Tracy Chevalier on Mary Anning
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2017
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Novelist Tracy Chevalier discusses the life of Mary Anning with Matthew Parris.
Mary was a working class woman from Lyme Regis who discovered full dinosaur skeletons on Dorset's Jurassic Coast and sold them to collectors in the early 1800s.
Her remarkable finds came before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and she believed them at first to be giant crocodiles, but as scientists began flocking to Lyme Regis to buy her specimens, she started to educate herself in geology, becoming an authority on fossils.
However, as with many of the subjects of Great Lives, she was never fully credited for her efforts and faded from public consciousness after her death.
With Hugh Torrens, Emeritus Professor of History of Science and Technology at the University of Keele.
Producer: Maggie Ayre
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 2017.
Transcript
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| 0:37.0 | You're just digesting that word paleontological. |
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| 0:44.0 | She sells seashells on the seashore. |
| 0:49.0 | This tongue twister is said to have been written about a real person, about a girl brought up in abject poverty in the early 1800s in the coastal town of Lyme Regis, |
| 1:00.0 | a girl who roamed the Jurassic coast with her family, finding fossils they could sell for small change. |
| 1:07.0 | Mary Anning is the subject of today's great lives. |
| 1:11.0 | She's being championed by the novelist Tracy Chauvalier, who's written about her in her book, Remarkable Creatures. |
| 1:17.0 | Tracy, you say that what really fascinated you about Mary when you first heard about her on a visit to Lyme Regis was the fact that she'd |
| 1:25.1 | survived being struck by lightning as a baby. Tell us about that. |
| 1:30.2 | When she's 18 months old, she was in a field and being held by a woman, not her parents, |
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