Jane Austen and the Jurassic

Join us for this year's Annual Jackman Lecture in the Humanities with Tom Keymer, Chancellor Henry N.R. Jackman University Professor of English. The Annual Jackman Lecture in the Humanities was inaugurated in 2022-23 on the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the Jackman Humanities Institute as a way to express our lasting gratitude for the support of the Honourable Henry N.R. Jackman for research in the humanities. This annual lecture features a leading humanist at the University of Toronto.

Ecocritical scholarship on 19th-century literature has explored the impact on Victorian writers of the new geological and palaeontological science and the dizzying apprehension of deep time that came with it: the fluid hills and primeval dragons of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850); the startling elephantine lizard of Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3); the grim, haggard cliff of Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872-3), where “the immense lapses of time each formation represented had known nothing of the dignity of man.” Writing a generation or two earlier, Jane Austen might seem a less promising candidate for this kind of analysis. Her contemporaries, however, were already growing alarmed by what a pioneering geologist of 1805 called “the abyss of time,” and in the next decade the fossil-hunting excavations of Mary Anning and others on the Dorset coast, notably Anning’s sensational ichthyosaur discovery of 1811, were attracting widespread attention. Austen made at least three extended visits to Lyme Regis during this period, met Anning’s father and probably Anning herself, and writes, in the pivotal Lyme chapters of her last completed novel Persuasion (1817), a sublime evocation of coastal erosion unlike anything else in her fiction. What happens when we read Austen's work in this unfolding context, with its interest in human phenomena—cold-bloodedness and predation; the unstable stratification of rank or class; social and dynastic survival or extinction—for which geology and palaeontology were beginning to offer new metaphors?

Tickets are free, but we do ask that you register.