Thomas Hawkins and geological spectacle

The lurid geological writings of the Glastonbury collector Thomas Hawkins (1810–1889) are often dismissed as the outpourings of a lunatic. When analysed within their literary context, however, they reveal conscious strategies for awakening the publicʹs visual imagination along similar lines to geological treatises by ʹmainstreamʹ authors like Gideon Mantell and Hugh Miller. By virtue of their unusual lack of restraint, Hawkinsʹ writings point up the theatrical tendencies and rhetoric of spectacular display which underpinned the popularization of geology in the 1830s and 1840s, and which still serves a useful purpose on our television screens today.