![]() Though they make the claim forcefully, they provide the weakest evidence for a connection between Anning and the tongue twister: none at all, not even a link to another version of the claim. Then I’m sure she sells sea-shore shells. The shells she sells are sea-shells, I’m sure.įor if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore Victorian fossil hunter Mary Anning was the inspiration for the tongue twister ‘She Sells Sea Shells.’ It was originally a song, with words by Terry Sullivan and music by Harry Gifford, written in 1908, inspired by Mary Anning’s life: ![]() QI puts forth the strongest version of the claim: Filipe de los Santos and placed on Flickr with a Creative Commons License.Įach of the blogs celebrating Mary Anning tells a version of the same basic story. ![]() This photo illustration of the tongue twister was created by L. As such, the tale may tell us more about ourselves than it does about history…and it’s likely to tell us a lot. Like the plague story, it’s a folk story about a piece of folklore, which is what folklorists sometimes call “metafolklore.” It’s also a folk story that purports to be a truthful account of events in the past…in other words, what we typically call a legend. ( As I pointed out in a previous post, it’s not.) Like the plague story, the tale of Mary Anning and the tongue twister claims that a fascinating but little known history lurks behind a folklore item that practically everyone knows. This struck me (and several of my folklorist friends from the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research) as a cousin to the story that “Ring Around the Rosie” is related to the plague. But none of them provided any evidence for their claim. To be honest, there was one problem: the hook on which most of these blogs hung their story was the assertion that Mary Anning was the inspiration for the tongue twister “she sells seashells on the seashore.” Most of them even included the tongue-twister connection in the title of the blog post. Normally, I’d love the way this story spread. It has everything: pioneer women scientists, Regency and Victorian England, beachcombing, fossils…it’s like Pride and Prejudice at the beach, with feminism, dinosaurs, and poop jokes. She also figured out that some of the rocks she was finding and breaking open were fossilized feces, becoming one of the discoverers of the coprolite! Because she was a woman, and working class, and a religious minority to boot, she was not always recognized for her achievements, and many of her discoveries were published by Anglican male scientists. Anning was a woman from a working-class family her father, a cabinetmaker, was mentioned by Jane Austen in 1804. Despite her lack of formal education, Anning was involved in the discovery of several categories of ancient animals, including the ichthyosaur, the plesiosaur, and the pterosaur. ![]() Some of my favorite blogs and magazines got in on the act: Atlas Obscura, QI ( Quite Interesting), Dangerous Women, Cracked, and Forbes, to name just a few, published versions of the Mary Anning story. This version resides in the Geological Society in London, and the image is in the public domain.Ī little while back, the internet was abuzz with the inspirational story of Mary Anning, a pioneering 19 th-century paleontologist from Lyme Regis in England. Donne, who knew Mary Anning personally, and is itself a copy of a painting done in 1842 by an unknown artist. The picture is an 1850 pastel drawing by B. Was Mary Anning the inspiration for “she sells seashells on the seashore?” We’ll take a closer look in this post. ![]()
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