LITMIR.BIZ

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not one to swoon with delight at fashion’s latest dictates or, indeed, to follow them. Although from a prosperous family in Wiltshire, Miss Benett did not succumb to the usual conventions of a woman in county society. Rather than settling into marriage in some comfortable country rectory she stayed firmly unattached, and her pony carriage would often be seen on the hills of Wiltshire while she pursued her main interest, geology. She devoted her life to her collection, and became so well known that eventually her name alone in the literature would suffice to denote work of outstanding quality.

      For Mantell such correspondence was both prestigious – she was, after all, a member of the gentry – and highly beneficial, since he could extend his knowledge beyond Sussex. He wrote to her in 1814, requesting ‘the honour of a correspondence’. Miss Benett graciously replied by sending a hamper of fossils to the wagon office in Lewes. Soon they were immersed in comparing the strata of Wiltshire and Sussex, trying to decide which rocks lay above and below others in the sequence. Although not yet known as such they were trying to unravel the sequence of ‘Cretaceous’ rocks across Southern England, which had been formed between 144 and 66 million years ago. Mantell was aided in this by another member of the gentry, George Greenough, who was busily engaged in developing his geological map of England with William Buckland. Greenough was only too keen to capitalise on Mantell’s enthusiasm, frequently requesting more detailed information on the Sussex rocks. By 1815, Mantell had already identified several different strata within the chalk formation around Lewes, the lowest being blue marl, then chalk marl, lower chalk and upper chalk. Greenough steered his research and provided advice on naming the rocks.

      In the course of his medical duties, Gideon Mantell was summoned to the assistance of a Mr George Woodhouse, a prosperous gentleman who owned a linen-draper’s business in London. While giving ‘unremitting professional attention’ to Mr Woodhouse, Mantell could hardly fail to notice his patient’s eldest daughter Mary. Her portrait shows a young woman with a mass of dark curls piled high, and large, regarding eyes, her face set off by a fashionably off-the-shoulder dress. She shared his interest in fossils and gave him gifts – corals from Worcestershire and other curiosities she had found. They soon ‘formed an attachment’ and, it would appear, could not wait to get married.

      The bride was only twenty, a minor in the eyes of the law, when she married in May 1816, by special licence and with the consent of her mother as guardian. Unfortunately, her father did not live to see the wedding. Thanking Mantell for his ‘professional exertions and kind attention’ shortly before he died, Mr Woodhouse presented him with a treasured gift of James Parkinson’s survey of the fossil kingdom.

      Once settled in Lewes, Mary Mantell dutifully helped her husband with the painstaking task of searching for fossils, which was rapidly becoming his consuming interest. It was not uncommon for her to ride out with him on geological expeditions and sometimes even on his medical rounds, when she would check the ground for fossils while he visited patients. She soon found she could assist him with drawings of his finds, and patiently tried to master the art of scientific illustration. ‘I am much pleased with her [Mary’s] first attempt at etching,’ wrote Etheldred Benett to Mantell in 1817. ‘A little practice to enable her to work stronger and bolder appears to me all that is wanting to make them a great ornament to your work.’

      With growing self-confidence in his geological observations, Gideon Mantell now decided to write a book setting out his findings on the rocks of Sussex, which he hoped would establish his scientific credentials and perhaps secure his membership of one of the prestigious scientific societies. Mary undertook the illustrations: a fragment of the claw of a crustacean, part of the dorsal fin of a fish, the extraordinary sharp spines of the Plagiostoma spinosa – all the dismembered bits of Nature in their incredible variety. With his wife’s total support and interest, Mantell described his happiness after his marriage as ‘greater than ever’.

      As Gideon Mantell began to explore further afield, he realised that there was very different rock to be found in an area known as the Weald, a forest-covered ridge lying between the chalk hills of the North and South Downs. ‘Advancing from the Downs, an outcrop of sandstone is first seen near Taylor’s bridge,’ he observed, ‘and it subsequently appears by the stream that winds along Cuckfield park. At this spot in Whiteman’s Green an excavation has been made.’ As he approached the quarry, he could see tucked below the gorse, wild thyme and trees clinging to the rocks at the surface, the Weald strata exposed to a depth of some forty feet. There were horizontal layers of sandstone, limestone and slate, lying on a bed of blue clays.

      With growing excitement, as he examined fragments of rock he began to realise that the fossils entombed in the layers of sandstone and limestone at Whiteman’s Green were quite unlike the invertebrates of the chalk hills around Lewes. Embedded among the debris appeared to be petrified fragments of larger bones. He mentioned this in his letters to George Greenough and Etheldred Benett in the autumn of 1817, explaining that he had uncovered the teeth and bones of vertebrates: amphibia, perhaps crocodiles or alligators. However, the fossils were so mutilated and worn that they were almost impossible to interpret or classify. The logical, tidy plans of the past months, the neat orderly drawings of invertebrates, everything that had fired his imagination about the former sea of chalk, began to be overshadowed by these curious fossil beds.

      Whiteman’s Green was too far from Lewes for Mantell to ride out each day, and with the arrival of his first child, Ellen Maria, in 1818 he had even less time than before. So he began negotiations with a Mr Leney who ran the quarry, and during the next year parcels from Cuckfield began to arrive at the Lewes wagon office. The first delivery was not particularly exciting: ‘the bones, teeth and the tongue of a fish’. After another abortive trip when ‘it rained in torrents nearly the whole of our journey’, Mantell ‘made further arrangements with Leney respecting the Cuckfield fossils’. He is likely to have taught the quarryman to search for the remains of larger bones. It wasn’t long before several packages arrived from him, including some fossils that Mantell described as ‘superb specimens’.

      Among the fragments of larger bones there were also invertebrates, such as tiny fossil shells and snails. Mantell tried to describe these to Etheldred Benett, although he admitted they were so damaged ‘it is scarcely possible to ascertain the genera or species’. Nonetheless, Miss Benett thought the shells from the Weald were similar to those uncovered in a rock she knew called ‘Purbeck limestone’. This is a formation that stretches across Wiltshire and Dorset that was well established in the geological sequence as Secondary rock. The Weald and the Purbeck, Mantell wrote, following Miss Benett’s advice, ‘correspond in so many particulars … that there is every reason to suppose that they belong to the same formation’. If this was true, the rocks at Whiteman’s Green in the Weald lay well below the chalk at the top of the Secondary series. He was revealing tantalising glimpses of a former world that had thrived an unknown number of years before the fishes and ammonites embedded in the chalk.

      All this time Mantell’s medical practice prospered, and he was able to buy a house in Castle Place from his former partner, James Moore, for £700. By 1819 he could afford the house next door and the two houses were knocked together, becoming known, grandly, as ‘Castle Place’. Positioned prominently in the High Street and backing on to Lewes Castle, the imposing home was a world apart from the modest cottage in St Mary’s Lane where Mantell had been brought up. A team of craftsmen was hired to create a gracious interior with Georgian windows to the floor, ornamental arches over the stairwell and even carvings of ammonites to decorate the Ionic columns at the front of the house. As if to complete the metamorphosis from bootmaker’s son to doctor of standing, Mantell adopted the coat-of-arms of his forebears and painted them, entwined with those of Woodhouse, on the porch outside and on the marble table in the dining-room. But if Mary Mantell was under any illusion that she might acquire an elegant new drawing-room to entertain guests, she was to be disappointed. Her husband’s burgeoning ‘little cabinet’ became a grand ‘Collection’ and quickly came to fill the new first-floor drawing-room.

      As news of Gideon Mantell’s collection spread, visitors came to view the fossils. One caller was that same Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Birch who had sought out Mary Anning; Mantell described him as a ‘very agreeable and intelligent man’. Birch had been touring the West Country and had spent much time in Dorset buying fossils of

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