Edward Dolnick is the author of the new book Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World. His other books include The Writing of the Gods. He lives near Washington, D.C.
Q: What inspired you to write Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, and how was the book’s title chosen?
A: For years I’ve been fascinated with the question of what it was like to see something that no one had ever seen before.
What was it like when someone first looked at the night sky
through a telescope and saw that the stars went on forever? Or when people
first looked into the depths of the Grand Canyon? Or first looked through a
microscope and saw a whole busy, miniature world that no one had ever dreamed
of?
The question behind Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party was, What was it like when
people first realized that the world had once been home to lizards as big as
elephants and a host of other strange creatures?
That was a brand-new idea. Everyone had always taken for
granted that the only animals in the world had been the ones we know today —
lions and tigers and cats and dogs — and, suddenly, they had to grapple with a
startling new picture.
The title Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party was meant to do a couple of things at
once. First, I wanted to offer a kind of invitation: this will be fun, not
homework. Second, the title was a hint at one of the book’s themes.
The discovery of dinosaurs was remarkably recent — until the
early 1800s, no one had ever imagined any such beasts. In the Victorian era the
picture of the natural world was that it was cozy and friendly. And then along
came fierce, snarling dinosaurs, and suddenly the picture took on a spooky new
dimension.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially
surprised you?
A: The big surprise for me was that dinosaurs were a new discovery. I’d somehow taken for granted that we’d always known about them. But that’s wrong — until fairly modern times, no one had ever imagined such things.
What I liked best was the notion that, not so long ago, very
very smart people were knocking their heads against the wall trying to unravel
a mystery that any 6-year-old today could have told them all about.
The research was partly a matter of wading through archives and memoirs,
listening for stories, and partly a matter of tramping along with modern-day
fossil hunters, pestering them with questions.
The book is set in the Victorian age, and by good fortune
the Victorians were fanatic letter-writers and diary-keepers. In an era before
the telephone or e-mail, people set down their thoughts and hopes in long,
detailed letters and journal entries. I had stacks and stacks of letters and
journals to dive into.
And, fortunately for us, the main figures in the story were as eccentric and
larger than life as the creatures they unearthed. When you set out to write a
book, you know that the people you’re writing about will be in your life for
years. They’ll turn up every morning for coffee and they’ll pop up throughout
the day. So you hope that they’ll be lively, surprising company, and in this
case they were.
Q: What do you see as Mary Anning’s role in the story?
A: Mary Anning is one of the heroes of the story. I fell a bit in love with Mary. She was feisty and brilliant and intrepid, but in the early 1800s that wasn’t no guarantee that people would listen to you.
Anning had three strikes against her — she was poor, uneducated, and female — and in her day science was an upper class, all-male affair. But talent won out, and soon, if you wanted to know about fossils, you had to make an expedition to visit Mary Anning in her tiny home on England’s southern coast.
Q: The writer Paige Williams said of the book, “Dolnick’s enthusiasm and respect for his evocative subject shows on every page. He leaves readers both marveling at the known history of life on Earth and perhaps pondering their own place within it.” What do you think of that assessment, and what do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Paige Williams’s generous comment highlights what I hope readers will find in the book — here is one of the great yarns ever, about a mystery that had always been overlooked even though it had been right under our nose all along.
What were the strange bones and fossils that people
occasionally unearthed? Were they really relics of dragons or giants, or was
there something even stranger going on?
And what's fun is that, even though this is a book about history, the story
raises questions about the present day.
It’s easy to say, “Oh, how silly our ancestors were. Look what they didn’t catch on to!” But it must be true — don’t you think? — that we’re missing some story today that’s out there but that we just don’t see. I like to imagine that some future generation of 6-year-olds will look back on us and say, “How could they have been so dense?”
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a new book that has nothing at all to do with dinosaurs or natural history. It’s nonfiction, a true story of World War II and bombs and spies. Nothing in common with this book, except that it’s a terrific yarn. Stay tuned!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Edward Dolnick.
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