The Lost World (1912) by Arthur Conan Doyle with Richard Fallon

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.

Transcript

Roland Squire (00:01)

Before this episode begins, there is something I just need to read out. I've been sent it, and I need to read this to cover my back legally. Okay? Mr. Roland Squire, that's me, desires to state that both the injunction for restraint and the libel action have been withdrawn unreservedly by Professor G. E. Challenger, who, being satisfied that no criticism or comment in this podcast is meant in an offensive spirit, has guaranteed that he will place no impediment on its broadcast and joyful circulation. Phew.

Welcome to The Pirates Don't Eat The Tourists. And today, I feel like I've reached that pinnacle already, because this is a big one. This is the big one in the dinosaur canon. This is the first major work where dinosaurs, not sea reptiles or marine reptiles as in last episode, come to the fore. Dinosaurs, as we will learn, were much better researched and there were more impressive species being found, mainly in America. Plus, we have a really big name in Arthur Conan Doyle.

Now, Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859, in fact the same year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which feels almost too neat of a story for what I'm telling this season. He trained as a doctor, kept a struggling practice, and filled the empty hours in his waiting room by writing. In 1887, that writing produced Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective who would make Doyle one of the most famous authors alive, and who Doyle himself almost came to resent, so much so that he threw him off the Reichenbach Falls in 1893. But then he was only forced to bring him back by public demand.

And then if we skip forward to 1912, when The Lost World comes out, Doyle gets to present the world someone who I think is much closer to who Doyle maybe doesn't find as easy to write, but I think a little bit more interesting and closer to who he actually felt he was. Which is slightly an unflattering image, as we'll learn. So for Professor George Edward Challenger, a bellowing, barrel-chested, gloriously intolerant man of science who doesn't deduce the extraordinary from an armchair, but drags four men to the far edge of the map to prove that dinosaurs exist, that a lost world exists. Now, if Holmes closes mysteries down, The Lost World blows them wide open. And Doyle has so much fun in this novel. There is so much heart and humour and just glorious adventure in The Lost World.

If I give you a little synopsis of the story, in case you haven't read it, the novel starts off with Edward Malone, who is a young journalist who wants to prove himself worthy of marriage to his fiancee Gladys. So his editor sends him to interview the most dangerous man in London, that is Professor Challenger, a scientist who claims to have found living prehistoric creatures on a remote plateau in South America, and who greets sceptical reporters by physically throwing them into the street, which is what he does to Malone. Malone joins the expedition sent to test this claim, alongside the acid-tongued Professor Summerlee, who thinks Challenger is a fraud, and Lord John Roxton. Lord John, big game hunter, an all-round adventurer. What they find on the plateau is everything Challenger promised: Iguanodons, pterodactyls, lakes full of monsters and brutal war between a tribe of humans and a race of ape men. Stranded, hunted, and transformed by the place, the four men have to survive it, escape it, and then do something even harder: convince a sneering London that any of it was real. Doyle, ever the showman, dressed up as Challenger for fake photographs and opened the book with a solemn legal notice that I parodied at the start of this episode.

But anyway, that's enough waffle from me. To help me climb the plateau today, I'm joined by Richard Fallon, research associate at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge, author of Contesting Earth's History and currently editing a new scholarly edition of The Lost World itself. Hi Richard, thank you so much for joining me today and joining me to talk about The Lost World. Before we get into the book, I was wondering whether you could introduce yourself to the listeners.

**Richard Fallon (05:44)**

No, and it's a pleasure to be talking about The Lost World on any occasion, really. So my job is research associate in natural history humanities at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge. So natural history humanities is a scheme to get historians, science, literary scholars, art historians looking at scientific collections in Cambridge. So I'm looking at a lot of a history of the palaeontological collections, fossil collections. And my background is really in literary, well, as The Lost World indicates, a literary history of palaeontology in Britain and to a certain extent America, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

So my PhD, a while back now, was on dinosaurs in late Victorian literature, and after that I did a literary culture of [unclear] ideas about Earth's history. So Atlantis, creationism, psychics, people like that. And that came out last year in a book called Contesting Earth's History. And The Lost World has been something I've been coming back and back to throughout that work. At the moment I'm editing an edition of The Lost World, so once again it's come back and I'm reading it again and thinking about it again. So this is a very timely podcast, really, for me.

Wow. So when did you first read it?

That's a question I couldn't comprehensively answer. I remember watching, there was a TV adaptation around 2001 or something along those lines. I saw that. I remember watching that on Boxing Day or whatever, whenever it came out. That's the first time I remember thinking about the stuff.

**Roland Squire (07:08)**

Well that was the Walking with Dinosaurs year, wasn't it?

**Richard Fallon (07:11)**

Is it Bob Hoskins maybe in it? Yes, that's what I remember. I don't remember when I first read the novel, but I'm sure when I did read it, I probably would have found it quite slow and a bit heavy, as I think a lot of children reading The Lost World maybe do now. Of course, it's completely inaccurate because it's the most fast-paced novel you could possibly find from 1912. But it was really during my PhD, so around 2015-16 when I started working on it and I read it again, and I went and looked at the manuscript and I started to think about it and found what a rich novel it is in terms of Arthur Conan Doyle being such a larger than life character. It's a novel that has a wide hinterland of bizarre interest around it.

How many times at this point do you think you've read it now? If you could put a ballpark figure on it.

Well, let's start. I've just had to read it about five or six times because I was comparing different text versions. So I had to go through it, the manuscript, the American version, the British version, Strand version. It's possibly the thing you could do with some sort of OCR, but I went through it. So there's that. So let's say double that as a starting point. But then again, earlier times, it would have been quite incoherent. So let's say something like 12 or so over a long time. But the first couple of readings, I suspect, would be skipping to the dinosaurs.

**Roland Squire (08:24)**

I've never made notes in books before, just been reading them for pure enjoyment. But then with The Lost World, going back to it now, I found myself just underlining so much in it. There is so much, just in Doyle's craft of writing it, there are bits and sentences and turns of phrases that I'm like, this is brilliant.

**Richard Fallon (08:47)**

Given that I'm now thinking about what will be the end notes of the edition of The Lost World, of course I'm having to think about what do you not include as much as what you do include, because sometimes you read critical editions or scholarly editions, whatever, and everything has got an asterisk next to it. You think, probably someone could just Google that now. So you try and think, okay, what's [unclear], or these are of course factual things to highlight rather than points of interest, which are of course equally, you're reading through and you're thinking, hmm. I never noticed that sentence before. That really raises a lot of questions, or such and such.

**Roland Squire (09:16)**

So if we go into a bit of the history of Edwardian palaeontology, what was the scene like? Who are the figures? What are the debates? And what was in the newspapers at the time as well?

**Richard Fallon (09:28)**

So this is the first period where dinosaurs really are starting to become more like what they are today. So dinosaur, the term is coined in 1842, much earlier. Dinosaurs being described, but they aren't the centrepiece now, particularly because they're not found inside such good specimens as would be discovered in the US in the late 19th century. And it's 1905 when the Natural History Museum in London first gets Dippy the Diplodocus, and that's a real turning point in making dinosaurs prestigious, popular with the public. So that's one thing that's happening. Interest in largely American dinosaurs. Although Britain also, because it has a history of dinosaur palaeontology, British palaeontologists and scientists are eager to stress that this is also quite a rich country for finding these remains.

Dinosaurs are of interest, but they're not, I guess, the real cutting edge of specialist palaeontology. There's all sorts of work on biostratigraphy going on in the background that the public isn't super interested in, but are very important for finding mineral resources, for globally mapping the strata, correlating strata in Britain with those in colonies, with other countries. Palaeoanthropology, which is to a certain extent part of palaeontology, to a certain extent is archaeology. That's big. So just after The Lost World is when Piltdown Man, the fraudulent Piltdown Man, is discovered.

**Roland Squire (10:46)**

I didn't realise it was that close.

**Richard Fallon (10:48)**

And there's connections to Conan Doyle now, which we won't be able to go into later, although the spoiler is that Conan Doyle probably didn't create the Piltdown Man hoax. But that's huge because palaeoanthropology is huge, then there's a huge amount of interest in human evolution, where we came from, the exact connection with apes, the missing link, all that kind of stuff.

And a lot of this, I mentioned America before, dinosaurs, a lot of it, America is really a huge place of palaeontology, and Britain is very important and of course very powerful and sort of scientific base, but America is a lot where the money is going into research on these big topics, and so is often looking to America and particularly the New York museum, the American Museum of Natural History, where there's a great deal of interest in dinosaurs and human evolution.

But you see dinosaurs in The Lost World, you see palaeoanthropology in The Lost World. I guess those are the public centre points and the stuff that Challenger isn't that interested in. He's not super interested in trilobite stratigraphy, or invertebrate palaeontology that may be the nuts and bolts of what a lot of people in museums and universities are studying day-to-day. He likes the big stuff, pterodactyls.

**Roland Squire (11:54)**

So there's interesting things with Doyle because he's interested in spiritualism and, is it the Collingley fairies as well? Cottingley fairies. How does he take those elements and do you think they're at play when he's writing about this lost world as well?

**Richard Fallon (12:13)**

So Doyle's interesting things goes back before The Lost World. His interest in psychical research, which is a bit more mainstream than fairies, it's a lot more mainstream than fairies, that goes back to earlier than Sherlock Holmes. So he's long been interested in, I guess, the fringes of science, the borderlines of science. That's not super unusual for a Victorian gentleman.

And The Lost World, part of what's going into that is his interest in pushing the boundaries of what is knowledge, of unexpected developments seeming miraculous but turning out to be scientific, things like telegraphy is a classic example, it almost seems supernatural. Doyle, like many people, thought things like telepathy, to a certain extent communicating with the dead, might be part of that. And he's dealing with that in the years leading up to The Lost World.

Fairies are seen by most as a much more extreme move that tallies with his public acceptance of spiritualism in about 1916, 17, 18, which is a more religious version of psychical research. It claims to be based on science, but it has much more emotive connotations than the Society for Psychical Research, and other more legitimised forms of that interest. And Cottingley fairies is more connected to occultism. So Conan Doyle is slightly interested in occultism, which again is adjacent to all these things, the late 19th century founding of something called the Theosophical Society. A society that combines science and religion, particularly Eastern religions, and Cottingley fairies, and perhaps their elementals or sprites or any of these vaguely preternatural beings that these scientific fringe interests were interested in.

So The Lost World is part of this. He does become much more antagonistic towards mainstream science in the 1920s, partially because of the rejection of his beliefs by pretty much every scientist of standing. And it's in the twenties when he does reflect back on The Lost World and starts to say things like, he claims, and I've never seen him claim earlier than 1922, that he saw an Ichthyosaur on his holiday in 1909, or possibly a Plesiosaur, in the Aegean when he was coasting off on his honeymoon. So he starts to make claims which are more sensational but relate to The Lost World, and which ostensibly happened before it. So according to that claim, he had seen what he thought was perhaps a prehistoric animal before he wrote The Lost World, which of course is very important for The Lost World if it actually is a novel that is playfully dealing with something he thought.

But then again, it's so hard to know exactly what he thought. He perhaps in 1909 thought he saw something strange. By 1922, it's become an Ichthyosaur or a Plesiosaur. He writes from the Natural History Museum, to say in 1922, remember I saw something a while back. The curator or keeper of geology, someone we might talk about, Arthur Smith Woodward, he wrote off, probably a turtle.

But the gist of that, I guess, is that Conan Doyle has always been interested in things which are on the edges of science. But he moves further and further from the edges of science, particularly in the 20s, when I guess there is maybe more of a ring fence around what research is considered to be legitimate than there was when he was growing up in the 1880s.

**Roland Squire (15:26)**

I went to the British Library and looked at their, I think it was the New York edition that I looked at, but it had all of those fake photographs and stuff in it, and I love the start of the book. So very funny, the start of the book. The forewords is: Mr. E. D. Malone desires to state that both the injunction for restraint and the libel action have been withdrawn unreservedly by Professor G. E. Challenger, who, being satisfied that no criticism or comment in this book is meant in an offensive spirit, has guaranteed that he has placed no impediment to its publication and circulation. And I just love that as the first thing that you see when you open the book. He's trying to trick us that this is real, and the way that Malone talks in the book is as a correspondent, I suppose.

**Richard Fallon (16:18)**

He does various levels of this trick. So his ideal version of a novel was pretty much all trick. So very little Conan Doyle, all fake photographs, all this is by Malone. So the British first edition keeps up quite a lot, and there's a deluxe version as well, which has a few more images. That's got the photos of him dressed as Challenger and other people dressed as the characters. It has a couple of fake photos of a plateau. It has sketches ostensibly made by Malone, of Iguanodons, of the view from the top of the ginkgo tree, and [unclear] and Plesiosaurs. These are made by his brother-in-law, Pat Forbes, and photographer Ransford.

So the Strand version, the one which has other illustrations as well by Harry Ransford, classic for super sensational romantic images. That cuts quite a lot of the stuff that Conan Doyle prepared, which he wasn't super happy about. But it still has some of the classics, like the famous photo of Doyle as Challenger. There's the American serial in an American newspaper, which actually came out very slightly earlier. That again, it has its own images by an American publisher. It's got some of the ones Conan Doyle made, and the American book version is based on that.

There's all sorts of different versions, but the American ones in particular really half-arse the attempt that this is real. Things are increasingly not really credible. And the Strand, it's a very thin device, but I think this is a slight defeat for Conan Doyle, who I think wants it to go more fully hoax-like, even if there's no edition of The Lost World that truly doesn't say his name on it anywhere, as far as I'm aware. So he was never able to go as fully ridiculous. In a sense, some of the letters do seem to imply that he thought it might have been a bit legally risky to do so. But it seems like the more involvement he had, the more of that sort of stuff was involved in it, stuff that made it seem like a real journalist report.

**Roland Squire (18:01)**

And he loves the theatrics of it all, doesn't he? So I was wondering who Doyle was orbiting at this time and whether those people appear in the book.

**Richard Fallon (18:11)**

So someone who I think is not mentioned so much, but is submerged there, is the palaeontologist Conan Doyle seems to have met, certainly corresponded with, in 1909. So Doyle, who's living in Crowborough then, finds in a quarry not far from his house dinosaur footprints, which he thinks are Iguanodon footprints, perhaps. This is one of the key things, seems to prompt the novel. So he writes for the Natural History Museum in letters that you can still read there today. He draws out the footprints he's seen and seems to arrange a trip for them to come visit him. This is Arthur Smith Woodward, the guy I mentioned earlier, the keeper of geology, so he's a big name at the museum. It's unclear what really happens. Conan Doyle, it's unclear whether he visits. Conan Doyle later has casts of these footprints in his billiards room. So he does something with them, but it's unclear what really happens there. But he keeps a relationship to a certain extent with Woodward throughout subsequent decades.

At the same time, Doyle is making, I hesitate to say, friends with a guy called Charles Dawson, who's, this is maybe two of the three guys who I think are relevant. They're all guys. A solicitor from Hastings, who is a palaeontologist. He'd been finding dinosaur fossils around the area for decades, sent them to the museum, very impressive Iguanodon bones, arrowheads, things like that. He starts to make friends with Conan Doyle and helps him to find fossils and arrowheads and various prehistoric remains. Dawson is the main suspect for the hoaxer of Piltdown Man. So that's why Doyle is often associated with this. So that's around 1912, this discovery is announced that there is in Piltdown in Sussex human remains, which completely don't fit any of the narratives of human evolution at that time. Of course, very important, exposed in the 1950s as a hoax, and Charles Dawson almost certainly was the main perpetrator.

And at the time he's introducing Conan Doyle to [unclear], making fun of him a bit in the letters. So Conan Doyle is obviously quite eager and maybe over enthusiastic about what is and isn't a fossil. He's finding petrifactions that look like kangaroos and things and saying, you've got to come and see this, and then Dawson will come along and say, it's just another rock. There's a story about the curator of Hastings Museum frantically bicycling towards Conan Doyle's house, only to find out it's another petrifaction that looks a bit like an Iguanodon.

But the one who's really in the book, because he's literally mentioned, is E. Ray Lancaster, who is another Natural History Museum guy. He was the director of the museum in London in the late 1890s till I think 1907. He is a naturalist, not a palaeontologist, but he works in palaeontology sometimes. He works in invertebrate biology, a very, very larger than life figure. He's a large man physically, he's tall and wide. He's known for his work on the okapi, so one of the most recent large mammals to be discovered and named by Western science, as that's before The Lost World. He's known for his work on degeneration, so the idea that evolution could, in effect, go backwards if animals are found to be in environments where they will adapt to be less competitive, in effect. That's in 1879-1880. He does a talk called Degeneration, which is often quoted as part of this high imperial concern, in that he literally compares evolution to the fall of the Roman Empire based on the idea of decadence.

So Lancaster is someone Conan Doyle knew of, particularly Conan Doyle read his book on extinct animals, which is called Extinct Animals. It's actually a series of lectures for children from 1904 to five. But it was a very popular book at the time, it's got very fun illustrations, it's very accessible. This is one of Conan Doyle's key sources. We know this for various reasons. For one is the illustrations his friend Forbes made in the book. Conan Doyle sent his friend Pat, his brother-in-law rather, cut out pages from the book to copy the dinosaurs and things in. So he had a copy of it there. But he also refers to the book in The Lost World, as I'm sure you know. Malone even is in Professor Challenger's study and Challenger reaches out and says, I have a monograph or something from my friend Ray Lancaster. And he gets out a book and will proceed to quote lines from the real book, which is not the dense monograph he's describing. It is literally a book for children. Which is I assume part of a joke of The Lost World, which of course has this balance between the man and the boy.

But Lancaster is there in that literal sense, but he's also all over Challenger's character in that he is a combative man, controversial. That in part was why he ended up leaving the Natural History Museum. He was made to retire on the age of retirement from the museum because he was basically not as quiescent as directors of the Natural History Museum were expected to be. He was famous in the late 19th century for his criticisms of spiritualists and seances and mediums. He's very much a Richard Dawkins kind of figure in his rationalism. And later, although Conan Doyle clearly idolises him a bit in this period, he will become one of Conan Doyle's critics in the 1920s because of this rationalist angle, where suddenly Conan Doyle's spiritualism clashes against Lancaster, and the larger than life qualities that Conan Doyle liked about him suddenly become very difficult because he has to deal with a man who absolutely will not accept his beliefs about the afterlife. But Lancaster is a large percentage of Challenger's character.

**Roland Squire (23:18)**

When I was reading it, I was thinking, because I read Sherlock Holmes and you can feel that in Challenger as well, I think, and this meshing of Holmes and almost Conan Doyle as well. Because physically he feels closer to Doyle, Challenger does. And he's just so playful. He's a terrifying man. I would not want to be taken into his study because he'd probably beat you up and then he'd get you a cigar afterwards or something.

**Richard Fallon (23:51)**

He's made fun of a lot more than Sherlock Holmes in this. He is obviously a ridiculous character. Conan Doyle seems to like to use him to both lionise the things he loves most about science, the romanticism, the discovery of things unimagined, the refusal to accept a bland world, in effect. But also he's super parodied for his pedantic aspects, his obsession with nomenclature and minute taxonomic distinctions, the stuff that Conan Doyle actually didn't care about about science.

Challenger somehow managed to be the romantic hero who is using science to forge brave new worlds, but also the pencil pushing dweeb that Conan Doyle obviously found rather disenchanting. And he plays with both these things, and it works because it's held together with just this idea, it's basically just a super intolerant man, both for good and bad. He refuses to let his true ideas not be accepted, but equally, he just won't accept being wrong about anything. And it's almost impossible to believe that he was conceived without the idea of Brian Blessed in Conan Doyle's mind.

**Roland Squire (24:56)**

It's in my notes here. And in that same, my god, what is he gonna say next sort of aspect that you have with him.

**Richard Fallon (25:03)**

And he becomes, of course, he's used to do all sorts of bizarre things in the later stories where Conan Doyle obviously wants to make him a recurring character, but he never becomes quite like Sherlock Holmes. And every new adventure is really quite different. He is either more heroic or more human or much more ruthless, or in the final story, When the World Screamed, which is, is that one you've read?

No, I haven't read, no.

So this is, we're talking the late 1920s. One of the last things Conan Doyle wrote, it's about Challenger's theory of the world is alive, it's a bit like Gaia, but it's more literal. So the world is a crust around a huge sea urchin sort of creature. And Challenger creates a giant drill that will drill through the crust to stab this creature. And it ends with him doing that and the earth screaming. That's the title, When the World Screamed. And the idea ends with Challenger as a super scientist, a man who made the earth recognise him.

Totally, it's very unclear what we're supposed to think of this because, like all the Challenger stories, it's full of jokes, it's full of things that are supposed to be taken seriously. But we're supposed to think, is this a good thing that this bizarre man has made the earth scream? That seems bad. That seems to be part of the general, I guess, the tension to make Challenger interesting is that he is dangerous and his silliness can trip into ultra violence in a way that tonally is complex and is semi-intentional and semi unintentional, I suppose.

**Roland Squire (26:27)**

And so the narrator of the story really is Edward Malone. Do we have a reference point for him at all?

**Richard Fallon (26:34)**

We need a Malone in the same way we need a Watson, don't we? Challenger is not a narrating character. Conan Doyle never tries that. So Malone again has a strong analogue in real life. So E. D. Morell, a journalist who Conan Doyle knew from his work on atrocities in the Congo, there's a few connections to the atrocities in the Congo and also atrocities in the Peruvian rubber trade that Doyle draws upon. But Morell, I don't know a huge amount about the real man Morell, but his name is literally Ed Morell, and this is Ed Malone. And Conan Doyle changes E. D. Malone from, I think, James Malone in the manuscript, so he makes it more like Morell.

But again, I guess the idea, this is a hard-hitting investigative journalist in real life, whereas Malone is a different man, really. He's a young man trying to prove his career, but there's obviously a nod to a real person, in the same way as so much of The Lost World is nods, including in the famous photos where Conan Doyle is dressed as Challenger. Everything has this jokey in-joke aspect to it that is hard to say exactly how much anyone outside of Conan Doyle's close circle acknowledged at the time.

**Roland Squire (27:41)**

When I was reading about Summerlee and Summerlee's description, just because I've been dealing with him a lot recently, is there any similarity between him and Richard Owen? The idea of him? There's that owl-like quality of the sunken cheekbones and stuff, but I don't know whether that's just me.

**Richard Fallon (28:02)**

I think there may be a bit of Arthur Smith Woodward in him. Smith Woodward is quite an austere guy who's a little bit hard to get a sense of. There's some letters from Conan Doyle's friend James Ryan talking about your chalk fossil man being quite dry and a little bit disappointing. And I wonder if that's supposed to be a reference to Smith Woodward, who Conan Doyle. But that's sort of speculation.

Owen is someone Conan Doyle would have known about. I think Owen is a bit larger than life and Summerlee, Summerlee is bitter and acerbic, and maybe later in life Owen had aspects of that. But Owen has more Challenger quality, I think, particularly in the Victorian imagination. Owen now is known for his less flattering characteristics, widely, because they're very funny and widely quoted. But he was a guy who was seen as a real genius of science, he fought for the Natural History Museum, he was a wizard who, you gave him one bone and knew the animal, that was his party trick, highly exaggerated, but that was the myth of Owen.

And so while he was a hair splitter and he got into arguments, he always wanted to be right, as Summerlee does, if he's in Summerlee, and I don't doubt he's in The Lost World, it's not as strong an analogue, I think, apart from the fact that both of them become quite wizened and thin and bony. And that was always a joke about Owen, is that he looks like he's made of some kind of bunch of old fossils. Summerlee is obviously the foil to Challenger and someone who is probably, I guess, the least interesting of the characters, and he gets the unfair role really of being wrong and keeping on complaining about things even though it's quite clear that Challenger is right.

**Roland Squire (29:37)**

I just love the fact that when he's like, I do not believe you at all, gets there, sees the Iguanodon and all of this, I believe you, let's go home. Let's leave this to science, let's get a bigger expedition out here.

**Richard Fallon (29:51)**

Which is quite a wise, often right, correcting what he says. He also, like Challenger, his specialisms, he seems to be an entomologist. At one point he's a comparative anatomist like Richard Owen. And he talks about the end, I'll use my diamonds to create my monograph on the chalk fossils, which is again like Arthur Smith Woodward, I think. So he's going for the specialist who is unimaginative. That's what Doyle's going for, more modern scientists rather than the more romantic Challenger archetype, but still he's actually a real polymath who seems to know all about everything, including palaeoanthropology. He's like, that's a Dryopithecus or a Pithecanthropus. So he seems to know just about everything. And he's in the photographs played by the same man who plays Roxton, Pat Forbes, again, the artist.

**Roland Squire (30:36)**

And Roxton, Lord John Roxton, is the cheese to the chalk of Summerlee. He is, I'm not quite sure. I can't remember who played him in that television adaptation. I'm trying to think of a similar person of who you would cast him today as, I don't know. He's like a rugby player, but also shoots everything that he comes across, but does it with a wink and a grin.

**Richard Fallon (31:01)**

Reading The Lost World far too many times in the last year, it's quite clear Conan Doyle really, really likes Roxton. And he's the character who has the least unflattering aspects. So Malone is naive and silly, Challenger is megalomaniacal, Summerlee is a bit pathetic. But Roxton has very few flaws, or Lord John, as I guess [unclear] tends to call him. He, as you say, he's a big game hunter, he finds fun in the moments of peril, he's very talented.

There's also that quite interesting dynamic, which is something that you see elsewhere in The Lost World, where he is incredibly masculine about his appeal, but he lives in a really quite feminine bachelor pad with pink frilly decorations and frames of 18th century Rococo paintings and things. So Conan Doyle is showing he's a man who's comfortable in the artifices of society and also the hyper-masculine frontiers, and that's something Conan Doyle, because he loves that big game hunter thing, Conan Doyle obviously is a man with a sense of humour and some sense of perspective, and I guess he realises you have to inhabit both these worlds. And so he's quite careful to make sure Roxton is grounded in that way.

The thing that reading the manuscript of The Lost World makes clear is that Conan Doyle had a crisis about what Roxton should sound like about halfway through writing the novel. So the [unclear] accent now only comes through quite late, so he goes back and adds that in from more boring dialogue. So basically, for the first two-thirds of the novel, his dialogue is the same general content, but it's said in a more general upper class way. And so he clearly looks at this and thinks, this character isn't quite doing what I want to do. So he adds what is now the most characteristic aspect of Watson's character, the what what stuff.

I was wondering if in some sense he's trying to distance this character from another real life analogue, Roger Casement, who is, alongside Morel, someone Conan Doyle knew from working on the atrocities in the Congo, King Leopold II in Belgium. And also Roxton was explicitly, sorry, Casement, this is an Irish diplomat, was explicitly working on atrocities in the Putumayo, Peru, which is mentioned in The Lost World as where Roxton wages his private war against slave traders. And so they're quite clear specific points, and I wonder if he thought, okay, I ought to make this character a bit less like this real man, in that I'm assuming Casement, who was actually executed for treason, [unclear] was always part of Irish rebellion against the British Empire. Presumably didn't speak like that because he was less of a character and was actually a real man. But Roxton, reading it, Conan Doyle loves Roxton, he really does, because Roxton can do nothing wrong.

**Roland Squire (33:46)**

No. Maybe he aspires to be like Roxton.

**Richard Fallon (33:50)**

I think, if he could be any of his characters, I suspect he'd prefer to be Roxton than Sherlock Holmes.

**Roland Squire (33:55)**

Definitely. I think so. I think he has more fun writing The Lost World than a lot of the Sherlock Holmes. Have you found any evidence for that, that Challenger and this world was more interesting to him?

**Richard Fallon (34:07)**

Comes up every so often. I can't remember ever seeing him say Challenger's my real favourite character, but I feel like I've heard that quote referred to secondhand. I've never seen him really say that. And he's either precious with the character, which stops him from overusing him, or he doesn't really know how to use him. Sherlock Holmes, I guess, is quite formulaic. There's a lot of variety of my stories, but you know what's going to happen, whereas Challenger, every story's different.

He seems to revive him coincidentally when it happens to be a film being made of The Lost World. So there's a marketing tie in there. And he uses him for spiritualism, which could be taken either way, really. Spiritualism, of course, was dear to his heart. And so having, in The Land of Mist in 1925, Challenger discover that spiritualism is true, there is an afterlife, and you can communicate with the dead, that does show a desire to humanise the character, even though that novel is also complex and funny. But someone who is more like Conan Doyle than Sherlock Holmes, who either because he thought the markets would never accept it or because he thought it wasn't credible, of course, never accepts any of his psychical or spiritualistic interests.

**Roland Squire (35:13)**

There are some bits of The Lost World which, because of its time that it's written in, there's a sincere lack of any women characters, and all women characters with any agency in the story.

**Richard Fallon (35:25)**

It's always interesting that the films always correct this. So straight from 1925, you have women on the plateau. And it's interesting because it's clearly something even the early audiences thought we need this. But it goes against what Conan Doyle is clearly going for in the novel, which is a homosocial fantasy, where Conan Doyle's protagonist, Malone, wants to get married to a slightly artificial young woman living in a drawing room. And obviously the novel rejects that entirely, and he symbolically takes Roxton's hand at the end and is going to go back to The Lost World.

There's no women in that novel, not because Conan Doyle didn't want a romantic lead, because he often would have romantic leads in his novels, or female characters, whether they're good or not, is up for debate. Occasionally they are. But The Lost World is a super masculine novel by intention, and it's foregrounded quite clearly throughout the novel, particularly in the Gladys bookend scenes. And you're making a Hollywood film, you need, for a start, you need to not suggest any homosexuality, which is something the novel certainly does suggest, or at least it is tonally there.

**Roland Squire (36:27)**

And Conan Doyle, when you're writing a novel, when you're doing the different codes as well, I suppose.

**Richard Fallon (36:33)**

Yes, you can do different things, and of course Conan Doyle isn't really implying anything in The Lost World, but he's implying that there are things appropriate to men, and he's very interested in masculinity. Whereas the films, first of all, I think just for star power, we have a woman in the 1925 film. But later we've realised, well, actually it's not really acceptable to have a film without any women in, and so other adaptations will add them in.

But it's interesting that it is built around that, and that we see, I think, the biggest change tonally to the 1925. There's a lot of things for the 1925 film, you could say, but what it does to Roxton is quite interesting. Roxton goes from being the novel's heart to being a slightly disappointed elder love competitor for Malone's real romantic pair in that film. I forget her name, Bessie or something, who's on the plateau, it's not Gladys, it's another woman, possibly Maple White's daughter. And so Malone and Roxton are basically competing for this young woman, but clearly Malone is her age, where Roxton is much older, ends with Roxton accepting leaving her to him, and a completely different dynamic there between a character where clearly the victory is that Malone has accepted men rather than marrying in the novel, whereas in the film he accepts marrying and Roxton is a sad character, which is super not what Conan Doyle was going for in the novel.

**Roland Squire (37:50)**

There's ties with Journey to the Centre of the Earth. So that's how Axel is when he sets off on that adventure. They both name bodies of water after their fiance.

**Richard Fallon (38:03)**

It's worth mentioning, I've just said that about the Gladys angle. In the manuscript, it's even more extreme. So Gladys seems to have been quite a late addition to the novel. So the first manuscript's chapters seem to start with chapter two, where Malone goes to the office in the newspaper and is given the job of going to see Challenger. In the book version, the published version, Gladys, he meets her and she says, I'll marry you if you have a great adventure, basically. None of that's there at first.

It's hard to know exactly when Conan Doyle, but many chapters go by in the manuscript where references to Gladys appear in the published book but don't appear in the manuscript. And it's only about midway through where you start to get allusions to Gladys that imply that Conan Doyle started to think about it, and then finally you have a draft chapter of the first chapter eventually. It's hard to say when Conan Doyle wrote it. But he's clearly realised Malone needed different motivation. Again, perhaps to slightly push back against the idea of this guy just randomly decides to go on a life-changing quest with lots of men, he actually has a girlfriend, that was motivating it. So that's the various interpretations of that.

But you mentioned the lake, so in the manuscript, he doesn't name it Lake Gladys, just Central Lake. Actually, reading the novel again, I notice quite often he doesn't call it Lake Gladys after the lake has been named Lake Gladys, often calls it Central Lake. So I think Conan Doyle forgetting to go back in and properly work it through the novel. Lake Gladys is only mentioned, I think, for the first time when Malone says we'll name her Lake Gladys, and I think maybe one other time. And so he's forgetting about this character when he's doing it because she's so superficial to the dynamic of the novel really.

**Roland Squire (39:39)**

And is that because his main influence for this is Ryder Haggard and King Solomon's Mines, and is that the tradition that he's writing in?

**Richard Fallon (39:49)**

I mean, King Solomon's Mines has an explicitly misogynistic start, where he's talking, this is no petticoats in this adventure. I think he definitely is going for that. In The Lost World, even though the name is used for the genre in [unclear] world, The Lost World is a slightly nostalgic late contribution to a genre that, as you said, is invented by Rider Haggard, basically one man invention in the 1880s. There've been decades of these lost world adventures where groups, granted quite often with romantic leads in, not complex female characters almost ever, but they will have women on the adventures. Haggard doesn't always, though She, straight after King Solomon's Mines, is about an incredibly powerful woman, so he's obviously interested in that.

But I suppose his all male team is partially harking back to that original classic, which is referenced in The Lost World as if it's a novel in the world of The Lost World. It's like, I guess, in a sense, it's one of those things where I'll do you one up by just turning you into a book, whereas I've got the real adventure and I have dinosaurs and ape men, which admittedly are more exciting than whatever's in King Solomon's Mines.

**Roland Squire (40:52)**

There is bits in this that, the indigenous people that they come across, they are either really stupid or they are untrustworthy. So the reason why they get stuck on the plateau is because someone of mixed race is taking it out on Roxton because he shot their brother. What was the driving force that meant that Conan Doyle wrote these characters like this?

**Richard Fallon (41:21)**

So characters often refer to racial theories in the novel about skull shape and physiognomy and things like that. Notably, actually, usually it's made fun of in the novel. So these are theories that would have had quite a lot of currency and would have been considered by many, but not by all, to be certainly reasonably legitimate science, distinct between race based on craniometric details, which are just now spurious.

But Conan Doyle, a lot of his Lost World, like much of his fiction, is racist in many ways, as you imply. Half breeds as they're described, in a mixed race will always get a raw deal in this kind of fiction, often worse than people who are seen as explicitly racially pure, whether that's white or black or whatever, something about mixed race is obviously very unsettling. And so, anyway, even if you've seen films from late 20th century, you've got these suspicious half-breeds who are always sabotaging people, and that's a character type that has a long, long duration and they get the rawest deal.

It's quite interesting, the indigenous tribe in The Lost World, whose name, again, despite reading this novel many times I've forgotten, so who live on the plateau, who are taken more seriously. They're denigrated because four white guys come onto the plateau and instantly do what they couldn't do over millennia of trying to live there, which is conquer the plateau and bring it under control. But they're treated with what Conan Doyle would have considered to be a sort of respect. So Challenger says they're of a similar standing to the European or something on those lines. Or there are lines which imply that Challenger's racial hierarchies are more based on his egotism rather than any particularly clear bases.

But again, I think partially it's a noble savage kind of vision going on with them, isn't there? They're described as simple but earnest, these patronising descriptions, and they ultimately for the most part work alongside these four British guys, which I guess is what is seen as, they know which side their bread is buttered.

But the ultimate logic of the story is that The Lost World is a microcosm which these guys have come in, have colonised, have conquered, and then they leave before they have to do the boring managerial aspect of it. But it's interesting that the heart of the novel is to what extent the supremacy of men like that is reliant on a balance between the civilisation and nature. Or brain and brawn, or artifice and machinery versus physical strength. So the novel is, like I guess many of these lost world novels, interested in not setting clear racial hierarchies, but saying, okay, in order for these four white men from London to survive, they need to be more like indigenous people. And of course, they can do it better because they can draw upon knowledge as well. But they have to, in some way, be seen to learn from their wilder context. And that's something that you see in all sorts of these novels, and including in King Solomon's Mines.

So there's a very clear code to a lot of these novels. I guess that's The Lost World's complexity. And it's represented in the most bombastic form by Challenger, who notoriously has a gigantic brain, but is in the body of what looks like an ape, in fact, explicitly looks like the ape men. And that's the symbol of, and the maybe less complex version of, what the novel is going for, which is that you need to have both. And someone who is, say, the eventual husband of Gladys, he's probably a solicitor or a clerk or something. The joke isn't that he is superior. It's not saying you're intrinsically superior by being part of the imperial metropole. You have to be tested in environments of more challenging Darwinian contexts, and that's what brings out the Roxtons and the Challengers, and ultimately the Malones, who is able to show his true self, particularly when he starts massacring the ape men with his machine gun. Which is clearly supposed to be quite good.

**Roland Squire (45:13)**

He certainly learns how to operate a gun. I was wondering about Doyle's first attempt at writing this, because in your book that you edited, which I really enjoyed reading all of those stories. Oh, Creatures from Other [unclear]. Yes. The Terror of John Blue Gap. And that feels like an introduction to The Lost World.

**Richard Fallon (45:38)**

So that's 1910, so that's notably after, well, I say Iguanodon prints, the dinosaur footprints that Conan Doyle found, 1909. So Blue John Gap is a story about caves under Derbyshire where there's a prehistoric cave bear surviving. That's a relatively formulaic story by that point. Conan Doyle is a better writer than most of his contemporaries in popular fiction, so it's good, but stories about prehistoric animals surviving in caves, or animals that are coded as prehistoric, let's say, are relatively common by that point. It's unusual for them to be under England, which again is maybe a slightly more disturbing sense of the eruptions of the past breaking out, which people would have had a sense of knowing that, say, London was formerly inhabited by hippos and elephants and things. So that's Conan Doyle, I guess, testing these ideas. In The Lost World, he ultimately goes for the far distant frontiers of empire and informal empire in South America rather than that literal sense that there could be eruptions from deep time underneath your feet.

The Lizard is a story from I think 1899 in the Strand magazine, which Blue John Gap is quite similar to. That's about someone discovering this blind lizard with lots of tentacles and things underneath somewhere else in England, I think. I think I [unclear] a different version of that called The Crimson Beast in that story. Which is a shorter and slightly rarer but slightly less developed version.

And so this is Conan Doyle in those short stories contributing to a genre that's been going for quite a few decades, which are, someone in a remote location discovers prehistoric animal and usually has to kill it or is killed by it, which can be taken in very bizarre and strange, I think I'm saying the word bizarre a lot, but I think it's probably because these stories are often not very normal. It can be very formulaic or it can be very interesting.

And you'll have read the most strange of all of them, Monster of Lake Calamitry, which I reproduced in the collection. That really means you shouldn't overuse the word bizarre, because that is what deserves the word bizarre. Nothing is bizarre when you've gone to a story about a man whose brain is put inside an Elasmosaurus, and then he starts singing increasingly working class songs until he just turns back into an Elasmosaurus and kills the protagonist. And that's not formulaic.

**Roland Squire (47:49)**

But they were taken fun of, weren't they, really? That's what I learned from those early stories in that book, is that the early fiction didn't really take these creatures very seriously at all. They were almost the butt of jokes or used as satire.

**Richard Fallon (48:06)**

They're often, there's very little humanisation or empathy or sympathy. They are either very silly, and that's quite a lot of popular science about, particularly dinosaurs, is that they're quite scary and terrifying, but actually, if you think about it, they were very stupid and bumbling, and so they went extinct due to their own failures. The stories are equally keen to display these animals as just grotesque garbage monsters that are utterly disgusting. That's what we have in the earliest one in that collection. The earliest story in that formula, The Last Dragon by Charles Jacobs Peterson from 1871-ish, and that's like a Plesiosaur, but it's like a chaotic slime ball, its legs are barely flippers, or its flippers are barely legs, and it's basically part of a slime it's crawling out of.

One thing I don't really do much of in that collection is tie those fiction genres, which really emerge from, well, that's quite an early one, the 1870s, really the 1890s things are going, with a lot of non-fiction at that time, because a lot of these techniques about time travel and encountering prehistoric animals or descriptions of these animals as alive is from non-fiction, popular science writing of the time, where there are visions among the descriptive prose of, imagine if we were back in the Silurian period or whatever, by authors like Hugh Miller and Gideon Mantell.

One of the earliest of any of these sort of stories about humans encountering prehistoric animals is in French. Have you come across Pierre Boutard's Paris Before Men?

No, I've not.

So there's an English translation of this by Brian Stableford, I think you can get, in Journey to the Sun, which is another story by the same author. So this is a series of popular science articles from the 1830s in the Musée des Familles, a French periodical. And it's about a man who is taken back in time by a demon called Asmodeus. And it's effectively an excuse to describe the anatomies of the Megalosaurus and educate about geological periods, but these animals do menace the narrator in a way that is on the borderlines between a very structured popular science article and a story, in a way that a lot of popular science really blurs those distinctions.

And so the kinds of encounters we read in these later fictions are really developed by science writers attempting to engage audiences with new ideas about prehistory and deep time. And it takes quite a long time for authors like Verne in the 1860s, the first really big novelisation of these ideas, to actually just think, okay, we'll just make a novel where these animals are encountered. And of course, you need to have an excuse. All the fiction, it's either a metaphor or a time travel that turns out to be a dream, or a sorcerer has summoned the animal back, like in the poem The Sandstone Bird. But Verne comes up with the ultimate conceit, which is that there is underground realms, lost worlds where these animals survive, and that becomes very useful for nearly everyone afterwards, because somehow it's very plausible to believe that underground anything could happen.

**Roland Squire (51:03)**

Why do you think the idea of the lost world continues to be so popular? Because Edgar Rice Burroughs does The Land That Time Forgot, and then of course Crichton does it again with his version of The Lost World. Do you see a through line with these stories, anything that they always have to contain?

**Richard Fallon (51:25)**

So Haggard's formula is really successful. In the 1880s, it changes the rules about, you can write shorter adventure novels, they can have more fantasy in them, which is quite unusual for the mid-Victorian period. It's seen as a little bit childish or silly to have these kinds of adventures, and suddenly they become acceptable to read, basically, because people like Haggard. And for decades you have that formula. Sometimes they'll have dinosaurs in, before and after Doyle. Conan Doyle, I suppose, is seen less, The Lost World rather is seen less as the dinosaur novel than a particularly good novel in this genre. And now, of course, we see dinosaurs as being almost their own distinct thing. I don't think many of Conan Doyle's contemporaries would necessarily have thought that.

And Rice Burroughs is a real churner outer of stories who clearly, presumably read The Lost World or heard about it and thought, yeah, that's a pretty good idea. And so he'll use it, and then he, because he is writing in the American pulps, which are new, a new development, you need more stories, they're cheaper, you've got to write them quickly. He's able to do that. He's big because of Tarzan, not because of his stories about prehistoric animals, though Tarzan does go inside the centre of the earth and encounters dinosaurs later. And in fact, Tarzan encounters dinosaurs in his stories as well, just because they become generic conventions of lost worlds. There might be a dinosaur surviving, doesn't necessarily need to be an important part of the plot, but you go to Central Africa or Antarctica or South Pole, and yeah, it makes sense there'd be a dinosaur there because it's just something's got to tick off. That's part of the dinosaur scene.

And then of course cinema, that's really key, isn't it? So cinema, I guess, is really becoming big as the lost world as a genre is becoming less of the leading popular fiction genre, because suddenly you're getting westerns, crime novels, romance in the modern sense of stories about love, and suddenly the lost world isn't a formula that will get you infinite amounts of free interest. But then special effects in The Lost World 1925 and in King Kong in 1933 make it a very imitable movie formula, even if not everyone can bring that level of budget to it. So I suppose that's really where it migrates to, it becomes a very good excuse to have special effects action.

And then becomes a cinema genre, which then expands and becomes, I guess, less formulaic. And increasingly you have to invent new reasons as to why the worlds are lost, or as in 1960, Lost World, where they just fly there on a plane, and that's, I guess, a symbol of the expiry date of a particular version of the lost world concept, and why Crichton's Jurassic Park is so innovative. Because Crichton realises that formula is cliched to a degree that makes it unacceptable to use and comes up with his own formula that will be endlessly repackaged by lesser writers.

**Roland Squire (54:10)**

I was wondering whether there was any particular lines or quotes from The Lost World that really have stuck with you through so many readings.

**Richard Fallon (54:18)**

I'll get them up now from the helpfully text searchable Project Gutenberg version. So we mentioned earlier Malone becoming a man through this story and realising his inner ape man. This is the famous section where he is defending Challenger and co. from the ape men with his automatic rifle or whatever it is, often quoted.

There are strange red depths in the soul of the most commonplace man. I am tender-hearted by nature, and have found my eyes moist many a time over the scream of a wounded hare, yet the blood lust was on me now. I found myself on my feet emptying one magazine, then the other, clicking open the breech to reload, snapping it to again, while cheering and yelling with pure ferocity and joy of slaughter as I did so.

It's worth bearing in mind for readers who haven't read this recently, The Lost World starts off as quite a comic novel. The first three chapters or so are really just jokes. And the novel is full of jokes, it becomes more serious later on. But this is, I guess this is Conan Doyle's more serious point as he sees it about masculinity and shedding the [unclear] of civilised life, in this scene where Malone just, he's doing it in self-defence, but obviously this is an argument, there is, men are just like this when they have the opportunity to be, I suppose, is the point of that scene.

And another, I guess, is key, is the sense of romance, a word that doesn't mean for Conan Doyle what it means to us, but means mystery, fiction-like qualities. This is when they're leaving the lost world, and which is why it's crucial that the lost world is, we never learn about what it's like when civilisation really gets there.

With much labour we got our things up the steps, and then, looking back, took one last long survey of that strange land, soon I fear to be vulgarised, the prey of hunter and prospector, but to each of us a dreamland of glamour and romance, a land where we had dared much, suffered much, and learned much, our land, as we shall ever fondly call it.

So this idea that this is a shame, but it will be colonised, in effect. It's something that is a playground really for fantasy and for the unknown, rather than, I guess, the scientific project of making things knowable, about something Conan Doyle is pretty uncertain if it's always a good thing. Or certainly he believes that it's quite a limited understanding of the world. There'll always be these mysteries, or at least if they're not, then there certainly should be.

And The Lost World, while a lot of the discussion of The Lost World rightly focuses on the colonial fantasy of it, it's very important that you don't actually have to really think about what that might mean. Start extracting diamonds from a lost world. That's not what the novel's really about. It's about fun and play for men who are tired of urban existence, tired of the tedium of daily life. And for Conan Doyle, science is basically only interesting when it's romantic, when it's exciting. He's not super interested in reading detailed taxonomic monographs about Iguanodon. He's interested in Megalosauruses tearing each other apart and blowing up dinosaur brains and all the fun things that science has opened up to his mind anyway.

**Roland Squire (57:34)**

My favourite bit, and I laughed out loud several times on this bit, but it's the seeding of Challenger and the character of him. So we get the foreword, which I mentioned earlier, and then even before you meet him, Malone gets a letter and it says, there was a letter with the West Kensington postmark on it, and my name scrawled across the envelope in a handwriting which looked like a barbed wire railing. And I was like, that is just such a good line. And he couldn't take the whole day off after writing something like that.

**Richard Fallon (58:13)**

He certainly was on a real roll at the beginning. And as I say, he obviously wrote the Gladys stuff, seemingly wrote the Gladys stuff later. So I guess if we think of chapter two as the start, but it's very funny, and it really does build up a sense of comic dread as meeting this guy. I particularly like the section where Malone is blagging that he understands the discussion of Weismann and he gets into Challenger's office and Challenger's obviously worked this out and says nonsense to him, and Malone's saying yes, yes. Then he finally brawls with him, and it's very cleverly done.

And Conan Doyle, I guess, he doesn't always get that credit for being really quite a funny writer, and he's easily a funny writer. And he has those turns of phrase, and he obviously just must have been thinking, storing a funny Challenger line, I'll say that about him, all throughout writing The Lost World. Because there's all these sorts of touches about his megalomania, his Assyrian bull-like appearance.

**Roland Squire (59:04)**

He puts his wife on top of a high plant pot stand of some kind, and it's very. Or when there's that bit with the tick and then he takes off his top and there's just a single line about trying to pluck the tick off of his hair, and it completely coats his body or something. You're just adding these little elements to him at every opportunity.

**Richard Fallon (59:28)**

I also like, it's funny that Challenger has ethos as someone who will accept any punishment for science, so he's saying, you should be glad you got bitten by that tick because it could be a new species. Because when he finds he's got a tick on him, he actually is completely disgusted. So there is a sense that Challenger is hypocritical in aspects. He's overly self-obsessed in a way that isn't truly a machine for science. Obviously that's clear because he's a machine for himself, but his hypocrisies are funny and humanise him in a way that a lesser writer wouldn't have done, I think. They would have had only the persona of Challenger without the sections we see where he actually is humanised. Occasionally he will even stoop down to a level that's vaguely credible as a human being.

And then in The Land of Mist, as I say, ultimately his is about his wife who's dead, and that's part of his journey to spiritualism, and that's a completely different perception of this man, who you wouldn't really believe Conan Doyle would ever attempt to write a story where his emotions are remotely, we're reliant on us feeling his emotions. The Poison Belt being the immediate sequel to The Lost World, which is another strange apocalyptic novel that has its own pathos to it. But again, undercut by the fun Conan Doyle has with Challenger at every turn and his boisterous, he just can't help himself.

He's just too fun to write, which is why it's a shame, really. He didn't write more, but the five stories we have are a precious quintet of strange actions.

**Roland Squire (01:00:57)**

I was wondering, what's the single image from the world that The Lost World paints that you can't get out of your head?

**Richard Fallon (01:01:06)**

So this is definitely one image. It's actually one of the illustrations that he had his brother-in-law make for the book version. It's only in the British book versions, not in the serials. It's Malone's sketch for Central Lake, which has a Plesiosaur head approaching water. I think perhaps there's an Ichthyosaur in. There's a pterodactyl in the foreground, if I remember. And otherwise it's just a lake. It's a very slightly amateurish looking painting, intentionally so, partially because it's written by Malone, although it says it's touched up, it says slightly complexly retouched by Pat Forbes, so it's got this element of reality to it.

But this is an image that was very important to Doyle. He was very sad when it wasn't included in the British serial, but it was replaced, like all the Forbes images, by a more professional one of lots of prehistoric animals jumping around all over the place. For Doyle, this image seemed to sum up the sense of mystery that was The Lost World's more serious heart, the sense of the romance for the not knowing and the things that are beyond knowledge of this deep water, which he describes as actually rose-tinted in the novel. Which is an interesting turn of phrase. The Central Lake is a symbol for the novel of the unseen and what's waiting out there for the adventurer.

And so the image Forbes gets to make, which is part of its charm, I think, is that it doesn't actually depict very much. And I think that sums up what Conan Doyle wanted to do with the novel's more serious project of enchanting his readers, making them feel wonder about science and about exploration, about the world. That's key to what it was doing, in addition to the fact that it's a funny, silly, popular novel intended to be widely read. If Conan Doyle thought this was something worth putting time into, it's because he believed more seriously in this mission which plays into all his more extreme beliefs in spiritualism and fairies, in telepathy. Is this belief that there's more out there than we know, and we might not necessarily want to close that knowledge with something more permanent.

**Roland Squire (01:03:04)**

Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been absolutely amazing to talk to you about this book. I genuinely love it. And talking to everybody, the various different people that I've met, and I asked them what's their favourite dinosaur fiction book. This is the one that comes out on top, and for good reason because of all the things that you said. I was wondering whether you were working on anything at the moment.

**Richard Fallon (01:03:28)**

So the main thing related to this is that edition of The Lost World, but I wouldn't hold your breath because it's gonna be quite a few years before it comes out. When it does come out, it should be interesting. For anyone who likes people you've talked to who've read this novel a lot of times, there should be interesting stuff in there partially because I've done the tedious task of reading different editions of a novel that you'd think, well, it's basically the same thing. Quite often it turns out it's not. While the changes vary in depth, there are interesting differences between, say, the American serial, between the deluxe version. But for someone who's very familiar with the novel, who's read it a lot of times, think, oh, so that really does change our perspective on it. So that's hopefully one to look out for.

At the moment at Cambridge in the natural history humanities scheme, I'm working on more images actually than the fiction at the moment. So I'm working on a couple of women who were working on graptolites, these small invertebrates, which were a big part of Cambridge palaeontological research in the early 20th century, big biostratigraphical subject, graptolites are very good for dating strata.

But these two women, Gertrude Ellis and Ethel Wood, worked on a book called The Monograph of British Graptolites in the Edwardian period, which has incredibly lifelike images of graptolites, which may not be incredibly sensational to look at, but had a very complicated and rich and strange history of illustration. Graptolites basically were quite hard to illustrate, and these two women were among the first women to have major professional positions in palaeontology in Britain, basically meant the world. So I've been looking at a lot of graptolites, a lot of histories of women in Cambridge, and learning about all the different technologies that you used to make a high quality image in [unclear] 1901, which is, it turns out, incredibly difficult, complicated, and involves a lot of gelatin.

**Roland Squire (01:05:07)**

Amazing. And where can people find your work and find you online, if indeed you want them to?

**Richard Fallon (01:05:14)**

I am on Blue Sky. I don't think there are many other Richard Fallons on Blue Sky. So if you search for there, you'll find me. The University of Cambridge profile page has recently been redone. It had my publications on it. The old one, the new one, I don't think they've got them on there yet. I guess that'll be where to look, and eventually they'll be on there. So I've written about things like the short stories I mentioned. I've written about The Lost World, I've written about psychic geologists.

If you can get your library together, I'd recommend my most recent book, Contesting Earth History. It's expensive to buy, so maybe if you have a library nearby, request it from there. But that's got histories of hollow earth theory, which is something many people are familiar with, in the 19th century histories of people who were really interested in the lost continent of Atlantis, occultists who I've discussed, particularly occultists who believed you could travel mentally back in time by holding a fossil, and also a lot of creationists. Who, while they may seem slightly tedious when you're dealing with them in the 21st century, in the 19th century, are really quite interesting and have lots of very creative ideas about why the book of Genesis is geologically accurate.

So if you seek that book out, I'm hoping that few people will be disappointed with the amount of, let's use that word again, bizarre figures who have been involved in palaeontology in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Amazing. Thank you so much.

**Roland Squire (01:06:25)**

I'm going to go and get that right now, I think. Music to my ears.

Well, that's it. That's The Lost World. And my enormous thanks to Richard Fallon for sharing what must be a nation-leading number of rereadings with me. Do seek out his collection of early prehistoric fiction and ask your library to order Contesting Earth's History, which covers hollow earth theorists, Atlantis hunters, and occultists who believe that they could travel back in time just by holding a fossil. Haven't read it yet myself, but believe me, I will be. And of course, keep an eye out in the far distant future for that scholarly edition of The Lost World. You can find Richard on Blue Sky, and I'll put all of his links to reach him in the show notes for this episode.

Now, next episode, I'm bringing you something different, and something I really wasn't expecting to be recording or wanting to record really, and that is the untimely passing of our Dr. Alan Grant, Sam Neill. His portrayal as Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park III, and Jurassic World Dominion means so much to me and so much to our Jurassic community that I couldn't let his passing go without dedicating some time to unpacking his legacy in the series and also just him as a fantastic actor. So next time on The Pirates Don't Eat The Tourists, I'm joined by James Mottram as we turn this very sad event into a celebration of his life and work.

**James Mottram (01:08:08)**

You're gonna be looking at a reckon around too. It was after Jurassic World, because I remember asking him about Jurassic World.

**Roland Squire (01:08:14)**

2017.

**James Mottram (01:08:15)**

So he'd had time to see Jurassic World by this point, and which he said something along the lines of, yeah, similar to the other one, couple of kids in it, and they get the [unclear] out of them. Which was pretty much the exact quote, I think.

**Roland Squire (01:08:28)**

So join me on the 19th of August for my look back at the life and work of Sam Neill. I'd like you to tell me about your Sam Neill. Now, whether that's part of the Jurassic franchise or not, tell me about the moments that he did something small that stayed with you. The thing you tell someone who only knows him as Alan Grant.

Now, if you want to get in touch, there's a link at the bottom of the show notes that lets you text the show, or better still, leave a voicemail. And I can't wait to hear your thoughts about Sam Neill and share with you mine and James's best loved moments and films from his career. But until then, I'll just say thank you very, very much for listening, and hopefully, the pirates don't eat the tourists.

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