Episode Details

In 1912 Arthur Conan Doyle dragged four men to the far edge of the map and brought Dinosaurs back to reality! The Lost World is the first major work to put dinosaurs, rather than marine reptiles, at the centre of prehistoric fiction, and it remains the book that comes out on top whenever I ask a guest for their favourite.

I am joined by Richard Fallon, research associate in natural history humanities at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge, author of Contesting Earth’s History and currently editing a new scholarly edition of the novel. He has read it roughly twelve times, six of those in the last year alone!

Richard takes me through Edwardian palaeontology, the arrival of Dippy the Diplodocus, and the real men behind Challenger, Summerlee, Malone and Roxton. We get into the fake photographs and Doyle’s ambition to publish the whole thing as a hoax, the Piltdown Man connection, and what the manuscript gives away about Roxton’s voice. And we finish on the novel’s colonial logic, its homosocial heart, and the one illustration of Central Lake that Doyle cared about more than any other.

Guest

Richard Fallon

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/richardfallon.bsky.social

Cambridge profile: https://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/staff/dr-richard-fallon

Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences: https://www.sedgwickmuseum.org

The Book: The Lost World (1912)

Project Gutenberg, free, and the text Richard reads from in this episode

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/139

Richard’s books

Creatures of Another Age: Classic Visions of Prehistoric Monsters, Valancourt Books 2021 (affiliate link)

https://amzn.eu/d/07x8bkXX

Contesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935, Oxford University Press 2025 (affiliate link)

https://amzn.to/4gbXuUD

Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature, Cambridge University Press 2021 (affiliate link)

https://amzn.to/4wysYdo

Richard’s writing, free online

Professor Megalow’s Dinosaur Bones: Richard Owen and Victorian Literature, The Public Domain Review.

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/richard-owen-and-victorian-literature/

Seen through Deep Time: Occult Clairvoyance and Palaeoscientific Imagination, Journal of Victorian Culture

https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/28/2/143/6759198

Richard on his own book, Making Science Public blog

https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2025/04/03/contesting-earths-history/

Links

E. Ray Lankester, Extinct Animals (1905), Doyle’s key source and the book Challenger quotes at Malone. Free on Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/extinctanimals1905lank

Allen A. Debus, Dinosaurs in Fantastic Fiction: A Thematic Survey (affiliate link)

https://amzn.to/4fCoPPH

The Lost World (1925) Free to watch on Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/TheLostWorldCompleteVideoQualityUpgrade

Next time: a tribute to Sam Neill with James Mottram, 19 August.