April 3, 2025, by Brigitte Nerlich

Contesting Earth’s History

This is a GUEST POST by Richard Fallon, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Natural History Museum, London. Richard has studied interactions and overlaps between literature and science, focusing on the long nineteenth century and paying particular attention to the literary popularisation of dinosaurs. His current work examines transatlantic geoscience between the 1860s and the 1920s characterised by fierce disputes about the planet’s deep history.

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I’m thankful for the opportunity to talk here about my new book, which explores many topics that are central to the Making Science Public blog, not least the role of language and imaginative literature in shaping science at various levels of society. The book’s title is so long that is almost acts as a synopsis in itself: Contesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860–1935: Believers and Visionaries on the Borderlines of Geology and Palaeontology. It was published by Oxford University Press on 27 March 2025, and was possible thanks to a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. 

Like others before it, this book brings literary studies and history of science into conversation, here to help understand how the boundaries of legitimate science were navigated in a period of upheavals in geology, palaeontology, and palaeoanthropology. During the second half of the nineteenth century, evolutionary theory and the antiquity of humanity became widely accepted among naturalists, but the exact mechanism of evolution and the shape of the human family tree would long be areas of fierce disagreement. Meanwhile, geological research into Earth’s history was complicated by polarised opinions on subjects like continental drift.

Around the fringes of these debates, and sometimes closer to the centre of them, lurked figures interested in Earth’s history but unsatisfied with the nature of conversations about it: creationists, spiritualists, occultists, Atlanteans, hollow-earthers, and more. Typically, they sought a more starring role for humans in geological history than the meagre one granted by most elite naturalists, or they believed that humans have more power to gaze into the past than those naturalists would admit. These people are the subjects of Contesting Earth’s History.

Historians have shown that the professionalisation of science in this period was far less thorough than once believed, while the persistent importance of religious belief in scientific culture is clear. Whose views on Earth’s history were considered legitimate, then, and whose were beyond the pale? And for whom? It might have been apparent to most audiences that the claims of a psychic like Elizabeth Denton, who could see back in time to the Jurassic period, were to be taken with a pinch of salt. Less easy to disregard were those like J. W. Dawson, avid creationist and Canada’s leading geologist, or Henry Hoyle Howorth, an English MP whose writings on a catastrophic mega-flood in geologically recent history were published in the respected Geological Magazine.

This is where literature comes in. Drawing on scholarship from literature and science studies and the study of ‘pseudoscience’, I make sense of my figures’ conceptions of science, and those of their readers, by attention to the choices they made about genre, mode, and literary technique.

After all, while the registers and media formats appropriate to high-level science in this period were slowly narrowing – with the most serious contributions broadly moving towards the ideal of inaccessible, specialised articles in technical journals – figures on the fringes did not always seek mainstream legitimacy by following this recipe. Some, like the creationist Cuthbert Collingwood, put forth their hypotheses in palaeontological poems. Others, including hollow-earthers Washington Tower and De Witt C. Chipman, utterly blurred the line between snappy adventure novel and technical argumentation. The clairvoyant superstar Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, on the other hand, cheerfully admitted that her macrocosmic masterpiece The Secret Doctrine (1888) was barely readable. Each decision had its rationale, and its converts.

An alternative approach was to turn the tables on the literary and visual languages of elite science. This was the tactic employed by George McCready Price, member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and arguably the world’s leading proponent of young-earth creationism in the first half of the twentieth century. Price was very familiar with the way that geologists had built up brilliant visual genres, such as stratigraphic sections, to communicate their research. He also recognised that the popularity of geology in the previous century had skyrocketed thanks to the skill of writers like Hugh Miller, who described the prehistoric world as a place of wonder and romance.

Price demolished diagrams and descriptions alike. Although he was, himself, something of a poet and litterateur, Price accused the elite geologists and evolutionary biologists whose work he detested as being authors of imaginative literature rather than empirical science. If they had trudged on as empiricists, rather than fantasists, he insisted, they would have been able to read the plain evidence in the rocks. This evidence showed that a massive flood – the Flood – had ravaged Earth about 4,000 years ago and rapidly laid down most geological strata. As for what the genial antediluvian world, when humans intriguingly coexisted with prehistoric animals like dinosaurs, had been like, Price – unlike undisciplined scientists – wasn’t interested in literary speculation.

Thus whether by penning transcripts of psychic experiences (Denton’s The Soul of Things, 1863), poetic flights (Collingwood’s A Vision of Creation, 1872), or pedantic satire (Price’s textbook The New Geology, 1923), or by the dense dressing of sensational arguments in inductive garb (a strategy of Howorth’s The Mammoth and the Flood, 1887) – the subjects of my book crafted themselves advantageous platforms from which to contribute to scientific culture.

Some readers, especially general readers or those in religious communities far from the heights of scientific society, believed that the arguments in these books deserved a hearing. After all, why couldn’t important scientific claims be based on a thinker’s encyclopaedic reading (rather than fieldwork and laboratory studies), or on evidence drawn from ancient or sacred texts? Even if you didn’t agree with their precise argument about the location of the lost city of Atlantis, it was nice to know that there was a still a space in literary and scientific culture for this kind of work. Or so the argument went.

These writings were also valuable literary inspiration in themselves. While he may not have believed that the Earth was actually hollow, Edgar Rice Burroughs milked the concept in his pulp romances from At the Earth’s Core (1914) up until the posthumously published Savage Pellucidar (1963). H. P. Lovecraft was another avid reader of this ‘borderline palaeoscience’, as expressed in novellas like The Shadow Out of Time (1936). In modern editions of these books, some of the strangest science of the period I discuss remains in print, although the History Channel’s obsession with ancient aliens represents the true lineal successor to nineteenth-century fringe palaeoscience.

If that sounds up your street, then please do ask your library to pick up a copy. But be on your guard: many who start down the road of investigating the lost city of Atlantis, or Earth’s hollow and often mammoth-filled interior, or the biblical Flood, do not retrace their steps.

Image: Image from page 139 of J. W. Dawson’s “Nature and the Bible. A course of lectures delivered in New York, in December, 1874, on the Morse foundation of the Union theological seminary” (1875)

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