Chatting to me about books the other day, my nephew – a scientific type – mentioned this one which had intrigued and fascinated him. And I’m so glad he did because it’s the most enthralling non-fiction book I’ve read since Entangled by Merlin Sheldrake which I wrote about here in February 2024.
William Smith (1769-1839) was the son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith who eventually created what this book’s title refers to – the world’s first geological map. I had, to my shame never heard of him and neither, I think, had my nephew. Smith was a self-educated canal engineer and surveyor who became fascinated with the rocky strata he was working though only a few years after the term “geology” was coined. His major observation was that different sorts of fossils are found in different sorts of rock even as they run in massive seams across the country. He concluded therefore that it is possible to date the fossils from this data, thereby negating all the orthodox religious views about creation as a seven day event which took place four millennia before Christ – a doctrine in which many people still believed. His work, almost literally, paved the way for Darwin and Wallace and their theories of natural selection later in the nineteenth century
Eventually Smith began to map his conclusions and one of his masterpieces hangs behind a curtain at Burlington House Academy in Piccadilly – which is Simon Winchester’s starting point for his engaging biographical story. The trouble was that others were beginning to draw similar conclusions and Smith was very badly treated. His work was plagiarised and stolen – mostly by dilettante, well-born amateur geologists who, among other slights, snobbishly denied him membership of the Geological Society when it was formed in 1807, because he wasn’t the right sort of chap. So severe did his problems become that he spent eleven weeks in a debtors’ prison. Meanwhile he had made an unfortunate marriage to a woman who sounds like a cross between Mrs Rochester and Tchaikovsky’s wife Antonina, although Smith’s diaries, a rich source of information for Winchester, say little about her. When he was discharged from prison he left London and went to live in Yorkshire where he seems to have found peace and at least some of the acclaim he was more than entitled to. The Geological Society which soon ceased to be a lunch club and became much more focused on serious science, eventually awarded Smith its first Wollastaon medal in 1831 which was very prestigious and remains so to this day.
Winchester, ever inch a story teller, writes very compellingly and one senses that his heart really is in this book because he studied geology himself at Oxford before branching into political and other journalism. There are one or two dating errors in the history. For instance he mentions wisteria-covered cottages in Oxfordshire in the late eighteenth century but wisteria didn’t arrive in the UK (from China) until 1816 and it this leapt off the page at me because, my a strange coincidence I researched this for a story of my own only a few months ago. But this, and couple of other similar tiny things, are very minor gripes in a fine book.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
PERSONAL NOTE
This blog is, for me, rather a special one. It is five years since I posted the very first one about Death of Grass by John Christoper on 13 January 2021. So I’m celebrating the quinquennial anniversary of Susan’s Bookshelves. And I as I do so, of course I can’t help but look back. It was originally a project to give me something to do when we were locked down and there was no other work. But I found I enjoyed doing it and the feedback has always been encouraging. So 260 blogs and book titles later, here we are. I said at the start that I planned to be as eclectic as possible so I’ve ranged over short stories, poetry, non-fiction, children’s books and, of course novels from all periods including rereads and new discoveries. I’ll read pretty much anything but I can’t stand dragons, giants, trolls and their mates and I’m not keen on ghosts or horror as you might just have noticed …
Join me in raising a glass to the next five years.
