ABSTRACT
The stratifi ed, fossil-fi lled cliff s of Lyme Regis, Dorset, loom up in Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992), in Tom Holland’s The Bone Hunter (2001), and in Tracy Chevalier’s novel about fossil hunter and Lyme resident Mary Anning, Remarkable Creatures (2010). Swift’s and Chevalier’s novels spotlight the ichthyosaur fossils that occupied center stage in the revised story of earth and human history that Anning helped produce, and all three dramatize the preoccupations and problems of characters whose lives become intertwined with fossils and their scientifi c and cultural signifi - cance. Between them these novels separate out strands of signifi cance that fossil and geological fi ndings held for the nineteenth century. Introduced in the previous chapters, these concern the age of the earth, how it was formed and shaped, the relation of humans to other life forms, humanity’s place in the earth’s past and future, the causes and signifi cance of extinctions, randomness and historical contingency, evidence of design in nature, and how to understand God. The three novels capture the excitements and apprehensions of times that often seem, and especially so in neo-Victorian fi ction, more intellectually and imaginatively engaged than ours because of their combustible mixture of rationalism, romanticism, conservatism, religion, complacency, activism, and curiosity about itself and its past.
