The Lost World began at the Royal Geographical Society. On February 13, 1911, Percy Fawcett stood up there and described a plateau in South America, and monstrous tracks of unknown origin, and Conan Doyle was interested enough to ask him for more.
Fawcett’s own memoirs record it: Doyle wanted information for a novel about central South America, and The Lost World came out the following year.
Fourteen years after that lecture, Fawcett walked into the Mato Grosso looking for a lost city and was never seen again.
So the man who supplied the geography for the most famous lost-plateau novel in English disappeared into the same continent, and the search parties sent after him produced a second round of disappearances.
Fiction by René Rehn
What It Is
Serialized in the Strand from April to November 1912, with forty-six illustrations by the New Zealand artist Harry Rountree, and published as a book by Hodder and Stoughton on October 15, 1912.
It reached America first. The Sunday Magazine of the Philadelphia Press ran it with the photographs and the Washington Evening Star ran it with drawings, from March 24 to July 21, 1912, which puts the American serial in print a month before the British one.
Professor George Edward Challenger claims there is a plateau in the Amazon where prehistoric animals have survived. He is ridiculed. An expedition sets out to settle it: Challenger, the skeptical Professor Summerlee, the hunter Lord John Roxton, and a journalist called Malone who narrates.
They are betrayed by their guides, trapped on the plateau, and have to deal with dinosaurs and a tribe of ape-men.
The premise is as clean as premises get, and the book is faster than its reputation.
He Also Faked Photographs to Sell It
To publicize a novel about explorers finding living dinosaurs, Conan Doyle dressed up as his own Professor Challenger and had a series of staged photographs made.
They ran in the Strand in April and May 1912 and in the first English book edition. The sitters are named: Doyle himself, plus W. H. Ransford and Patrick Forbes.
This is the man who, a few years later, examined photographs of paper fairies cut out by two girls in Yorkshire and declared them genuine.
He knew exactly how easy a faked photograph was, because he had commissioned some.
The fairies, and the rest of the spiritualism, are covered on my Arthur Conan Doyle page.
Challenger Is the Reason It Works
Doyle’s second-best character, and the argument for reading it rather than watching an adaptation.
He is enormous, arrogant, physically violent with journalists, and right. He has already assaulted four or five reporters before Malone arrives, and Malone earns his respect by refusing to press charges after being assaulted too.
Holmes is cold and correct. Challenger is a bully who happens to be telling the truth, which is a much harder character to make likable and Doyle manages it.
It Sits in the Middle of a Line You Can Trace
This is the useful thing about the book and it is why it belongs in a science fiction list rather than a Holmes one.
Verne got there first. Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864, has prehistoric creatures surviving underground.
Doyle extended it. One account puts it precisely: he wanted to take Verne’s idea further by combining dinosaurs and primitive ape-men in a single undiscovered place, and he chose South America. He read up for it too, working from the zoologist Ray Lankester’s Extinct Animals.
Then Burroughs took it further again with The Land That Time Forgot in 1918.
And Crichton used the title outright for the Jurassic Park sequel, as an acknowledgment.
The one before has its page in my Journey to the Center of the Earth guide, and the one after is covered on my Edgar Rice Burroughs page.
Roxton Is Roger Casement, and the Slavers Are Real
Lord John Roxton’s backstory is not invention. It is journalism, lifted from a man Doyle knew.
Roger Casement was a British consul in South America who investigated the Peruvian Amazon Company in 1910 and again in 1911, and what he found there he had already found once before in the Congo.
Julio César Arana’s rubber company was registered in London in 1907. What it ran in the Putumayo was forced labor enforced by flogging, starvation, mutilation and murder. The scars left by the whip were known locally as the Mark of Arana. Estimates of the dead across the period run from thirty-two thousand upward, and roughly nine in ten of the affected Amazonian population did not survive it. Casement’s verdict was that it was not merely slavery but extermination.
Roxton is the Englishman who went there with a rifle.
He calls himself the flail of the Lord. And the line Doyle gives him is not adventure-novel swagger: there are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.
Which reframes the book. The Lost World reads as a boys’ adventure about dinosaurs, and one of its four heroes is a lightly fictionalized humanitarian investigator carrying a real atrocity into a story about a plateau. Doyle put the Putumayo in a novel two years after Casement went there, and almost nobody reading it now knows.
And the Film Fed King Kong
The 1925 silent adaptation used stop-motion animation by Willis O’Brien, mixing actors and dinosaurs in the same frame, and was marketed as an event. Wallace Beery played Challenger.
O’Brien went on to make King Kong eight years later, and later trained Ray Harryhausen.
The resemblance between the two films is not subtle: a lost geography containing incompatible kinds of life, and something brought back that should not have been.
Filmed again in 1960, 1992, 1998, 2001 and 2005, with a television series from 1999 to 2002, and none of them is the one to watch.
The Footprints Were Real
In 1909 fossil iguanodon footprints were found in a quarry near Doyle’s home in Sussex, and it is generally believed that this is where the novel started.
An iguanodon duly appears in it, and Doyle puts a reference to a Sussex doctor puzzled by footprints into the text.
Somebody Used This Novel to Accuse Him of a Fraud
Worth knowing, because it is the strangest thing in the book’s afterlife.
Piltdown Man was the skull assembled from a human cranium and an orangutan jaw, presented in 1912 as a missing link, and exposed as a forgery in 1953. It is the most famous hoax in the history of paleontology, and it happened in Sussex, where Doyle lived, in the year he published a novel about ape-men.
The American historian Richard Milner took The Lost World as his starting point and argued that Conan Doyle was the forger, reading a cryptic confession into the text.
He was wrong, and the Doyle scholarship says so plainly.
But it is a real demonstration of what this novel does to people. A book about a scientific fraud that turns out to be true, published in the same county and the same year as a scientific truth that turned out to be a fraud, by a man who faked photographs to promote it and later authenticated fake photographs in earnest.
No wonder somebody went looking for a confession.
The Sequels
The Poison Belt, 1913, in which Challenger works out that the Earth is passing through a cloud of poisonous ether.
The Land of Mist, 1926, which is a supernatural novel and is Doyle’s spiritualism arriving in the fiction.
There are shorter Challenger pieces besides those two, and neither novel is as good. One publisher’s assessment is that neither is as successful or as interesting, and that is the consensus.
Where to Go Next
The author, and what Holmes paid for, is the subject of my Arthur Conan Doyle page, and the writer he was extending is covered on my Jules Verne books guide.
