The Lost World (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Allen Grove

Professor Challengers claims of dinosaurs living in twentieth-century South America may seem outlandish, but even skeptics become believers in The Lost World (1912). Part adventure story, part science fiction, The Lost World generates motifs and characters that have such long-lasting popular appeal that they constantly reappear in todays fiction, film, and television.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411430303

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a Scottish author best known for his classic detective fiction, although he wrote in many other genres including dramatic work, plays, and poetry. He began writing stories while studying medicine and published his first story in 1887. His Sherlock Holmes character is one of the most popular inventions of English literature, and has inspired films, stage adaptions, and literary adaptations for over 100 years.

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INTRODUCTION

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE’S 1912 NOVEL THE LOST WORLD HAS APTLY been identified as science fiction, fantasy, gothic, a boys’ book, and an imperialist adventure story. Most accurately, the novel combines elements of all of these genres. Unarguable is Doyle’s success in putting aside Sherlock Holmes to explore a new type of fiction with a new type of hero: The Lost World’s physical, boisterous, and acerbic Professor Challenger. Doyle was so fond of this character that he employed him in many of his later fictions: The Poison Belt (1913), The Land of Mist (1925), When the World Screamed (1928), and The Disintegration Machine (1929). Nor was Doyle the only fan. The motifs and characters of The Lost World have had such long-lasting popular appeal that they constantly reappear in fiction, film, and television.

Adventure stories such as The Lost World came naturally to Arthur Conan Doyle. Born in Edinburgh in 1859, he was raised by a mother who early on taught him to value his family’s history and the actions of heroic men. During his pre-teen years in Jesuit school, Doyle was already an avid reader and storyteller. He published his first fiction in magazines while attending medical school at Edinburgh University, and the first of his Sherlock Holmes stories, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887. Today Doyle is certainly best known for the Holmes stories, but they do not represent the bulk of his life’s work. Indeed, the breadth of his writing is remarkable and includes seven full-length historical novels, numerous adventure stories and tales of terror, several works of science fiction, a few pamphlets and books on wars and the military, and, late in his life, both fiction and nonfiction focusing on Spiritualism. As prolific as he was, Doyle also worked as a physician and eye specialist, a detective, and a lecturer on behalf of Spiritualism. He had two children with his first wife, Louise Hawkins, and three children with his second wife, Jean Leckie. Doyle died of a heart attack in 1930.

When Doyle wrote The Lost World, he had been trying unsuccessfully for years to retire Sherlock Holmes. Holmes’ popularity and financial success made such retirement difficult, but Professor Challenger provided Doyle with a larger-than-life figure who could measure up to the great detective. This is not to say that Doyle was not fond of Holmes. In fact, in many ways Doyle was Holmes: In more than one case Doyle wrote compelling Holmes-like defenses of men he thought were wrongly convicted of crimes. Yet if Holmes was an alter ego of Doyle, so too was Professor Challenger. When The Lost World first appeared in The Strand Magazine in 1912, it contained a fake photograph of the novel’s four central characters: Professor Challenger, his rival Professor Summerlee, the reporter Ed Malone, and the wealthy adventurer Lord John Roxton. It is no coincidence that the Professor Challenger of the photograph—with his barrel chest, heavy beard, and bushy eyebrows—is none other than a heavily disguised Arthur Conan Doyle. Challenger had the scientific brilliance of Holmes, but Doyle was also drawn to the brashness and physicality that his professor uses to shake the twentieth-century world out of its complacency. In Challenger, Doyle found a much more fitting hero for an adventure story than the cerebral Holmes.

Nevertheless, engaging characters still need an effective plot, and the existence of dinosaurs in twentieth-century South America may seem a rather dubious concept on which to center a novel. Doyle, however, has the rare ability to lower his readers’ defenses and make them willingly enter his lost world. Doyle populates his novel with skeptics who, like the reader, need to be convinced of Professor Challenger’s outlandish assertions about prehistoric life. Part of Doyle’s success in doing this stems from the closeness of the subject matter to his heart. When he wrote The Lost World, Doyle had long been nourishing his interests in geology, archeology, and paleontology, and at the time his home in Windlesham boasted plaster casts of iguanodon footprints he had discovered a few years earlier. Also, as a graduate of medical school and a man with an inquisitive scientific mind, Doyle had first-hand experience with the academic backdrop of his novel. In fact, Challenger is based partly on William Rutherford, a professor under whom Doyle had studied at the University of Edinburgh.

Doyle’s skill at narrative framing, dialogue, and plotting makes his story as enjoyable to read today as it was in the early twentieth century, but twenty-first-century readers may find Doyle’s representation of both race and gender dated if not offensive. The Lost World is clearly a novel about men and masculinity. Only two women appear in the novel: the aloof Gladys of the novel’s first and last chapters, and Professor Challenger’s wife, Jessie. The latter, described as an enraged chicken, serves little purpose other than to chastise ineffectually her brutish husband. When Professor Challenger stooped, picked her up, and placed her upon a high pedestal of black marble, he dramatizes the status of women in Doyle’s novel: They are simply inconveniences who get in the way of male adventure. Gladys’s role is a bit more complicated, for she motivates Malone to seek out adventure, and the reporter hopes to win her hand through his heroics. By the novel’s end, however, Malone seems quite content to begin another male adventure and leave Gladys behind in her limited domestic world as the wife of a solicitor’s clerk. The renaming of Lake Gladys as Central Lake effectually erases her from the world of men and their exploits.

Whereas The Lost World is a novel about men and male adventure, it is more specifically a novel that values white British men. Doyle was not one to undermine British imperialism or British attitudes of cultural superiority. The novel represents Zambo as a huge negro who is faithful as a dog and the so-called half-breeds as treacherous and murderous. The Indians are subservient, and the British adventurers unquestioningly accept the servitude of the natives, clearly illustrated when Lord John Roxton proclaims, these Indians will carry stores, or when Professor Summerlee comments upon the undignified action of heading a raid of savages upon a colony of anthropoid apes. Scholars have often interpreted the red Indians as representations of the Irish, but whether Celtic or native South Americans, Doyle clearly identifies them as an inferior race.

The Lost World’s British-centered view of the earth can be traced through some of Doyle’s earlier writings. A decade before the publication of The Lost World, Doyle played a key role in asserting Britain’s moral high ground in the Boer War. Many European nations were critical of British activities in South Africa. The accusations of cruelty, looting, and the inhumane treatment of women and children were largely true, but Doyle could not believe them. Feeling the need to act and defend his country, Doyle tried unsuccessfully to enlist in the military, and finally managed to serve as a physician in a field hospital. In 1901 he drew upon his observations in South Africa and wrote a defense of the British in The War in South Africa; Its Cause and Conduct. The booklet managed to quell much of the international criticism of the British role in the Boer War, and led to Doyle’s knighthood in 1902.

Despite his knighthood, his fervent patriotism, and his belief in British cultural and moral superiority, Doyle’s desire to see justice served often transcended racial identity. His 1909 pamphlet The Crime of the Congo illustrates the complexity of Doyle’s racial politics. In this work, he discusses the horrific treatment of African natives at the hands of their Belgian rulers. Through an intertwining of history, polemic, photographs, and interviews, Doyle exposes the cruel, brutal, and murderous behavior lurking behind Belgium’s ivory and rubber industries. Doyle is so incensed by the humanitarian horrors in the Congo that he proposes Britain, either with or without help from European allies, remove the African territory from Belgian rule. Doyle never goes so far as to suggest that the Congo should be an independent nation, nor does he ever question British imperialism in India. He does, however, argue that a nation’s imperialistic and capitalistic ventures must be carried forward with great humanity and responsibility.

These writings on the Congo and South Africa might suggest that Doyle is entirely blind to Britain’s own shortcomings, but The Lost World does reveal the tenuousness of his country’s status. The Darwinian underpinnings of the novel hint that civilized men are not far removed from the beasts and savages they hunt and dominate. The narrator Malone notes that there are strange red depths in the soul when he finds himself killing the ape-men and cheering and yelling with pure ferocity and joy of slaughter. Furthermore, the king of the ape-men and Professor Challenger are nearly identical in appearance save that his coloring was red instead of black. The two figures have the same short, broad figure, the same heavy shoulders, the same forward hang of the arms, the same bristling beard merging itself in the hairy chest. Indeed, The Lost World’s slippage between man and beast challenges Britain’s cultural superiority in ways reminiscent of the horse-like Houyhnhnms in Jonathan’s Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and the surgically modified animals in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).

Little in The Lost World does not have a precursor in Victorian literature. In 1895, H. Rider Haggard presented an African version of a lost world in King Solomon’s Mines. The novel narrates a similar type of imperialist adventure complete with battles and diamond mines that are suspiciously similar to those in Doyle’s work. One can also find in The Lost World elements of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (translated into English in 1872) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883). Everett Bleiler points out that Frank Reade’s 1896 The Island in the Air shares numerous motifs with The Lost World, notably the setting of an inaccessible South American plateau. Most scholars agree that this plateau is based on Mount Roraima, a high mesa on the boundary of Brazil, Venezuela, and Guayana. Sir Everard im Thurn was the first to ascend Roraima’s cliffs in 1884, and Rosamond Dalziel notes many striking similarities between Doyle’s novel and im Thurn’s writings.

That these influential works were written decades before The Lost World is not a coincidence. As Doyle’s editor correctly notes early in the novel, the big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere. Indeed, Doyle’s work does seem to be behind the times, for by 1912 European imperialism had extended its fingers into nearly all corners of the earth, and few of Doyle’s contemporaries would believe in the continuing existence of prehistoric life on their ever-shrinking planet. Yet perhaps this is precisely why The Lost World was so successful: Doyle’s heroes are able to overcome the skepticism of the spiritually dead British and shock them into the realization that wonders do still exist in the world.

It is perhaps for this reason that The Lost World maintains its appeal and continues to influence writers and cinematographers today. The progeny of The Lost World are difficult to count, but the novel was adapted for the screen on numerous occasions. The first of these was a 1925 silent film with stop-motion animation. With production costs hovering around $1 million, it was, at the time of its release, the most expensive film ever made. In 1960, Twentieth Century Fox made a new version of The Lost World, but scholars and critics seem to agree that this is one of the worst renderings of Doyle’s work ever produced. In 1992, two more film versions of Doyle’s novel were made in Great Britain. These low-budget movies, The Lost World and Return to the Lost World, can now be found only on obscure videocassettes. In 1998, another poor adaptation entitled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World appeared, soon followed by a movie-length pilot and TV series based on the novel. None of these movies does justice to Doyle’s original work, although the 1925 film is certainly worth the attention of anyone interested in film history.

The influence of The Lost World, however, is by no means limited to direct Lost World adaptations. Many novels, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land that Time Forgot (1924), borrow heavily from Doyle. Similarly, television shows such as Land of the Lost certainly owe a debt to Doyle, as do some of the most successful monster movies of the twentieth century: Godzilla, King Kong, and Jurassic Park, to name just a few. Undoubtedly, the legacy of The Lost World will continue well into the twenty-first century. Doyle’s image of a pterodactyl flying through his contemporary London remains an apt metaphor, for the more we push the boundaries of our knowledge, the more we recognize that there are great marvels and horrors still to be discovered.

Allen Grove is an Associate Professor of English at Alfred University. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and his research and teaching focus primarily on eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century British fiction.

CHAPTER ONE

THERE ARE HEROISMS ALL ROUND US

MR. HUNGERTON, HER FATHER, REALLY WAS THE MOST TACTLESS person upon earth—a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centered upon his own silly self. If anything could have driven me from Gladys, it would have been the thought of such a father-in-law. I am convinced that he really believed in his heart that I came round to the Chestnuts three days a week for the pleasure of his company, and very especially to hear his views upon bimetallism—a subject upon which he was by way of being an authority.

For an hour or more that evening I listened to his monotonous chirrup about bad money driving out good, the token value of silver, the depreciation of the rupee, and the true standards of exchange.

Suppose, he cried, with feeble violence, that all the debts in the world were called up simultaneously and immediate payment insisted upon. What, under our present conditions, would happen then?

I gave the self-evident answer that I should be a ruined man, upon which he jumped from his chair, reproved me my habitual levity, which made if impossible for him to discuss any reasonable subject in my presence, and bounced off out of the room to dress for a Masonic meeting.

At last I was alone with Gladys, and the moment of fate had come! All that evening I had felt like the soldier who awaits the signal which will send him on a forlorn hope, hope of victory and fear of repulse alternating in his mind.

She sat with that proud, delicate profile of hers outlined against the red curtain. How beautiful she was! And yet how aloof! We had been friends, quite good friends; but never could I get beyond the same comradeship which I might have established with one of my fellow-reporters upon the Gazette—perfectly frank, perfectly kindly, and perfectly unsexual. My instincts are all against a woman being too frank and at her ease with me. It is no compliment to a man. Where the real sex feelings begins, timidity and distrust are its companions, heritage from old wicked days when love and violence went often hand in hand. The bent head, the averted eye, the faltering voice, the wincing figure—these, and not the unshrinking gaze and frank reply, are the true signals of passion. Even in my short life I had learned as much as that—or had inherited it in that race-memory which we call instinct.

Gladys was full of every womanly quality. Some judged her to be cold and hard, but such a thought was treason. That delicately bronzed skin, almost Oriental in its coloring, that raven hair, the large liquid eyes, the full but exquisite lips—all the stigmata of passion were there. But I was sadly conscious that up to now I had never found the secret of drawing it forth. However, come what might, I should have done with suspense and bring matters to a head tonight. She could but refuse me, and better be a repulsed lover than an accepted brother.

So far my thoughts had carried me, and I was about to break the long and uneasy silence when two critical dark eyes looked round at me, and the proud head was shaken in smiling reproof.

I have a presentiment that you are going to propose, Ned. I do wish you wouldn’t for things are so much nicer as they are.

I drew my chair a little nearer.

Now, how did you know that I was going to propose? I asked, in genuine wonder.

Don’t women always know? Do you suppose any woman in the world was ever taken unawares? But, oh, Ned, our friendship has been so good and so pleasant! What a pity to spoil it! Don’t you feel how splendid it is that a young man and a young woman should be able to talk face to face as we have talked?

I don’t know, Gladys. You see, I can talk face to face with—with the station-master. I can’t imagine how that official came into the matter, but in he trotted and set us both laughing. That does not satisfy me in the least. I want my arms round you and your head on my breast, and, oh, Gladys, I want—

She had sprung from her chair as she saw signs that I proposed to demonstrate some of my wants.

You’ve spoiled everything, Ned, she said. It’s all so beautiful and natural until this kind of thing comes in. It is such a pity. Why can’t you control yourself ?

I didn’t invent it, I pleaded. It’s nature. It’s love!

Well, perhaps if both love it may be different. I have never felt it.

But, you must—you, with your beauty, with your soul! Oh, Gladys, you were made for love! You must love!

One must wait till it comes.

But why can’t you love me, Gladys? Is it my appearance, or what?

She did unbend a little. She put forward a hand—such a gracious, stooping attitude it was—and she pressed back my head. Then she looked into my upturned face with a very wistful smile.

No, it isn’t that, she said at last. You’re not a conceited boy by nature, and so I can safely tell you that it is not that. It’s deeper.

My character?

She nodded severely.

What can I do to mend it? Do sit down and talk it over. No, really I won’t, if you’ll only sit down!

She looked at me with a wondering distrust which was much more to my mind than her whole-hearted confidence. How primitive and bestial it looks when you put it down in black and white! And perhaps after all it is only a feeling peculiar to myself. Anyhow, she sat down.

Now tell me what’s amiss with me.

I’m in love with somebody else, said she.

It was my turn to jump out of my chair.

It’s nobody in particular, she explained, laughing at the expression on my face, only an ideal. I’ve never met the kind of man I mean.

Tell me about him. What does he look like?

Oh, he might look very much like you.

How dear of you to say that! Well, what is it that he does that I don’t do? Just say the word—teetotal, vegetarian, aeronaut, Theosophist, Superman—I’ll have a try at it, Gladys, if you will only give me an idea what would please you.

She laughed at the elasticity of my character. Well, in the first place, I don’t think my ideal would speak like that, she said. He wold be a harder, sterner man, not so ready to adapt himself to a silly girl’s whim. But above all he must be a man who could do, who could act, who would look death in the face and have no fear of him—a man of great deeds and strange experiences. It is never a man that I should love, but always the glories he had won, for they would be reflected upon me. Think of Richard Burton! When I read his wife’s life of him I could so understand her love. And Lady Stanley! Did you ever read the wonderful last chapter of that book about her husband? These are the sort of men that a woman could worship with all her soul and yet be the greater, not the less, on account of her love, honored by all the world as the inspirer of noble deeds.

She looked so beautiful in her enthusiasm that I nearly brought down the whole level of the interview. I gripped myself hard, and went on with the argument.

We can’t all be Stanleys and Burtons, said I. Besides, we don’t get the chance—at least, I never had the chance. If I did I should try to take it.

But chances are all around you. It is the mark of the kind of man I mean that he makes his own chances. You can’t hold him back. I’ve never met him, and yet I seem to know him so well. There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done. It’s for men to do them, and for women to reserve their love as a reward for such men. Look at that young Frenchman who went up last week in a balloon. It was blowing a gale of wind, but because he was announced to go he insisted on starting. The wind blew him one thousand five hundred miles in twenty-four hours, and he fell in the middle of Russia. That was the kind of man I mean. Think of the woman he loved, and how other women must have envied her! That’s what I should like—to be envied for my man.

I’d have done it to please you.

But you shouldn’t do it merely to please me. You should do it because you can’t help it, because it’s natural to you—because the man in you is crying out for heroic expression. Now, when you described the Wigan coal explosion last month, could you not have gone down and helped those people, in spite of the choke-damp?

I did.

You never said so.

There was nothing worth bucking about.

I didn’t know. She looked at me with rather more interest. That was brave of you.

I had to. If you want to write good copy you must be where the things are.

What a prosaic motive! It seems to take all the romance out of it. But still, whatever your motive, I am glad that you went down that mine. She gave me her hand, but with such sweetness and dignity that I could only stoop and kiss it. I dare say I am merely a foolish woman with a young girl’s fancies. And yet it is so real with me, so entirely part of my very self, that I cannot help acting upon it. If I marry, I do want to marry a famous man.

Why should you not? I cried. "It is women like you who brace men up. Give me a chance and see if I will take it! Besides, as you say, men ought to make their own chances, and