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| US advertising postcard for The Lost World |
Hello and welcome to Episode 57. Today, we begin our long-awaited journey into The Lost World, Conan Doyle’s celebrated adventure novel which introduced Professor George Edward Challenger to the reading public.
Read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Lost_World
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Synopsis
Edward Dunn Malone is a lowly young journalist at the Daily
Gazette whose heart’s desire is to win the hand of the beautiful but
exacting Gladys Hungerton. She, however, finds Malone lacking in ambition and
the requisite spirit of manly competitiveness. She will only bow before another
Burton or Stanley, and Malone must venture into the world to discover and
conquer before she will consider his approaches. Luckily, his editor, McArdle,
gives him the ideal opportunity by introducing him to the irascible, combative
and press-hating Professor George Challenger who claims to have found evidence
of the continued existence of prehistoric life in South America. Upon first
approaching Challenger, Malone is thrown down the professor’s stairs. Then, in
a surprising turn of events, he is given the opportunity to join a new
expedition to the Amazon to prove – or refute – Challenger’s outlandish
assertions…
Writing and publication history
While this was the spark, Conan Doyle had long had a desire
to write a “boy’s own” adventure, dating back to January 1889 when he conceived
of a “Rider Haggardy” novel called The Inca’s Eye. In 1909-10, though,
several strands of thought and influence converged to make the novel possible.
The first was Conan Doyle’s interest in palaeontology, spurred by the discovery
of fossil remains near his home in Crowborough. Conan Doyle had plaster replicas
made of the Iguanodon footprints which graced his home, Windlesham.
Another influence was events in the Belgian Congo. In 1909,
Conan Doyle was brought into the campaign against the Belgian atrocities by E.
D. Morel, founder of the Congo Reform Association. Conan Doyle wrote The Crimes
of the Congo that same year. Through Morel, he met Sir Roger Casement and
the three dined together in May 1910. Both men impressed Conan Doyle and influenced
characters in The Lost World.
A third influence was the popular enthusiasm for exploration.
In 1909, Conan Doyle read of Percy H. Fawcett’s exploration of South America
and in 1910 he gave a speech in honour of Commander Robert Edwin Peary who
voyaged to the North Pole in the previous year. Conan Doyle pretended to take offence
at explorers who were filling in the blank spaces on the map, a sentiment which
reappears in The Lost World.
The novel was written in October and November 1911 and
completed on 3 December. It was serialised in The Strand Magazine
between April and November 1912, with the novel coming out on 15 October 1912. It
appeared slightly earlier in the USA in The Sunday Magazine of the Philadelphia
Press between March and July 1912.
An excellent annotated edition of the novel was edited by
Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin and came out from Wessex Press in 1996, while a
manuscript facsimile was produced by SP Books in 2020.
”Rider Haggardy” Victorian Quest Romances
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| The way to Kukuanaland in King Solomons' Mines |
Haggard wrote his own story in response to Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island (1883). Both stories – plus some by Kipling and Conan
Doyle’s The Lost World – are examples of Victorian Quest Romance, a
genre of novels that are male adventures and coming of age stories with themes
like chivalry, bravery, masculinity and violence.
The Victorian Quest Romance, while having its roots in
antiquity with the likes of ‘Jason and the Argonauts’, is commonly seen as reaction
to the social dramas that dominated triple decker novels in the 1880s. While
partly a response to changing reading tastes and publishing models, it has also
been seen by scholars, notably Elaine Showalter, as men seeking to reclaim the
English novel from female authors like George Eliot. Andrew Lang argued for more
masculine imaginative fiction in direct response to feminine domestic and
social dramas.
The Victorian Quest Romance emerged around the same time of modern
science fiction. Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) is an
obvious influence on The Lost World, as are H. G. Wells’ The Island
of Dr Moreau (1896), The War of the Worlds (1897) and The First
Men on the Moon (1901). The Lost World, being a late example of
Victorian Quest Romance, is aware of earlier tropes while also helping to
influence the generation of science-fiction writers to come.
Faked evidence
Haggard was particular taken with the map in Treasure
Island and took this idea into King Solomon’s Mines, which came with
a fold-out map. Conan Doyle took the idea further, faking photographs, maps and
other documentary evidence to create a truly immerse novel.
This endeavour starts with the Foreword, which suggests
Challenger had placed an injunction on Malone which has only just been lifted. This
is quickly followed up with photographs of the Challenger team, in which Conan
Doyle dressed up as Challenger. He was assisted in this by his brother-in-law, the
illustrator Patrick Forbes, and William H. Ransford, a photographer friend of
Forbes. Ransford appears in the photograph as Malone, while Forbes is both
Summerlee and Roxton.
Forbes’ illustrations are heavily based on Edwin Ray Lankester’s Extinct Animals (1905) which was a huge influence on The Lost World. Conan Doyle and Lankester were friends at the time, although their relationship was strained in later years on account of their differences over spiritualism.
Conan Doyle continued to have fun faking evidence for The
Lost World, culminating with his screening of Willis O’Brien’s test footage
of the stop motion animations for the 1925 movie at a dinner of the American
Club of Magicians in New York in 1922.
Chapter I – There are heroisms all around us
We are introduced to Edward Dunn Malone as he attempts to
propose to Gladys Hungerton. Gladys rejects Malone for not being “a Stanley or a
Burton” and he determines to find a quest worthy of her. Gladys seems to want a
man of high achievement and endeavour, while also one who can be violent and aggressive.
Malone’s name is a nod to E. D. Morel of the Congo Reform
Association, while he shared the characteristics of other Conan Doyle coming-of-age
narrator such as Micah Clarke. Malone’s Irishness (“Irish Irish”) is commented
on by Challenger, while Roxton also notes Malone is likely to receive his cap
for Ireland in the Rugby.
Chapter II – Try your luck
with Professor Challenger
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| August Weissman |
McArdle offers Malone a quest in the form of an interview
with the noted zoologist and press-hater, Professor Challenger. Challenger’s Who’s
Who entry reveals him to be Scottish and educated at Edinburgh University,
although rarely is Challenger’s Scottishness a feature of adaptations.
The biography also reveals Challenger’s opposition to
Weissmanism, a theory of evolutionary genetics that admitted to the possibility
of regression. This becomes more important in the second half of the novel.
Malone consults a fellow journalist, Tarp Henry, at the
Savage Club. This club’s membership included Lang, Haggard, Stevenson and
Kipling, although Conan Doyle is not thought to have joined with them.
Chapter III – He is a
perfectly impossible person
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| William Rutherford |
After knowing Challenger only by reputation, Malone
discovers the professor is just as extraordinary in real life. The description and
character of Challenger are strongly based on Professor William Rutherford, a
member of the faculty of Edinburgh University, who inspired Challenger’s stature,
booming voice and Assyrian beard.
Other influences on Challenger likely include the author’s
former business partner, George Turnavine Budd, and E. Ray Lankester, whose
obituary, reported in Pilot and Roden, suggests he informed Challenger’s temperament.
There is also a strong component of Conan Doyle himself in Challenger, a
character that he loved dearly and who, famously, followed the author to become
a confirmed spiritualist.
Chapter IV – It's just the
very biggest thing in the world
Challenger tells Malone of his earlier expedition to South
America and how he came upon Maple White, an American explorer, whose sketch
book is now in the professor’s possession. The illustrations therein are
heavily based on Lankester’s Extinct Animals (1905). Lankester himself
is name-checked in the chapter.
Malone’s shock at the estimated size of a stegosaurus ("Why,
Charing Cross station would hardly make a kennel for such a brute!")
recalls the opening lines of Dickens’ Bleak House (1852): “As much mud
in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the
earth, and would it not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or
so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.”
Chapter V – Question!
Malone attends a popular lecture which is persistently interrupted
by Challenger. The professor is confronted by the sceptical Professor Summerlee.
Challenger offers to take Summerlee to South America with him and finds two further
volunteers in Edward Malone and Lord John Roxton.
The debate at the Zoological Institute recalls the hurly-burly
of the lectures that Conan Doyle would have attended at medical school. The
sequence is particularly funny, with commentary on “popular” scientists, poor
public speaking and the raucous behaviour of the crowd.
Summerlee is a stereotype of the sceptical scientist, but may
have drawn inspiration from Edinburgh anatomists, James Spence and Sir Robert
Christison.
Chapter 6 – I was the Flail
of the Lord
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| Roger Casement |
Albany was then (and possibly now) an “aristocratic rookery”
of luxury bachelor apartments. Roxton’s apartment is a peculiar mixture of
feminine domestic touches and overtly masculine guns and trophy heads. There are
several mentions of masculinity, virility and manliness in the chapter, which is
a theme we will come back to when we cover the rest of the novel.
Roxton voices Conan Doyle’s concerns about military preparedness
when he despairs that Malone’s shooting is “about average Territorial standard.”
“Good Lord! As bad as that?”
Roxton’s appearance and back
story are informed by Sir Roger Casement, the former British consul, who revealed
the horrors of the Belgian Congo and the South American rubber plantations.
Casement was tried and executed for treason by the British in 1916 for his involvement
in the Irish nationalist movement. Conan Doyle and other authors interceded to
have his sentence commuted without success.
Another inspiration was most likely the explorer Percy Henry
Fawcett who conducted seven expeditions to South America and disappeared in
1925. His appearance also closely matches that of Roxton.
We end this part of the story as
the party leave for South America, with Professor Challenger waving them off
from the dock side…
Next time
We hope to be joined by an interview guest, before we return to The Lost World in the new year.
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| A rather wonderful knitted 'Lost World' postbox topper, spotted in Covent Garden |
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our
supporters on Patreon and Paypal.
Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan
Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support
the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.
Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com).
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.
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