the feminist utopia. There’s something delightfully ironic about the creation, for there’s no doubt her world, an all-female one getting along very nicely thank you, would have horrified the original creator of the form, Sir Thomas More, and indeed it initially horrified her three main characters, men of her own time, who in best traditional style, set out to explore this unknown, mysterious land.

The narrator is Vandyke, clearly the most sensible and level-headed of the three; it’s a marker of the age of the text, and its liberal origins, that he’s trained in sociology. The character who is a symbol of the “typical” man of his age, and the one who fails utterly to cope with a society where women aren’t automatically his prey, is Terry, who supplies the aircraft and the funds for the expedition into this hidden land, sealed off by a volcanic eruption some two millennia previously.

The atypical man, the one who finds himself at home in Herland,
is Jeff, the expedition doctor and science lover, the sensitive, poetic type not entirely at home in his own society.

It’s a society that’s constantly striving to perfect itself: “Moadine told him. ‘We have no laws over a hundred years old, and most of them are under twenty’.” The society is a democracy, if rather too fond of the decisions of the elders for modern tastes.

It’s developed what Vandyke finds is an entirely acceptable science, from astronomy to physiology, but where it has really excelled is agriculture, turning its limited environment into a veritable Garden of Eden (no accident that surely), in which every tree produces a crop and lives in managed harmony with is environment. In terms of another modern genre, they’ve terraformed it perfectly.

There’s only one thing it relies on from the time before the women were left – by combination of conflict and natural disaster – on their own to cope: a few huge old buildings, including the now largely redundant fortress.

As the author surely had no choice – and really as in science fiction today the science isn’t really the point – she skips over the essential development of virgin birth. It happens, and the women, understandably enough, come to revere it, putting motherhood at the centre of their society (although later, when they understand the limits of population growth controlling it by social pressure). But there’s little focus on heredity, and no desire for personal glory in it.

If there’s one main criticism of the nature of Herland today it is that as a society it is rather too perfect, impossibly so (even the men are forced to admire the practicality and suitability of the dress – although Perkins Gilmann’s concern with this, at the start of the 20th century, is understandable enough).

The 21st-century world is rather less sanguine about the perfectibility of human nature and indeed the possibility of perfection at all – Ursula Le Guin’s utopia/dystopia The Dispossessed in being a case in point.

Yet Perkins Gilmann can be excused in this: she wrote in a more innocent age – before the horrors of two world wars – and more importantly, she wrote at a time when women were barely allowed, and by most, thought possible of much practical constructive effort at all (although then as now, women on average worked harder and longer than their menfolk with the double burden of home and employment).

She was facing a huge mountain of public disbelief, and any flaw in the world of Herland would have been a fissure of opportunity for the enemies of feminism.

Although long neglected, Herland is indeed one of the founding texts of feminism, and anyone who’s interested in being a feminist should read it – but don’t worry, it is mercifully short and to the point, not at all flowerily “literary”. Its author is non-nonsense, getting on with the job, writing for purpose, not ego, just as her characters, and so often women generally, do.

Fame, particularly for women, is a strange and unpredictable thing. For centuries, most of the great things done by women, their outstanding talents and amazing discoveries, have been forgotten and later reinvented by men, or claimed from the start by men – and often there’s little chance of this being corrected. Yet sometimes, a story is so outstanding, so surprising, so amazing, that it’s survived to be revived and propagated in an age that seeks out these women’s deeds.

Who would have predicted that Mary Anning, a working-class woman, who spent much of her life only a few pounds from the workhouse, in an obscure little English coastal town, would today be one of the most famous women of the 19th century?

An actress portraying her regularly parades around the Natural History Museum, many of her great fossil discoveries are properly labelled with her details, and now, Tracy Chevalier, well known for her Girl with a Pearl Earring (although personally I prefer The Lady and the Unicorn) has made her the subject of her latest book, Remarkable Creatures.

Like those books, this isn’t great literature, but very good reading – built around finely woven characterisation and dialogue that superbly exercises that cardinal novelist’s rule: show don’t tell.

As in all of her other books, Chevalier has clearly done her research on Anning, and her other central character, Elizabeth Philpott, a middle-class if impoverished spinster who helped Anning, while doing her own fine and important work on fossil fishes. She’s also clearly absorbed the social mores of this stiff, superstitious, class-obsessed age, and the way it was deeply disturbed by the unmistakable message that emerged as the fossil record in the cliff of the coast around Lyme Regis started to be unearthed.

(N.B. This book has not yet been released in the US, but is available in the UK.)

If the structure of their relationship – its great split engendered by what seems like an unlikely obsession with a clearly unsuitable, unlikely man – seems a little forced and artificial, well that’s the price one pays for popularising Anning’s story. (And it has to be said that for all her virtues, Chevaliers always have the whiff of the writing class about them.)

Nevertheless, if you know Anning, you should read this book – it might not teach you anything new, but it will enjoyably put flesh on the bones of her story. If you don’t know Anning, read it for the entertainment value, but also because you’ll then know about a great woman of history, and have acquired the knowledge in an entirely pleasurable manner.